Ovid’s sequel to the story of Pygmalion’s marriage to his former statue is a darker tale of incest, transformation, and obstetrics in the arboretum, resulting in myrrh and the unique birth of Adonis.

Pygmalion’s great granddaughter Myrrha was cursed by the Fates and blighted in love. Although she had many suitors, she fell in love with her father, King Cinyras. Ovid relates her long soliloquy in which she wrestles with her own mind over this. When her father asked her what to do about her suitors, she first stayed silent, then burst into tears, eventually confessing that she wanted a husband like her father.

That night she lay awake in bed, her mind in turmoil, until resolving that her only solution was suicide. She tied a noose around a beam in her bedroom, and was just about to hang herself from it when her old nurse came in. Eventually, Myrrha confessed to her shameful desire, and her nurse promised to arrange the matter for her.

When the festival of Ceres came, Cenchreis, Myrrha’s mother, was busy with her duties, allowing the nurse to arrange Myrrha’s liaison with her father. The nurse ensured that Cinyras had plenty to drink, and promised him a night making love to a girl as young as his daughter. Later that night, the nurse took Myrrha to her father, and put her to bed with him, making her pregnant. Myrrha and her father continued to sleep together night after night, Cinyras still oblivious of who his partner really was. Eventually, he brought in a lamp so that he could see her, and was shocked to discover his own daughter.

He drew his sword to kill her, but she fled and wandered in the desert until it was time for her child to be born. Myrrha then called on the gods to help her, but wanted to neither live nor die. She was transformed into a myrrh tree, providing the precious resin myrrh from the sap generated from her tears of grief.

Adonis, the child who had been growing within her, was then delivered by Lucina, goddess of childbirth, and laid on soft leaves by the Naiads to be anointed with his mother’s myrrh.

This classical fresco from the Golden House of Nero in Rome shows Lucina presenting Venus, who stands clutching the top of a myrrh tree, with the newborn Adonis.

Possibly one of Titian’s earliest works, although this is disputed and even Giorgione has been credited, this cassone panel of The Birth of Adonis probably dates from 1505-10. At the left, Myrrha and her father Cinyras lie together, although this would of course make certain his knowledge of her identity. In the centre, a baby is delivered from the woody womb of Myrrha as a tree, in multiplex narrative.

At about the same time, Bernardino Luini painted his fresco account of The Birth of Adonis (1509-10), which also adopts multiplex narrative to explain the origin of Myrrha’s pregnancy. In the foreground, the couple are shown together, and at the top left the miraculous birth has just taken place. In an alternative reading, the couple in the foreground could be Adonis as a young man, with the goddess Venus as his lover.

Over a century later, this wonderful panel was painted, showing The Birth of Adonis and Transformation of Myrrha. This was possibly after Luigi Garzi, although again its origin remains disputed. Reference to Myrrha’s dark past has been concealed, and she is here shown as a chimera between woman and tree, with the infant Adonis just delivered by a whole team of midwives and maids. The helper at the right wears a coronet with the crescent moon on it, signifying the goddess Diana. On the left side of the tree, one of the other helpers is holding up a tray with a small container of myrrh to anoint Adonis. In the foreground, a wingless putto is laying out a napkin for the infant.

One artist painted this story repeatedly: Marcantonio Franceschini, a Baroque painter in the Italian city of Bologna.

This version of Franceschini’s The Birth of Adonis probably dates from around 1685-90, and is now in Dresden. Myrrha is a distinctive cross between tree and woman, and a couple of satyrs are laughing in the bushes behind her. Two young women are rather pointedly looking in amazement at the origin of Myrrha’s baby. In the centre, Adonis is being given by Diana, with her crescent moon, to Venus, who stars in his later life, and is already admiring his beauty.

Franceschini’s later version from around 1692-1709 is now in Vienna, and arranges a similar composition into vertical format. Here Diana is handing Adonis over to another goddess, possibly Venus, who is preparing to assume the role of wet-nurse. Behind them, the two women looking in amazement appear to be less anatomically engaged, and Pan and a satyr are providing some celebratory music. The napkin-bearing putto is here a winged Cupid.

Apart from a slightly later painting by Boucher, which I have been unable to illustrate here, those seem to have been the last paintings of this disturbing story of the origins of myrrh and Adonis, until recently.

Contemporary artist Rafael Metz’s The Transformation of Myrrh and the Birth of Adonis (2006) shows only the final part of the story, as the infant is being cradled by another woman, under the chimeric tree of Myrrha with its ornate and decorative branches. Myrrh resin is already exuding from the bark.

After Ovid has told of the tragic death of Hyacinthus, he moves on to one of his most unusual myths. Almost all the myths of transformation gathered in his Metamorphoses involve one or more people changing into animals, plants, or inanimate objects. The ultimate function of his stories may thus be to explain the origin of something, such as the hyacinth flower, or as a salutary example of punishment for disrespect of the gods. The story of Pygmalion reverses the usual direction of transformation, in that it centres on an inanimate object transformed into a person, and it is neither about punishment nor a story of origins.

Ovid prefaces this with contrasting tales. He tells first of the shameful memories of the Cerastae, who desecrated an altar, for which Venus turned them into bulls. Venus is then the link to mention of the Propoetides, women who denied the divinity of Venus. For that, the goddess first hardened their hearts by turning them into prostitutes, and finally into hard flint rocks.

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, and became celibate as a result of his revulsion towards their behaviour. He still wanted married love, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to signify her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered, and went straight to the statue and kissed it repeatedly. As he did so, it transformed from cold, unyielding ivory to warm, soft flesh. His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Telling the story of this transformation in a single painting proved too great a challenge for artists before the late nineteenth century.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Sculpture (Pygmalion Praying Venus to Animate His Statue) (1786) is one of the best of these traditional versions, but lacks any visual clue that this statue will shortly turn into a flesh-and-blood woman. It does, though, hint at another story of great interest to the arts, of Pygmalion as the original sculptor, which isn’t told by Ovid.

Edward Burne-Jones’ solution was to paint a series titled Pygmalion and the Image. He did this twice, once between 1868-70, and again in 1878. I show here the paintings from his second version of the series, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1879, that helped secure his position as one of Britain’s leading artists.

The Heart Desires shows Pygmalion in his celibacy. In the left background are Propoetides, or other women engaged in debauchery. They’re echoed by and contrasted with Pygmalion’s statues of the three Graces on the right. He stands alone, pondering his next sculpture.

The Hand Refrains shows Pygmalion’s statue of the perfect woman. He stands back, his tools still in his hands and scattered at the foot of his work. Too scared to touch the statue now, he looks longingly at it, as if falling in love.

In The Godhead Fires, Venus (left) comes to Pygmalion’s statue while he is praying to her at the temple. The goddess transforms the inanimate marble, rather than Ovid’s ivory, into a living woman, and their arms interlace.

The final painting in the series, The Soul Attains, shows Pygmalion’s discovery that his statue has come to life, and him seeking her hand in marriage, with a symbolic pink rose on the floor by her left foot.

Just over ten years later, it was Jean-Léon Gérôme who devised the best narrative approach. Known principally now as a realist painter of fine detail, Gérôme was also a sculptor, and in a series of paintings he explored relationships between the sculptor, model, and sculpture. Among these were his first studies for what must be the most brilliant narrative painting of Ovid’s myth.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, where Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting could be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so he reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stays on the right side of contemporary standards of decency. His attention to detail is as delightful as ever, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing. For Gérôme too recognised the other stories about sculpture and seeing that could be brought in to enrich Ovid’s original narrative.

