The art of darkness

At a museum in Brussels, GRAHAM REID encounters the gigantic works of a most unusual 19th-century painter

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Antoine Wiertz was one pretty sick bastard, all right. The gallery he demanded be built to house his gigantic paintings in his home town of Brussels is a testament to an artist obsessed by death, disembowelment, rape, damnation and a virulent sexuality.

Everywhere flesh is impaled or torn, eyes glisten with horror, spears drive through bodies, there is a beheading, a giant crushes people underfoot while biting on the leg of an unfortunate ... This delirious imagery is mesmerising, especially when it is rendered on such a scale. Some canvases stretch 7m up the wall and 4m across.

In one painting a child is being burned while its mother screams and mysterious figures hover in the shadows; another is of a woman shot while fleeing; and elsewhere a woman being raped turns and blows the head off her attacker with a heavy pistol.

The Wiertz Museum in a small street beside the European Parliament also offers similarly conceived sculpture: two naked warriors engage in mutual penetration on their swords and the trompe l'oeil in the corner of a half-clothed woman peaking through a door is behind a statue of a woman with a tambourine - and a long sword impaled in her forehead.

Whatever Wiertz was on - and it mainly seems to have been an inflated ego combined with religion - this extraordinary 19th-century visionary entertained some strange thoughts.

Everywhere the work is suffused in a gloomy dark romanticism of the nightmares of life and war. One painting is entitled Une seconde apres la mort.

So who was this odd visionary whose genius wasn't recognised by his contemporaries or critics, but who through force of personality insisted the fledgling Kingdom of Belgium build him a studio which would be his monument and museum?

Antoine-Joseph Wiertz was born to a poor family in the small picturesque town of Dinant on the Meuse River in February 1806 and rose to become one of the main figures of Belgium's romantic movement. His modest talent was encouraged by various benefactors but his painting epiphany came when he saw Rubens' Descent from the Cross while visiting Antwerp. Immediately he wanted to work in the grand baroque manner. He later embraced Raphael and Michelangelo and his works accordingly grew in scale and grandiloquence.

He never had any doubt about his gifts and when he came second in the 1828 Prix de Rome competition he announced that, "I am the first, yet I am not; opinions on the matter are divided." He said the judges' decisions were capricious and that others said a great injustice had been done to him.

When he later submitted another work in the same competition he won, and with the prize went to Rome to study and paint.

His works were originally small and modest, then he chose a topic befitting a huge canvas, a battle between the Greeks and Trojans. At 4m by 7m it was constructed on an epic scale. He wanted to display it at the Paris Salon in 1838 but it arrived too late. Wiertz was livid, and began to mistrust critics and the art establishment. When a number of his works were accepted for the salon the following year they were poorly exhibited and met public indifference and critical ridicule. Wiertz fumed, called critics "those penny-a-liners" and turned his back on Paris.

"It is my plan," he raged, "my new plan of Brussels, the capital of Europe ... so that next to you Paris is no more than a provincial town."

That his museum, once in a small sidestreet, is now literally in the shadow of the European Union buildings may be his revenge. This is the building he demanded be built to house his increasingly passionate and bloody visions.

He persuaded the state to build the huge gallery on the promise he would donate his paintings to the state as long as they remained in the studio after his death.

Technically Wiertz had his shortcomings. His foreshortening can be poor and some of his figures are disproportionate. If his seated Vulcan stood up he'd be about 3m tall and with a leg at right angles to his hip.

Elsewhere, he realised his visions with great delicacy. He references Raphael in a lovely Esmeralda and, in another work, an unnaturally slender blonde engages the viewer dispassionately.

Wiertz died in his studio in 1865 and, as he wished, his remains were embalmed in accordance with ancient Egyptian burial rites.

And yet he did not die. His disturbing visions live on in the museum of his own making and he never doubted his genius, only that it would take a while for people to recognise it.

"It is impossible to condemn or absolve a man's work before his demise," he once wrote. "It takes at least two centuries to judge a painter."

Just another 60-something years to go then, Antoine. Meantime, those who find your monument to yourself come away bewildered and entranced by your hellish, impelled visionary work. You sick bastard genius.