I have divided narrative forms in painting into the following categories:

• instantaneous, where the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it’s likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, where a series of separate images (paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, where a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, where two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, as in comics or manga;
• polymythic, where a single image contains two or more distinct stories.

The previous article showed examples of each apart from multiplex narrative, the subject of this sequel.

Multiplex

In more recent years, multiplex narrative has become considered by many narrative painters as being too complex for modern viewers. Given its popularity in ancient times and during the Renaissance, this appears curious.

Immediately on looking at this Roman painting of Perseus and Andromeda, you can see the duplicated images of Perseus: one flying in from the left, the other being congratulated at the right. If intended to be a literal telling of the story, Cetus the sea monster wouldn’t appear until after Perseus had freed Andromeda from her chains. It therefore contains at least two different moments in time, but isn’t divided into frames, and is therefore multiplex narrative.

Masaccio’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of The Tribute Money (1425-8) contains three images of Saint Peter, and two of the tax gatherer, carefully set and projected into the same single view. Although each is spaced apart from the next, no pictorial device is used to separate them into frames.

His literary reference is to the Gospel of Matthew, in a story in which Christ directs Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish so that he can pay the temple tax. In the centre, the tax collector asks Christ for the temple tax. At the far left, as indicated by Christ and Peter’s arms, Peter (shown a second time) takes the coin out of the mouth of a fish. At the right, Peter (a third time) pays the tax collector (shown a second time) his due.

Masaccio demonstrates how important space and layout are in successful multiplex narrative.

In Piero di Cosimo’s Andromeda freed by Perseus (c 1510-15), Perseus appears three times: flying down from the top, stood on Cetus about to kill the monster, and in the subsequent party at the bottom right. Andromeda also appears at least twice. These separate events are combined in its multiplex narrative.

The five different sets of Adam and Eve shown in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Garden of Eden (1530) are set within the representation of the garden as a whole, making this multiplex narrative.

Following the Renaissance, multiplex narrative was largely forgotten, until its more recent revival.

At the centre of Camille Corot’s painting, Diana and her attendant nymphs are bathing in a stream, and soaking up the sunshine. At the right, Actaeon with one of his hunting dogs is just about to run straight into them. Diana, appropriately crowned, stands pointing to the distant figure at the left, which is again Actaeon, antlers growing from his head as she transforms him into a stag.

Actaeon appears twice in spatially separate scenes, with Diana and her group being part of both. In the first, they are simply bathing and larking about, but in the second Diana stands, points, and transforms Actaeon.

In the early twentieth century, Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos (1913) combines two separate events into a single image: the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus on the left, and the arrival of Dionysus/Bacchus to be her future husband on the right. He does this without any duplication of actors, and it’s multiplex narrative.

At the centre of Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules from 1947 is Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, who is about to grasp the horns of Achelous, shown in the form of a bull. Immediately to the right, Deianira is shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown and seated on the Horn of Plenty. To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, 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.

This narrative technique is by no means confined to Europe, as shown in the next two examples.

This detail of Krishna Storms the Citadel of Narakasura (c 1840) contains two near-identical representations of Krishna, making it multiplex narrative.

My final example of multiplex narrative is that of the Heiji Monogatari Emaki (Sanjo Scroll) (late 1200s), in which time advances from right to left, and there is duplication of actors.

Before the arrival of railways in the middle of the nineteenth century, travel was slow, and holidays were optional. Most of the working class in cities were grateful to get one day off each week, and in many cases that was Sunday to be spent in church. Most employers allowed their workers as little time off as they could get away with, and those who weren’t there simply weren’t paid.

By the 1870s, cotton workers in Lancashire saved all year and took a week’s unpaid leave to travel by train to stay on the coast, in what were known as Wakes Weeks. These allowed mill and factory owners to shut production down for that week in the summer to perform maintenance, while their workers recuperated by the sea.

Public holidays, officially known as Bank Holidays because banks were allowed to close for the day, weren’t introduced in England until 1871, and even then consisted of just four days a year, and remained that few for the next century. Workers had no right to any paid holiday until 1938, when employers were required to provide them with one week a year in addition to Bank Holidays.

Eugène Lepoittevin’s Bathing, Étretat Beach shows French families enjoying the beach in 1864, and their first tentative steps in the development of beach and swimwear. Those shown are all middle class, well-dressed and hardly taking unpaid time away from the factory.

Similar groups are shown visiting the bathing resort of La Grenouillère in the summer of 1869, in one of Auguste Renoir’s masterworks from early Impressionism. This is located a short distance downstream on the River Seine from Paris, and easily reachable by train.

In 1882 at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time again shows members of the middle class dressed in the latest beachwear. The young woman to the right of centre may still have her head wrapped in a bonnet, but you can see her lower legs and all her arm, almost to the shoulder. It’s noticeable that several heads have turned to look at her, as she walks in her sandals along the wooden walkway.

The railway came to Ramsgate in 1846, and with it the masses from London in search of a ‘cure’ from its waters. William Powell Frith holidayed there in 1851, when he made his first preparatory sketches for his painting of Ramsgate Sands (1854). On its beach is a more eclectic mixture of classes, reflected in their clothing and activities, although I still can’t see many from London’s factories or market-barrows.

In 1920 William S Horton painted this Punch and Judy show taking place on the beach at Broadstairs, Kent, a traditional family beach resort at the extreme eastern tip of the south-east coast of England. Most if not all are visibly well-dressed and hardly working class.

In 1902 Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

There are a few paintings showing lower classes in America away from their labours, though.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water near a dilapidated wharf on New York City’s East River. These are from poor migrant families inhabiting overcrowded neighbourhoods in Manhattan’s East Side.