After Orpheus has told of the abduction of Ganymede, he moves on to tell of another shameful passion, that of Apollo for the young Spartan, Hyacinthus. One midday, Apollo and Hyacinthus undressed, as they were wont to do prior to athletics, oiled their limbs, and threw the discus together. Apollo used his divine powers to throw it high through the clouds.

As the discus was falling, Hyacinthus ran out to catch it, not thinking of its likely speed and kinetic energy. The discus ricocheted from the hard earth and struck him full in the face, inflicting a mortal wound. The youth went white as he bled from his wound, and Apollo blanched too as he tried to arrest Hyacinth’s haemorrhage.

Apollo lamented the youth’s imminent death, accepting responsibility for it. As the blood of Hyacinthus poured from his wound, the god decreed that from it would grow a new flower in his memory, and the Spartans would celebrate him in an annual festival. So the blood of Hyacinthus became the purple hyacinth flower, and was commemorated in the festival of Hyacinthia.

In 1636, when he was in retirement, Peter Paul Rubens made one of his wonderful oil sketches of The Death of Hyacinth, capturing the scene vividly, as Hyacinthus’ head rests against the fateful discus. But apparently he didn’t turn that into a finished painting.

It was Jan Cossiers, then assisting Rubens in some of his remaining projects, who made the finished version from that oil sketch in 1636-38. There are perhaps the first signs of plants growing in the blood under the dying youth’s right shoulder, although they aren’t recognisable as hyacinths yet.

The most complete narrative painting of this story must be Tiepolo’s magnificent The Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53. Tiepolo has been inspired by an Italian translation of the Metamorphoses from 1561, that changed the discus into a tennis ball, actually from the popular game of pallacorda.

The classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, but hardly in the throes of death. Apollo is swooning above him, and the Cupid to the right also seems to have suffered some facial injury, perhaps in sympathy. Above that group is a grinning Pan, in the form of a Herm, and a brightly coloured parrot, who seems to have escaped from another story.

On the left of the painting are a motley group of witnesses, wearing the most extraordinary headgear and clothing. Tiepolo does manage to show some hyacinth flowers, at the right bottom corner, at the foot of which are the racquet and balls. The colour of those flowers is far from that of Tyrian purple, as given in Ovid’s account, but may of course have faded over time.

For completion, Tiepolo tucks some cypress trees in the background, alluding both to the previous story of Cyparissus, and Apollo’s grief.

Jean Broc’s The Death of Hyacinth (1801) is a dramatically-lit and overtly homoerotic interpretation, which includes the discus at the lower left, and some hyacinth flowers at the lower right.

There is still controversy over whether the flowers that arose from the blood of Hyacinthus were actually intended to be hyacinths. As no one seems to have come up with a more plausible alternative, and none of the paintings here shows them particularly well, I close with one of the finest floral still life paintings of hyacinths.

Alfrida Baadsgaard was a talented floral artist and author, and her undated Still Life with Hyacinths and Butterfly provides a good choice of colours. All we need do is add a few to the foot of Tiepolo’s wickedly humorous painting.

Painting war and conflict is demanding on composition and technique, but how about painting peace? In this week’s two articles examining how to read visual art, I show how some of the masters have risen to that challenge. This article shows examples based on myths and ancient history, and tomorrow’s comes more up to date with more recent events.

One popular approach to depicting the abstract is to use deities from classical mythology who are already associated with war, peace and related concepts.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of Minerva and Mars from 1578 is an early example of Minerva (in blue) pushing the god of war (in black armour, at the right) away from her, as her right hand rests on the shoulder of Peace, with Prosperity at the left edge of the canvas.

It was Peter Paul Rubens who excelled in this, as an important international diplomat living at a time of wars throughout Europe, and a master of mythological art.

In the young Rubens’ The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), made when he was the finest painter in Flanders, Mars is almost glorified.

The Treaty of Antwerp had been signed in 1609, and the city was flourishing in the Twelve Years’ Truce that ensued. Rubens painted this in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

In 1629-30, when Rubens was acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain and trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England, he painted Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), one of his greatest narrative paintings, as a gift with a message for the king of England.

Its central figures are those of Demeter (Ceres), here in the role of Pax (the personification of peace), and Athena, behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto (one of the Furies), with sundry Bacchantes, a Satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.

If the use of classical deities is too indirect, another approach is to paint historical events of conflicts being resolved in peace.

Early in the history of Rome, its new citizens were overwhelmingly men, and devised a plan to abduct the wives of the nearby Sabine people. That inevitably took the Sabines to war under their king and general Tatius, who led them in their march against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets that Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.

As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, and that became known as the Tarpeian Rock, the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their deaths.

With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of this episode in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle in front of the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the body of Tarpeia was reputed to have been left buried.

Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.

Moving swiftly on to the rule of Charlemagne in Europe in the late eighth century, we come to his prolonged and bloody series of campaigns against the Saxons in Germany.

Charlemagne forced the Engrians to submit to him in 773, pushing on later to Sigiburg. A series of revolts led by Widukind ensured that his forces were kept busy. This turned more savage in 782, when his courts started to hand down death penalties to Saxon pagans who refused to convert to Christianity, and Charlemagne ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners in the Massacre of Verden. After a further three years of war, the Saxons were finally subdued, and Widukind submitted to baptism. Over a millennium later, Ary Scheffer painted Charlemagne Receives the Submission of Widukind at Paderborn in 785 (1835).

In 1175 and 1176, the emperor Barbarossa was defeated at Alessandria and in the Battle of Legnano, where he was wounded and nearly killed. The following year, he was reconciled with Pope Alexander III, and had to humble himself before the Pope in Venice. He also established permanent peace with the Lombards in the second Treaty of Konstanz, in 1183.

The Rathaus in Konstanz has a series of remarkable external murals showing key moments in history, including this undated painting of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa concludes peace in Constance with the Lombards. Although the name Barbarossa appears in the inscription below, his beard doesn’t appear to be in the slightest bit red, as he shakes hands to seal the peace with the leader of the Lombards.

After telling the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, Ovid relates a series of shorter myths involving transformations. He introduces these by listing each tree that gave Orpheus shade as he sang in mourning with his lyre, from ash to willow. He then adds two species that were the result of transformations: the Italian pine and cypress. The former he attributes to Attis, who had been consort to Cybele, known to the Romans as the Great Mother goddess.

Ovid’s main story here is of Cyparissus, a youth who had been the love of Apollo. A majestic giant stag had become quite tame in that area, and was a favourite of Cyparissus, who used to lead the stag to pasture, and ride it around on occasion. In the middle of a hot summer’s day, when the stag was asleep, Cyparissus accidentally killed it with his javelin. The youth was heartbroken, and was transformed into a cypress tree. Ever since that tree has grown in and by cemeteries and other places of grief.

Surprisingly, this overtly pederastic relationship between Apollo and Cyparissus has been shown in several paintings, of which Claude-Marie Dubufe’s Apollo and Cyparissus (1821) is perhaps an early example. Cyparissus here rests against the stag, but there’s no sign of its wounding or death, although the god is comforting the youth.

There’s no ambiguity in Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov’s Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Making Music and Singing (1834). While Hyacinthus plays the pipes, Apollo embraces Cyparissus. The stag lies sleeping on a rock at the right.

By far the most complete depiction of this myth is that painted by Domenichino and his assistants in the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, as part of the Stanza di Apollo in its garden pavilion. He has wisely kept the god out of this section of the fresco, and shows the stag dead on the ground, although killed by an arrow rather than a javelin. Next to the animal’s body, a distraught Cyparissus is already changing into a cypress tree.

