The craft of the blacksmith goes back long before the Iron Age, but once our ancestors had learned to work cast iron (by turning it first into wrought iron), in about 1200 BCE, it became one of the key crafts in many societies. It’s also the only craft represented by a deity in the classical Greek pantheon, in the god Hephaistos, translated by the Romans to Vulcan.

He had the misfortune to have been born lame, as a result of which Hera tried to be rid of him, and threw him into the sea. He was there cared for by Thetis and others. He later assumes his role as the god of fire, volcanoes, and crafts allied to blacksmithing, including sculpture.

In paintings, Vulcan is characteristically seen in his forge, as in Tintoretto’s painterly Vulcan’s Forge (1578), one of four mythological paintings he made for the Atrio Quadrato in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Tintoretto was clearly familiar with the division of labour in a blacksmith’s workshop. The two well-muscled men wielding large hammers are strikers, whose brute force is more important. Vulcan is the older man at the left, who strikes the casting with his small hammer to tell them where theirs should strike.

Homer’s story of the adulterous affair of the wife of Hephaistos, Aphrodite (Venus), with Ares (Mars) is retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the likely source for Diego Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan from 1630. This shows Apollo, at the left, visiting Hephaistos (to the right of Apollo) in his forge, to tell him about this infidelity.

Homeric Laughter (1909) is one of Lovis Corinth’s most complex, even abstruse, paintings of classical myth. He provides a good clue as to its interpretation in his inscription (originally in German translation):
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaistos
together with the reference to Homer’s Odyssey book 8 line 326.

In this first version, Corinth shows Aphrodite recumbent on the bed, shielding her eyes from the crowd around her. Ares struggles with the net securing the couple, looking frustrated. Hephaistos, clad in black with his tools slung around his waist, is talking to Poseidon (who wears a crown) with Dionysos/Bacchus behind him (clutching a champagne glass). At the right edge is Hermes/Mercury, with his winged helmet. Sundry putti are playing with Ares’ armour, and an arc of putti adorns the sky.

The blacksmith also features in some accounts of the origin of Pandora.

John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and is now almost forgotten. This work had been put into storage in 1949 and wasn’t rediscovered until 1990.

Pandora is at the centre, having just been fashioned out of earth by Hephaestus, who stands at the left, his foot on his anvil. Behind them, other blacksmiths work metal in his forge. At the right, Athena is about to place her gift of a robe about Pandora’s figure, and other gods queue behind to offer their contributions.

There are several fine paintings of regular blacksmiths at work over the centuries. The earliest I have been able to locate is a disturbing detail in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgment from about 1495-1505.

Among the torments featured in the centre panel are painful punishments in the blacksmith’s at the top.

Francisco Goya’s Forge from 1817 is a superb depiction of the physically demanding work of the blacksmith. Its extensive use of black is also a herald of the Black Period to come in Goya’s paintings at the end of that decade.

Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875 shows the village blacksmiths still at work long after the Industrial Revolution brought steam-powered hammers.

Ernst Josephson’s Spanish Blacksmiths from 1882 shows a smith in the shredded remains of his white shirt, and his striker to the right in his black waistcoat, with a horseshoe hanging below the roof of their forge in Seville.

Döme Skuteczky’s painting In the Smithy from 1897 shows another smithy, this time in Slovakia.

These days, across much of Europe the traditional blacksmith earns their keep from forging horseshoes for the many horses ridden for pleasure.

Sirens are mythical woman-like creatures with alluring voices, best-known from their appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, but also featuring in other tales including that of Jason and the Argonauts. Typically their singing lures sailors to their death, and that reputation has led them to represent anything that’s dangerously attractive. Originally they weren’t described in any physical detail, but visual representations soon envisaged them as having the upper bodies of beautiful young women, and the lower bodies and legs of birds, and that has been incorporated and elaborated in later accounts and retelling.

At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she helpfully advised him that he would have to sail past the sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their death with their singing. In preparation, Odysseus got his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax before they reached the sirens, so they couldn’t hear their song, and to bind him to the mast. He gave them strict instructions that under no circumstances, no matter what he said at the time, were they to loosen his bonds, as he would be listening to the sirens’ song.

As the group reached the sirens, Odysseus told his men to release him, but instead they bound him even more closely to the mast. Once they had passed safely from earshot of the sirens, Odysseus used his facial expression to inform his men, who then released him, and they sailed on.

William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses from about 1837 is one of the pioneering accounts in paint of this story from the Odyssey. His three naked sirens are all woman, one playing a lyre, another holding double pipes aloft, all three doing their best to draw the sailors from Odysseus’ ship to a shore where there are the remains of earlier victims.

Edward Poynter’s The Siren from about 1864 has Aesthetic overtones in the lyre she is playing.