In this second of my three articles devoted to paintings of Easter, I cover the Crucifixion, from Christ’s ascent to calvary bearing his cross, to the entombment of his body.

Way of the cross

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Ascent to Calvary (E&I 128) is unusual among paintings of this phase of the Passion for its inclusion of all three of those to be crucified bearing their crosses. Christ is naturally prominent in the upper half of a composition dominated by diagonals, formed by the winding path and the crosses themselves. He and the two thieves are each given assistants who help them with the burden of the crosses.

In the upper distance are banners declaring the oversight of the Roman authorities, in their inscriptions of SPQR. Tintoretto links this with the Crucifixion with the inclusion of the tradesmen and their tools who were shortly to be responsible for the mechanics of the executions. Here the thick ropes bind the figures together, as they are used to attach the crosses to their bearers, and to draw the three along to their deaths.

Lovis Corinth’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1909) explores Christ’s Passion in real terms. Although this contains most of the usual elements seen in traditional depictions, his language is contemporary, almost secular. Two men, one of them apparently African, are helping Christ bear his exhausting load, while a couple of soldiers are whipping him on, and threatening him with their spears. A third soldier is controlling the crowd at the upper left, and behind is a mounted soldier and one of the disciples.

Crucifixion

Tintoretto’s Crucifixion (E&I 123) (1565) is over 5 metres (17 feet) high, and 12 metres (40 feet) across. The artist makes use of space with a narrative technique based on the traditional ‘multiplex’ form popular during the Renaissance: its single image shows events at more than a single point in time, in an ingenious and modern manner.

Naturally, the painting centres on Christ crucified, but the two thieves executed beside him are not shown, as would be traditional, already hanging from their crosses. Instead, to the right of Christ, the ‘bad’ thief is still being attached to his cross, which rests on the ground. To the left of Christ, the ‘good’ thief is just being raised to the upright position.

Spaced out around the canvas are relevant sub-stories from that whole. At the foot of Christ’s cross is his group of mourners, including the Marys. Each of the crosses has attendant workers, busy with the task of conducting the crucifixion, climbing ladders, hauling on lines, and fastening each victim to his cross. This mechanical and human detail brings the scene to life, adding to its credibility and grim process.

James Tissot’s What Our Lord Saw from the Cross is a uniquely innovative and narrative depiction of the crucifixion.

Descent from the Cross

Peter Paul Rubens painted a huge panel showing the Crucifixion, although in this case it’s strictly speaking a Deposition: this centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), is from his triptych commissioned by the Confraternity of the Arquebusiers of Antwerp for the Cathedral of Our Lady in that city. This remains one of Rubens’ greatest religious paintings.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of Lovis Corinth’s major paintings from his time in Munich, and won a gold medal when it was exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich, in 1895. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to this classical theme, in its framing, composition, and the faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his paintings.

Pietà

Gustave Moreau painted several versions of the Pietà (c 1876), this one on a tiny panel. It incorporates some of the more radical imagery which was appearing in his mythological paintings, with a blue wing in the centre.

Entombment

William Blake’s The Entombment (c 1805) refers to the gospel of Luke, chapter 23 verses 53 and 55:
And he took it [the body of Jesus] down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently, professional painters have been cautious to stay within the bounds of what has been deemed decent for their time and society. One way to push those boundaries is to depict classical times.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of Ariadne on Naxos from 1913 shows a group of figures from classical myth on a symbolic, if not token, island. At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in ecstasy on Theseus’ left thigh, as shown in the detail below. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right. They are from the later part of this myth, after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island. Bacchus then turned up and the couple married.

Bacchic festivities or Bacchanals are another opportunity for a bit of physical ecstasy.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth painted this Bacchanal, with several of its participants staring heavenward with open mouths, clearly in physical ecstasy.

The ecstasy of love and sex was a trickier theme left for the brave or foolish, like Jacques-Louis David in 1809, when Napoleon was approaching the height of his power. David then chose to paint a legend that tells of the love of the poet Sappho 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 his great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus 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.

David’s Sappho and Phaon was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and an ecstatic gaze on Sappho’s face, resembling those of Corinth’s Bacchantes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was more coy in his pen and ink painting of Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber from 1857, taken from the seamy side of Arthurian legend. While Lancelot is brandishing his sheathed sword at knights on the other side of the door, Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen, already seems to be transported in ecstasy, to the consternation of her chambermaids behind. At least she conforms to Victorian standards of decency in being fully clothed, and doesn’t even expose her feet.

My remaining examples are taken from the transition of the story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom at the whim of Herodias, to the femme fatale of Salome in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Following Gustave Moreau’s startling paintings that changed the original post-Biblical story in The Apparition (c 1876), Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, published in 1893.

Richard Strauss saw Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera of the same name premiered in Dresden at the end of 1905. The following year, as an even more immediate inspiration for Franz von Stuck, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, featuring a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, and sparking the wave of ‘Salomania’ that swept Europe.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) is one of several similar versions. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery, naked to the waist and in ecstasy. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist.

Gustav Klimt had already conflated this novel Salome with Judith, who had killed the enemy general Holofernes.

Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience, and he returned to using gold leaf in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. In his Judith I from 1901 he emphasises her neck with a broad gold choker studded with gems, and echoed in a golden belt at the foot of this painting. Her glazed eyes are almost closed and her mouth open in overt ecstasy.

In 1909, Klimt followed that with greater ambiguity in what could be Judith II or Salome (1909). Below her is the severed head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist, in a disturbing link between erotic ecstasy and death.