While considering the cypress as a companion of grief, I cannot ignore the greatest paintings of cypresses of all time, particularly in the context of Vincent van Gogh’s imminent fate.

He may not have known of this myth, but this painting is surely about the grief of Cyparissus, and that of Vincent van Gogh himself.

Orpheus then takes over the narration, telling briefly of Jupiter’s shameful passion for the Trojan prince, Ganymede, and how the god, in the form of an eagle, abducted him to Olympus, where the young man became his cupbearer, to Juno’s evident displeasure.

Ganymede was one of the early citizens of Troy. One day during his youth, he was tending the family flock of sheep near Mount Ida, well inland from the city of Troy, when Jupiter abducted him using an eagle; the bird has been variously described as Jupiter himself or his agent. Ganymede was taken to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, where he was given eternal youth and immortality, and served as the cupbearer to the gods. Jupiter compensated Ganymede’s father by having Hermes deliver him fine horses.

According to Pliny, writing in his Natural History in 77-79 CE, depictions of the story of Ganymede, and his abduction in particular, changed in about 325 BCE, when Leochares cast a wonderful bronze sculpture showing Ganymede being carried off by an eagle. Sadly the original is long lost, but this marble copy remains in the Vatican.

This copy of a drawing by Michelangelo (1475-1564) sets the precedent for many later paintings: an eagle as large as, or larger than, Ganymede bears him up to Zeus. Ganymede’s posture is shameless in revealing the purpose of the abduction.

Correggio’s The Abduction of Ganymede (1520-40) introduces two new features: Ganymede’s dog, left barking at the departing eagle, and the woodland from which he is abducted. The youth looks younger here, and is less flagrantly sexualised.

Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede (1635) makes him little older than a large toddler, no longer fitting with the story about him tending the family flocks. His face, though, is wonderfully expressive.

Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Ganymede (1636-37) is a surprise in using this story with profane humour, with the placement of both ends of Ganymede’s quiver. Clearly this wasn’t intended for viewing by polite mixed company.

Le Sueur’s The Abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter (1644) is more respectable, although still not free from pederastic taint.

Nicolaes Maes, in his Portrait of George Bredehoff de Vicq as Ganymede, must have been extremely naive to have chosen the story for a portrait of an infant.

There followed further paintings of the abduction of Ganymede, although its popularity in narrative painting waned.

Then in 1886, Gustave Moreau painted this watercolour which retold the new version, complete with barking dog and the surrounding wood. With his detailed knowledge of classical times, it’s hard to believe that Moreau didn’t understand its connotation.

Around the start of the twentieth century, Frank Kirchbach made a drawing that was turned into an engraving, and came to inspire still more bizarre connections.

In 1904, Kirchbach’s print was borrowed for an advertisement for Budweiser beer. The advertiser’s ‘modern vision of Ganymede’ is taken almost directly from Leochares sculpture of 325 BCE, over two millennia earlier. It’s hard to believe that no one recognised its associations with pederasty, then becoming known as paedophilia and recognised for the crime that it is today.

Butterflies are now most strongly associated with their beauty, fine summer weather, and the transience of their existence. In visual art, they have other interpretations that seem strange today. This article and its sequel tomorrow try to unravel some of those, starting with oddest by far.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 might seem a strange painting in which to find butterflies. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It’s claimed that flying insects, including butterflies, were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly here appear quite incongruous.

Another early painting of butterflies is also unusual. Dosso Dossi shows the senior of the classical gods painting butterflies in a pseudo-Christian act of creation in his Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue from 1524. The underlying myth stems from a quarrel between Virtue and Fortune, a case brought by Virtue to Jupiter. But he is too busy painting the wings of butterflies, so Mercury tells her to wait before pleading her case. Jupiter’s painting is so real, like that of Apelles, that as he completes each butterfly it takes life and flies off. Behind him is a rainbow providing the brilliant colours for his painting, making it an allegory of painting as well.

Edward Poynter’s painting of Psyche in the Temple of Love from 1882 tells a story from classical mythology that has been painted with butterflies on several occasions. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract a butterfly as her attribute, although the common and prosaic small white rather than anything more exotic. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

By the early nineteenth century, Europeans were travelling overseas to look for exciting new species of butterfly. Carl Spitzweg’s The Butterfly Catcher from about 1840 shows every hunter’s dream: discovering the largest, most spectacular butterflies ever seen. Compare the size of the hunter’s net with the unrealistically large butterflies in the foreground.

Winslow Homer’s Butterflies from 1878 shows a young woman hunting eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies with her net. This swallowtail species is widespread in the eastern USA, and related to the Old World swallowtail found across Europe. She’s carrying a box in which to place her specimens, in which they’d be killed, ready to mount in a glass cabinet. Collecting butterflies was considered sufficiently ladylike, because of their beauty, while less aesthetically satisfying insects such as beetles were left to male entomologists.

Sophie Anderson entered the faerie painting sub-genre with Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things from 1880. The title is taken from some verse allegedly by Charles Ede, although the only literary person of that name who I can identify was born long after this work was completed. Not only are there butterflies adorning this fairy’s hair, but she also appears to have butterfly wings.

The ephemeral lives of butterflies made them a popular candidate for vanitas paintings expressing a weariness of earthly life.

The first of those started to appear in the early sixteenth century. In Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40, an androgynous angel with butterfly wings cradles a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Those wings were modelled after the swallowtail butterfly.

A few years later, an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch painted Christ among the Doctors (c 1545), with a large butterfly settled in the foreground.

Many other paintings of butterflies simply represent their beauty.

Pisanello’s egg tempera Portrait of a Princess, showing Ginevra d’Este in 1435-49, surrounds her with flowers and four butterflies. The two on the left are red admirals, and one of the right is a swallowtail, two of the larger and more spectacular species that are abundant in southern Europe.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated A Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century, is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Jan van Os’s Flowers from about 1780 is a much later example, featuring a peacock, swallowtail and red admiral. Each would have been painted from a dead specimen in a collection; collections became popular as the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the better-educated to take an active interest in developing sciences such as entomology.

Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ended with several obscure myths that have been painted little, but Book 10 opens with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of the European canon: that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ovid links to this through Hymen, the god of marriage, and the wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus. It was a wedding marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, just as the bride was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Among the earliest paintings of this story in the post-classical era is Jacopo da Sellaio’s superb panel showing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus from 1475-80. This is one of a series that’s now dispersed across continents. It employs multiplex narrative to show the start of the story, with Orpheus left of centre, tending a flock of sheep, as his bride is bitten by the snake. At the far right, Orpheus, with the assistance of Aristaeus, puts Eurydice’s body in a rock tomb.

One of Poussin’s most famous narrative works, Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice (c 1650-53) shows Orpheus with his lyre at the right, and Eurydice standing in white, as a snake approaches from the left. Poussin had a thing about snakes, and painted other landscapes with snakes threatening people, and his enigmatic Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). Here his normally peaceful rustic landscape is showing ominous signs of falling apart: the distant castle is on fire, with smoke billowing into the sky.

In Eurydice and the Serpent, a pastel from 1915, Ker-Xavier Roussel shows them just a moment before the bite, with the snake seen on the ground in front of her.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice is one of his early works from about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. His lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He came across Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he too would stay in the Underworld with her. He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen. Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock that he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Henri Regnault’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1865) was probably based more on the popular opera by Offenbach, first performed in 1858. Orpheus is seen at the left, his lyre in his hand, singing to the dead. Behind him, at the left edge, are two of the heads of Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the Underworld, and sat on the double throne at the upper right are Persephone, who only spends half the year in the Underworld, and Hades himself.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above could he look back, or she would be returned to the Underworld for ever.

