After death, most of us will end up in a coffin, sometimes known euphemistically as a casket. Despite their widespread use, they seldom appear in paintings, perhaps because they obscure the body. Although there’s no shortage of deaths in classical myth and legend, I’ve been unable to find any conventional narrative painting that includes a coffin. There is, though, one remarkable history painting that does.

This is Francisco Pradilla’s painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – from 1877, which won the Medal of Honour at the National Exhibition in Spain, went on to the Exposition Universel in Paris, and won further acclaim in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain. He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. This is the basis of Pradilla’s painting, where Juana is shown in the nun’s habit she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Coffins do appear more in symbolic roles.

In 1923-24, Albin Egger-Lienz painted a thoroughly modern account of the Resurrection of Christ. His finished painting includes contemporary peasants, and the risen Christ standing in his own coffin.

They also appear in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s unusual And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It (1892), whose title is a quotation from the Book of Revelation:
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
(Revelation Chapter 20, verse 13.)

Considered to be one of his most dramatic paintings, it was initially intended to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, but was rejected as unsuitable. It was then commissioned at reduced size by Henry Tate for his new gallery of British art, now The Tate Gallery in London.

Unlike much of the fearsome imagery of the Second Coming described in the book of Revelation, this is essentially an optimistic scene, being the resurrection and spiritual salvation of those who have died at sea, an all too common fate around the British coast. A central family group shows stages of awakening: the man has been fully awakened, his son is just starting to breathe but still white, and his wife still bears the pale green hue of the dead.

Around them, others are likewise being awoken from their coffins, presumably from burial at sea, or from the water itself. Leighton’s tones and colours refer to Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), by far the most famous painting of shipwreck and death at sea, with which Leighton was very familiar. There are also references to Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500-1), in the National Gallery and a favourite of Leighton’s at the time.

This third version of Arnold Böcklin’s famous Island of the Dead was painted in 1883 for his dealer. As with others he painted, this shows a coffin being brought by boat to the island for interment.

The few other paintings of coffins show them in more ordinary funerals.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the stave church in the distance.

Jakub Schikaneder’s finished version of The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse drawing the cart bearing a coffin. The woman, presumably a widow before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. In the background is the floodplain of a river in full flood. It appears to be in the late autumn, with the last of the brown leaves remaining on the trees. Schikaneder’s world is barren, bleak, and forlorn.

In his village in Norway, Nikolai Astrup recorded the public rites of the community, as in his Funeral Day in Jølster (before 1908). With the grandeur of the hills behind, a small party escorts the coffin of one of the villagers. The artist’s father, the pastor, leads the procession to the small churchyard.

Perhaps the most famous painting of a burial in European art is that below, Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50).

Courbet’s monumental Burial at Ornans (1849-50), shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in this small provincial town. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment that could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image that ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy. Another feature it has in common is that its most significant object, the coffin, is almost obscured here by the bearers.

Finally, there’s one painting that explores one of the great fears of the nineteenth century, that of being presumed dead and being buried alive.

After his mother’s death, Antoine Wiertz became progressively more obsessed with death. His Premature Burial (1854) visits this not uncommon dread of the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, and then recovering to find yourself in a coffin. This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive, leading to coffins being designed with bells that could be rung by a recovered occupant. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, had found Iole, Hercules’ lover, a good confidante. Since Hercules’ apotheosis, and at the hero’s instruction, Hyllus had married Iole, and she was now pregnant with his child.

This reminds Alcmena of her own pregnancy with Hercules, that had been cursed by Juno to be a difficult one. She was in labour for seven days and nights, in agony, and called on Lucina and the multiple Roman deities of childbirth to deliver her child. But Lucina had received instructions from Juno, and would not let the labour progress.

Lucina sat on an altar by the door, her legs crossed and her hands linked, preventing delivery. One of Alcmena’s most loyal maids, Galanthis, took matters into her own hands, and announced to Lucina that Hercules had been born. The goddess was so shocked that she jumped up, parting her hands, so allowing Alcmena’s labour to conclude at last. But Galanthis ridiculed Lucina for this. The goddess seized Galanthis by her hair and dragged her along the ground. As the maid struggled to rise she was transformed into a weasel, and Hercules entered the world.

I’ve been unable to find any paintings of this story, but there are several engravings.

Virgil Solis engraved Alcmena’s Labour at some time around 1550. Alcmena is in the left foreground, in the throes of her protracted labour, with four women attending to her. In the background, two women are talking, and at the far right, Lucina is dragging Galanthis to the ground by her hair. There’s also a weasel walking past.

Subsequent engravings have drawn on this. Some show Lucina and Galanthis fighting in the background, but most omit the weasel. One other comes close to showing the story as told by Ovid.

The unknown engraver who made Alcmena Giving Birth to Hercules: Juno, Jealous of the Child, Attempts to Delay the Childbirth, in about 1606, has an almost identical group around Alcmena. The same two women are talking in the background, but the weasel is prominent.

Other stories about Hercules as a baby and young child, which Ovid doesn’t tell here, have been much better represented in paintings. According to older Greek myths, the sons of Jupiter could only become divine if they were suckled at Juno’s breast. Shortly after the birth of Hercules, Mercury took the infant to Juno, who put him to her breast. When she realised who the baby was, she pulled him away, and the excess milk released as a result sprayed over the heavens, forming the Milky Way.

There are two outstanding paintings showing this unusual scene.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way from about 1575 shows the infant Hercules being pulled away by an anonymous assistant, with fine streams of milk gushing upwards to generate individual stars. In the background, Jupiter’s eagle appears to have a crablike object in its talons, perhaps representing the constellation of the Crab (Cancer), and Juno’s peacocks are at the right.

Just a few years before his death, Rubens painted an even more wonderful version, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-37). Jupiter sits in the background on the left, seemingly bored. Juno’s milk arcs out from her left breast over the heavens, and her peacocks look distressed.

Other myths tell that Juno was still furious that Hercules had been born, so she placed two serpents in his cradle, in an attempt to kill the child. Hercules’ mortal twin Iphicles (not mentioned by Ovid) screamed at the snakes, bringing their father Amphitryon running. He found Hercules strangling the serpents with his bare hands: proof that he was indeed the son of Jupiter.

Several fine paintings seize this unique opportunity to show an infant strangling serpents.

This painting from the mid seventeenth century, attributed to Bernardino Mei, has been neutrally titled Scene from the Infancy of Hercules. Rather than let his father discover the baby’s strange abilities, it’s Alcmena who has come running into his nursery.

Pompeo Batoni’s account, The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle from 1743, succeeds because it shows so well Hercules’ parents, disturbed from their bed, discovering their baby despatching the snakes, all by the light of an oil lamp.

The third version of this story comes from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1785 to paint her a history subject of his choice. Reynolds thought that he could flatter the Empress of Russia, perhaps, and produced this preparatory study for the heart of his final work.

The Infant Hercules was painted between about 1785-88, then exhibited at the Royal Academy before being sent to Russia. Reynolds is reputed to have used a real baby as his model, and later reused this for a painting of Puck as a baby.

Reynolds’ finished painting of The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) loses the baby among its elaborate supporting cast. It has also suffered problems with deterioration in its paint layer, a common issue with many of Reynold’s paintings.

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the events leading to the death of the great hero Hercules. This reverses the chronological order, as the next story after that in Metamorphoses tells of his birth.

Having won her hand by defeating Achelous, Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate from the winter’s rains. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, but the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across.

Hercules had thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected Nessus was trying to abduct her, so shouted warning to him before loosing an arrow at the centaur’s back.

Ovid’s description of these events poses a problem for those trying to depict them, in choosing the right point of view and composition to remain faithful to that account.

Guido Reni’s masterly painting from around 1620, one of the finest of its period in the Louvre, almost fills the canvas with Nessus, who looks worryingly heroic, and Deianeira, who seems to be flying. The small figure of Hercules in the distance is well-lit, but loses the details of bow and arrow. In any case, that arrow could hardly strike Nessus in the chest.

Paolo Veronese’s painting from about 1586 also elects for this early moment, as Hercules is readying his bow and arrow, with Nessus just reaching the opposite bank. He shows the scene from Hercules’ position, but discovers the problems with that point of view: Nessus and Deianeira are now small, and Nessus is looking away with his chest concealed, and even Hercules’ face is turned from the viewer. The result makes its hero look more like a furtive stalker.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and body well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest. To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

Antonio del Pollaiolo’s painting from about 1475–80 tries a side-on view, requiring Nessus to be shot while still in the river, in a slight adjustment to the original story. Deianeira appears precariously balanced, and must be grateful that Nessus’ muscular arms save her from being dropped into the river below. The artist also leaves it to the viewer to know that Hercules’ poisoned arrow strikes Nessus rather than Deianeira.

Three centuries later, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée clearly understood the compositional problem, but didn’t arrive at such a good solution. Nessus, bearing a distressed Deianeira in his arms, has just reached the opposite bank, in the foreground. Hercules is on the left in the distance, and we can at least see his face, bow and arrow. There appears to be no way that Hercules’ arrow could impale Nessus’ chest, without first passing through some of the abundant Deianeira, nor his back. Lagrenée also adds a ferryman, who seems to have been knocked over in Nessus’ haste to make off with his captive.

Gustave Moreau’s final drawing of about 1860, squared up and ready to transfer to canvas for painting, alters the story to make its composition feasible. He puts Nessus in the foreground, with the attendant risk of making him appear the hero, somehow supporting the upstretched body of Deianeira. In the right distance, Hercules has already loosed the fatal arrow, which is prominently embedded not in the front of Nessus’ chest, but in his back. The centaur’s legs have collapsed under him, and his head and neck are stretched up in the agony of death.

Gustave Moreau and Jules Élie Delaunay seem to have worked on a compositional solution together, resulting in Delaunay’s brilliant painting of 1870, which is sadly not available for use here.

That single shot ran Nessus through. He tore the arrow out, and his blood spurted freely, mixed with poison from the Lernaean hydra. Determined to avenge his own death, the centaur gave Deianira his tunic soaked with that poison, telling her to keep it to “strengthen waning love.”

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Hercules, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Hercules’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, but Deianeira is in no position to collect it.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. Initially, she was upset, but then tried to devise a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. It was then that she recalled the blood of Nessus, and his dying words to her. She therefore impregnated a shirt with that blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, quickly growing into intense pain. Trying to tear the shirt off, he obtained no relief, and only ripped off his burnt skin from the burning flesh underneath. Hercules roamed through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt off his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea, where he was transformed into a rock pinnacle.

Hercules then cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Jupiter came to the aid of the dying hero, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and his immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

Tiepolo’s wonderful Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765) portrays this as a saintly ascension, which seems inappropriate.

The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza release a group of convicts, they fear for their safety, so head for the mountains. Once there, events become more interrelated and complex, presenting even greater challenges to those who tried to paint them in standalone works, rather than illustrations accompanying the text.

The pair find a hoard of gold coins apparently abandoned with a notebook in a travel bag. Then Don Quixote catches a glimpse of a man leaping around the bushes half-naked, and suspects that he’s the owner of the bag and its coins. A little way around the hillside, they find a dead mule whose owner they think had carried that bag.

This scene must have fascinated the French artist Honoré Daumier, who painted a series of oil sketches of it in about 1867.

In the first, the knight leads his squire towards the dead mule.

This rough oil sketch shows them drawing even closer.

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra is more generic, and omits the dead mule altogether.

A little later, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, so the knight dispatches him on his own horse Rocinante to obtain three replacement donkeys, and deliver a letter to the Lady Dulcinea, Quixote’s semi-imaginary ‘lady’ of his chivalric quests. Meanwhile, the knight laments and feigns madness for the lady. Panza meets their village priest and barber, and they agree to deceive Quixote in a bid to persuade him to return to the village for his madness to be treated.

