In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

Gates as a means of access through the walls of fortified cities have ancient origins, but it wasn’t until the Etruscans and the Romans that they acquired their own deity, notably in the Roman god Janus with his two faces. His association with gates, and the start and end of war, gave rise to an interesting tradition in classical Rome: the gates at each end of an open enclosure associated with the god were kept open in times of war, and closed when the city and empire was at peace. Opening the gates of the temple of Janus was therefore a mark of starting a war.

In Rubens’ Temple of Janus from 1634, those gates, here imagined to be those of a temple, are being opened to let a warrior through to battle. Above that doorway is a statue of Janus with his two faces.

In Biblical narratives, the prominent account involving gates, other than those of heaven or hell, occurs at the start of the Passion of Jesus, in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, since celebrated by Palm Sunday. This has been depicted in two significant works in the late nineteenth century.

Gustave Doré painted several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem including this preparatory sketch, in preparation for his final huge version exhibited at the Salon in 1876, measuring 6 by 10 metres.

In 1897 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted his account of The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. According to all four gospels, Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, and as he proceeded towards Jerusalem, crowds laid their clothes on the ground to welcome his triumphal entry into the city. Aside from being one of the major events in the Passion to be shown in paintings, for Gérôme this may have had another reading. Just a few years earlier, his paintings were being welcomed by throngs at the Salon, and commanded huge sums when sold. A short time later, his work was largely ignored, and he may have seen himself as being prepared for crucifixion in public.

The gate of hell is featured in two of the major Christian literary works of the early modern period: Dante’s Divine Comedy (c 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

At the start of Dante’s Inferno, the ghost of Virgil leads the author to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above it is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

It’s also William Blake who depicts Satan at the gates of hell in his paintings to accompany the second book of Milton’s epic.

Two versions, that from the Thomas set above, and below that from the Butts set, show Satan at the gate of hell, on his way out and heading for heaven.

Although the phrase pearly gates, derived from a description of the gate to heaven in the book of Revelation, has been in common use, few if any paintings have depicted them literally. However, in paintings of secular life they can have symbolic significance.

James Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she was a governess, perhaps. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if the floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Regency scene of The Elopement from 1893, shows a woman leaving home to run away with her lover, the oarsman in the boat. She closes the gate on her old life as she looks back and reflects, before boarding the boat in which she will start the journey of her new life.

Once the ripe grain had been cut, the crop had to be gathered into sheaves, then those were assembled into stooks for transport by cart to await threshing, mechanical separation of the precious grain from straw. The latter was an important building material, and was used as thatch for the roof of most country buildings across Europe.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through a field of ripe wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters bearing their heavy-duty scythes, at the end of the day. They are awaiting payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

Adrian Stokes had further to travel for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings that he and his wife made of their protracted visits to Eastern Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut cereal wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind enhancing their strangeness.

John Linnell’s Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed.

Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer in 1914, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are all those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) also shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, here drawing a threshing sledge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals were being used as a source of power, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines before they were made mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

Lovis Corinth wasn’t the only artist to have his own suit of armour. Rembrandt apparently bought at least one, while Jean-Léon Gérôme seems to have kept a suit hanging in his studio.

The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of Gérôme’s series of unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of him as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains naked. Hanging against the wall behind is a complete suit of armour, and there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand.

Armour has occasionally been purely symbolic, most famously in the collaborative painting of Touch by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens in their series The Five Senses from 1618.

Touch extends beyond its title to encompass other tactile sensory modalities. Heat is associated with a brazier, fine touch with brushes nearby. Much of the panel is devoted to a collection of armour, weapons, and their manufacture by gunsmiths and armourers. The many suits on display, seen in the detail below, appear to be equipment that isolates rather than stimulates the sense of touch.

During the nineteenth century, many painters looked back at the age of knights and chivalry, which inspired German Romantics, Pre-Raphaelites, and some of the last academic artists of the century.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Conquest from 1884 shows a stereotype knight in shining armour walking through an arch with its portcullis raised, a fair maiden walking behind him, as this victor enters the castle he has just conquered. The knight appears to be an idealised self-portrait.

