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.

Among Ovid’s Heroines, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one who not only survives, but emerges from her crisis rather well in the end. The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her half-brother, from her mother’s extraordinary bestial relationship, was the Minotaur. Her father blamed the Greeks for the death of her full brother Androgeus, so demanded they provided the Minotaur’s annual diet of seven young men and seven young women. The Minotaur was kept concealed inside the Labyrinth, an ingenious maze designed and built by the master artificer Daedalus.

Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and decided to put an end to this attrition of young Greeks by killing the Minotaur. The only way he could gain access to it was by including himself in that year’s batch of sacrificial victims. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne fell desperately in love with him.

Ariadne came up with an ingenious plan to enable Theseus to make his way back out of the Labyrinth once he had killed the Minotaur: she provided him with a ball of thread, which he used to mark his route of entry. He could then retrace his steps along the line of thread and escape. In return for this assistance, Theseus agreed that, once he had killed the Minotaur and escaped, he would marry her.

When it was Theseus’ turn to enter the Labyrinth, Ariadne held the end of the thread, he went in, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back to her. They wasted no time, and sailed immediately from Crete, stopping off overnight on the island of Dia (Naxos), where they consummated their marriage. The following morning, Theseus and his crew set sail before Ariadne had awoken, abandoning her on the island, as she watched Theseus’ ship heading towards the horizon and Athens beyond.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Bacchus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

By the moment shown in Angelica Kauffman’s Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774), she has seen Theseus’ ship heading back to Athens, and is now swooning in the realisation that she has been jilted.

The painting that perhaps captures best Ariadne ready to write her letter to Theseus, is Paulus Bor’s Ariadne (1630-35). She looks desolated, is still undressed from bed, and clutches the thread with which she had saved his life, the thread that she thought held them together as a couple, only now there is no one at the other end.

Evelyn De Morgan envisages her alone on the beach, in her painting of Ariadne in Naxos (1877). It’s possible that Ariadne had slept there, in the large brown blanket still wrapped around her legs, but there’s now no trace of her former husband, not even a sail on the horizon.

The other painting that’s truly Ovidian is Herbert James Draper’s Ariadne (c 1905). Still half-naked, kneeling on a rock by the sea, she beats her breast in the grief of Theseus’ betrayal. This is a direct reference to Ovid’s lines in Ariadne’s hypothetical letter.

Ovid’s letter also contains some subtle allusions as to what happened next, but is written in ignorance of that. In a remarkable turn of fortune, who should turn up on the island of Dia/Naxos but the god Bacchus, who promptly marries Ariadne, and carries her off to Olympus with him. Maybe Bacchus’ lifestyle didn’t make him an ideal husband, but this was far better than the fate of Ovid’s other heroines.

Eugène Delacroix’s Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63) shows the moment of his arrival, as he helps the despondent Ariadne back up from her gloom. Behind is his chariot, here drawn by lionesses.

Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos (1725) is the ideal romantic ending, the couple staring longingly at one another as putti cavort with fruit. But look carefully at what’s going on down at the beach, in the background.

Maurice Denis’ Bacchus and Ariadne from 1907 is a radically modern treatment of the story of Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos, which could be mistaken for a recreational beach scene at a coastal resort. Buried in there are some more traditional references.

Just to the right of centre, Dionysus stands behind Ariadne, helping to hold a red and white striped cloak or sheet on her left shoulder. Ariadne’s three attendant nymphs are resting on the rocks at the left. Various bacchantes and other figures are riding black horses down in the water at the right, one of them clutching the thyrsus (staff). There is no sign of Silenius, a chariot, or big cats, and a yacht at the right edge may not have anything to do with the narrative.

My favourite painting of this scene has to be Lovis Corinth’s vivacious and complex Ariadne on Naxos (1913). He uses multiplex narrative to tell the whole story, from Theseus’ betrayal at the left, to the arrival of Bacchus at the right.

None, though, shows Ariadne’s revenge on Theseus.

Theseus had made an elaborate arrangement with his father, the king of Athens, to signal to him the outcome of his mission. When Theseus had sailed from Greece, his ship had black sails. The agreement was that he would change those sails to normal white or, more probably, tan ones in the event that he had successfully killed the Minotaur.