As the three head back towards Don Quixote, they meet Dorotea, who had previously been tricked and seduced. She agrees to dress up as a fine lady and pose as Princess Micomicona, who purports to have come all the way from Guinea to ask a boon of the knight.

Pedro González Bolívar’s painting of The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote from 1881 shows their meeting. Without that background information, this would prove impossible to read.

Don Quixote is persuaded to leave the mountains and return home with them, but that’s the start of another series of misadventures. During these, Dorotea’s true identity is revealed, and at dinner Don Quixote gives a long and impassioned speech in which he argues surprisingly rationally in favour of the pre-eminence of arms over learning.

This is recorded in Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters from 1884. Sancho Panza stands immediately behind the knight, at the head of the table, on the right. Seated along the table’s length are a man who has just arrived from Algiers with a Moorish woman, the village priest, and others.

Don Quixote’s madness only continues, and eventually he has to be bundled into an oxcart and taken home.

On a Sunday when all the locals are out in the square, the oxcart bearing Don Quixote enters his village at noon, as shown in Hippolyte Lecomte’s undated Don Quixote’s Homecoming. At the left, Don Quixote’s niece or housekeeper holds her hands up in horror at his condition. To the left of the cart are the priest and barber, still mounted. Sancho Panza is riding his donkey, and has been greeted by his wife and their children, who are more interested in how many fine skirts he brought back for her, and how many pairs of shoes for their children.

The priest and barber leave Don Quixote alone to recover for a month after their return, then reassess him, as shown by Miguel Jadraque in this Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote from 1880. Don Quixote is becoming animated with them as he sits up in bed. In the left background are the knight’s niece and housekeeper, praying in vain for his recovery.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then leave on their third sally, which first takes them on a futile mission to El Toboso in quest of the Lady Dulcinea. After that, they head towards the city of Saragossa, and meet a cart full of players in costume, who create mayhem.

Carlos Vásquez Úbeda shows this encounter in his undated painting of Don Quixote. At this stage, the pair are still on their mounts, but shortly afterwards a clown causes Rocinante to bolt and throw Don Quixote, and one of the other players rides off on the squire’s donkey. For once, Sancho manages to persuade his master not to retaliate, and they continue on their way without coming to grief.

Later, they meet a group from a village, and are invited to attend a wedding there the following day.

The wedding brings an elaborate deception in which the bride’s first suitor appears to impale himself on his own sword so that he can marry the bride as his dying wish, but then miraculously comes back to life, to cheat the groom from marrying the bride as had been expected. Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of The Marriage of Basilio and Quiteria from 1881 shows the priest officiating in the centre, as the bride to the right is married to the dying suitor, who is supported by Don Quixote with his lance. The groom stands at the front of the tent at the right, staring in disbelief at what’s going on.

The newlyweds entertain Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for three days, enabling them to visit the Cave of Montesinos and the Lakes of Ruidera nearby. Gustave Doré, whose illustrations for the whole book have been used by others as the basis for further illustrated editions, painted this non-narrative scene of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria in about 1863.

In the middle of Cervantes’ second book of Don Quixote, the knight and his squire Sancho Panza become guests of a Duke and Duchess who had already read Cervantes’ first book, and set out to trick the pair into further comical misadventures. Soon after their arrival, the Duke’s chaplain asserts that Don Quixote isn’t a knight errant at all, causing the knight to deliver a searing riposte.

Out of the blue, maids arrive to wash and lather the knight’s beard, and that of the Duke, in a procedure that defuses a tense situation by transforming it into the absurd. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro’s painting of Don Quijote in the Duke’s House from 1878 shows this bizarre moment, with the rotund figure of Sancho Panza at the left, the gaunt Don Quixote in the centre, and the Duke and Duchess seated at the right, in obvious amusement.

Although Cervantes had completed Don Quixote in 1615, and it quickly became popular across Europe, it appears to have been painted infrequently before the nineteenth century. Only Valero Iriarte seems to have painted its comical adventure stories in the previous century. Although Eugène Delacroix painted the non-narrative Don Quixote in his Library in 1824, Cervantes’ novel was generally ignored by the major narrative artists of the nineteenth century, who continued depicting mostly classical myth.

These paintings demonstrate how modern fiction can form the basis for successful narrative painting, even though that has remained unusual.

Telling a story in a painting intended to be viewed independently of its literary account requires great skill. Illustrations have the advantage that they’re going to be seen alongside the words, but a narrative painting could be exhibited almost anywhere. The most popular solution is to depict the best-known myths and legends, typically from classical times, stories that all educated viewers should be familiar with.

Painting a modern novel is even more of a challenge, making those showing Miguel de Cervantes’ epic Don Quixote, published in 1605 and 1615, among the boldest of all narrative paintings. A few years ago I published a long series of summaries of the book accompanied by paintings and illustrations. This weekend I look at just the former, from outside the immediate context of the literary account, considering whether they work as narrative paintings.

Cervantes himself spent at least two periods in prison, and it’s claimed that he started work on Don Quixote during the second of those. Mariano de la Roca’s painting of Miguel de Cervantes imagining El Quixote from 1858 may be as fictitious as the book, but reveals a clear vision of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza. Their mounts are caricatured, but Don Quixote is fully detailed complete with the barber’s basin he wears as a helmet.

Nils Kreuger’s portrait of Don Quixote’s Horse Rocinante from 1911 is non-narrative, but nevertheless a fine painting, with the knight seated against the base of a tree and staring into the distance.

Quixote’s first, solo and briefest sally takes him to an inn, where he insists the innkeeper dubs him as a knight, as depicted by Valero Iriarte, who is now known almost exclusively for his paintings of this book.

Iriarte’s first scene of Don Quixote at the Inn (c 1720) shows one of the earliest comic events in the book, in which the landlord pours wine into a hollowed-out length of cane to enable the aspiring knight to drink through his helmet. Immediately beforehand, the two women had fed him, as his hands had been fully occupied in holding up his cardboard visor. To anyone familiar with the opening chapters of Cervantes’ book, this would have been instantly recognisable.

Iriarte’s second scene is set inside the inn, with Don Quixote Dubbed a Knight (c 1720). Quixote is on his knees ready for the ceremony, while the fat innkeeper stands behind with his back to the viewer, busy rehearsing his reading. To the left of Quixote is a young lad holding a candle, and a prostitute is holding the knight’s lance as she’s negotiating with her next customer, to the right. Again, Iriarte tells the story true to Cervantes’ account, and it’s readily recognisable.

After a couple of tragi-comic adventures, Don Quixote returns home battered and bruised.

One of his neighbours came past with a donkey, on which the knight was placed. To avoid any embarrassment, they don’t enter the village until after dark. Wilhelm Marstrand’s undated painting captures the sense of defeat during Don Quixote’s First Ride Home.

Don Quixote recruits Sancho Panza to be his squire during the fortnight he spends at home after that first sally. The pair then ride out together and engage in the most famous of their adventures, when Quixote attacks a windmill, convinced that it’s a giant.

José Moreno’s painting of Don Quixote and the Windmills from about 1900 portrays the climax perfectly, as the knight and his charger are hoisted aloft by one of the windmill’s sails, as it rotates with the wind.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then endure further misadventures, during which the knight loses part of his helmet and some of his left ear. They accept the hospitality of some goatherds for the night, and the following morning attend the burial of a local scholar whose death resulted from his unrequited love for a young shepherdess. She appears at the burial and denies responsibility, as painted by Cecilio Pla and Valero Iriarte.

Pla’s Marcela the Shepherdess from 1905 shows her standing defiantly above the scholar’s grave.

Valero Iriarte’s Story of Shepherds Grisóstomo and Marcela (c 1701-44) is overambitious in its detail. The shepherdess stands at the far right, well away from the burial taking place at the far left. Between them are Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, engaged in conversation.

The pair become involved in further unfortunate incidents, culminating in Don Quixote leaving an inn without paying for their accommodation. The knight then makes another spectacular error when he mistakes flocks of sheep for armies about to join in battle, a story that sticks in the mind.

As Johann Baptist Zwecker shows in his painting of Don Quixote from 1854, the knight then charges at the armies of sheep with his lance, to the annoyance of the drovers, who retaliate by knocking out several of his teeth with their slingshot.

A turning point in this second sally occurs when the pair free a dozen convicts who turn on them by bombarding them with rocks, then run away. Fearing that they are in danger, the knight and his squire ride off to hide in the mountains, as shown below in Adrien Demont’s painting of Don Quixote from 1893.

Tomorrow I’ll show paintings of what happened next.

No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the central feature in three classical myths and one religious story examined in this article; tomorrow’s sequel looks at the depiction of less famous, personal weddings.

Of the three great mythical weddings, the first in chronological order was that of Hippodame and Pirithous, which brought an end to the dominance of centaurs on earth, the Centauromachy. This was celebrated in prominent places: the subsequent battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was shown in sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the Parthenon at Athens. It was Ovid, though, who chose to tell this story in the context of the Trojan War.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked. Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings of the ultimate wedding feast gone wrong. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on the large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, and Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another. This is definitely a wedding to remember, if you survived it.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Rape of Hippodame (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

The next wedding to be grateful you missed was that between the great hero Perseus and the princess whom he rescued from Cetus the sea monster. Andromeda’s parents were so delighted at their daughter’s rescue that she, who had already been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into cold statuary.

Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.

Surprisingly few paintings of this wedding make reference to the goddess Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.

Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it. The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis.

The wedding of Thetis, sea nymph and spinster of this parish, and Peleus, king of Phthia and bachelor of that parish, was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the Judgement of Paris, and the rest is legendary.

For once it’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

This wedding banquet set up the beauty contest between Juno, Venus and Minerva in the Judgement of Paris. Venus won following her bribe promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened at the time to be married to King Menelaus of Sparta. After Paris abducted Helen to Troy, the Greeks united to wage war against Troy, eventually capturing and destroying the city.

In 1562, Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a large work for the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its central narrative is an episode of the ministry of Christ as recorded in the gospels: Christ and his disciples were invited to a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. Towards its end, the wine started to run out, and he was asked what they should do. He directed servants to fill jugs with water, which he then miraculously turned into wine.

This huge canvas shows Christ, distinguished by his halo, at the centre of his disciples, with the Virgin Mary (also with halo) at his right, and sundry disciples arrayed along that side of the tables. The wedding group is at the far left of the party.

At the far right of the canvas, wine is shown being poured from a large container, a clear cue to the gospel narrative.

There’s also a great deal of other activity in every part of the painting. On the balcony behind Christ there are scenes of the butchery of meat, which is generally claimed to be lamb and symbolic of Christ’s future death as a sacrifice for mankind, as the ‘Lamb of God’, although there are no visual clues to support that interpretation. In the musicians below, and other guests, it is claimed that there are portraits of artists, including Veronese himself, and Titian. Other important figures who are supposed to be shown include Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Emperor Charles V.

Finally, I turn to one of many weddings in more modern European literature.

The eighth story told on the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron concerns the misfortunes of one Nastagio Degli Onesti, involving one ghost killing and dismembering the ghost of a woman, a strange and grisly tale told in a series of four panels by Botticelli. The fourth and last shows the hero Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Ovid ended Book 8 of his Metamorphoses with a teaser, telling how the river god Achelous was able to transform himself into a snake or bull, and that he had recently lost one of the bull’s two horns. Book 9 opens by explaining how that came about.