Leighton’s The Accolade (1901) apparently shows Henry VI the Good – of Poland, not the British Henry VI – being dubbed a knight. Every link in his chain mail has been crafted individually.

Manuel García Hispaleto’s Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters (1884) shows the hero, his squire Sancho Panza behind, delivering one of his many orations after dinner, in a full suit of armour, as you would.

Eugène Delacroix visited tales of chivalry in his Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.

Plate armour continued to be worn by soldiers well into the twentieth century, and appears in some paintings of contemporary history.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows soldiers from both sides of this short war in 1870-71. The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. (I’m grateful to Boris for his expert interpretation of this motif.)

François Flameng’s undated scene of Germans from the First World War shows the odd combination of archaic plate armour with modern gas masks.

Finally, as everyone knows, a knight goes to their grave in their armour.

Briton Rivière’s Requiescat from 1888 epitomises the faithful relationship between a dog and its master. As the knight’s body is laid out clad in armour, so his dog sits pining by the side of his body.

This is the last of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 55-74, from the foundation of Troy to the age of Augustus.

The foundation of Troy by Laomedon who failed to repay Apollo and Neptune for their help, so Neptune floods the city. Peleus marries the Nereid Thetis, with their wedding banquet on Mount Pelion, attended by the gods. Eris, goddess of discord, throws a golden apple into the group as a reward for the fairest, setting up the Judgement of Paris and leading to the war against Troy. Thetis gives birth to Achilles.

55 The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis

Chione boasts she is fairer than Diana, so the goddess shoots an arrow through her tongue, and she bleeds to death. Her father is turned into a hawk. Ceyx and Halcyone are turned into kingfishers. Aesacus is turned into a seabird after the death of Hesperia from a snake bite.

56 The hawk, kingfishers and a diver

After his judgement, Paris abducts Helen and triggers the war against Troy. The thousand ships of the Greeks gather at Aulis, where they’re delayed by storms. Their leader Agamemnon had offended Diana, so has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the goddess. At the last moment, Diana may have substituted a deer.

57 The sacrifice of Iphigenia

The Greek fleet sets sail against Troy, and when it arrives Protesilaus, the first to land, is killed by Hector. Achilles kills Cycnus, who is transformed into a swan. Caeneus was born a woman and raped by Neptune, for which she was turned into a male warrior. Nestor tells of the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodame.

58 A wedding ruined by centaurs

Neptune’s hatred for Achilles leads to the warrior’s death from an arrow shot by Paris.

59 The death of Achilles

Ajax and Ulysses contest for the armour of Achilles, but Ajax loses and falls on his sword. His blood is turned into the purple hyacinth flower. Troy falls, Priam is killed, Hector’s son Astyanax is thrown from a tower, and Troy is sacked by the Greeks.

60 The sack of Troy

Queen Hecuba’s youngest son is murdered, and her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed to gain fair winds for the departing Greek fleet. Hecuba blinds Polymestor and is transformed into a dog. Aurora laments the death of her son Memnon.

61 Sacrifice of Polyxena

Aeneas flees Troy with his father Anchises and son Ascanius, but his wife Creusa dies before she can escape. They sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to Delos, then on to Crete.

62 Aeneas flees Troy

Aeneas sails on to land on Sicily. Galatea tells the story of her love for Acis, and the jealousy of Polyphemus the Cyclops, who killed Acis, whose blood was turned into a stream.

63 The tragedy of Galatea

Glaucus pursues Scylla, and is refused, so he visits Circe, who turns the lower part of Scylla’s body into a pack of dogs, then finally into a rock in the Straits of Messina. Together with Charybdis the whirlpool, they pose a threat to Odysseus’ ship.

64 Scylla meets Glaucus

Aeneas is rowed through the straits only to be blown south to Carthage, where he has an affair with Queen Dido. When he departs she falls on a sword he gave her and dies on her funeral pyre. Aeneas returns north to land at Cumae to visit its Sibyl. The pair visit the underworld, where they meet the ghost of Anchises.