In his rush to abandon Ariadne, Theseus forgot to change the black sails. As the ship approached the Greek mainland, his father noticed this. Knowing that meant that they would have to continue sending young Greeks to their death on Crete, King Aegeus threw himself to his death from a cliff. Theseus was broken by grief when he realised that his carelessness had caused the suicide of his father. I wonder if Bacchus and Ariadne ever visited Theseus to remind him of how his treachery backfired.

Monkeys and apes are some of the oldest motifs in European painting, and have been significant features in every century’s art since the 1400s. Until little more than a century ago, though, they were only human-like, and not considered to be our nearest relatives.

The earliest known example of monkeys in European art is this lavish fresco of Blue Monkeys found in the ruins of Thera, on the modern island of Santorini in Greece. This Cycladic civilisation was destroyed by a massive volcanic explosion in about 1627 BCE, so we know that these paintings are well over 3,500 years old.

Although now known as the fresco of the Blue Monkeys, these images make them look rather grey, and that may have been their intended colour. Presumably these monkeys had been introduced locally from North Africa.

The ruins on Santorini weren’t excavated until very recently, and these blue monkeys were concealed for the period from 1627 BCE until the late 1960s. Despite that, the next notable appearance of monkeys in European art shows animals that are eerily similar.

The reverse of Botticelli’s painting of Judith with the Head of Holofernes bears an unfinished work from about 1470 that has been given the title of Deer and Monkeys. Where the artist had seen these pale blue monkeys isn’t clear, although the background landscape shows a coastline on the Mediterranean.

Monkeys are sometimes included in assemblies of different species, such as those of the Garden of Eden.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Cornelis van Haarlem’s wonderful painting of The Fall of Man (1592) counts a monkey in with the many different species it shows in the Garden of Eden. These include familiar species such as dog, fox, sheep, cat, frog, and slug.

Between the legs of Adam and Eve is a touching passage of a small monkey embracing a cat. There are obvious relationships between the monkey and Adam, and between the cat and Eve, but van Haarlem may also have been invoking the fable of the cat’s paw.

Edwin Henry Landseer’s account of the fable of The Cat’s Paw from about 1824 shows the moment of climax in the retelling by Jean de La Fontaine in 1679. Bertrand the monkey is roasting chestnuts in the embers of a fire. Rather than risk burning himself retrieving the nuts from the heat, he promises Raton the cat a share of them if the cat will scoop them out for him. The cat agrees: as Bertrand eats the chestnuts when they emerge from the fire, the cat’s paw becomes more and more burned. Before the cat can claim its reward, they’re disturbed by a maid. The monkey then profits from the cat’s efforts and suffering, but the cat is cheated from enjoying its share. Landseer shows the chestnuts roasting on the top of a stove, and the monkey using the cat’s paw to hook them back in to him, as the cat wails in pain.

Painters have long been attracted to the spectacle of humans who look different. In Agostino Carracci’s case, he combined three strange examples in his Hairy Harry, Mad Peter and Tiny Amon, completed between 1598-1600, not long before his death. From the left are Tiny Amon (Rodomonte) the dwarf, Arrigo Gonzalez the hirsute (Hairy Harry) from the Canary Islands, and Mad Peter (Pietro the buffoon). Accompanying them are a large parrot, a couple of dogs, and two monkeys.

Monkeys were also relatively common in Vanitas paintings, such as Clara Peeters’ Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1615-20). A monkey is busy feeding from nuts, while gazing at a small pile of dead birds. I’m not sure how monkeys fit in with the symbolic associations with death in Vanitas compositions, though.

They have had other more symbolic associations, typically with mischief and mayhem.

In Pierre Bonnard’s large painting of Pleasure or Games from 1906, one of four panels he made for Misia and Alfred Edwards’ apartment in Paris, decorative edging includes images of birds and monkeys, whose innocent playfulness is seen as being pleasurable.

At least one monkey appears in the riotous assembly shown in Lovis Corinth’s painting of The Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1908. This radically different depiction of this episode in the saint’s life was painted after Gustave Flaubert, and exceptionally shows Anthony as a young man, a highly inventive account.