With a little prompting from Theseus, Achelous resumes his narration, lamenting that he’s about to tell a story of a battle lost. He and Hercules both asked for the beautiful Deianira’s hand in marriage, forcing other suitors to resign their claims and leave the matter to them to plead their cases. Hercules wasn’t happy to do this in words, so rushed at his competitor to engage him in a fight.

Achelous gives a flattering account of the pair wrestling, eventually admitting that Hercules got the better of him and forced him onto his knees. The river god then shifted shape, changing first to a snake so he could slither away from his opponent. Hercules mocked him for that, reminding him of his conquest of the Lernean Hydra. When Hercules got a stranglehold on him, Achelous changed into his third and final form, that of a bull. Once again Hercules brought him down, and wrenched off one of his horns. The missing horn was transformed into the Horn of Plenty, cornucopia, and the guests were then served fruit in such a horn at their banquet.

This exquisitely engraved rock crystal plaque by Annibale Fontana, showing Hercules and Achelous wrestling, is one scene from a life of Hercules. This was originally set with others into a gilded casket owned by the ducal Gonzaga family, of the city of Mantua in Italy. Hercules, on the right, wears his signature lion-skin, and Achelous is conventionally old, bearded, and shaggy.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in the wrestling, with Achelous in the form of a bull, brought to the ground by Hercules, who is here trying to twist his horns off.

Guido Reni’s Hercules and Achelous (1617-21) opts for a more conventional wrestling match, with Achelous still in his initial human form.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This too opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Nicolas Bertin’s Hercules fighting Achelous (1715-30) is more elaborate. Hercules has almost got Achelous onto the ground, and looks as if he’s about to punch him with his fist. Hercules’ club rests in the foreground. The woman at the right is Deianira, over whom they are fighting, and a winged goddess is ready to place the laurel wreath on the victor.

For once, the most detailed and magnificent account of one of Ovid’s myths is modern, painted in 1947 for a department store in Kansas City. Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules (1947) is a gem of narrative painting.

At the centre, Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, is about to grasp Achelous’ horns. Immediately to the right, Deianira is also shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown. They’re sat on the Horn of Plenty, and Benton is one of few to include this important reference.

To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, making this multiplex narrative. That is part of a passage referring to ranching and cowboys, and further to the left to the grain harvest. To the right, the Horn of Plenty links into the cultivation of maize (corn), the other major crop from the area.

My final painting to accompany this short story is another collaboration between the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder: Nymphs Filling the Horn of Plenty (c 1615). Although it has no references to the fight between Hercules and Achelous, it’s good to see the staff preparing the second course of Achelous’ banquet.

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of balconies in paintings, I looked at views of balconies from the outside; today we get to join the rich and famous and look out and down on the world below. Before cheap and easy travel became available in the late nineteenth century, standing on a balcony was probably one of the more elevating experiences for most of the population.

There has been speculation as to whether Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies from about 1490 were bored upper class wives, or courtesans in between gigs, although opinion currently favours their nobility. They sit amid a menagerie of peacock, doves and two dogs, staring into the blank distance.

Views from the balcony came of age in the early nineteenth century, with the arrival of paintings of figures standing in front of windows. These developed most obviously in German painting, in Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window of 1822, further elaborated two years later by his friend and follower Carl Gustav Carus.

First came Carus’ Friedrichian Woman on the Balcony from 1824. High above the rolling wooded countryside of central Germany, a young woman dressed in black sits contemplating the view and facing away from the viewer. The artist tells us where he painted this view from, and adds some foreground detail to help mystify the viewer.

When Carus visited Naples in about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, and framed a view in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). Instead of a figure, there’s a musical instrument, presumably to reinforce that this is Italy. The interior is mainly used for its framing and repoussoir effect.

After Manet’s The Balcony (1868-69), Berthe Morisot, who modelled for that and was soon to become his sister-in-law, painted her own Woman and Child on a Balcony in 1872. She uses the balcony primarily to combine full-length portraits of the two figures with an aerial landscape of Paris. The pillar and flowerpot at the right steer the eye from immediate foreground in a zigzag past the figures to end in the far distance. On the skyline just to the left of the woman is the dark mass of Notre Dame.

It was Gustave Caillebotte who recast and modernised the precursors of Friedrich and Carus for his painting of his brother René, the Young Man at His Window, in 1875.

Strictly speaking, Caillebotte’s younger brother René isn’t on a balcony here, merely standing in front of a balustraded window in the family apartment on the rue de Miromesnil in Paris. But the artist has here realised the interplay between the rich red upholstery of the interior and the bright exterior with its pale buildings and trees. Between those two worlds is a substantial stone balustrade. Caillebotte gives his figures the mysterious anonymity of facing away from us too.

Five years later, Caillebotte embarked on a series of paintings from the balconies of his apartment, of which the best-known is Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880). The interior has been replaced by intermediate details: a trough of flowers, the ornate iron balustrade, and a colourful awning.

Less well-known are two views looking along the length of A Balcony (1880), above, and another Man on a Balcony (1880), below. Both are revelatory in showing the faces of their figures who are looking across our direction of view, down at the exterior world below. Both are strongly projected to a vanishing point close to one edge of the canvas, and the view above places the head of one of its two figures at that focal point.

Caillebotte went on to paint a couple of tightly-cropped images showing small sections of balustrade with the trees and buildings below. Finally in 1884, he bought Manet’s The Balcony for his private collection.

The Norwegian painter Hans Heyerdahl, who was living in Paris at the time, responded with his close-cropped At the Window in 1881 (above), and the following year his compatriot Christian Krohg painted his Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (below) using the same artistic device. Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but as he neared the end of his time in France in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Heyerdahl engages deeply in the interplay between the woman’s interior world, with a half-open book on her lap, and her distant gaze towards the bright exterior.

Prior to this development of the themes of Friedrich and Carus, balconies had often played minor roles in portrait paintings. Maybe the sitter leaned on a section of balustrade, or a flowerpot cascaded its blooms from a pillar. In the late nineteenth century, balconies acquired greater prominence in a wide range of portraits and figurative paintings. Some of that was undoubtedly the result of their increasing availability: with the growth of cities, balconies became popular features of upmarket city apartments, particularly those in Paris.

This portrait of Maximilien Luce’s then unmarried partner and model Ambroisine ‘Simone’ Bouin, Madame Luce on the Balcony from 1893, is an example with objects from its interior set out in the outside sunshine.

Richard Bergh’s Nordic Summer’s Evening (1899-1900) features two distinguished models, Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke, and the singer Karin Pyk, who were both close friends of the artist. In fact, it’s a wonderful composite: the pillars shown were borrowed from the floor below, where they supported this balcony, and Pyk was actually painted when she was in Assisi in Italy. Their figures look not at one another, but their gazes cross paths as they stare at the still parkland beyond, lit by the low sun.

We can only imagine the ‘cheating’ that Isaak Brodsky must have contrived to paint this marvellous Self-portrait with Daughter in 1911. Here, the balcony is an integral part of an aerial precinct in the town; there is no sight of ground level. Brodsky’s world exists a couple of stories above.

Lovis Corinth painted this Balcony Scene in Bordighera in 1912 early during his convalescence in the Midi after his stroke the previous year.

The scene in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Lady on a Balcony appears more relaxed. His sitter, I.A. Yusupova, looks to be enjoying the fine summer weather in Koreiz, not far from Yalta, on the northern coast of the Black Sea. At about this time, the Balkans had been plunged into crisis following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and by the end of July the Great War had begun. During its closing stages, the Crimean Peninsula was swept up in the Russian Civil War, and changed hands every few months, with tens of thousands being massacred during the chaos.

The last artist whose paintings I show here had a lasting fascination for painting views through windows, extending to the balconies he had added to his homes: Pierre Bonnard.

In La Fenêtre (The Window) from 1925, Bonnard frames the view from his villa in Le Cannet looking inland, and includes part of the all-important balcony.

One of Bonnard’s fullest views of a balcony comes in The French Windows with Dog from 1927, where our gaze is led from its interior, out through the French windows, over the decking and wooden balustrade, to the palms and town of Le Cannet beyond.

The view from the balcony is a journey through life.

Balconies have been a significant device in painting, and in this and tomorrow’s articles I look at two groups of views using them with effect. This article looks from outside the balcony towards it, and the interior behind; tomorrow I’ll reverse that and look from balconies, typically from inside looking out at the world beyond.

These balconies are mostly platforms projecting from the upper part of a building, above ground level, normally capable of containing people, and constraining them from falling by a surrounding balustrade. They were popular features of some of the most ancient buildings in Europe, and much loved by classical civilisations.

For the visual artist they offer several opportunities, from their height above the ground affording good views or giving vertical extent, for the relationships between people on the balcony and those below, and most interestingly for their extension to the interior of a building into the exterior. Suspended in mid-air, they’re simultaneously both inside and outside, but neither.

Balconies play a significant role in several well-painted narratives, including that of David and Bathsheba, here in Jan Matsys’ painting of 1562. The action is taking place at ground level, where one of King David’s court has been sent down to express regal interest in the scantily-clad Bathsheba, to the wicked amusement of her maid. King David himself is leaning over the balustrade in the distance, elevated as his position demands, and looking down at us.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s much later Bathsheba from 1889 may have been painted three centuries later, but bears striking compositional similarities.

Another well-known story in which a balcony plays a key role is the love of Romeo and Juliet, as told in Shakespeare’s play, in which Act 3, scene 5 is known as the Balcony Scene. Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo ascended and about to kiss Juliet, as a rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.

Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation from 1869-70 makes this even more vertiginous, with the couple alone and squeezed into a balcony smaller than a single bed. We ascend to the heights of love, and of ecstasy.

Balconies proved popular among those allied with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who in his Home After Victory from 1867 uses one to lend a more courtly mediaeval air to this scene of rejoicing.

Balconies even appear in pioneer landscape painting. Possibly the smallest major painting of a balcony is that in Thomas Jones’s early plein air oil painting of A Wall in Naples, made on paper in about 1782. Not only is this painting tiny, little more than 10 x 15 cm (4 x 6 inches), but the balcony is so small that it’s really only good for hanging out the washing.

Another landmark painting of a balcony, Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, made between 1800-12, is unusual for ignoring almost all its compositional properties. These two young women are at much the same height as the viewer, and there’s no clear inside or out, just a couple of shady guys skulking behind them, and the black iron balustrade fencing them in. Majas were lower-class women in Spain, particularly its capital Madrid, who dressed in elaborate local style, here in florid mantillas, for example.

Goya apparently inspired Édouard Manet to paint The Balcony in 1868-69. Its four figures are Berthe Morisot (seated, left) who later became Manet’s sister-in-law, the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, Fanny Claus (standing, right, with umbrella) a violinist, and in the shadows behind Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. As with the painting that inspired it, this all but ignores the visual potential of the balcony.

Shortly after Manet had exhibited that to derision at the Salon, the young American Impressionist-to-be Mary Cassatt visited Spain, where she painted her more conventional take, The Flirtation – A Balcony in Seville (1872). Romeo and Juliet have been revisited, without a maja’s mantilla in sight.

It took the Valencian painter José Benlliure a trip to Italy to find his balcony, in The Carnival in Rome (1881), and exploit its potential more fully. Festooned with flowers and richly-decorated carpets, this balcony has become the carnival in miniature, its occupants dressed for the occasion. Even a pair of pigeons are joining in the revelry.

Balconies have also been places for more formal ceremonial, such as Papal and royal addresses. Jean-Jacques Scherrer uses this allusion for Charlotte Corday in Caen from 1894. It was Corday who assassinated the revolutionary Marat in his bath. Here Scherrer imagines her as heroine, greeting crowds of supporters beneath her balcony.

