Luis Ricardo Falero: Nudes Among the Stars: The Bizarre Erotic Paintings of the Spanish Astronomer - Video

19th century Spanish painter Luis Ricardo Falero is odd, brilliant, iconoclastic, obsessed with the night sky and with exploring where the astronomer’s vision meets the world of the erotic, the nude and beauty. He visually embodies what the poet William Blake would call "Human Form Divine."

We can think of Falero as Neo-baroque in his ornate and often contorted paintings. He anticipates Surrealism which would burst on the scene fifty years after he Falero was painting. He is a master of the sensual, the sexual and the erotic. He paints with the eye of to the wonders of astronomy and often to the wonders of botany.

He is worlds away from his most notable contemporary painters and yet as far as representing the night sky with reverence Van Gogh comes to mind as the only painter who comes close.

In a way his art anticipates the fantasy covers that would adorn pulp fantasy and science fiction magazines in the thirties and forties.

There’s an almost scientific precision to Falaro’s work, whether painting plants with a botanists precision or the night sky.

And the celestial, astronomical night sky’s are our first clue to who Falero really was. As a young man he became fascinated by astronomy and it remained a lifelong interest with Falero dating illustrations for the well known French astronomer Nicolas Camille Flammarion.

Some of his paintings are right at home in the orientalist movement, already thriving for decades in 1851 when Falero was born

Orientalism was a highly sensual reimagining the worlds of ancient Egypt or the middle east. Some of his orientalist paintings are very, very good.

And then there are Falero’s nudes, some are among the most joyful and shameless celebration of the nude in all 19th century paintings. The beauty of the human form is so at core of Falero’s sense of painting and even of the artists’s mission.

Here is Falaro’s 1892 allegory of art.

And his painting of Faust’s vision from 1880.

And his remarkable dreamy “The Nymphs”