Peter Paul Rubens’ atmospheric painting of the flight of Orpheus and Eurydice (1636-38) was made during his later years of retirement, a few years before his death. Orpheus, clutching his lyre, is leading Eurydice away from Hades and Persephone, as they start their journey back to life. He opts for an unusually real-world version of Cerberus at the bottom right corner.

Camille Corot’s Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) shows the couple as they near the light at the exit of the underworld. He is instantly recognisable by his lyre held high in front of him, and both are moving towards the right edge of the painting, the edge of the dark wood. Rather than use an abstract form to represent the underworld, Corot has used a wood, with a pool in the middle distance. Behind that are spirits of the dead, some still grieving their death.

Edward Poynter’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) takes the couple on an arduous journey, striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside. While he looks straight ahead, she seems to be struggling to keep up.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx (1878) takes the couple further still, onto the bank of the River Styx, where Orpheus is summoning Charon the boatman to take them back across the water. He clutches her closely and still looks straight ahead, the couple bound together by the black sash of the Underworld.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did she melted away back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at empty air. She was gone.

It’s hard to know whether George Frederick Watts’ undated painting of Orpheus and Eurydice shows Orpheus embracing the dead body of Eurydice immediately after she has been bitten by the snake, or (more probably) Orpheus clutching in vain at her spirit as it melts away back into the Underworld, after he has looked back.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years shunning the company of women, despite their attraction to him, and brought shade to an exposed meadow with his singing, leading to the next myth.

The final painting in this series is Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice (c 1891), showing the bard, his ghostly lyre slung from the dead treestump behind him, lamenting the loss of Eurydice after his failed attempt to bring her back from the Underworld. Moreau painted this dark and funereal work to mark his own inconsolable grief at the death of his partner, Alexandrine Dureux.

After he has told us of the birth of Hercules, Ovid uses Alcmena’s link with Hercules’ former lover Iole to introduce several obscure stories, starting with the transformation of Dryope.

Iole tells the tale of her sister Dryope, the fairest in all Oechalia. She had been raped by Apollo, then married Andraemon, by whom she had a baby boy. When her son was only one and still at the breast, Dryope and Iole came to a lake, and picked crimson water-lotus flowers to please the infant. They were horrified to see drops of blood on the foliage; these later turned out to be from the nymph Lotis, who had been transformed into that bush after fleeing from Priapus.

As Dryope tried to run away, she found herself literally rooted to the spot as she was transformed into a Lotus Tree, as punishment for picking the lotus flowers. Her distraught husband came and took his son away to be cared for by a nurse.

Baur’s engraving from about 1639 shows Dryope and Iole distant, at the right. As Dryope transforms into a Lotus Tree, she’s still holding her son, and Iole is praying to the heavens. Presumably the two males in the foreground are Dryope’s husband and a friend.

By the end of Iole’s story, Alcmena is in tears. They are then interrupted by Iolaus, Hercules’ former charioteer who took part in the Calydonian boar hunt, who had just been rejuvenated as a result of the intervention of Hercules, now a god, and Hebe, his heavenly wife.

Ovid briefly mentions the sons of Achelous’ daughter Callirhoe, whose years were advanced by Hebe to allow them to avenge their father’s murder. This in turn resulted in discord among the gods over Iolaus’ rejuvenation. Ovid uses this aside to link to the story of Byblis and Caunus, twins born to Miletus and the beautiful nymph Cyanee, the first of two concerning ‘unnatural love’ concluding book 9 of the Metamorphoses.

Byblis was strongly attracted to her twin brother Caunus. At first this was nothing more than sisterly love, but it grew into something more passionate, if not obsessive, as demonstrated in her long soliloquies. Eventually, Byblis decided the best way ahead was to write to her brother confessing her love for him. She did this on wax tablets, but kept erasing her words, until she eventually arrived at a long and elaborate message, given in full by Ovid, that she signed with her signet ring and despatched to Caunus via a slave.

On starting to read his sister’s message, Caunus flew into a rage, threw the tablets to the ground, and angrily sent the slave back to Byblis, with a clear message that his sister’s proposition was shameful. In another soliloquy, Byblis blamed herself for getting it so badly wrong, saying she shouldn’t have put her feelings in writing, but should have told them orally to her brother. She then pondered whether the slave had made some error, or that her brother had mistaken her true love for him for simple lust.

Becoming more confused and upset all the time, Byblis beat herself, tore her clothing, and ran through the countryside, until she fell on the ground by a forest. The wood nymphs there tried to comfort her, to no avail, as she dissolved in her tears to form a spring.

Despite its sensitive subject of an incestuous relationship, the story of Byblis and Caunus has appeared in a few paintings. In each case, they show Byblis’ transformation into a spring, or rather they provide an opportunity to paint a young nude woman outdoors.

Jean-Jacques Henner includes a spring of sorts, and some garments that have been cast off, not exactly torn, in his Byblis Turning into a Spring (1867).

This is a smaller version of Bouguereau’s painting of Biblis from 1884, the larger one having been exhibited at the Salon in 1885. His spring is more substantial, but there’s nothing to suggest that this wasn’t just another carefully posed nude.

This undated account by Armand Point, Biblis Changed into a Spring, reads a little more faithfully to Ovid’s story, but this image of it is too poor to see other potential narrative elements such as the figures in front of the temple at the left.

Ovid then concludes Book 9 of his Metamorphoses with one of his most remarkably insightful tales. I have to keep reminding myself that he wrote this over two thousand years ago, but the issues he considers are thoroughly modern, and his approach to the story of Iphis and Ianthe is sensitive even by current standards.

Ligdus lived in Phaestos in Crete, not far from the great Knossos. Telethusa his wife was pregnant with their first child. They weren’t rich, and as a consequence Ligdus told her that she had to bear him a son, as they couldn’t afford to have a daughter. If she were to give birth to a girl, he said the child would have to die. Telethusa begged her husband to accept a daughter, but he wouldn’t budge.

Late in her pregnancy, Telethusa had a vision of the Egyptian goddess Isis, with attendant deities. Isis told her to keep and rear the baby, whether it was a boy or girl, if necessary by deception. The goddess promised that she would answer her prayers and help in times of need. Telethusa promptly went into labour that morning, and was delivered of a girl. She followed Isis’ instruction and declared the child to be a boy. The couple then raised their daughter as a son named Iphis, a name ambivalent in gender.

Thirteen years later, Ligdus found his son a bride, Ianthe, and their match appeared excellent, each falling in love with the other. Iphis, though, knew that she was a girl, and became upset that because of her gender, their marriage couldn’t happen. She postponed the wedding, delayed it further, but eventually ran out of excuses, and a final date had to be fixed.

The day before their marriage, Telethusa prayed to Isis, with Iphis at her side. As they walked back together, Iphis was transformed into a man who then married Ianthe, and lived happily ever after, remembering to make offerings to Isis in thanks for the remarkable transformation.

As you can imagine, few if any patrons in the past would have commissioned artists to paint this story, although it has been tackled by those illustrating this book of the Metamorphoses.

Bernard Picart’s engraving Isis Appears to Telethusa, from about 1732, dodges the real issues at stake by showing Telethusa’s vision of Isis and her entourage of Egyptian deities.

Johann Wilhelm Baur was braver in his engraving, showing Isis Changing the Sex of Iphis (c 1639) shortly before the wedding, although his composition keeps well away from any troublesome detail in the figure of Iphis.