Around the end of the nineteenth century, the viewer became one of the riff-raff below the balcony of those richer and more famous. George Clairin’s undated Spanish Woman on Balcony looks down at us with disdain from lavish potted flowers.

In Clairin’s On the Balcony, from around 1910, we aren’t even close to those already halfway to heaven behind their ornate art nouveau balustrade.

Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the Blue Balcony from 1910 doesn’t reveal how important balconies became to him. But in each of two homes that he made with his lifelong partner (and later wife) Marthe, seen here on the balcony of the title, Bonnard had extensive balconies added.

As Ovid draws Book 8 of his Metamorphoses to a close, Lelex has just told the touching story of Philemon and Baucis, who were transformed into an intertwining pair of trees. Achelous, host of the banquet, then takes over as narrator, to tell of three examples of shape-shifters, who can transform whenever they want.

His first example is probably the most accomplished of all: Proteus, who apparently can transform himself into all manner of creatures and objects, at one moment a boar, the next a snake or a fire. Both Hans Thoma and Cy Twombly have painted Proteus, but I regret that neither of their works is available to show here.

This leads Achelous on to tell the longer story of another shape-shifter, the daughter of Erysichthon, who remains unnamed here, elsewhere being known as Mestra or Mnestra. But he first has to introduce her father, by telling the story of his downfall.

Erysichthon was an irreligious man, even desecrating Ceres’ sacred grove by chopping down a giant and ancient oak within it. As he prepared to swing his axe at the tree, it shuddered and turned pale. A man stood in his way, so he was peremptorily beheaded. As he raised his axe ready, its nymph warned him that her death would bring him punishment.

The other Dryads (wood nymphs) prayed to Ceres to punish Erysichthon. The goddess decided to bring him insatiable hunger, but as it was decreed that Ceres and the goddess of hunger could never meet, Ceres sent an Oread as her messenger. The Oread found Hunger in the Caucasus mountains, and passed the message. Ovid then gives a detailed account of how Erysichthon was wracked with hunger, even in his dreams. Nothing could satisfy his appetite, and he spent his entire wealth trying to do so. When he ran out of money, he sold his own daughter to raise money for more food.

Erysichthon’s daughter then called on Neptune, who had previously raped her, to be spared from slavery. The god then transformed her into a fisherman, and her father, not recognising his daughter, called on the fisherman to tell him where his daughter had gone. She denied all knowledge of her former female self, and the man who had bought her went away. Knowing her ability to transform herself, Erysichthon sold her to a succession of people, enabling her to cheat on them and be sold again in a different form. He fed his constant hunger from the money she brought him, until he started to eat his own flesh and limbs.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving showing Erysichthon Sells His Daughter Mestra (c 1630) is a simple depiction of Ovid’s story, but has the interesting feature of Neptune, with his traditional horses and trident, down on the water to the right.

It’s Neptune and water that provide a thread running through much of Ovid’s narrative here. For Neptune not only raped Mestra and enabled her shape-shifting, but he is the father of Proteus, the most adept of all shape-shifters, and both Achelous and Neptune are gods of the waters. Neptune has been painted frequently, but I can find no reference to him being shown with his son Proteus, nor with Mestra. But there is one painting in which father and son might appear together.

Nicolas Poussin’s The Birth of Venus (1635-36) is controversial, as there is no general agreement as to what it is actually about, nor the identity of the goddess at its centre. One reading maintains that its current title is correct, and the central goddess is Venus, who has just been born from sea foam. To the left is clearly Neptune (Poseidon), bearing his trident, and astride his horses. In the far distance, riding on the clouds, Venus’ chariot is being towed towards her by swans.

There are other figures to identify, but one man in the distance at the left edge looks similar to Neptune, and could well be his son, The Old Man of the Sea, Proteus himself. An alternative interpretation is that it’s the sea nymph Galatea, being drawn on a chariot of cockleshells by a school of dolphins, at the centre, rather than Venus.

There is another more recent painting that appears to have been influenced by Poussin’s: William Dyce’s remarkable fresco in Queen Victoria’s holiday palace on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House.

In Dyce’s Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea (1847), Neptune stands astride his three white seahorses with their fish tails, holding their reins in his right hand, and passing his crown with the left. The crown is just about to be transferred by Mercury (with wings on his cap) to the gold-covered figure of Britannia, who holds a ceremonial silver trident in her right hand. Neptune is supported by his entourage in the sea, including the statutory brace of nudes and conch-blowers. At the right, Britannia’s entourage is more serious in intent, and includes the lion of England, and figures representing industry, trade, and navigation.

The depiction of Neptune, and much of the left half of the painting, has more than a passing resemblance to Poussin’s. But look into the distance, below Mercury and behind Neptune, and there’s an Old Man of the Sea with two nymphs. Could that also be Proteus?

In the closing lines of the book, Ovid then reveals through Achelous the link to the start of Book 9: Achelous reveals that he too is a shape-shifter, able to transform himself into a snake or a bull. But that bull had recently lost one of its two horns, the basis of the next myth.

A century ago today, 12 October, the Spanish painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840–1924) died in Málaga, Spain. Although now largely forgotten outside his native country, he was an accomplished artist and achieved international recognition. Of the relatively few of his works that remain accessible, there are several that are striking and individual.

He was born in Valencia, Spain, and started his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos there, before abandoning them and travelling to Rome, where he largely taught himself. He then returned to Spain, where he started exhibiting his landscapes in 1862.

Muñoz Degrain’s early Landscape of El Pardo as the Fog Clears from 1866 is set in El Pardo Mountain Reserve, the hunting grounds of the Spanish royal family, where one of its rangers is taking his horse to water. The mountain in the background is Guadarrama, which is surprisingly alpine and rugged. His style is detailed realist, perhaps a little behind the times.

He developed his skills as a narrative painter with a series of commissioned historical works, including a painting of Queen Isabella with Christopher Columbus, for which he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III.

In 1880, he started painting a series showing the climax of William Shakespeare’s play Othello. The first, Othello and Desdemona shows Othello entering Desdemona’s bedchamber to find her asleep.

Muñoz Degrain returned to Rome in 1882 on a two-year fellowship.

In 1888, he appears to been commissioned to depict The Conversion of Recaredo for the Palace of the Spanish Senate in Madrid. This shows Reccared I (c 559-601) abandoning Arianism and converting to Catholicism during the Third Council of Toledo in 589. This was organised by Saint Leander but convened in the name of Reccared, the Visigothic King of Hispania and Septimania. The king had already renounced Arianism in January 587, and his public confession was read aloud at the council, which marked the start of his new Catholic kingdom.

The details of jewellery and costume in this painting are extraordinary.

Ten years later, he was appointed chair of landscape painting at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he became its director in 1901.

Over this period, his landscape paintings had grown steadily more painterly, although this view of the Port of Bilbao from 1900 remains in the earth colours of Barbizon rather than the bright hues of Impressionism.

In Washerwomen just three years later, he has become full Impressionist, with profuse visible brushstrokes and higher chroma.

A few years on, between 1905-10, his Seascape View of Palma de Mallorca is almost Fauvist, with a rich range of textures.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District from 1914 is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

Finally, his undated View of the Alhambra is one of my favourite paintings of this motif, for its intriguing foreground details, and the poplars lit as white-hot pokers in the fiery light of sunset.

Muñoz Degrain died in Málaga on 12 October 1924, at the age of eighty-three.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Achelous the river god is hosting Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others at a banquet. Once Achelous has told the story of the nymphs who were turned into the Echinades, Lelex launches into the next, of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife). This is one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.

Lelex claims that Achelous made the gods appear too great, so tells his story to prove that whatever the gods decree will happen does take place. His story is set in Phrygia (now west central Anatolia, in Turkey), at a place where an oak and a lime tree grow side by side. Nearby is a marsh, where once the land was habitable, and Lelex explains how those came to be.

One day, Jupiter and his son Mercury were walking in Phrygia. When they grew tired and wanted to rest, they tried a thousand homes, but every one rejected the visitors, until they came to a poor thatched cottage. There they met the elderly Philemon and Baucis, who had married in their youth, and had lived good and pious lives together ever since. The couple welcomed the gods into their tiny and humble home.

Philemon and Baucis waited on their guests’ every needs, lighting a fire, providing them with warm water to bathe their feet, then serving them food and wine; the latter was strange, because as fast as they could pour wine into their guests’ beechwood goblets, the pitcher of wine refilled itself. The couple tried to catch the goose that guarded their cottage, to kill and cook it for their guests, but it ran to the safety of a guest’s lap.

Adam Elsheimer’s exquisite oil on copper painting of Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10) shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and the goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert’s undated painting of Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury provides the basis of what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need. Baucis has almost caught the evasive goose, and an additional figure is in the background preparing and serving food for the gods. Rijckaert adds some subtle details such as Jupiter’s eagle perched in the rafters.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) is one of his late works, and shows Jupiter looking decidedly Christlike, and Mercury the younger, almost juvenile, figure, sat at the table of a dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury. This dramatic lighting is precursor to similar effects in his later Ahasuerus and Haman (1660) and Conspiracy of the Batavians (1661-2). Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing the evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

Although Rembrandt created many wonderfully narrative paintings, he seldom depicted stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He has made the painting using rough brushstrokes and highly gestural marks of paint, as roughly hewn as the cottage which it depicts. It isn’t just an outstanding account of this myth, but one of his finest narrative paintings.

Johann Carl Loth, in his Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (c 1659-62), appears to have reworked the narrative from Ovid’s original. While Baucis and Philemon are waiting on their guests, with Philemon holding the jug containing wine, Mercury (centre) appears to be remonstrating with Jupiter (right), holding out his right index finger and pointing it at the other god. The evasive goose is shown behind Mercury’s back, apparently about to peck his left hand. The whole scene is set in a well-lit area, perhaps outside the cottage in daylight.

This painting from the circle of Appiani, possibly by Stefano Tofanelli or Pietro Benvenuti, shows Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis in less straitened circumstances. Jupiter (left) holds a glass of wine in his left hand, and Mercury (centre) is both eating grapes and looking longingly at a fresh bowl of fruit that Philemon (right) is just about to place on the table. Baucis (front right) is looking at Jupiter, and holding out her right hand, as if to refill his glass.

The gods then revealed their divinity, and told their hosts that those who had shunned them would pay for their wickedness, but the old couple would be spared. Jupiter and Mercury then took them outside, and led them up the nearby mountain. When close to the top, Philemon and Baucis looked back to see all the land below was flooded, except for their tiny cottage, which had been transformed into a temple with a roof of gold.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis from about 1625 is one of the few paintings to show a broader view of this later moment in Ovid’s story. His dramatic landscape shows storm-clouds building over the hills, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, dragging large trees and animals in its swollen waters, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, Jupiter points to a rainbow formed over a waterfall at the lower left corner, and Mercury is all but naked.

Jupiter then asked the couple what they most wanted. After a moment’s consultation, they agreed that they wanted to be the priests of that temple, and that, when their time came, they should both die together. Their wish was granted, and later, when they were even older, they both turned into an intertwining pair of trees, one an oak, the other a lime (linden), just as Lelex had described.

In the first of these two articles showing tents in paintings, I covered those depicting historical battles of the more distant past. Today’s sequel brings those up to date with tents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, starting with one of John Singer Sargent’s works as a war artist in the closing months of the First World War.

Sargent painted several scenes in military medical facilities, including this watercolour of the Interior of a Hospital Tent, with its packed rows of folding camp beds and a multitude of guy ropes visible through its large windows.

During his travels in the Middle East, Alberto Pasini must have become very familiar with the sight of An Arab Camp, shown here at a small watering place in 1866. From the dress and preponderance of horses, this was probably further north into Syria or even Turkey.

Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) was one of his most successful paintings based on the studies from his first visit to the west in 1859. This shows a summit of 3,187 metres (10,456 feet), named by its surveyors after a general who died in the Civil War. The First Nation people shown are Shoshone, seen in their traditional wigwams with their characteristic circular opening.

Nearly fifty years after the event, François-Auguste Biard painted The Duke of Orleans Received in a Lapland Camp, August 1795 (1841). This shows the Duke looking disdainful and detached in a Sami tent, apparently shunning the bowl that is being offered to him. The tent’s framework of poles is clearly visible, and put to good use bearing the weight of the pot and drying furs.

Tents were also popular with explorers and those prospecting for valuable minerals such as gold.

Ludwig Becker painted this watercolour view of his prospector’s tent at Bendigo, in the Australian outback during the early years of its gold rush in 1853, one of several paintings he exhibited in Melbourne the following year. At its height, similar tents and shacks housed forty thousand prospectors, including the artist.

Edward Adrian Wilson’s rough pencil sketch of Camping after Dark (1910) shows a cutaway of a ‘pyramid’ tent in the Antarctic, its three occupants crammed in tightly together. From their tangle of legs and boots to the mittens and balaclava hats hanging to thaw and dry above them, it’s cramped but warm and sheltered. Wilson was one of Captain Scott’s party who died during their return from the South Pole two years later.

Tents had also become popular temporary shelters at fun events across the world.

William Powell Frith’s famous painting of Derby Day (1856-58) shows some of the canvas palaces installed for this horse-racing festival at Epsom, to the south of London. The tent in the left foreground is that of the Reform Club, an exclusive private members club in London, founded in 1836.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. Many circuses relied on these huge tents to contain their spectators around the ring where the entertainers performed.

Pierre Bonnard’s The Beach (Arcachon) from about 1922, shows this beach packed with tents and awnings covering the golden sand, and crowds of people and moored yachts in the distance.

In the summer of 1913, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring and his family holidayed in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing, perhaps not such a far cry from the armies of long past.

Since ancient times there have been some who need to live in temporary shelters. If you don’t have a dense wood to hand, then one of the better options is a tent consisting of animal skins or fabric stretched over a frame. If you want to be truly nomadic, then you can pack up your tent and tow it around wherever you want to go. This pair of articles looks at paintings featuring tents; today’s mainly in depictions of stories and events that took place in the more distant past, and tomorrow’s concentrates on their more modern use.

Armies have long been one of the main users of tents, to accommodate their many soldiers in field conditions. For the Greek forces during the war against Troy, that meant a period of ten years. Having lived in a two-man tent in the Antarctic for a period of nine months over the winter, that’s actually not as arduous as it might sound.

Tiepolo shows some of those tents in his fresco in the Villa Valmarana, Vicenza, from 1757. This, the last of them, shows the scene as Eurybates and Talthybius Take Briseis, Achilles’ Concubine, to Agamemnon, who presumably was also living under canvas throughout. As you’ll see in the paintings below, these tents are conical, and likely to be constructed around a central pole or stave.

Francesco de’ Rossi’s fresco of The Inhabitants of Sutrium Supplicate to Camillus to Free them from Tyranny shows a moment in early Roman history, with Camillus and his troops camped outside the town, when the city of Rome was being sacked by Gauls in around 390 BCE. Again, these tents are conical and of similar appearance.

Albrecht Altdorfer’s breathtaking view of the Battle of Issus (1529), fought between Alexander the Great and Darius III of the Achaemenid Empire, in 333 BC, shows a large tented camp in the distance.

Charles Le Brun’s account of The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander, also called The Tent of Darius, is faithful to Plutarch, in placing this event in Darius’ abandoned tent. This appears a more ornate structure, and lacks a central pole, being most probably set on a wooden frame.

Johann Georg Platzer’s magnificent Rococo The Amazon Queen, Thalestris, in the Camp of Alexander the Great, was painted on copper towards the middle of the eighteenth century. At its centre are the figures of a monarch who could be Thalestris, wearing her crown, waving with her right hand to the arriving Amazons, and showing a fine pair of legs. Next to her is Alexander, who seems to be talking to or about the horse to the right of him (on his left), who could be Bucephalus. Alexander’s tent is great indeed, and pyramidal rather than conical in form, although others look simpler.

The armies that left Europe to fight the Crusades also lived for long periods in tents. Those are shown in paintings of Torquato Tassi’s epic Jerusalem Delivered, a fictional account of the first Crusade of 1096-99.

Here, David Teniers the Younger shows Armida before Godfrey of Bouillon (1628-30), amid the tents of the Christian forces, complete with their guy lines, used to tension and brace the structure.

Ary Scheffer’s painting of The Death of Saint Louis from about 1817 is one of a pair commemorating the death of the French King Saint Louis IX (1214-1270). He was a great reformer who got rid of barbarism from justice, including the banning of trials by ordeal. Louis took part in the seventh and eighth Crusades, and died of dysentery during an epidemic that struck the latter. This shows him in a tent on the Libyan coast in the throes of death, surrounded by his court, with the high spears of warriors in the left background.

William Hogarth’s portrait of David Garrick as Richard III from about 1745 shows William Shakespeare’s character waking in his tent with a start following a dream. In the distance are the long rows of conical tents housing his army.

Marià Fortuny’s vast and uncompleted canvas of The Battle of Tetouan (1862-66) shows Spanish forces attacking an Arab camp, to the left, as they advanced towards the city of Tétouan in Morocco in February 1860.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin’s After the Attack. Plevna, 1877-1878 (1881) is a brutally frank depiction of the human devastation at a field hospital, with the wounded, dying and dead littered outside its long framed tents.

At the end of the Calydonian boar hunt, what should have been an occasion for rejoicing turned sour when the two sons of Thestius objected to Atalanta being given the prize, and the enraged Meleager ran them both through with his sword. This leads Ovid on to describe the strange death of Meleager, following that with a series of stories told at a feast hosted by the river god Achelous.

When Meleager’s mother Althaea first hears of his success in killing the boar, she gives thanks to the gods. She then learns that he has also killed her two brothers, and is plunged into profound grief, and anger at her son. She determines to avenge the deaths of her brothers, and recalls that when Meleager was born, the Fates gave her a burning log they said would determine the life of her child: he would live as long as that log remained, and wasn’t consumed by fire. As soon as the Fates had gone, Althaea took the log from the fire, extinguished its flame, and kept it in a safe place, so preserving her son’s life.

She now decides to throw that log of life onto a fire of her hatred. Four times she tries to throw the log onto the flames and cannot bring herself to do it. She lets loose a long soliloquy (one of Ovid’s finest) in which she frames her dilemma, then finally throws the log on the fire, where it’s rapidly consumed.

Meleager doesn’t know what is happening, only that he has a deep internal burning pain. As he groans, he calls for his mother, brothers, and sisters in his suffering, and dies with his sisters at his side. Two of Meleager’s sisters are thus transformed into birds, most probably guinea hens.

This marble relief from a Roman sarcophagus shows the Death of Meleager using multiplex narrative. At the right, Meleager has killed one of the sons of Thestius, and is about to kill the other. In the centre, he lies on a couch, in the throes of death, his sisters beside him. At the left, his mother Althaea throws a log or brand onto the fire to bring about her son’s death.

By comparison, François Boucher’s The Death of Meleager from 1727 is more formulaic. Meleager is ailing fast on the left, his family and friends around him. One sister at the right is apparently being fondled quite inappropriately by the man behind her. Although there is a figure in the centre background who might be Althaea, there’s no clear visual reference to the burning log.

Ovid then moves on to the next set of stories, which take place during Theseus’ journey home after the boar hunt. It has been raining very heavily and the rivers are swollen when he reaches the River Achelous, whose river god invites Theseus to pause with him until his waters have fallen. Theseus accepts this invitation, and is taken to a hut made of pumice and volcanic tufa, with a damp and mossy floor, and a ceiling decorated with conch and murex shells. There Achelous hosts a banquet, his guests being Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others, who recline on couches as they feast.

Theseus looks out and sees an island which he doesn’t recognise. Achelous informs him that it’s actually five islands, the Echinades. They had been five nymphs, who had sacrificed ten bullocks to the gods, but forgot to invite Achelous. The river god raged in anger, and washed them out to sea, where they formed those islands. Achelous points out one island in the distance which is dear to him, and named Perimele: she had been a nymph beloved by Achelous, but had lost her virginity. Her father Hippodamas was so incensed that he threw her from a cliff. Achelous saved her, and called on Neptune to turn her into an island too.

Hendrick de Clerck’s The Banquet of Achelous was probably the first of a run of depictions of this myth in the seventeenth century, and was painted in about 1610. The four men are feasting, sat around a table rather than reclining in Roman style. The rock pergola surrounding them is suitably decorated with shells, and a bevy of bare-breasted young women serve seafood and fruit. In the distance, to the right, nymphs are cavorting in a bay, a delightful reference to Achelous’ story of the creation of the Echinades.

Jan Brueghel the Younger and Hendrick van Balen combined talents to paint The Feast of Achelous slightly later, by about 1620. It follows a similar composition to de Clerck’s painting, but is reversed, with the distant nymphs on the left. (I apologise for the poor quality of this image.)

At about the same time, around 1615, Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder (father of Jan Brueghel the Younger) in The Feast of Achelous. There are now nine men around the table, and the distant nymphs are nowhere to be seen.

At some time during the first half of the seventeenth century, a painter from Rubens’ school made this rather less convincing and closer composition of The Banquet of Achelous. The stone hut has closed in on the group, and the distant landscape views are gone. The arrangement is reminiscent of the Last Supper or a New Testament wedding feast, with the figure of Theseus presiding, even down to a loaf of bread on the table, and wine being poured. There is precious little to link this painting with Ovid’s story of the Echinades.

After Achelous has told this story, Lelex starts the next, of Philemon and Baucis, one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.

Although birth hasn’t proved such a popular theme in paintings, there are countless depictions of death. Dominant among them in European works are those of the Crucifixion, but in this brief survey I concentrate on those showing figures from myth, history and contemporary life, particularly those of deathbed scenes, and omit religious paintings entirely.

Adonis is perhaps the only figure whose birth and death have been popular in paintings. Following his strange birth from the myrrh tree, when he was a young adult he bled to death after he had been gored by a wild boar while he was hunting.

Hendrik Goltzius’ startlingly foreshortened projection of the Dying Adonis from 1609 pushes his face and head into the distance and makes their features almost unreadable, while his feet take pride of place and you can even read their soles.

Piero di Cosimo’s wonderful painting of a dying nymph uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to the nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. Sometimes claimed to show the death of Procris by a javelin thrown by her husband Cephalus, this tells a different and unidentified story.

The death of Dido is more easy to identify, particularly in this depiction by Henry Fuseli, from 1781.

Dido has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and the eventual founding of Rome.

The story of lovers Pyramus and Thisbe and their tragic deaths has been popular with painters since classical times. When they arrange to meet outside the city, she flees from a lioness, leaving her bloodied cloak. He then arrives and assumes that she has been killed by the lioness and falls on his sword. She returns to find him dying, and falls on his sword so they can be reunited in death. Their spilt blood turns the fruit of the mulberry bush from white to red.

This version from the ruins of Pompeii includes all the main cues, with the lioness in the distance, and a mulberry tree with its white fruit. Its composition has remained in use for the two millennia since then.

More recent legends, particularly those of King Arthur, have formed the basis for some notable painted deathbed scenes.

In James Archer’s The Death of King Arthur from about 1860, the dying Arthur is surrounded by four women, as the black boat approaches the beach behind them. At the right, the ghostly figure of an angel holding a chalice is materialising, in accordance with Sir Thomas Malory’s popular literary account.

