Ovid’s fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses continues his account of the early rulers of Rome, making its way steadily to reach the Emperor Augustus. Following the apotheosis of Romulus, the next to feature is his successor Numa, who becomes the narrator for an overview of the Metamorphoses in terms of Pythagorean philosophy.

Fame nominates Numa as successor to Romulus as the ruler of Rome. Numa had left Cures, the town of his birth, to travel to Crotona (Crotone), in the far south of the Italian peninsula, where he visited Croton, its ruler.

This is the cue for a story about Myscelus, who founded Crotona. Hercules appeared to him in a dream, and told him to travel to the river Aesar, despite his being forbidden from leaving his native land of Argos. Driven by dreams of Hercules, Myscelus tried to leave but was accused of treason, and appealed to Hercules to save him from the mandatory death penalty. At that time, trial juries voted by casting black or white pebbles into an urn; being undoubtedly guilty, all those cast in Myscelus’ case were black when they were placed in the urn. But when the urn was emptied they had all changed to white, and Myscelus was saved, and able to sail to found Crotona on the River Aesar.

After he had fled Samos, Ovid tells us that Pythagoras lived in exile at Crotona, and this leads to a long discourse on his doctrines and philosophy. Having assured us of Pythagoras’ diligent observation of the world around him and careful analysis of what he saw, Ovid starts with an exhortation to vegetarianism.

Within this discourse, Ovid makes reference to preceding sections and themes of Metamorphoses. Pythagoras’ words hark back to the Golden Age covered in the first book. Pythagoras lays claim to reincarnation too, saying that in a previous life he had been Euphorbus, who had been killed by Menelaus in the Trojan War. This leads Pythagoras to discussing change and transformation, the central theme of these fifteen books.

Pythagoras sees change in the waves of the sea, in the sequence of day and night, in the four seasons, in the ageing of humans, and in the transformation of the elements (earth, air, water, and fire).

Pythagoras then illustrates this constant change with a long list of places whose geography had changed in recorded history, and of places that cause change in those who visit them. After those, he returns to the theme of change in animals, telling the legend of the Phoenix reborn from the ashes of its parent. This leads on to consideration of some great cities that have fallen, and the chance to point out that Troy never fell completely, as it reached its destiny of founding the city and empire of Rome. Pythagoras concludes by exhorting vegetarianism by looking for harmless food rather than killing other animals.

In his magnificant fresco in the Palazzo Apostolico, The School of Athens painted in about 1509-11, Raphael includes Pythagoras at the lower left corner.

This detail shows Pythagoras writing in a large book, with a chalk drawing on a small blackboard in front of his left foot. Others are looking over his shoulder and studying what he is doing.

Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders to paint Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism in about 1618-20. The mathematician and philosopher sits to the left of centre, with a group of followers further to the left. The painting is dominated by its extensive display of fruit and vegetables, which is being augmented by three nymphs and two satyrs. One of the latter seems less interested in the food than he is in one of the nymphs.

Today, Pythagoras is best known for his geometric discoveries, rather than the doctrines detailed by Ovid. Fyodor Bronnikov’s painting of Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise from 1869 is perhaps more in keeping with the Classical perception. These followers are decidedly musical, holding between them four lyres, a harp, and a flute, and worshipping the rising sun.

After Numa had learned the doctrines of Pythagoras (an historical impossibility, as Numa lived between about 753-673 BCE, and Pythagoras between about 570-495 BCE and lived in Croton from about 530 BCE), he returned to Rome and established its early laws and institutions.

Numa’s success depended on his wife, the nymph Egeria. Although Ovid isn’t explicit, other sources make the couple’s meeting a key step in the development of Rome, as Egeria was said to have dictated the first set of laws of Rome to Numa.

Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 is thought to have been painted for his long-term friend and patron Cassiano Dal Pozzo (1588-1657), a scholar and patron of the arts, who was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

It shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.

Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the King of Rome.

Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a reed pen. Egeria is quite different, though, and appears a simple and very naked nymph.

Inevitably, Numa grew old and then died. His wife Egeria was heartbroken: she left the city of Rome, and went deep into the forest, where her moaning disturbed those at the nearby shrine built by Orestes to Diana. Sister nymphs tried to comfort her, but couldn’t help. They told Egeria the tragic tale of Phaedra and Hippolytus, but that didn’t ease her grief either, and she dissolved into tears to be transformed by Diana into a spring.

The only accessible painting showing Egeria’s grief following the death of Numa is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Nymph Egeria Weeping Over Numa from 1669.

Unfortunately, confusion has arisen over the true nature of this painting, as two images of details have been published on the internet purporting to be quite different and complete paintings. Claude’s painting itself is something of a puzzle too, and the result is that many of the images shown online of this work make no sense at all.