One artist who did show an interest in this story is John William Godward, whose own lifestyle demonstrated he wasn’t afraid to shock. Sadly, his two paintings of Ianthe dodge the issues, and are only weakly narrative in any case, although they’re still rather beautiful. Godward’s Ianthe (1889) above simply shows the bride-to-be, and I can see no hint of Ovid’s story.

His undated painting, again of Ianthe below is more elaborate, but I still cannot see any references to the issues or events.

There is another painting which, in recent years, had become associated with the story of Iphis and Ianthe, and on some websites has been re-titled to make it appear to be about this story.

This is Angelica Kauffmann’s The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry (1782), which has been misinterpreted as showing a pre-transformed Iphis embracing Ianthe, as if in a lesbian relationship. As its real title demonstrates, that suggestion would be a travesty of Kauffmann’s intent. I also suspect that George Bowles, for whom she painted it, would have been shocked if someone had suggested that this was actually Iphis and Ianthe.

Perhaps Latin poetry can remain subtle enough for Ovid to get away with such a remarkable story so long ago, whereas the visual explicitness of a painting could never have enjoyed such licence. We could do with more brave paintings now, to challenge some of modern society’s remaining prejudices.

One century ago today, 7 November 1924, the German painter Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe, Germany. This is the second of two articles commemorating his life and art. Prior to 1886, he had struggled to get the critical attention and patronage that he thought his work deserved.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is his painting of the grisly myth of the contest between the god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos, a type of double oboe commonly referred to as a flute. This was judged by the nine Muses, and resulted in the horrific flaying of the satyr, a popular motif for the great classical narrative painters. Thoma chooses to show the contest itself, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably appreciated by contemporary viewers.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is a more puzzling mythological painting. 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.

The Sower in Thoma’s 1886 painting is strongly reminiscent of Jean-François Millet’s sowers, here at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour.

Memories of Orte from 1887 refers to Thoma’s second visit to Italy, and this ancient town about forty miles north of Rome. Two cloaked riders are silhouetted against the glowing buildings of Orte, perched on its tuff butte above the valley of the River Tiber.

Lonely Ride (1889) shows a mediaeval knight riding alone in full armour, through rolling, hilly countryside. This and others of his paintings suggest Thoma may have seen and been influenced by paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement when he visited Britain.

In 1890, Thoma’s career was transformed by his first one-man show in Munich, which brought him critical acclaim and national recognition. For the next twenty years or so, he was ranked among the leading artists in Germany.

Summer (Landscape near Karlsruhe) (1891) shows a fine summer’s afternoon on a country track, on the plain which he must have known well.

He returned to his idiosyncratic mythology with this fascinating painting of Wondrous Birds completed in 1892. The birds shown here aren’t storks or cranes, but are based on the grey heron, a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe. There are various myths and legends associated with storks and cranes, but I’m not aware of any for the heron.

Spring (1895) refers not to the season, but to the source of water shown here, in German, Die Quelle, the source). Thoma avoids the conventional classical treatment with an old river god, but shows a young man slaking his thirst. The woman with the lute could perhaps be a water nymph, or Naiad.

Thoma does refer to the season in his Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898), showing a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She is surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti. Thoma seldom if ever depicted his putti with bird-like wings, but seems to have preferred the more unusual insect or butterfly wings, with their rich colours.

By 1899, Thoma had become associated with the Kronberg artists’ colony, and could afford to move his family into an apartment with its own studio near to the Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg im Taunus, outside Frankfurt. He was appointed professor at the academy in Karlsruhe (to the south of Frankfurt), and director of the Kunsthalle in that city, posts he held until he retired in 1920.

Thoma’s Self-portrait in Front of a Birch Grove (1899) is his best-known self-portrait, and probably marked his sixtieth birthday that year.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley (1904) shows one of the deepest valleys in the Swiss Alps, a gorge travelling five miles up to the spectacular Staubbach Falls, with the Eiger and other peaks beyond.

From 1905 to 1918, Thoma served in the upper chamber of the Baden State Parliament.

Prior to the First World War, like many German artists of the day including Lovis Corinth, Thoma was strongly supportive of the militarisation of Germany. His painting of War from 1907 thus seems strange, with its bleak apocalyptic vision.

In the year that war broke out, Thoma painted Spring Melody (1914), which could be interpreted as an idealistic longing for peace, rather than a statement of nationalism.

Thoma continued to paint through the war, and completed this Landscape in 1917. Then in his late seventies, this almost deserted view expresses a tranquillity that must have been wishful thinking at the time.

His eightieth birthday in 1919 was marked by a celebration organised by Ernst Oppler and Lovis Corinth. He died five years later, in 1924.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Having just told us of the events leading to the death and apotheosis of Hercules, Ovid continues book 9 of his Metamorphoses by telling the story of his birth. He leads into this by telling us that Alcmena, Hercules’ mother, had found Iole, Hercules’ lover, a good confidante. Since Hercules’ apotheosis, and at the hero’s instruction, Hyllus had married Iole, and she was now pregnant with his child.

This reminds Alcmena of her own pregnancy with Hercules, that had been cursed by Juno to be a difficult one. She was in labour for seven days and nights, in agony, and called on Lucina and the multiple Roman deities of childbirth to deliver her child. But Lucina had received instructions from Juno, and would not let the labour progress.

Lucina sat on an altar by the door, her legs crossed and her hands linked, preventing delivery. One of Alcmena’s most loyal maids, Galanthis, took matters into her own hands, and announced to Lucina that Hercules had been born. The goddess was so shocked that she jumped up, parting her hands, so allowing Alcmena’s labour to conclude at last. But Galanthis ridiculed Lucina for this. The goddess seized Galanthis by her hair and dragged her along the ground. As the maid struggled to rise she was transformed into a weasel, and Hercules entered the world.

I’ve been unable to find any paintings of this story, but there are several engravings.

Virgil Solis engraved Alcmena’s Labour at some time around 1550. Alcmena is in the left foreground, in the throes of her protracted labour, with four women attending to her. In the background, two women are talking, and at the far right, Lucina is dragging Galanthis to the ground by her hair. There’s also a weasel walking past.

Subsequent engravings have drawn on this. Some show Lucina and Galanthis fighting in the background, but most omit the weasel. One other comes close to showing the story as told by Ovid.

The unknown engraver who made Alcmena Giving Birth to Hercules: Juno, Jealous of the Child, Attempts to Delay the Childbirth, in about 1606, has an almost identical group around Alcmena. The same two women are talking in the background, but the weasel is prominent.

Other stories about Hercules as a baby and young child, which Ovid doesn’t tell here, have been much better represented in paintings. According to older Greek myths, the sons of Jupiter could only become divine if they were suckled at Juno’s breast. Shortly after the birth of Hercules, Mercury took the infant to Juno, who put him to her breast. When she realised who the baby was, she pulled him away, and the excess milk released as a result sprayed over the heavens, forming the Milky Way.

There are two outstanding paintings showing this unusual scene.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way from about 1575 shows the infant Hercules being pulled away by an anonymous assistant, with fine streams of milk gushing upwards to generate individual stars. In the background, Jupiter’s eagle appears to have a crablike object in its talons, perhaps representing the constellation of the Crab (Cancer), and Juno’s peacocks are at the right.

Just a few years before his death, Rubens painted an even more wonderful version, The Birth of the Milky Way (1636-37). Jupiter sits in the background on the left, seemingly bored. Juno’s milk arcs out from her left breast over the heavens, and her peacocks look distressed.