Many historical figures have been portrayed in their final moments.

In Paul Delaroche’s Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1828) the haggard queen is shown slumped on a makeshift bed on the floor, putting her low in the painting. Her maids and other female attendants are in distress behind her, supporting the pillows on which her head rests. I presume that the male kneeling by the queen and extending his right hand towards her is Robert Cecil, leader of the government at the time, and behind him are other members of the Privy Council of England, who were shortly to install Elizabeth’s successor.

Benjamin West’s best-known painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) shows a scene from an almost uniquely brief battle between British and French forces on 13 September 1759, which lasted only an hour or so. At the end of their three months siege of the French city of Quebec, Canada, British forces under the command of General Wolfe were preparing to take the city by force. The French attacked the British line on a plateau just outside the city.

Within minutes, Wolfe suffered three gunshot wounds, and died quickly. The French commander, General Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was also hit by a musket ball, and died the following morning. The British line held, and the French were forced to evacuate the city, ultimately leading to France ceding most of its possessions in North America to Britain, in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. Wolfe’s death was quickly seen as the ultimate sacrifice of a commander in securing victory, West’s underlying theme here.

Just over twenty years later, it was the turn of the French Revolution to provide a more equivocal hero.

On the morning of 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Normandy, turned up at the Paris house of Jean-Paul Marat, one of Revolution’s most influential radicals, asking to see him; his fiancée turned her away. She gained entry later that evening, and started giving him the names of some local counter-revolutionaries. While he was writing them down, she drew a kitchen knife with a 15 cm (6 inch) blade from her clothing, and plunged it into Marat’s chest, killing him rapidly.

David’s famous painting shows Marat’s body slumped over the side of his bath, the murder weapon and his quill both on the floor, the pen still in his right hand, and a handwritten note in his left hand. Corday was executed in public by guillotine on 17 July. Marat became a martyr for the cause, after his friend David had organised one of the spectacular funerals for which he had become known.

When Théodore Géricault, who had painted The Raft of the Medusa in 1818-19, died in Paris on 26 January 1824, the young and promising history painter Ary Scheffer painted his tribute as The Death of Théodore Géricault (1824). At the artist’s bedside are his close friends Colonel Bro de Comères and the painter Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, and the wall of the room is covered by his paintings.

When Claude Monet’s first wife was dying in the late summer of 1879, he painted his tribute to her in Camille Monet on her Deathbed (1879). She appears to be surrounded by diaphanous feathers that rise on either side of her head to form angelic wings. She was only 32, and they had two children.

By the Deathbed (1895) is Edvard Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist wasn’t quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details that he no longer saw. This explains its relative simplicity.

Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is their mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.

Like Manet and the French Impressionists, Marià Fortuny painted motifs that challenged social attitudes of the day. His portrait of Miss Del Castillo on her Deathbed from 1871 shows a similar scene to Monet’s later painting above.

Sometimes, deathbed and other posthumous portraits prove too great a challenge.

Maria Munk, known as Ria, had been engaged to the actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers; when he called off their engagement, she committed suicide just after Christmas in 1911, by shooting herself in the chest. Gustav Klimt was commissioned by Ria’s family to paint a posthumous portrait of her, and first made Ria Munk on her Deathbed, initially completed in 1912 but here dated to 1917-18. She is manifestly dead, and surrounded by floral tributes. The family rejected the work, finding it too distressing, and asked Klimt to depict her when she had still been alive, from photographs.

A second portrait completed in 1916 was also rejected, although there’s doubt about the identity of the painting, and the reason for its rejection. Klimt started his third attempt in 1917, and was still working on it early the following year. It was clearly going to be one of his richly decorated paintings, with abundant colourful flowers in the background, and brilliant peppers and other vegetables. In early January 1918, Klimt caught the deadly influenza that had just started to spread across Europe. He quickly developed pneumonia, suffered a stroke, and died on 6 February 1918.

Despite the hopes of the taxman, there really only are two certainties in life, that everyone alive was born, and we’ll every one of us die. This week, in this series examining how to read visual art, those two events are my themes, starting today with birth, the less frequently painted of the two.

There are several notable if not downright bizarre births among classical myths. The first are the twin deities Diana and Apollo born to the goddess Latona.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 shows the mother remonstrating with Lycians who are preventing her from slaking her thirst. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog, the fate that befell them all.

The origin of the goddess Venus must have stretched the imagination of many ancients, as she is supposed to have emerged in full-size adult form from sea foam produced from the severed genitals of Uranus, leading to the popular visual account as Venus Anadyomene, Venus rising from the sea.

The first known painting of Venus Anadyomene is thought to have been made by the Greek artist Apelles, but was lost long before the modern era. In Botticelli’s Birth of Venus from about 1486, she stands in an over-sized clamshell, naked and beautiful, her long tresses blowing in the breeze while crucially ‘covering her modesty’.

Joseph Stella’s treatment of The Birth of Venus is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. She is shown at sea, her human figure perfect above the waterline, below that morphing into an aquatic plant, and finally merging into a helical shell rather than the traditional clam.

Of all the Classical deities, Bacchus (or Dionysus) must have the least credible origin. He was the result of another of Jupiter’s extramarital relations, this time with the mortal Semele. She seems to have been incredulous as to the true identity of her lover, and trapped him into having to reveal himself to her in his full divine majesty. Knowing that would inevitably kill her, he tried to dissuade her, which could only have fuelled her suspicions. Despite bringing only his weakest thunderbolts, the inevitable happened, and she was consumed by fire, but not before Jupiter could perform a Caesarian section on her and remove their unborn son Bacchus. The head of the Olympian deities then sewed his son’s foetus into his thigh to continue to term, when Bacchus was born a god.

Giulio Romano and his workshop’s Birth of Bacchus (c 1535) is a wonderful and revealing depiction of contemporary midwifery practice. Jupiter, at the upper right, seems to be fleeing the scene, thunderbolts in his right hand, and Juno, at the upper left, seems puzzled and upset. Down on earth, Semele has just been delivered of a baby boy, Bacchus, and her four attending midwives are caring for the baby, busy with the traditional towels and water as they do. However, above Semele’s abdomen and right thigh there are flames rising, and smoke. She looks up at Jupiter in distress if not horror. He isn’t stopping to take on any surrogate pregnancy, though, and Bacchus looks full-term too, hardly in need of further gestation.

While we’re stretching credibility, the story of Leda’s children is also extraordinary.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises Helen’s unique birth. The outcome of the union of Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, with Jupiter, in the form of a swan, Helen didn’t have a normal birth, but hatched from an egg laid by her human mother. Some accounts claim that Leda had intercourse with both the swan and her husband Tyndareus on the same night, and produced one or two eggs containing Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux, as shown here.

If you find that hard to believe, can I offer you Adonis, who was born from a myrrh tree? Myrrha’s incestuous relationship with her father led to her pregnancy and punishment by transformation into the myrrh tree, from which came forth Adonis.

Marcantonio Franceschini’s Birth of Adonis from around 1692-1709 adopts an appropriately vertical composition. Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to take the role of wet-nurse, an obligatory task when your mother is a tree. Behind them are two women looking in amazement, and Pan and a satyr are providing appropriately celebratory music.

Having prepared you with adults born from sea foam and babies hatched from eggs, the Christian Nativity should now seem relatively mundane.

It’s probably Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel from 1308-11 that formed the prototype for centuries of subsequent paintings, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, and the attendant animals (ox, ass, sheep) and humans (shepherds, angels). This was installed at the high altar in the Duomo (cathedral) in Siena on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506. Each panel has its own apposite Latin inscription.

Inevitably, when oil painting arrived in the Northern Renaissance, the Nativity was one of the first themes, here painted by Robert Campin some time between 1415-30. This is also an early example in which the scene has moved out from the cave that had become popular in southern Europe, to a shed more typical of local farms. The sparse background of earlier Nativities has been replaced with a landscape typical of the coast of northern Europe.

That immensely popular motif of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus has changed considerably over the years, through Raphael’s lifelike and intimate Madonnas, and again into the late nineteenth century with Virginie Demont-Breton’s contemporary reinterpretation in her undated Alma Mater. She looks very young, and there is no sign of Joseph, just her obviously holy infant lying swaddled on her lap. Around her are the weeds of waste and derelict sites.

The third painting in Louis Janmot’s epic series Poem of the Soul is curiously titled The Angel and the Mother without reference to its real subject, the baby. This is set by the Lake of Moras, where the mother sits with the newborn soul on her lap. Its guardian angel is kneeling in prayer for the mother and the soul of her new child. This combines the images of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus.

Although many artists have painted their own infants and children, I know of only one showing the artist’s son immediately following birth.

The dates and background to Ford Madox Brown’s incomplete painting Take your Son, Sir! remain unclear. It’s thought that Brown started work on this in 1851, although it shows his second wife Emma with their newborn son. Their first son, Oliver, wasn’t born until 1855, and their second, Arthur, in September 1856, suggesting that he didn’t start this until at least 1855. It’s generally held that this shows not Oliver, who lived until 1874, but Arthur, who died aged ten months in July 1857, at which time Brown abandoned the painting.

It’s most interesting for the detail seen reflected in the mirror, showing a contemporary living room and a man, presumably a self-portrait. This is reminiscent of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding (1434). The artist’s wife appears to be pale and flushed, as if her labour wasn’t free of incident either.

As Ovid approaches the midpoint of Book 8 of his Metamorphoses, he has just left Daedalus burying his son Icarus after their flight from Crete went tragically wrong. He then relates one of the greatest stories of the period, of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, which he tells with wry humour, lightening its gruesome events.

With the Minotaur dead, and Daedalus welcomed to Sicily, Theseus was sought to bring help to Calydon, a city in southern Greece that was being plagued by a wild boar as big as an ox, the vengeance of Diana. Calydon’s king Oeneus had paid oblations to most of the deities, but not to Diana, so incurring her wrath. Ovid provides a vivid description of how the beast was destroying crops and livestock in the area surrounding the city.

A long list of heroes were summoned to hunt the boar: Theseus brought Pirithous with him, Telamon the son of King Aeacus came, Meleager from Calydon itself, and more than a dozen others. With them came a plainly dressed young woman, Atalanta, to whom Meleager took an immediate fancy.

Their departure is shown in The Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta (c 1634-39), dubiously attributed to Nicolas Poussin. The procession of heroes, some on horseback, others on foot, makes its way out into the Calydonian countryside. It’s easy to spot Atalanta who is wearing a plain blue robe, holding her bow, and riding a white horse, towards the right. There are two statues behind: on the right is Pan with his pipes, and in the centre is Diana, cause of the problem, with the skull of a boar shown on the tree behind.

The hunters travelled to dense ancient woodland to trap the boar, where they laid their nets, released their dogs, and set about trying to track their quarry. They found the boar at the boggy bottom of a deep gully, from where he rushed at them. Several threw their javelins, but none hit the beast, who promptly charged at the men, goring several of them fatally before disappearing into a dense thicket.

Telamon tripped over in his pursuit, and as he was being helped up, Atalanta loosed an arrow that grazed the boar’s back and buried itself into the animal’s head just below the ear. Meleager praised her for this first success.

Ancaeus then boasted how his weapons would surpass those of any woman, and raised himself to bring his double axe down on the boar. The beast gored and disembowelled him before he could strike. Pirithous threw his spear only to strike the branch of a chestnut tree, and Jason’s javelin impaled one of their dogs, pinning it to the ground.

At this stage, the efforts of the heroes had been at best amateur, if not farcical. It was now up to Meleager, whose second spear-shot struck home in the boar’s back, allowing him to finish the beast off.

Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop painted several different accounts. The first appears to have been The Calydonian Boar Hunt, in about 1611-12, now in the Getty. Here Meleager is just about to finish the wounded boar off. Atalanta’s arrow is visible by its left ear, and the body of Ancaeus lies just behind Meleager’s left foot. The wall of horses behind the boar, and the crowd of hunters behind Meleager, including Atalanta in blue, frame the combatants in the foreground, with some spears directing the gaze at a visual centre of the boar’s snout.

A few years later, in about 1618-19, Rubens reworked his composition in this marvellous study of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar. This shifts the visual centre closer to the geometric centre, and brings the gaze in using a greater range of radials. It also gives Atalanta a more active part, as in Ovid’s text.

Rubens’ finished result is The Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta probably from around 1618-20, now in Vienna. Meleager has aged slightly, and the boar rests its hoof on the body of Ancaeus. Radial lines of spears are augmented by a dog and some human figures, and the centre of the painting now includes a landscape, with bright sky used to emphasise the visual centre. It also seems to show not just Atalanta at the right hand of Meleager, but two other women behind her, and possibly another in blue robes on a horse just above the middle of the painting.

Meleager stood, one foot on the boar’s head, and gave his prize to Atalanta, to share the glory with him: he delighted her by giving the young woman the boar’s skin and head with its tusks as large as an elephant’s. But the two sons of Thestius objected to this, and took Meleager’s gift, enraging him, who promptly killed them both with his sword, leading into the next story.

With the boar now dead, Jacob Jordaens shows Meleager and Atalanta (1620-50) allocating the best part of the prize, the boar’s head. This is raised high above the couple at the right. On the left, though, the two sons of Thestius look incredulous, and are just about to refute Meleager, and take the head from Atalanta.

Rubens and his workshop’s Meleager Presents Atalanta with the Head of the Calydonian Boar (before 1640) prefers a more private award by Meleager. The couple are here alone, apart from an inevitable winged cupid, and a goddess, most probably Diana, watching from the heavens. Meleager stands on the forelegs of the dead boar, and his spear behind is still covered in its blood.

Ovid’s Heroines (Heroides in the original Latin) are among his more controversial writings. They could have been written early in his career, or quite late, and some have claimed that few of its letters were even written by him. Until the late nineteenth century, they were among his most popular works, at times better-known than his Metamorphoses. Bizarrely, it was after the critical attention they received during the nineteenth century that they started to decline in popularity.

Heroines consist of two series of letters, and Ovid claimed that they established a new genre of epistolary (poetic) fiction. The genre has developed considerably since, although it remains limited in scope and popularity.

The first series, consisting of letters 1 to 15, are fictional letters written by a woman, one of Ovid’s heroines, to her partner during a time of separation. Their situations vary considerably, from Penelope’s imminent reunion with her husband after twenty years apart, to several who knew that they could never be reunited and chose suicide.

The second series, letters 16 to 21, consists of three pairs of fictional letters, the first from the man to the woman, and the second from the woman to the man, in relationships where Ovid considers the woman to have been a heroine. They’re accounts of famous couples, whose lives weren’t necessarily ended because of their relationship. Indeed, the collection ends with the thoroughly positive story of Cydippe and Acontius, who seem to have lived happily thereafter.

The most recent literary critical examinations of Ovid’s letters consider them to have been highly innovative in their approach to gender and its roles. For a male Augustan poet to have even considered writing such a collection seems extraordinary. When you read the individual letters, many have deep insight, and a timelessness that’s exceptional among contemporary literature.

These Heroines have inspired many fine paintings and other works of art over the centuries, many of which share Ovid’s radical ideas on women and their roles. I hope that this series of articles reflects those paintings, and does justice to Ovid’s poetic epistles.

References

Wikipedia.
AS Kline’s translation.
The Latin Library‘s text in Latin.
Downloadable PDFs of Loeb Classical Library – L041 includes the Heroides in English and Latin.
Arthur Palmer’s edition and commentary (1898).

Murgatroyd, Paul, Reeves, Bridget, & Parker, Sarah (2017) Ovid’s Heroides, a New Translation and Critical Essays, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 72216 3. (Essential and comprehensive.)

Boyd, Barbara W (ed) (2002) Brill’s Companion to Ovid, Brill. ISBN 978 90 04 22676 0.
Hardie, Philip (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 77528 1.
Knox, Peter E (ed) (2009, 2013) A Companion to Ovid, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 118 45134 2.
Syme, Sir Ronald (1978) History in Ovid, Oxford UP. ISBN 019 814825 9.

Kenney, EJ (1996) Ovid Heroides, XVI-XXI, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 46623 3.
Knox, Peter E (1995) Ovid Heroides, Select Epistles, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 36834 6.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 1, Latin text, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 05 0.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 2, Commentary, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 06 8.

Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 1, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85360 9.
Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 2, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85362 3.
Morford, MPO, Lenardon, RJ, & Sham, M (2015) Classical Mythology, 10th ed., Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 19 999739 8.

1: Penelope to Ulysses, Penelope in Ithaca
She waited patiently and faithfully for his return from the war against Troy.

2: Phyllis to Demophoon, Abandonment, suicide and scandal
She fell in love with him as he was returning from Troy, but they couldn’t marry at the time, and he later abandoned her.

3: Briseis to Achilles, The anger of Achilles and the faithfulness of Briseis
Taken as a concubine after her family had been killed, she remained faithful to Achilles when taken by Agamemnon.

4: Phaedra to Hippolytus, Phaedra’s shame and a chariot accident
A stepmother who fell in love with her stepson.

5: Oenone to Paris, Paris’s jilted lover
Paris’s first wife, whom he abandoned when he abducted Helen to Troy.

6: Hypsipyle to Jason, Jason’s first abandoned wife
A queen he married then abandoned on his way to Colchis and the prize of the Golden Fleece.

7: Dido to Aeneas, Dido’s doomed affair
Widowed Queen of Carthage who wanted him to stay when he sailed off to found the precursor to Rome.

8: Hermione to Orestes, The Plight of Hermione
First agreed to marry Orestes, but forced to marry Pyrrhus instead, and a rival of Andromache.

9: Deianira to Hercules, Blood of a centaur and the troubled woman
Married to Hercules, when he left her for Iole, she sent him a tunic impregnated with toxic blood from the centaur Nessus.

10: Ariadne to Theseus, Ariadne’s revenge
She helped him kill the minotaur, then eloped with him to Naxos, where he abandoned her.

11: Canace to Macareus, Canace and Laodamia in secret
Pregnant from her incestuous relationship with her brother.

12: Medea to Jason, The many faces of Medea
Sorceress who ensured Jason won the Golden Fleece, but later abandoned, so she killed Jason’s next wife and her own two children.

13: Laodamia to Protesilaus, Canace and Laodamia in secret
Widow of the first Greek to land and engage the Trojans at the start of the war.

14: Hypermnestra to Lynceus, The crime of faithfulness
Refused to kill her newlywed husband.

15: Sappho to Phaon, Sappho and the ferryman
A well-known Lesbian who is claimed to have ended her life for the love of a ferryman.

16, 17: Paris to Helen, Helen to Paris, Helen of Troy: victim or villain? part 1 and part 2
Abducted or seduced by the Prince of Troy, she later helped the Greek forces take the city.

18, 19: Leander to Hero, Hero to Leander, Paintings of Forbidden Love: Hero and Leander
He swam the Hellespont to meet his lover, until one night it went wrong, he drowned and she killed herself.

20, 21: Acontius to Cydippe, Cydippe to Acontius, Cydippe’s apple of love
He tricked her into vowing to marry him using an apple bearing an inscription.

There’s more to classical Greek and Roman myths than rape, murder and metamorphoses. Sometimes they tell touching stories of true love, like that of Acontius and Cydippe. You won’t have heard of them, because their story is tucked away in a couple of imagined letters in Ovid’s Heroines (letters 20 and 21), and in his Art of Love (1, from line 457 on).

Acontius was a young man from the lovely Greek island of Keos, who fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful young woman Cydippe. Sadly, she was of higher social standing than he was, and such a marriage was unthinkable to her family. He devised an ingenious plan to trick her into making a commitment to him: he wrote the words I swear before Diana that I will marry only Acontius on an apple.

He then approached Cydippe when she was in the temple of Diana, and rolled the inscribed apple in front of her. Her nurse picked it up, and handed it to Cydippe to read his words aloud before the altar, so binding her to the vow.

The wonderful Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman exhibited a painting titled Acontius and Cydippe at the Royal Academy in London in 1771. Like so many of her paintings, it was wildly popular, but now appears to have been lost. A copy was made by someone from her circle, and that has survived, although it was earlier thought to show Orestes and Iphigenia.

This surviving version of Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe with Acontius behind her, armed with his inscribed apple, but there’s no sign of any nurse. Acontius holds his ingeniously inscribed apple high above Cydippe, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to drop it in front of her.

Kauffmann’s painting was engraved, and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has what I understand to be a hand-coloured print made by the Swedish painter Johan Fredrik Martin.

That’s a fine narrative work that does the story justice, but pales in comparison to the painting of Cydippe in the Rijksmuseum, by a little-known Dutch artist Paulus Bor.

His Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple is undated, but probably from around 1630-40. It puts a different slant on the story: here, Cydippe leans on the altar, alone, the inscribed apple held up in her right hand. But she isn’t reading Acontius’ words: she has clearly already said those out aloud, and now seems to be thinking through the vow she has just made.

Bor paints the details of the altar exquisitely. Cydippe’s dress may be anachronistic, but Bor brings in the skull of a sacrificed goat and festoons of flowers.

She then seemingly overlooked this inadvertent commitment that she had made in front of Diana.

Sadly, Cydippe’s family had other ideas, and found her a prospective husband of appropriate status. Shortly before the couple were due to marry, Cydippe fell ill with a severe fever, and the proceedings had to be postponed. After she had recovered, a second attempt was made to marry the couple, but again Cydippe fell ill just before the ceremonies, and so the wedding had to be called off yet again.

Unsure of what to do next, Cydippe’s parents consulted the oracle at Delphi, who told them the whole story. Recognising the strength of the vow that she had made, Cydippe and her parents finally accepted the match, and Acontius and Cydippe married with the blessing of both families.

I still feel sure that some artist would have depicted some more of their story, but my reference sources only point to poetry and operas. These include an allusion in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, verse by Edward Bulwer Lytton and the artist and designer William Morris. There have been no less than six operas written about the story, including Hoffman’s Acontius und Cydippe, first performed in 1709. Apparently Angelica Kauffmann and Paulus Bor were alone among painters.

In the first article of these two considering voyeurism in paintings, I examined classical examples from myth and the popular Biblical stories of King David and Bathsheba, and Susanna and the Elders.

According to legend, King Candaules of Lydia boasted of the beauty of his wife, Nyssia, to the chief of his personal guard, Gyges. To support his boast, the king showed his wife to Gyges by stealth, naked as she was preparing for bed. When she discovered Gyges’ voyeurism, Nyssia gave him the choice of being executed or of murdering the king. Opting for the latter, Gyges stabbed the king to death when he was in bed, then married Nyssia and succeeded Candaules on the throne.

Jean-Léon Gérôme in his early King Candaules from 1859 chose to show the moment that Nyssia removed the last item of her clothing, prior to the moment of peripeteia. The king is in his bed, awaiting his wife, who has just removed the last of her clothing as she spots the dark and hooded figure of Gyges watching her from the open door. Gérôme’s love of detail in the decor saves this from the accusation that this was just another excuse for a full-length nude.