Arnold Böcklin takes an unusual approach of almost dereferencing Odysseus in his painting of Sirens from 1875, although there is an approaching vessel that could be his. The two sirens filling the canvas are very human down to the waist, below which they resemble birds. One sits facing us, clearly in full voice, and highly alluring in looks. The other, her back towards us, is playing an aulos and looks rather obese, to the point of almost being comical, her right breast laid upon a flat-topped rock. At their feet are three human skulls and other bones to indicate their graver intentions.

Gustave Moreau’s The Sirens (1882) shows them as beautiful figures in a static scene, with a saturnine setting sun. There is, though, a lone sail on the horizon that hasn’t yet attracted their attention. Their lower legs turn into the writhing coils of sea serpents.

Moreau’s slightly later group portrait of The Sirens from about 1885 is more complete, with Odysseus sailing past, but its three figures are clearly all woman and no bird.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is one of Hans Thoma’s unusual mythological paintings. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

John William Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) is closer to the Homeric account, although he provides a total of seven sirens, shown as large eagle-like birds of prey with only the head and neck of beautiful women. He has added bandage wrappings around the head of each sailor to make it clear that their ears are stopped from hearing sound, a visual device that links neatly with the text. His sirens are clearly singing, particularly the one closest to the viewer, who is challenging the hearing protection of one of the sailors. Another sailor, at the stern of the ship (left of the painting), is seen clutching his ears.

Almost a decade later, Waterhouse painted this non-narrative portrait of The Siren (1900).

The Sirens (1903) marked Henrietta Rae’s return to painting narrative works featuring classical nudes. Odysseus’ ship is in the distance, as three beautiful sirens use their aulos and lyre to lure its occupants.

Late mythology suggests an unpleasant end for these sirens: Hera challenged them to a singing contest against the Muses. When the latter won, the penalty they exacted of the sirens was to have all their feathers plucked out to turn into crowns. As a result of that disgrace, the sirens turned white, fell into the sea, and formed the islands including modern Souda, on the north-west coast of Crete in the Mediterranean.

Sirens have steadily spread their presence into other paintings, particularly during the twentieth century.

Georg Janny’s fantasy painting of Sirens Bathing by the Sea from 1922 is throughly other-worldly, and there’s no trace of their bird legs.

More cryptic is Paul Nash’s Surrealist Nest of the Siren (1930), which brings together the incongruous, and hardly refers to Homer’s story. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is the faceless figure of a siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

They even manage to sneak symbolically into other classical stories.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid. This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury foretelling Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her. Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

In more recent literature, sirens appear in the less-known second part of Goethe’s play Faust.

Margret Hofheinz-Döring is one of the few artists who has painted from this second part. With the Sirens from 1962 is her pastel painting showing the sirens among rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea, a sub-scene concluding the second act.

The Eurasian wolf has been subject to a general campaign of extermination across much of Europe since the Middle Ages. The last in England was killed by the end of the fifteenth century, in Scotland in 1684, Denmark in 1772, and Norway in 1973. This hasn’t deterred artists from reminding Europeans of their sinister reputation.

Early in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he tells of Lycaon, who was transformed into a wolf by Jupiter as punishment for cheating him.

Jan Cossiers’ impressive Jupiter and Lycaon from about 1640 shows Jupiter’s eagle vomiting thunderbolts at Lycaon, who is hurrying away as he is being transformed into a wolf, becoming the prototype for the werewolf of the future (see below).

Wolves got a better press in the popular account of the origins of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. Numitor’s daughter, a Vestal Virgin, was discovered to be pregnant. Although that would by tradition have led to her death, Amulius’ daughter interceded, and she was merely kept in solitary confinement. She gave birth to twin boys, who were superhuman in their size and beauty. Amulius ordered one of his servants to take the twins away and drown them in the river, but they were put first into a trough that functioned as a boat. As a result they were washed ashore downstream still alive. A she-wolf then fed the babies, and a woodpecker watched over them; both were later considered to be sacred to the god Mars.

One of the frescoes in the Palazzo Magnani, probably painted by Ludovico Carracci and/or Annibale Carracci, shows the She-Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus (1589-92). The twins are still inside the trough in which they had survived their trip down the river, and on the opposite bank a woodpecker is keeping a close watch.

Peter Paul Rubens shows Romulus and Remus being discovered by Faustulus, in his painting of 1615-16. Not only is the she-wolf taking care of the twins, but a family of woodpeckers are bringing worms and grubs to feed them, and there are empty shells and a little crab on the small beach as additional tasty tidbits.

Despite that, the wolf had a fearsome reputation in Europe, no doubt amplified by those who sought its extinction.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 shows a shepherd being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

Christian associations can be more positive, particularly in the legend of Saint Francis of Assisi and the wolf of Agubbio, or Gubbio, a small mediaeval town in the Apennine Mountains in central Italy. The saint did a deal with the wolf, where the animal would stop terrorising the town, in return for its people providing it with food.

