GODDESSES & MUSES
An ode to humanity, through divine femininity.
Italian artist Daniel Salvi elevates women into a new pantheon through mixed-media digital artistry — merging photography, AI, digital painting, and retouching — to create ethereal worlds that celebrate the feminine as humanity’s most vital and profound expression.
An encounter with the divine
immersed in the here and now
Each artwork in GODDESSES & MUSES is conceived as a singular presence—an unrepeatable entity existing only in the fleeting instant of encounter.
These ethereal figures, suspended between the real and the surreal, gaze back with disarming intensity, inviting the observer into a silent exchange of emotions.
They do not merely represent the divine; they also embody a deep, fragile humanity – a mirror in which anybody may lose themselves, only to rediscover who they truly are.
Perfectly Imperfect
Visions of Goddesses from the new millennium
The worlds of Salvi, between timeless imaginary and new technologies.
History teaches that humanity’s greatest innovations in the creation and reproduction of images are destined to become vehicles for art.
This was the case for the use of the camera obscura, printing, and photography: every step forward taken by human technology led to the inevitable rise of a group of critics who repudiated and denigrated these means, prophesying the death of genuine human artistic expression because of their introduction.
In the midst of the second decade of a new millennium, we now witness the birth of a new step toward the unstoppable democratization of the artistic medium: Artificial Intelligence.
We live in an era of immense possibilities: now anyone, by sheer will and creativity, can decide to contribute their own creations to that age-old narrative that distinguishes what is human from the animal realm and — engaging with inspirations of the past — help shape the image of the future.
A camera obscura box with mirror, with an upright projected image at the top.
By unknown illustrator - 19th Century Dictionary Illustration, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Boulevard du Temple, a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph to include people. By Louis Daguerre - Scanned from The Photography Book, Phaidon Press, London, 1997., Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Daniel Salvi’s works, called “Visions” or “Visualizations,” are the exact representation of this opportunity:
split from previous definitions of painting and photography, they are visual manifestations whose seeds are born in today’s technologies but whose realization goes beyond the machine’s output, continuing in extensive photocomposition and artistic direction, resulting in works rich in inspiration and references.
Like the Golem, like Adam, raw material is skillfully shaped and then infused with a soul. Thus, the image, the illustration, becomes art.
The human figure depicted, laden with emotions and history, transcends earthly reality and time, becoming divine and an immortal idol that engages in a silent, everlasting dialogue with the observer.
Daniel Salvi, Golden Childhood (2024, Particular). Fine Art Print on cotton paper, Unique piece, 100 cm (39.3 in) x 100 cm (39.3 in).
The “Goddesses” are a series that Daniel Salvi dedicates to works that portray one of the most recurring subjects in his oeuvre — the female figure — flourishing in metaphysical spaces devoid of any temporal context.
The “Timelessness” at the base of every aspect of Daniel Salvi’s work takes shape in visualizations that center on subjects immortal through the ages, such as emotions, human passions, and ancient European and Middle Eastern mythologies, upon which the very archetypes of every story have been built.
Amedeo Modigliani, Femme aux yeux bleus (1918). Oil on canvas, 81 (31.9 in) x 54 cm (21.2 in).
Daniel Salvi, An Indiscreet Question (2023). Fine Art Print on cotton paper, Unique piece,
80 cm (31.4 in) x 120 cm (47.2 in).
In the eyes of these “Goddesses,” the strongest emotions pass — revenge, abandonment, betrayal, ecstasy — yet they transmit them with grace and composure, avoiding becoming prey to impulses and instead becoming their universal vehicle, in which every person can identify.
As in Modigliani’s artistic expression, so too in Salvi’s, the encounter with the subject is a singular and private “face-to-face,” a frontal vision that could be with the other or with a mirror image of oneself.
Salvi’s new Medea, new Lamia are not direct reproductions of neoclassical canons but are fields of study of the unknown through the known, of the metaphysical through the physical, of the invisible through the visible.
This impossibility of complete expression through myth leads the author to introduce new faces and new characters into his pantheon: subjects like shamans, mystics, and sibyls become recurring elements of the production and a bridge for the observer toward the most mysterious unknown — that of desire and the subconscious.
Salvi creates an ode to humanity, according to the manifestation he considers the deepest, most vital, universal, and full of wonder: the feminine.
Daniel Salvi, The Heart of Kronos (2023). Fine Art Print on cotton paper, Unique piece, 113 cm (39.3 in) x 150 cm (59 in).
Similarly to what was posited by Mondrian, the landscape and background in Salvi’s compositions are only a context in which the action of the protagonist unfolds. The human body merges in a statuesque manner with what surrounds it and becomes an immobile part of a panorama, suspended between the organic and the artificial.
Common in Salvi’s depictions is the use of backdrops that stand out for their less realistic tones than the subject, as if they were painted on a canvas or simple projections.
The presence of draperies reveals the arcane and confirms that the world in which these “Goddesses” move is mostly unreal, two-dimensional, suspended in a reality not unlike a stage in the half-light where theatrical numbers follow one another.
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Daniel Salvi, Creation (2025, Particular). Fine Art Print on cotton paper, Unique piece, 60 cm (23.6 in) x 80 cm (31.4 in).
Salvi’s compositions are mostly essential, centered around the actions of his protagonists and the secondary objects or characters with whom they interact, the latter often mysterious or hidden.
The world that manifests around them is an inner world more than an outer one: it takes the shape and colors of emotions.
From darkness and obscurity, from sleep and from the smoke of clouds—elements that since the time of the Odyssey represent the manifestation of the mystical and the incomprehensible—emerge the faces of the goddesses, emanating an often unreal light, as if projected or emitted by the subjects themselves:
they are the Suns and Moons of these microcosms cut off from time and space. Everything exists through them, for them, in that single eternal moment of action.
Daniel Salvi, Isis' Lullaby (2024, Particular). Fine Art Print on cotton paper, Unique piece, 113 cm (39.3 in) x 150 cm (59 in).
For this reason, every element is suspended and immobile, every subject is statuesque, stable, and rooted, quiet and waiting.
The gazes of the Goddesses, when open and visible, represent the only way to escape these closed spaces, infinitely expandable yet suffocating: they look at the observer without hesitation, implicating them, creating a bridge and a dialogue between their world and ours, between the immutable suspended and the dynamically changing.
The “Goddesses” are unique planets that the observer—becoming themselves a presence outside of any reality—can visit at their leisure, thereby immediately evoking the emotions that have given them image.
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