Two years later, Gérôme looked again at this theme.

Phryne was a highly successful and rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece who, according to legend, was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Phryne is to the left of centre, in the midst of the semicircular court, completely naked apart from some jewellery on her neck and wrists, and her sandals. She is turned away from the gaze of the judges, her eyes hidden in the crook of her right elbow, as if in shame and modesty. Behind her (to the left), her defence has just removed her blue robes with a flourish, his hands holding them high. At Phryne’s feet is a gold belt of a kind worn to designate courtesans in France from the thirteenth century, with the Greek word ΚΑΛΗ (kale), meaning beautiful.

The judges, all men with bare chests and wearing uniform scarlet robes, are taken aback. Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses from pure fright, to anguish, grief, or disbelief, with each of those men looking straight at Phryne.

Superficially, it’s easy to suggest that Gérôme was using Phryne’s nakedness to appeal to the lowest desires, which remained one of the popular attractions of the annual Salon. However it’s more likely that this is a statement about attitudes to the nude female form, the judgement of the Salon, voyeurism and looking.

In his Musidora And Her Two Companions, Sacharissa And Amoret from 1795, Benjamin West turns to a now-forgotten cycle of poems by James Thomson, The Seasons, published between 1726-30. In this scene from Summer, Damon, who is peeping from behind a tree at the far left, voyeuristically watches the three young women bathing in a stream. He’s in love with Musidora, and towards dusk on a summer’s day is sat in a hazel copse, lost in thought. She, with her two friends, then comes to bathe in the nearby stream, and he watches them undress, forming a “soul-distracting view”. He finally can’t stand the sight any more, writes Musidora a note revealing that he had been watching her, then rushes away. She discovers his note, recognises his writing, and responds with mixed emotions.

Eugène Delacroix’s painting of Louis d’Orléans Showing his Mistress from 1825-26 tells a sordid story of misogyny from French history. Set in about 1400, it shows Louis I, Duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, at the right, displaying the legs and lower body of his mistress, Mariette d’Enghien, to his chamberlain. Her face is obscured because the mistress also happens to be the chamberlain’s wife.

Marià Fortuny pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in art in his portrait of Carmen Bastián (1871-72). His model here is a young gypsy woman whom he ‘discovered’ in the Barranco de la Zorra, then a desolate area towards Granada’s main cemetery, in Spain. When posing for the painter on his ancient sofa, she provocatively lifted her skirt to taunt him, and make the artist and viewers voyeurs.

Nude on the Beach at Portici (1874) is an excellent example of the balance that Fortuny struck between its vigorously scrubbed-in background, giving a textural feel to the beach, and the virtuoso brushwork he used to render the woman’s body. Its high angle of view and her pose makes this decidedly voyeuristic.

The most prolonged, even exhaustive, period of voyeurism must be in the intimate domestic scenes Pierre Bonnard painted of his longstanding partner Marthe, from 1898 to her death in 1942. Of the thousands of paintings and photographs that he made of her, I have selected just two.

In 1898, Bonnard painted the first of his controversial works revealing his private life with Marthe, in Man and Woman in an Interior (1898), a motif known better from his later version of 1900. He stands naked, looking away, as Marthe is getting dressed on the bed. Its post-coital implications are clear. The image has also been cropped unusually, as if it was a ‘candid’ photo, enhancing its voyeuristic appearance.

Bonnard’s best-known nudes of 1925 are those in which his model is still in the bath, most notably Nude in the Bath. The bath is cropped to show just the lower torso and legs of the woman in its water. A second, clothed, person is striding across from the left, its figure cropped extremely to show just the front of the body and legs.

It is thought that the figure on the left is that of the artist, but I cannot make sense of that. He or she appears to be wearing light patterned clothing consisting of a jacket and long skirt, with soft slippers resembling ballet shoes!

I hope that you’re now feeling thoroughly uncomfortable in looking at all these paintings.

As a visual art, painting is all about looking and seeing, and one of its more discomforting themes is that of the voyeur, the eyes that shouldn’t be there, looking at something they really shouldn’t. In these two articles, I first show examples of paintings that explore this in classical myths and Biblical stories, then tomorrow will take that on to more modern subjects.

When Acis, son of the river nymph Symaethis, was only sixteen, Galatea fell in love with him, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The latter did his best to smarten his appearance for her, but remained deeply and murderously jealous of Acis. Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye. This upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there, playing his reed pipes.

Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach. Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, Polyphemus grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was crushed to death by the boulder that Polyphemus lobbed at him.

Gustave Moreau’s Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked in the countryside with her eyes closed, and the cyclops playing sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be appropriate to a sea-nymph. Polyphemus is shown with two ‘normal’ eyesockets and lids, his single seeing eye staring out disconcertingly from the middle of his forehead.

Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops (c 1914) is one of the masterpieces of Symbolism, and follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of the voyeurism of Polyphemus. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis nowhere to be seen.

Van der Werff’s modern reputation includes painting the erotic, and his Amorous Couple in a Park Spied upon by Children, or Paris and Oenone, from 1694, is one of his earlier works exploring the intense relationship of this legendary couple. When he was still a shepherd, Paris of Troy married the nymph Oenone, whom he later abandoned to marry Helen.

The Biblical story of King David and Bathsheba is all about voyeurism and sinister power.

Miniatures, such as Jean Bourdichon’s Bathsheba Bathing from 1498-99, led more private lives and could be considerably more explicit. Here is the most frequently painted moment of the story, with a nude Bathsheba bathing in the foreground, and David in his crown and regal robes watching her from a window in the distance.

In 1714, Adriaen van der Werff painted his traditional version of Bathsheba, who is combing her hair under the distant gaze of King David.

The Scottish artist David Wilkie’s Bathsheba from 1815 is set in the countryside. She is now beside a small stream where she has been bathing, and is just donning a stocking. King David is again shown as a sinister voyeur.

As you might expect, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bathsheba (1889) is a literal interpretation of the story. Watching Bathsheba washing in her small roof-garden is the figure of David, leaning forward to get as close a look as he can.

The other related Biblical narrative is that of Susanna and the elders, which opens with the two men watching her bathing in the privacy of her own garden.

In Jacopo Tintoretto’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Susanna is blissfully unaware of being watched by the evil elders. This puts the viewer in the uncomfortable predicament of knowing what’s going on, but also knowing what she doesn’t know.

Susanna herself is caught as she is drying her leg after bathing in the small pool beside her, looking at herself in a rectangular mirror propped up against a rosy trellis in a secluded part of her garden. Scattered in front of her are the tools of grooming, her personal jewellery, and a fine gold-encrusted girdle, behind which appear to be her outer garments.

Peering round each end of the trellis are the two old elders dressed in orange robes, who have entered the garden and crept right up to get a better view of Susanna’s body. To the right are trees, against whose foot Susanna’s back rests. Immediately above her head is a magpie, a bird associated in fables with mischief and theft. In the centre distance, the secluded area opens out to another pond, on which there are ducks and their ducklings, then there is a covered walk beside which is a Herm. In the left distance is a larger pond, at which a stag and a hind are drinking. On the far side are some trees and another Herm.

Unlike other paintings of nudes, where mirrors are often used to extend the view of the figure on display, neither the image seen in the mirror nor the reflection on the water show anything more of Susanna.

Lovis Corinth started painting this story in 1890, when he made two slightly different versions of what was fundamentally the same work. Their only reference to the garden is now a single rose, the flower chosen by Tintoretto for the trellis in front of Susanna, on the floor. The two elders have followed Susanna back inside after her bathing, and are now spying on her from behind a curtain, where only one of them is prominent. In common with Tintoretto, Corinth chooses a moment before Susanna is aware that she is being watched, and long before the elders force themselves on her. Both paintings emphasise her nakedness by including her clothes, and add the jewellery of more traditional depictions.

The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

The previous article looked at paintings of three classical myths which extolled the principle of hospitality to strangers by warning people of the dire consequences of failing to respect it: Atlas was turned to stone, people were drowned in a flood, and others turned into frogs. There are also many examples of hospitality given in the Old and New Testaments, although these start to reflect changing values which perhaps anticipated more modern codes.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Abraham’s Oak (1905) shows an ancient oak tree that died as recently as 1996. Tradition holds this to mark the place where three angels appeared to Abraham, or Abraham pitched his tent. The location is just southwest of Mamre, near Hebron, and its story runs that Abraham washed the feet of three strangers who appeared there, and showed them hospitality. They revealed themselves to be angels, and informed Abraham that his wife would become pregnant and bear him a son.

Perhaps the most revealing stories are those in the teachings of Jesus Christ, concerning Israelites whose origins were in Samaria, the Samaritans, who by that time had become shunned by the Jews, hardly in accordance with the ancient code of hospitality.

In Maximilien Luce’s Good Samaritan (1896), for example, the artist combines a brilliantly colourful dusk landscape with a classical narrative painting, showing the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament, in which a Samaritan gives aid to a traveller who has been robbed and beaten up on the roadside. Jesus uses this to explain who your ‘neighbour’ is, a key point in the obligation of hospitality.

Less known is the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, told in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 4-26, in which Christ arrived at a well in Samaria, tired and thirsty after his journey. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus asked her to give him a drink. That surprised her, as at that time most Jews wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan like her. They then became involved in conversation, in which Jesus preached to her, and revealed himself as the Messiah.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1894) depicts this using fine brushstrokes to build colour and form, and in places those strokes have become organised in the way that Vincent van Gogh’s rather coarser strokes did.

More startling still is Odilon Redon’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (The White Flower Bouquet) from about 1895. In this unique interpretation, Christ appears to be holding a bouquet of white flowers for the woman. There are other adornments, such as the elaborate floral object between the two, and a bright blue object high above Christ’s head. Both the figures have their eyes closed.

The brilliant Polish artist Jacek Malczewski cast himself in the title role of his Christ and the Samaritan Woman from 1911.

Hospitality to strangers has been a recurrent theme in the lives of many different saints.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted a particularly apposite scene in his Saint Thomas of Villanueva (Villanova) Dividing his Clothes among Beggar Boys from about 1667. This shows a story from the childhood of Saint Thomas of Villanueva de los Infantes (1488-1555), claiming that when he was a child, he often came home naked, having given all his clothing to poorer children. Thomas became a friar of the order of Saint Augustine, and was famed for his care of the poor when he later became the Archbishop of Valencia.

Thomas is the boy in the clean white shirt to the right of centre, who has just given his jacket to the boy to the left, who is dressed in dirty rags. It looks like Thomas is preparing to part with his trousers too.

Early paintings of hospitals also stress their original role in hospitality.

The sick have traditionally been cared for by their families. But for those without families, particularly anyone away from home, there have long been charitable institutions and others prepared to offer hospitality. They could have been slaves in the Roman empire, soldiers in mediaeval Baghdad, those returning from the Crusades in Europe, or refugees crossing mountainous areas through passes.

Few early hospitals provided much in the way of medical care, which was generally expensive and in any case ineffective. Most were little more than large inns, and any care staff were usually members of religious orders. A few took in cases of transmissible diseases which had become proscribed locally, conditions such as leprosy, and plague, in an attempt to confine the disease and prevent spread. The richer you were, though, the greater the chance and desire of being nursed at home.

Jacopo Pontormo’s fresco showing an Episode from Life in Hospital from 1514 shows nuns from a religious order caring for other women, perhaps the sick from their own convent.

The rise of social realism and Naturalism during the nineteenth century provides insights into contemporary society, and its attitudes to strangers and those outcast from society.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners from 1887 shows the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for some hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

Naturalists like Jean-Eugène Buland took on challenging motifs with challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin. And we don’t doubt that she accepted it.

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.