The full painting, above, shows a group of people and dogs in the left foreground, set in an idealised classical landscape on the coast.

The detail, shown below, reveals the five women in that group. Second from left is most probably the figure of Egeria, although there is nothing to show her profuse weeping or grief. One of the three women to the right of Egeria is Diana, with her spear, bow, arrows, and hunting dogs. It is unclear whether she is on bended knee, or stood behind holding the leash of one of the dogs.

More puzzling is the gesture of the woman (Diana or nymph) who is kneeling on one knee. Her left hand points towards Egeria, and her right is pointing away, towards the buildings down by the water. Her meaning is obscure in the context of the story of Egeria.

Whether this painting by Claude shows the story of Egeria and her grief over the death of Numa must surely be in doubt, and the evidence bears careful re-examination.

In architecture, a frieze is a section of a building above the columns or walls and below the roof, commonly the location of decorative sculpture or a bas-relief.

This is the monumental hall of Walhalla, commissioned in the nineteenth century as a memorial to the great figures of German history. On its north side is this pediment frieze showing the victory of Arminius and the Germanic tribes over the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. This is an unusual frieze as it adds more depth to the figures than would appear in a normal relief.

The most famous is shown in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s beautiful painting of Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868), whose admiring figures include Pericles (at the right), Aspasia, Alcibiades and Socrates.

In two-dimensional visual art, particularly painting, the term frieze is also used to describe an arrangement of figures that are flattened into a plane parallel to the plane of the picture, thus resembling those seen in architectural friezes.

Among the most spectacular wall-paintings of Pompeii are those in the Villa of the Mysteries showing Dionysian Rites from before about 62 CE. Room 5 contains a frieze of 29 figures at nearly life size, apparently depicting a sequence of ritual events involving a mixture of Pompeiians and deities.

In the period before three-dimensional linear projection became widely adopted in European art, many paintings adopted a similar approach for groups of figures. But long afterwards the frieze continued to be used in the right circumstances.

Masaccio’s Adoration of the Magi (1426-7) delivers a frieze-like view of this popular subject. The Virgin Mary is sat on a golden portable folding chair decorated with lion heads and paws, the infant Christ on her knee. To the left of her is the standard group of ox and ass in a shed, and behind her is Joseph, holding one of the gifts from the Magi. Hints at depth are given in the heights of some figures, but they are confined to a shallow plane parallel to the picture plane.

When Raphael painted The Marriage of the Virgin known by its Italian name of Il Sposalizio (‘the marriage’), in 1504, he combined the frieze of figures in the foreground with grand architecture expertly projected in depth. This demonstrates the contrast between the flat frieze in the foreground and the depth of the building behind.

Some motifs are prone to creating frieze effects, and painters have gone out of their way to avoid that.

William Blake Richmond’s An Audience in Athens During Agamemnon by Aeschylus from 1884 is a study of the enraptured audience of a play. Its classical setting has strong formal symmetry, with its central figure perhaps representing the playwright himself. Richmond uses greatly exaggerated aerial perspective, with intense chroma in the foreground falling off rapidly towards the back of the theatre, to give depth to what would otherwise have appeared flat and frieze-like.

Late in the nineteenth century some artists like Ferdinand Hodler adopted frieze effects.

Hodler’s World-Weary (1891-92) was an important early work in the development of his style of Parallelism, with its emphasis on the symmetry and rhythms seen in society. He painted this frieze from models who sat for him in a local cemetery during the autumn of 1891.

The Disappointed Souls (1892), another in this series, also shows five older men, this time dressed in black robes and sat on a bench in barren fields.

While the use of colour to encode meaning in terms of sex/gender or devils is relatively unusual, there are other situations where colour conventions are employed in paintings. Among these are standards seen in religious paintings, such as those of the Virgin Mary.

In many paintings of the Virgin Mary, she’s shown wearing a cloak of ultramarine blue, although there are also examples of her wearing green, or a combination of red and green. In Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer, her cloak looks as if it was painted only yesterday rather than nearly four centuries ago. The choice of ultramarine may have originated from the fact that the pigment was weight-for-weight more expensive than gold, and visually even more stunning.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9) shows her embroidering with her mother Saint Anne, while her father Saint Joachim prunes a vine. Her red embroidery signifies the Passion to come, and the colour is often a symbol of Christ’s blood shed in the crucifixion. It was also adopted as the colour code for cardinals in the Roman Catholic church.

Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 is notable not only for the lifelike modelling of flesh, but for his attention to the surface textures of the fabrics, something he had developed since his early days with Perugino. Three distinct fabrics are shown in the cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta (hat), the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), both in cardinal red, and the luxuriant folds of his white rochet (vestment).

With a limited range of colours available, it was inevitable that there were unfortunate conflicts, as red not only signifies the Passion and crucifixion, and cardinals, but the scarlet woman as a carnal red.

