Encantadas

Rico Lebrun, an Italian American artist, is recognized for addressing death and human suffering through his treatment of the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. Trained at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts where he copied Italian old masters such as Bernini and Caravaggio, he also drew inspiration from artists such as Goya and Picasso, as well as Cubism, film, and photography. Working primarily in black and white, Lebrun bisected and fragmented the human form to emphasize the tragedy of dramatic events.

His treatment of The Encantadas (1854), a series of ten sketches Herman Melville (1819-1891) wrote about a trip he took to the Galapagos Islands, is quite typical. Lebrun chose to respond to two entries that focused on the famous, long-lived tortoises. Melville wrote that they were not “your schoolboy mud turtles, but black as widower's weeds, heavy as chests of plate, with vast shells medallioned and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have breasted a battle, shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea." Lebrun’s images of intertwined, twisting, and toppled tortoises encapsulate Melville’s description.