Other myths tell that Juno was still furious that Hercules had been born, so she placed two serpents in his cradle, in an attempt to kill the child. Hercules’ mortal twin Iphicles (not mentioned by Ovid) screamed at the snakes, bringing their father Amphitryon running. He found Hercules strangling the serpents with his bare hands: proof that he was indeed the son of Jupiter.

Several fine paintings seize this unique opportunity to show an infant strangling serpents.

This painting from the mid seventeenth century, attributed to Bernardino Mei, has been neutrally titled Scene from the Infancy of Hercules. Rather than let his father discover the baby’s strange abilities, it’s Alcmena who has come running into his nursery.

Pompeo Batoni’s account, The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle from 1743, succeeds because it shows so well Hercules’ parents, disturbed from their bed, discovering their baby despatching the snakes, all by the light of an oil lamp.

The third version of this story comes from Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1785 to paint her a history subject of his choice. Reynolds thought that he could flatter the Empress of Russia, perhaps, and produced this preparatory study for the heart of his final work.

The Infant Hercules was painted between about 1785-88, then exhibited at the Royal Academy before being sent to Russia. Reynolds is reputed to have used a real baby as his model, and later reused this for a painting of Puck as a baby.

Reynolds’ finished painting of The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle (1788) loses the baby among its elaborate supporting cast. It has also suffered problems with deterioration in its paint layer, a common issue with many of Reynold’s paintings.

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the events leading to the death of the great hero Hercules. This reverses the chronological order, as the next story after that in Metamorphoses tells of his birth.

Having won her hand by defeating Achelous, Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate from the winter’s rains. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, but the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across.

Hercules had thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected Nessus was trying to abduct her, so shouted warning to him before loosing an arrow at the centaur’s back.

Ovid’s description of these events poses a problem for those trying to depict them, in choosing the right point of view and composition to remain faithful to that account.

Guido Reni’s masterly painting from around 1620, one of the finest of its period in the Louvre, almost fills the canvas with Nessus, who looks worryingly heroic, and Deianeira, who seems to be flying. The small figure of Hercules in the distance is well-lit, but loses the details of bow and arrow. In any case, that arrow could hardly strike Nessus in the chest.

Paolo Veronese’s painting from about 1586 also elects for this early moment, as Hercules is readying his bow and arrow, with Nessus just reaching the opposite bank. He shows the scene from Hercules’ position, but discovers the problems with that point of view: Nessus and Deianeira are now small, and Nessus is looking away with his chest concealed, and even Hercules’ face is turned from the viewer. The result makes its hero look more like a furtive stalker.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and body well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest. To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

Antonio del Pollaiolo’s painting from about 1475–80 tries a side-on view, requiring Nessus to be shot while still in the river, in a slight adjustment to the original story. Deianeira appears precariously balanced, and must be grateful that Nessus’ muscular arms save her from being dropped into the river below. The artist also leaves it to the viewer to know that Hercules’ poisoned arrow strikes Nessus rather than Deianeira.

Three centuries later, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée clearly understood the compositional problem, but didn’t arrive at such a good solution. Nessus, bearing a distressed Deianeira in his arms, has just reached the opposite bank, in the foreground. Hercules is on the left in the distance, and we can at least see his face, bow and arrow. There appears to be no way that Hercules’ arrow could impale Nessus’ chest, without first passing through some of the abundant Deianeira, nor his back. Lagrenée also adds a ferryman, who seems to have been knocked over in Nessus’ haste to make off with his captive.

Gustave Moreau’s final drawing of about 1860, squared up and ready to transfer to canvas for painting, alters the story to make its composition feasible. He puts Nessus in the foreground, with the attendant risk of making him appear the hero, somehow supporting the upstretched body of Deianeira. In the right distance, Hercules has already loosed the fatal arrow, which is prominently embedded not in the front of Nessus’ chest, but in his back. The centaur’s legs have collapsed under him, and his head and neck are stretched up in the agony of death.

Gustave Moreau and Jules Élie Delaunay seem to have worked on a compositional solution together, resulting in Delaunay’s brilliant painting of 1870, which is sadly not available for use here.

That single shot ran Nessus through. He tore the arrow out, and his blood spurted freely, mixed with poison from the Lernaean hydra. Determined to avenge his own death, the centaur gave Deianira his tunic soaked with that poison, telling her to keep it to “strengthen waning love.”

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Hercules, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Hercules’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, but Deianeira is in no position to collect it.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. Initially, she was upset, but then tried to devise a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. It was then that she recalled the blood of Nessus, and his dying words to her. She therefore impregnated a shirt with that blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, quickly growing into intense pain. Trying to tear the shirt off, he obtained no relief, and only ripped off his burnt skin from the burning flesh underneath. Hercules roamed through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt off his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea, where he was transformed into a rock pinnacle.

Hercules then cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Jupiter came to the aid of the dying hero, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and his immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

Tiepolo’s wonderful Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765) portrays this as a saintly ascension, which seems inappropriate.

No matter what your background, religion or culture, there’s one universal cause for feasting and celebration, a wedding. One of the great challenges for the figurative painter, weddings are the central feature in three classical myths and one religious story examined in this article; tomorrow’s sequel looks at the depiction of less famous, personal weddings.

Of the three great mythical weddings, the first in chronological order was that of Hippodame and Pirithous, which brought an end to the dominance of centaurs on earth, the Centauromachy. This was celebrated in prominent places: the subsequent battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was shown in sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and on the Parthenon at Athens. It was Ovid, though, who chose to tell this story in the context of the Trojan War.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked. Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings of the ultimate wedding feast gone wrong. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on the large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, and Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another. This is definitely a wedding to remember, if you survived it.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Rape of Hippodame (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

The next wedding to be grateful you missed was that between the great hero Perseus and the princess whom he rescued from Cetus the sea monster. Andromeda’s parents were so delighted at their daughter’s rescue that she, who had already been promised in marriage to Phineus, was quickly married instead to Perseus. At the wedding feast, Phineus and his friends were understandably rather miffed, and a violent quarrel broke out between them and Perseus. As happens at the most memorable of weddings, this turned seriously nasty when weapons came out and bodies started to fall. The solution for Perseus was to brandish the head of Medusa and turn Phineus and his friends into cold statuary.

Annibale Carracci and Domenichino combined their talents in painting this fresco of Perseus and Phineas (1604-06) in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety.

Surprisingly few paintings of this wedding make reference to the goddess Minerva’s protection of Perseus, which is clearly expressed in Jean-Marc Nattier’s undated painting of Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa. The goddess, Perseus’ half-sister, is sat on a cloud to the right of and behind the hero. She wears her distinctive helmet, grips her spear, and her left hand holds the Aegis, providing narrative closure.

Perseus points his weapons away from himself and Minerva, and is looking up towards the goddess. In the foreground, one of Phineus’ party seems to be sorting through the silverware, perhaps intending to make off with it. The happy couple picked themselves up from the bodies, statues and debris, and moved on. Perseus gave thanks to Minerva for her support and the loan of her shield, by the votive offering of Medusa’s head, which Minerva had set into her shield, turning it into the Aegis.

The wedding of Thetis, sea nymph and spinster of this parish, and Peleus, king of Phthia and bachelor of that parish, was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, had not been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ The Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too. This sets up the Judgement of Paris, and the rest is legendary.

For once it’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

This wedding banquet set up the beauty contest between Juno, Venus and Minerva in the Judgement of Paris. Venus won following her bribe promising Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened at the time to be married to King Menelaus of Sparta. After Paris abducted Helen to Troy, the Greeks united to wage war against Troy, eventually capturing and destroying the city.