Luc-Olivier Merson’s marvellous painting of The Wolf of Agubbio from 1877 is set in the town’s central piazza, where it’s a cold winter’s day, so cold that the waters of its grand fountain are frozen as they cascade over its stonework. As the townspeople go about their business, there’s the large wolf of its title with a prominent halo, standing at the door of the butcher’s shop. Leaning out from that door, the butcher is handing a piece of meat to the wolf, as shown in the detail below.

A wolf may also appear in association with the Christian virtue of charity, as depicted by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

His Charity from 1887 is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding an unusual touch. This had apparently become a popular motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

A wolf is one of the three fearsome animals to threaten Dante in the opening of his Divine Comedy. Camille Corot’s painting of Dante and Virgil from 1859 shows Dante as he started to walk up a hill, only to find his way blocked first by a leopard, then by a lion, and finally by a wolf.

Wolves have made their way into other legends and fables.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s undated The Wolf and the Lamb tells a popular story (Perry 155, La Fontaine I.10) in which a wolf tries to justify killing a lamb on the strength of its criminal record. The lamb proves each crime claimed by the wolf to have been impossible, so the wolf says that the offences must have been committed by someone else in the lamb’s family, therefore it can proceed to kill the lamb anyway.

Gustave Moreau revisited Aesop’s fables late in his career. The Wolf and the Lamb of 1889 is, I believe, a monochrome image of a painting made in full colour, whose wolf looks more threatening than Oudry’s.

Mediaeval folk mythology developed stories of humans turning into wolves, although these were temporary transformations associated with cannibalistic episodes. They became progressively refined and popularised into the Gothic ‘horror’ stories of werewolves feeding on human blood, although those didn’t reach painting until the twentieth century.

Stuart Pearson Wright’s magnificent Woman Surprised by a Werewolf (2008) was inspired by the movie An American Werewolf in London (1981), itself a further transformation of werewolf stories into comedy horror form. The artist intended “to explore that uncharted place where the mystery and sublime of the romantic landscape meets the high camp and melodrama of Hammer horror”, which has come a long way from Ovid’s original story of lycanthropy.

Finally, wolves can sometimes be depicted as hunting quarry.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Wolf and Fox Hunt from about 1616 is one of his brilliant series of hunting scenes, here featuring two large wolves.

The good news is that, since the 1950s, populations of wolves in Europe have been recovering, and with the exception of the British Isles, they’re gradually re-establishing themselves in those countries that had previously hunted them to death.

From their tragic encounter with tormented souls in the Suicide Wood, Virgil leads Dante onto a barren and sandy plain, where groups of spirits are in different postures, naked under steady showers of flakes of fire. These fall on their flesh, and set the sand afire underneath them. They are being punished for their differing acts of violence against God: blasphemers lie flat on their backs, sodomites are moving at all times, and usurers crouch with purses strung from their necks.

The two talk with Capaneus, a huge man who was once a powerful king and waged war against the city of Thebes, and a blasphemer who was struck by a thunderbolt for his arrogance towards the (classical and pagan) gods.

Among the sodomites is the prominent Guelph encyclopaedist Brunetto Latini (c 1220-94), who may well have been Dante’s mentor at one time. Also identified are Priscian a Latin grammarian, Francesco d’Accorso a legal scholar, and Andrea de’ Mozzi a bishop of Florence, together with three other Florentines.

Virgil explains some more of the topography of Hell, how waters originating from a statue on Mount Idaeus (Ida) on the island of Crete flow down to form its three principal rivers, the Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. The statue of the Old Man of Crete has a gold head, silver arms, brass torso, and iron below, apart from a terracotta foot. This follows the mythical ‘ages of mankind’ in descent, and its tears feed the waters of Hell.

Dante is next led down towards a vile monster with the face of an honest man but the body of a serpent, its body seemingly tattooed with knots and whorls, and a sting at the end of its great tail: this is Geryon, in classical myth a cruel king who was killed by Hercules, and here forming an image of fraud.

Before reaching that monster, the pair see some usurers on the ground. They are identified as contemporary members of prominent Florentine and Paduan families known for their riches and usury.

Virgil then jumps onto Geryon’s back, and encourages Dante to have courage to join him there. Once they have both boarded, Virgil tells Geryon to fly off, and the monster carries them down through a hundred spiralling turns to the foot of a high cliff.

Virgil and Dante have now descended to circle eight.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still in current use. They were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.

Francesco Scaramuzza (1803–1886) was an Italian painter who specialised in mythological and historical narratives. He became obsessed with Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for much of his career worked on producing paintings and drawings of its scenes. He worked mainly in Parma, in Italy.

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) was the greatest Danish sculptor, and one of the foremost in Europe. He worked most of his life in Italy, although the Thorvaldsens Museum with much of his work is in the city of Copenhagen, in a place of honour by the Christiansborg Palace. From humble origins, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, where he was extremely successful. He arrived in Rome in 1797, and remained there until 1838, when he was welcomed as a returning hero in Copenhagen.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.