65 The Cumaean Sibyl

A survivor left from Ulysses’ crew tells of their encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, who had held them captive. Ulysses got him drunk and blinded his single eye. The crew escaped tied under a flock of sheep. As they fled in their ship, the Cyclops threw a huge rock at them.

66 The tale of Polyphemus

A second of Ulysses’ crew tells of their time on Circe’s island. She turned them into pigs, but they were transformed back after Ulysses and Circe married.

67 Circe and her swine

Circe transforms Picus, King of Latium, into a woodpecker. Aeneas arrives at Latium, where he has to fight Turnus for the throne. Aeneas’ ships are burned and transformed into sea nymphs. As the end of Aeneas’ life draws near, he undergoes apotheosis to become Indiges.

68 Apotheosis of Aeneas

Pomona, a dedicated gardener who shuns men, is courted unsuccessfully by Vertumnus, god of the seasons. He assumes the guise of an old woman to try to persuade her, and tells her the tragic story of Iphis and Anaxarete, who was transformed into a statue. Vertumnus finally succeeds.

69 Vertumnus and Pomona

Rome is founded by Romulus. Its war with the Sabines, the death of the Sabine King Tatius, and Romulus becomes ruler of both peoples. Romulus is transformed into the god Quirinus, with his wife Hersilia as the goddess Hora.

70 Romulus and the founding of Rome

Myscelus is saved from death and goes on to found Crotona, where Pythagoras lived in exile. Pythagoras expounds change and transformation underlying everything in nature, and the central theme of Metamorphoses. The virtues of vegetarianism. King Numa returns to Rome and establishes its laws.

71 Pythagoras and Numa

Plague strikes Rome. The oracle at Delphi tells the Romans to bring the god Aesculapius to the city. He is taken as a snake from Epidaurus to his temple on Tiber Island, and the Romans are saved from plague.

72 Plague and Aesculapius

The assassination of Julius Caesar, who then undergoes apotheosis.

73 Julius Caesar

Jupiter foretells the accomplishments of Augustus, including success in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, and growth of the empire. The fate of Ovid in banishment to Tomis on the Black Sea.

74 The Age of Augustus

This is the third of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 37-54, from the fall of Icarus to King Midas.

Daedalus and his son Icarus try to escape Crete using wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flies too near the sun, his wings melt and he falls to his death. Daedalus’ nephew is transformed into a partridge.

37 The fall of Icarus

Calydon troubled by a wild boar. Many heroes hunt the animal, and Meleager is successful. He shares the glory of his prize with Atalanta, but his uncles take the prize, so Meleager kills them both.

38 The Calydonian Boar Hunt

Meleager’s mother Althaea avenges the deaths of her brothers by throwing a log on the fire, causing her son’s death. His sisters are turned into birds. Theseus travels home from the boar hunt and is entertained by Achelous, who explains how nymphs were transformed into the islands of the Echinades.

39 The feast of Achelous

Lelex tells of Jupiter and Mercury seeking hospitality when visiting Phrygia. Only the humble and poor couple Philemon and Baucis entertain them. The gods save them from a flood that drowns everyone else. They’re later transformed into intertwining oak and lime trees.

40 Hospitality to strangers and virtue rewarded

Achelous tells those at his banquet of three shape-shifters: Proteus the old man of the sea, Erysichthon who sold his daughter to assuage his hunger until he consumed his own body, and Achelous himself.

41 Shape-shifters and the Old Man of the Sea

Achelous and Hercules wrestle for the hand of Deianira. Achelous turns himself into a bull, and Hercules wrenches off one of his horns, which becomes cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty.

42 Wrestling for the Horn of Plenty

Hercules marries Deianira, but the centaur Nessus tries to abduct her, so Hercules kills him. Nessus gives Deianira some of his blood, and tricks her later into impregnating one of Hercules’ shirts with it, causing him to incinerate himself on a pyre. He is then turned into a god.

43 The death of Hercules

The birth of Hercules made difficult by Juno and Lucina. Other myths of Hercules as an infant.

