Since ancient times, mankind has been anxiously fascinated by unusual creatures from the ocean depths.
A terrible sea monster named Leviathan is mentioned as far back as the Old Testament.
The prophet Jonah was famously swallowed by a huge whale-like fish.
Water monsters appear in myths about the origin of the world of many cultures.
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Therefore, it is not surprising that painters often tried to describe terrifying beasts from the depths of the sea, which, of course, they could never see in reality.
In ancient times, fantastic and menacing sea creatures embodied many of the dangers of the maritime trade on which many Mediterranean societies depended.
Homer is in Odysseusidescribed two sea monsters named Scylla and Charybdis waiting on either side of a narrow channel (probably in the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily).
In a natural cave near the Italian coastal town of Spelonga, where he had a seaside villa, the Roman emperor Tiberius installed several dramatic marble sculptures.
Among the sculptures was a terrifying vision of Scylla, perched on an "island" within a pool in the middle of that vast cavern, devouring Odysseus' companions.
Although only fragments of this sculpture survive, Scylla's upper half takes the form of a gigantic, bare-breasted woman, while her lower parts consist of several furious dogs, which emerge from her genitalia and attempt to grab Odysseus' crew.
Intriguingly, one of the fragments is engraved with the names of the artists who sculpted the sculpture.
It turns out that they are the same trio, from the island of Rhodes, to whom the Roman writer Pliny the Elder attributes the authorship of the famous Laocoon, today in the Vatican.
This impressive marble group, praised by Pliny as "a work to be prized above all others," also contains sea monsters: two sharp-toothed sea serpents coil around the tormented Trojan priest Laocoon and his innocent sons.
In the Second Book of the Aeneid, Virgil offers a chilling account of the death of Laocoon, who was eliminated by Minerva because he realized that the Trojan Horse was a trick.
It was Virgil's Laocoon who first used the famous saying about not believing Greeks who carry gifts.
Two huge snakes, with glowing eyes, lashing tongues, hissing mouths and blood-red crests, suddenly emerge from the waves, before wrapping themselves around Laocoon and his sons in huge coils and devouring their poor limbs. What a spectacularly awful way to end.
Beware of the Kraken
During the Renaissance, during the glorious age of maritime exploration, maps were often decorated with incredible sea monsters.
Most were terrifying - a colossal squid-like creature known as the Kraken had terrorized mariners for centuries.
But many were also simply silly.
For example, unusual-looking whales, with unrealistically large teeth and wolf-like faces, as well as water jets, can be seen on the Karta marina ("Sea Map") of the Nordic countries of Northern Europe, drawn in the early 16th century by the Swedish churchman Olaus Magnus.
At the same time, there was a new desire to make authentic studies of these mythologized creatures whenever possible.
The German painter Albrecht Dürer, who was skilled at exceptional realism, traveled to the province of Zeeland in the south of the Netherlands in 1520 in the hope of seeing a stranded whale.
"It is much longer than 100 fathoms, and no living man in Zealand has seen one even a third of its size," he wrote in his diary.
However, when Dürer arrived, the "big fish" was no longer there, having been swept away by the tide.
After these efforts, Dürer developed a fever.
It is possible that he contracted malaria, which killed him in 1528.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, whale strandings were significant events in Northern Europe.
"Sometimes they were seen as signs of divine malice," explains Philip Hore, whose brilliant book Leviathan (2008), a mix of memoir and historical novel about his obsession with whales, won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction.
"In 1658, a white whale swam up the Thames as far as diarist John Evelyn's estate in Deptford.
"He was butchered to death, but his appearance was seen as foreshadowing the death of Oliver Cromwell," Horr explains.
Chor adds: "Stranded sea urchins often brought good luck, because of course they represented food and money - something we would never think of today."
During the 17th century in particular, there were many writings about stranded whales in the Netherlands. As a consequence, dramatic scenes of stranded whales became a constant motif of painting in the region.
Two years ago, for example, a conservator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge discovered a stranded whale under layers of post-applied paint on a painting by the Dutch seascape painter Hendrik Van Antonisen. View of the sandy coast Ševeningena from 1641.
"Foreign and impregnable"
In the 19th century, whaling had already become big business.
"He oiled and lubricated the Industrial Revolution," explains Hor, whose most recent travelogue, Inland Sea, was published in 2013.
The streets of New York, Berlin, Paris and London were lit with whale oil, which was America's second largest export after wood, he says.
"London's Millennium Dome is on the site of a whale processing facility," he adds.
Hunting for sperm whales on the high seas was a dangerous and dirty business - adult males can weigh up to 60 tons (60.000 kilograms) - but, for the general public, this bang seemed exciting.
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge discovered a stranded whale in a painting by Dutch seascape painter Hendrik Van Antonisen View of the sandy coast Ševen.(The Fitzwilliam Museum)
This partly explains why JMW Turner, the great British painter of landscapes and seascapes, painted a quartet of paintings on the theme of whaling in the 1840s.
The first permanent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brought together these four seascapes, which were first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1845 and 1846.
Turner wanted to imagine whaling as an elemental struggle between man and a sublime force of nature
It is quite possible that Turner chose whaling as a subject because he hoped to please his patron Elhanan Bicknell, who had made his fortune in the whale oil industry.
As a choice for images, Turner used The natural history of Uleshur (1839), a respected treatise written by former whaling surgeon Thomas Beale.
However, even a cursory look at Turner's paintings shows that he was not interested in accurately portraying the shape of the lusesura, which he probably never met in reality.
Instead, he wanted to imagine whaling as an elemental struggle between man and a sublime force of nature.
This is especially true of Turner's two earlier whaling paintings.
The Whalers' Mets, purchased by the museum in 1896 (the remaining three are in the Tate collection), have in the foreground the dark, ominous shape of a hunted sea lion, as it rises and thrashes in a veritable storm of foam, waterfall, churned blood and churning waves.
"What you see there is not a purple patch, but a beautiful whale, whose tail has just sent half a dozen whalers into eternity," said the English novelist William Thackeray, who saw the painting at the Royal Academy.
Turner's whales boast the haunting ferocity of sea monsters that excited the imaginations of sailors in ancient times.
According to Alison Hokanson, who organized the exhibition at the Met, it is even possible that Turner's whaling paintings influenced Herman Melville when he was writing Moby Dick.
Melville's masterpiece was published in 1851, a few months before his death.
Her third chapter contains a section describing a large oil painting of a whaling scene at a Massachusetts inn called the Spauter Inn: "A muddy, wet, slimy picture, in fact, enough to hold the attention of a nervous man," says narrator Ismail.
"And yet she possessed a kind of vague, half-achieved, unimaginable sublimity that glued you to her and froze you in place."
This sounds like one of Turner's paintings, which were notorious for their risk-free brushstrokes and lack of a traditional finish.
“Just look at Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monsters [unfinished canvas from ca. 1845 with an ambiguous pink shape in the middle]," Hor says.
"Under the surface, there are stirring, stirring things going on. Psychologically, it is extremely impressive.
"The bottom line is what lies deep beneath the unstoppable drive towards progress in the 19th century: the wilderness," he adds.
Melville believed that the ocean depths held many secrets, according to Hor.
"Under the skin of the ocean, as Melville said, everything is different - foreign and unconquerable.
"I'm not sure what Turner really knew about whales - he was only interested in them as a symbol," he explains.
Alistair Suk is the art critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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