In 1562, Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a large work for the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its central narrative is an episode of the ministry of Christ as recorded in the gospels: Christ and his disciples were invited to a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. Towards its end, the wine started to run out, and he was asked what they should do. He directed servants to fill jugs with water, which he then miraculously turned into wine.

This huge canvas shows Christ, distinguished by his halo, at the centre of his disciples, with the Virgin Mary (also with halo) at his right, and sundry disciples arrayed along that side of the tables. The wedding group is at the far left of the party.

At the far right of the canvas, wine is shown being poured from a large container, a clear cue to the gospel narrative.

There’s also a great deal of other activity in every part of the painting. On the balcony behind Christ there are scenes of the butchery of meat, which is generally claimed to be lamb and symbolic of Christ’s future death as a sacrifice for mankind, as the ‘Lamb of God’, although there are no visual clues to support that interpretation. In the musicians below, and other guests, it is claimed that there are portraits of artists, including Veronese himself, and Titian. Other important figures who are supposed to be shown include Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Emperor Charles V.

Finally, I turn to one of many weddings in more modern European literature.

The eighth story told on the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron concerns the misfortunes of one Nastagio Degli Onesti, involving one ghost killing and dismembering the ghost of a woman, a strange and grisly tale told in a series of four panels by Botticelli. The fourth and last shows the hero Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Ovid ended Book 8 of his Metamorphoses with a teaser, telling how the river god Achelous was able to transform himself into a snake or bull, and that he had recently lost one of the bull’s two horns. Book 9 opens by explaining how that came about.

With a little prompting from Theseus, Achelous resumes his narration, lamenting that he’s about to tell a story of a battle lost. He and Hercules both asked for the beautiful Deianira’s hand in marriage, forcing other suitors to resign their claims and leave the matter to them to plead their cases. Hercules wasn’t happy to do this in words, so rushed at his competitor to engage him in a fight.

Achelous gives a flattering account of the pair wrestling, eventually admitting that Hercules got the better of him and forced him onto his knees. The river god then shifted shape, changing first to a snake so he could slither away from his opponent. Hercules mocked him for that, reminding him of his conquest of the Lernean Hydra. When Hercules got a stranglehold on him, Achelous changed into his third and final form, that of a bull. Once again Hercules brought him down, and wrenched off one of his horns. The missing horn was transformed into the Horn of Plenty, cornucopia, and the guests were then served fruit in such a horn at their banquet.

This exquisitely engraved rock crystal plaque by Annibale Fontana, showing Hercules and Achelous wrestling, is one scene from a life of Hercules. This was originally set with others into a gilded casket owned by the ducal Gonzaga family, of the city of Mantua in Italy. Hercules, on the right, wears his signature lion-skin, and Achelous is conventionally old, bearded, and shaggy.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting of Hercules and Achelous, probably from around 1590, shows a late stage in the wrestling, with Achelous in the form of a bull, brought to the ground by Hercules, who is here trying to twist his horns off.

Guido Reni’s Hercules and Achelous (1617-21) opts for a more conventional wrestling match, with Achelous still in his initial human form.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This too opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club, although Ovid doesn’t refer to its use on this occasion.

Nicolas Bertin’s Hercules fighting Achelous (1715-30) is more elaborate. Hercules has almost got Achelous onto the ground, and looks as if he’s about to punch him with his fist. Hercules’ club rests in the foreground. The woman at the right is Deianira, over whom they are fighting, and a winged goddess is ready to place the laurel wreath on the victor.

For once, the most detailed and magnificent account of one of Ovid’s myths is modern, painted in 1947 for a department store in Kansas City. Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules (1947) is a gem of narrative painting.

At the centre, Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, is about to grasp Achelous’ horns. Immediately to the right, Deianira is also shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown. They’re sat on the Horn of Plenty, and Benton is one of few to include this important reference.

To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, making this multiplex narrative. That is 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.

My final painting to accompany this short story is another collaboration between the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder: Nymphs Filling the Horn of Plenty (c 1615). Although it has no references to the fight between Hercules and Achelous, it’s good to see the staff preparing the second course of Achelous’ banquet.

As Ovid draws Book 8 of his Metamorphoses to a close, Lelex has just told the touching story of Philemon and Baucis, who were transformed into an intertwining pair of trees. Achelous, host of the banquet, then takes over as narrator, to tell of three examples of shape-shifters, who can transform whenever they want.

His first example is probably the most accomplished of all: Proteus, who apparently can transform himself into all manner of creatures and objects, at one moment a boar, the next a snake or a fire. Both Hans Thoma and Cy Twombly have painted Proteus, but I regret that neither of their works is available to show here.

This leads Achelous on to tell the longer story of another shape-shifter, the daughter of Erysichthon, who remains unnamed here, elsewhere being known as Mestra or Mnestra. But he first has to introduce her father, by telling the story of his downfall.

Erysichthon was an irreligious man, even desecrating Ceres’ sacred grove by chopping down a giant and ancient oak within it. As he prepared to swing his axe at the tree, it shuddered and turned pale. A man stood in his way, so he was peremptorily beheaded. As he raised his axe ready, its nymph warned him that her death would bring him punishment.

The other Dryads (wood nymphs) prayed to Ceres to punish Erysichthon. The goddess decided to bring him insatiable hunger, but as it was decreed that Ceres and the goddess of hunger could never meet, Ceres sent an Oread as her messenger. The Oread found Hunger in the Caucasus mountains, and passed the message. Ovid then gives a detailed account of how Erysichthon was wracked with hunger, even in his dreams. Nothing could satisfy his appetite, and he spent his entire wealth trying to do so. When he ran out of money, he sold his own daughter to raise money for more food.

Erysichthon’s daughter then called on Neptune, who had previously raped her, to be spared from slavery. The god then transformed her into a fisherman, and her father, not recognising his daughter, called on the fisherman to tell him where his daughter had gone. She denied all knowledge of her former female self, and the man who had bought her went away. Knowing her ability to transform herself, Erysichthon sold her to a succession of people, enabling her to cheat on them and be sold again in a different form. He fed his constant hunger from the money she brought him, until he started to eat his own flesh and limbs.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving showing Erysichthon Sells His Daughter Mestra (c 1630) is a simple depiction of Ovid’s story, but has the interesting feature of Neptune, with his traditional horses and trident, down on the water to the right.

It’s Neptune and water that provide a thread running through much of Ovid’s narrative here. For Neptune not only raped Mestra and enabled her shape-shifting, but he is the father of Proteus, the most adept of all shape-shifters, and both Achelous and Neptune are gods of the waters. Neptune has been painted frequently, but I can find no reference to him being shown with his son Proteus, nor with Mestra. But there is one painting in which father and son might appear together.

Nicolas Poussin’s The Birth of Venus (1635-36) is controversial, as there is no general agreement as to what it is actually about, nor the identity of the goddess at its centre. One reading maintains that its current title is correct, and the central goddess is Venus, who has just been born from sea foam. To the left is clearly Neptune (Poseidon), bearing his trident, and astride his horses. In the far distance, riding on the clouds, Venus’ chariot is being towed towards her by swans.

There are other figures to identify, but one man in the distance at the left edge looks similar to Neptune, and could well be his son, The Old Man of the Sea, Proteus himself. An alternative interpretation is that it’s the sea nymph Galatea, being drawn on a chariot of cockleshells by a school of dolphins, at the centre, rather than Venus.