There are two origins proposed for the term scarlet woman: the earlier is the New Testament book of Revelation, in its characterisation of the Whore of Babylon in chapter 17, verses 4-5, where she’s described as being dressed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold, precious stones and pearls. William Blake’s watercolour of The Whore of Babylon from 1809 follows this literally, although his purple has faded now.

Carolus-Duran’s Portrait of Mademoiselle de Lancey (1876) was exhibited at the Salon, and in its own way became infamous as ‘the lady with the red cushion’. Most of those who attended that Salon knew only too well that she was one of the great courtesans of the Belle Epoque, and could name many of her succession of rich lovers. The scarlets and crimsons and her direct wide-eyed gaze at the viewer left little to the imagination, and the critics were almost as merciless with Carolus-Duran as they had been in 1865 with Manet’s Olympia.

A few artists have used distinctive colour codes in other ways.

Félix Vallotton’s Andromeda Standing with Perseus (1907) shows the sea monster Cetus heading for a defenceless Andromeda, as hero Perseus charges to her aid through a cleft in the black sky. Each figure is colour coded: green for the sea monster, pink for the near-victim, and blue for the hero, against a straw-coloured sea.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905 shows five women in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes that are coloured (from the left) lilac, gold, brown, green, and black, the sequence seen in nature.

Colour can be at its most important in multiplex narrative, to indicate each occurrence of an actor, so helping the viewer assemble each part of the story into a whole.

Masaccio’s Tribute Money (1425-8) contains three images of Saint Peter, and two of the tax gatherer, each carefully set and coherently projected into the same single view. Although each is spaced apart from the next, no pictorial device is used to separate them into frames, and they form multiplex narrative. This refers 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 (for the 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.

Now debased by hyperbole and its association with drugs, ecstasy was intended to denote a trance-like state normally attained in two contrasting contexts: religion, and physical pleasure. This week I show how artists have depicted this intense emotional experience, starting today with paintings of Christian religious ecstasy.

This is a state most widely attributed to followers of Jesus Christ, particularly Mary Magdalene, and in paintings appears in the Renaissance when facial expression and body language became acceptable in art. Mary Magdalene is the subject of a tangle of legends, most of them the result of conflation, and many of them bizarre or outlandish. Paintings of her in religious ecstasy appear to have arisen from her penitence and mourning.

Elisabetta Sirani’s Penitent Magdalene is a powerful painting in which Mary’s eyes are closed in an understated ecstasy, despite the vision of Christ crucified on the left.

In Artemisia Gentileschi’s portrait of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy from 1613-20, her mouth and eyes are closed and her head thrown back as she directs her unseeing gaze to heaven.

The story of the conversion of Saul into Saint Paul does at least have a textual basis in the Acts of the Apostles, but the received account proved a difficult compositional problem in visual art.

Domenico Morelli’s Conversion of Saint Paul from 1876 tries a novel solution, and is perhaps the most successful. Accepting the contradictory demands, he puts Paul in a brilliant light, showing its origin in the heavens, but has him face away from it. Now blinded by that light, Paul looks with unseeing eyes of revelatory ecstasy towards the viewer, his right arm and hand outstretched.

The life of Saint Cecilia is almost unknown, and she isn’t reputed to have undergone any notable ecstasy. However, that didn’t stop the event from being celebrated in paint.

Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, painted between 1513-14, is one of his masterpieces, and probably secured the popularity of Saint Cecilia as the patron saint of music and musicians. Beside her are, from the left, Saints Paul, John the Evangelist (patron saint of the church for which this painting was destined), Augustine, who holds a crosier, and Mary Magdalene. Signs of her ecstasy are limited.

Andrés de la Concha’s later painting of Saint Cecilia from 1570-1610 shows her in more obvious ecstasy, and playing a substantial pipe organ, with angelic instrumentalists in the clouds above.

After Mary Magdalene, the best-known Christian religious figure who has been painted in ecstasy is Joan of Arc.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably from around 1850, is a composite of different episodes from her visions and life: Joan is clearly older than thirteen, and isn’t in her father’s garden, but apparently spinning while tending his sheep. In the distance, a town is burning, referring either to the war being waged by the English, or one of the actions in which Joan became involved. Instead of her eyes being closed, they’re wide open, and her arms tensed against her lower leg.

It’s Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s undated portrait of Joan of Arc that captures her in fullest ecstasy, with a rainbow behind her.

When the French Naturalist Luc-Olivier Merson was in Italy, he concentrated on religious and historical paintings, some of which are almost phantasmagoric in content. The Vision from 1872 combines an altered image of the Crucifixion with that of a nun in an apparent ecstasy, and an angelic musical trio. It’s strongly suggestive of the much later paintings of Surrealists, particularly those of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).