Angelo Musco's Humanscapes Reveal Dante's Inferno-like Scenes (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

Angelo Musco's childhood story could arguably be a terrifying fairy tale. His mother gave birth to four children before him, each one bigger than the last. The Italian-born, New York-bred artist barely survived at a whopping 14 pounds, and was paralyzed on the right side of his body for the first few years of his life. To this day his work pays tribute to the surreal and mythical -- recognizing how nothing, even your own body, is ever familiar.

Some artists use the human body as a canvas, but Musco uses it as a medium. Bodies on bodies are layered into a piece as if they were a series of brush strokes. The floods of nude forms form new, twisted and mysterious pockets of life; sometimes the multi-headed beasts seem good, sometimes evil. Musco's living tapestries take the form of innocuous and breathtaking natural forms like birds' nests, honeycombs, ant colonies, spiderwebs. The nudes connect in harmony, forming chains of life. Yet sometimes the human bodies seem to writhe desperately in eternal darkness, looking like something out of Dante's Inferno.

Ovum

Tehom

Musco's epic works are infinitely complex. 'Ovum', for example, incorporated over 2 million bodies in the design. The wonder of these works is the simultaneous similarity and difference in the bodies: from far away they look like creatures swimming in the sea, yet up close you can still them as individuals displaying a range of emotions. See the utterly breathtaking works below.

What do you think, readers? Is this awe-inspiring or just strange?