Baboon and Young by Pablo Picasso

Photo: Baboon and Young (1951) sculpture by Pablo Picasso, located at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran.

Shiva-Nataraja at Musée Guimet, Paris

Shiva-Nataraja, the 11th century bronze sculpture of the Chola period from Tamil Nadu, India, displayed at Musée Guimet. Shiva-Nataraja (or Lord of Dance/Seigneur de la danse); statue of the dancing Lord Shiva, the most powerful and most skilled warrior God across the cosmos, holds in this depiction of him as Cosmic Dancer with the power to destroy and recreate the world. Shiva is shown in most Nataraja statues as dancing on the demon of ignorance. The Guimet Museum (Musée national des Arts asiatiques-Guimet or Musée Guimet), the museum of Asian art located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, has one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia.

Fountain of Aphrodite, Mexico City

The Lion man of Hohlenstein Stadel

The lion-headed figure, first called the lion man (Löwenmensch) and later the lion lady (Löwenfrau), is an ivory sculpture that is one of the oldest known sculptures, determined to be about 32,000 years old by carbon dating. It is 29.6 cm tall, 5.6 cm wide and 5.9 cm thick. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. It has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, or it might have been a deity.

Its pieces were found in 1939 in Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein (Stadel cave in Hohlenstein Mountain) in the Lone valley, Swabian Alb, Germany. Due to the Second World War, it was forgotten and rediscovered after thirty years. The first reconstruction revealed a humanoid figurine without head. During 1997-1998 additional pieces of the sculpture were discovered and the head was reassembled and restored.

The sculpture shares certain similarities with French cave wall paintings, though the French paintings are several thousand years younger. Later, a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture was found, along with other animal figures and several flutes, in another cave in the same region of Germany. These findings indicate the possibility that the lion-figure played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Upper Paleolithic period. The sculpture can be seen in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, self-portrait

Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, self-portrait (1886), oil on canvas, dimensions 40.6 cm x 30.5 cm, currently located at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen, Scotland.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (May 11, 1824 to January 10, 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.