44 The birth of Hercules

Dryope picks lotus flowers, and is punished by transformation into a Lotus Tree. Byblis dissolves into a spring after falling in love with her twin brother. A daughter raised as Iphis, a boy, who was transformed into a man immediately before marrying the woman Ianthe.

45 Dryope, Byblis and Iphis

Orpheus marries Eurydice, who is bitten by a snake and dies. He travels to the underworld and pleads for her to be allowed to return with him. That’s approved, provided he doesn’t look back. Near the end of their return journey, he does look back, and she fades away back into the underworld. He then shuns women for three years in his grief.

46 Orpheus and Eurydice

Cyparissus befriends a stag, then accidentally kills it, and in his grief is transformed into a cypress tree, now grown near cemeteries. Orpheus tells of the young Ganymede, who was abducted by Jupiter and taken to Mount Olympus to be cupbearer to the gods.

47 The cypress tree, and the abduction of Ganymede

Hyacinthus, lover of Apollo, is killed by the god’s discus, and transformed into the purple hyacinth flower.

48 Killed by Apollo’s discus

Pygmalion rejects libidinous behaviour in women, and remains celibate. He carves a statue of a woman in ivory, and asks Venus for a bride like her. His statue is transformed into a woman, they marry, and have a daughter Paphos.

49 Galatea transformed from a statue

Myrrha is made pregnant by her father following a deception. He tries to kill her, but she flees and calls on the gods, who transform her into a myrrh tree. Nevertheless, her baby is born, and becomes Adonis.

50 The making of myrrh and birth of Adonis

Venus tells Adonis of the story of Atalanta, who had been told not to marry, and became a fast runner. Hippomenes challenges her to a race for her hand in marriage. He tricks her during that by dropping three golden apples provided by Venus, and beats her to the finish as a result. He didn’t thank Venus for her help, so the couple make love in a shrine to Cybele. As punishment they are transformed into lions to draw Cybele’s chariot.

51 The race between Hippomenes and Atalanta

Despite the warnings of his lover Venus, Adonis goes hunting, is gored in the groin by a wild boar, and dies. His blood is turned into the red anemone.

52 Death of Adonis

Orpheus is attacked by a mob of Bacchantes, torn limb from limb, and dies. His remains are dispersed into rivers, and his soul reunited with Eurydice. The Bacchantes are transformed into an oak wood.

53 The death of Orpheus

Bacchus grants the wish of King Midas, and everything he touches is transformed into gold. This proves a disaster, so Bacchus removes that gift. Midas loses a music contest with Apollo, for which he is given ass’s ears.

54 How Midas got his touch and his ears

With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the last book of his Metamorphoses with praise of the contemporary Emperor Augustus, and expresses his own aspirations to immortality.

Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, who was then still known as Octavius or Octavian. These include successes in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and the growth of the Roman Empire. Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis, when he will become a god. Finally, the author wishes for his words to be read throughout the empire, and to live on in fame.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, ending years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It’s Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come. Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet at the left, holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus wasn’t a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when Ovid offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best captured this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome wasn’t formally revoked until 2017, two millennia later.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages, and depicted in many great paintings.

Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in his temple on Tiber Island in the city of Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary Emperor Augustus. These are politically charged topics, and merit inoffensive coverage and language. In his whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, Ovid is obliged to write that it was Augustus who was the greater, before tackling the thorny issue of Caesar’s assassination.

When swords were taken into the Senate House in preparation, Venus pleaded Caesar’s case, and Jupiter responded that the emperor’s life was already complete, and it was time for him to join the gods. Venus then descended quickly and rescued Caesar’s soul as he lay dying on the floor of the Senate. Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including his former friend and ally Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be brought by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this isn’t taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around twenty-three knife wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows the goddess Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis.

It’s Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) that shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius (later granted the honorific name Augustus) and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the portentous words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made early in his career.

Edwin Austin Abbey, in his painting Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar from 1905, spatters the white robe of the ghost with the blood from multiple stab wounds.

With Julius Caesar dead, it’s time for Ovid to draw his Metamorphoses to a close by praising the Emperor Augustus.