There is another more recent painting that appears to have been influenced by Poussin’s: William Dyce’s remarkable fresco in Queen Victoria’s holiday palace on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House.

In Dyce’s Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea (1847), Neptune stands astride his three white seahorses with their fish tails, holding their reins in his right hand, and passing his crown with the left. The crown is just about to be transferred by Mercury (with wings on his cap) to the gold-covered figure of Britannia, who holds a ceremonial silver trident in her right hand. Neptune is supported by his entourage in the sea, including the statutory brace of nudes and conch-blowers. At the right, Britannia’s entourage is more serious in intent, and includes the lion of England, and figures representing industry, trade, and navigation.

The depiction of Neptune, and much of the left half of the painting, has more than a passing resemblance to Poussin’s. But look into the distance, below Mercury and behind Neptune, and there’s an Old Man of the Sea with two nymphs. Could that also be Proteus?

In the closing lines of the book, Ovid then reveals through Achelous the link to the start of Book 9: Achelous reveals that he too is a shape-shifter, able to transform himself into a snake or a bull. But that bull had recently lost one of its two horns, the basis of the next myth.

Achelous the river god is hosting Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others at a banquet. Once Achelous has told the story of the nymphs who were turned into the Echinades, Lelex launches into the next, of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife). This is one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.

Lelex claims that Achelous made the gods appear too great, so tells his story to prove that whatever the gods decree will happen does take place. His story is set in Phrygia (now west central Anatolia, in Turkey), at a place where an oak and a lime tree grow side by side. Nearby is a marsh, where once the land was habitable, and Lelex explains how those came to be.

One day, Jupiter and his son Mercury were walking in Phrygia. When they grew tired and wanted to rest, they tried a thousand homes, but every one rejected the visitors, until they came to a poor thatched cottage. There they met the elderly Philemon and Baucis, who had married in their youth, and had lived good and pious lives together ever since. The couple welcomed the gods into their tiny and humble home.

Philemon and Baucis waited on their guests’ every needs, lighting a fire, providing them with warm water to bathe their feet, then serving them food and wine; the latter was strange, because as fast as they could pour wine into their guests’ beechwood goblets, the pitcher of wine refilled itself. The couple tried to catch the goose that guarded their cottage, to kill and cook it for their guests, but it ran to the safety of a guest’s lap.

Adam Elsheimer’s exquisite oil on copper painting of Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10) shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and the goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert’s undated painting of Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury provides the basis of what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need. Baucis has almost caught the evasive goose, and an additional figure is in the background preparing and serving food for the gods. Rijckaert adds some subtle details such as Jupiter’s eagle perched in the rafters.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) is one of his late works, and shows Jupiter looking decidedly Christlike, and Mercury the younger, almost juvenile, figure, sat at the table of a dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury. This dramatic lighting is precursor to similar effects in his later Ahasuerus and Haman (1660) and Conspiracy of the Batavians (1661-2). Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing the evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

Although Rembrandt created many wonderfully narrative paintings, he seldom depicted stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He has made the painting using rough brushstrokes and highly gestural marks of paint, as roughly hewn as the cottage which it depicts. It isn’t just an outstanding account of this myth, but one of his finest narrative paintings.

Johann Carl Loth, in his Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (c 1659-62), appears to have reworked the narrative from Ovid’s original. While Baucis and Philemon are waiting on their guests, with Philemon holding the jug containing wine, Mercury (centre) appears to be remonstrating with Jupiter (right), holding out his right index finger and pointing it at the other god. The evasive goose is shown behind Mercury’s back, apparently about to peck his left hand. The whole scene is set in a well-lit area, perhaps outside the cottage in daylight.

This painting from the circle of Appiani, possibly by Stefano Tofanelli or Pietro Benvenuti, shows Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis in less straitened circumstances. Jupiter (left) holds a glass of wine in his left hand, and Mercury (centre) is both eating grapes and looking longingly at a fresh bowl of fruit that Philemon (right) is just about to place on the table. Baucis (front right) is looking at Jupiter, and holding out her right hand, as if to refill his glass.

The gods then revealed their divinity, and told their hosts that those who had shunned them would pay for their wickedness, but the old couple would be spared. Jupiter and Mercury then took them outside, and led them up the nearby mountain. When close to the top, Philemon and Baucis looked back to see all the land below was flooded, except for their tiny cottage, which had been transformed into a temple with a roof of gold.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis from about 1625 is one of the few paintings to show a broader view of this later moment in Ovid’s story. His dramatic landscape shows storm-clouds building over the hills, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, dragging large trees and animals in its swollen waters, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, Jupiter points to a rainbow formed over a waterfall at the lower left corner, and Mercury is all but naked.

Jupiter then asked the couple what they most wanted. After a moment’s consultation, they agreed that they wanted to be the priests of that temple, and that, when their time came, they should both die together. Their wish was granted, and later, when they were even older, they both turned into an intertwining pair of trees, one an oak, the other a lime (linden), just as Lelex had described.

In the first of these two articles showing tents in paintings, I covered those depicting historical battles of the more distant past. Today’s sequel brings those up to date with tents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, starting with one of John Singer Sargent’s works as a war artist in the closing months of the First World War.

Sargent painted several scenes in military medical facilities, including this watercolour of the Interior of a Hospital Tent, with its packed rows of folding camp beds and a multitude of guy ropes visible through its large windows.

During his travels in the Middle East, Alberto Pasini must have become very familiar with the sight of An Arab Camp, shown here at a small watering place in 1866. From the dress and preponderance of horses, this was probably further north into Syria or even Turkey.

Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) was one of his most successful paintings based on the studies from his first visit to the west in 1859. This shows a summit of 3,187 metres (10,456 feet), named by its surveyors after a general who died in the Civil War. The First Nation people shown are Shoshone, seen in their traditional wigwams with their characteristic circular opening.

Nearly fifty years after the event, François-Auguste Biard painted The Duke of Orleans Received in a Lapland Camp, August 1795 (1841). This shows the Duke looking disdainful and detached in a Sami tent, apparently shunning the bowl that is being offered to him. The tent’s framework of poles is clearly visible, and put to good use bearing the weight of the pot and drying furs.

Tents were also popular with explorers and those prospecting for valuable minerals such as gold.

Ludwig Becker painted this watercolour view of his prospector’s tent at Bendigo, in the Australian outback during the early years of its gold rush in 1853, one of several paintings he exhibited in Melbourne the following year. At its height, similar tents and shacks housed forty thousand prospectors, including the artist.

Edward Adrian Wilson’s rough pencil sketch of Camping after Dark (1910) shows a cutaway of a ‘pyramid’ tent in the Antarctic, its three occupants crammed in tightly together. From their tangle of legs and boots to the mittens and balaclava hats hanging to thaw and dry above them, it’s cramped but warm and sheltered. Wilson was one of Captain Scott’s party who died during their return from the South Pole two years later.

Tents had also become popular temporary shelters at fun events across the world.

William Powell Frith’s famous painting of Derby Day (1856-58) shows some of the canvas palaces installed for this horse-racing festival at Epsom, to the south of London. The tent in the left foreground is that of the Reform Club, an exclusive private members club in London, founded in 1836.

One of Émile Friant’s earliest works is this 1881 painting of The Entrance of the Clowns, showing the interior of the Big Top at the moment that the clowns, acrobats, and other entertainers parade. Many circuses relied on these huge tents to contain their spectators around the ring where the entertainers performed.

Pierre Bonnard’s The Beach (Arcachon) from about 1922, shows this beach packed with tents and awnings covering the golden sand, and crowds of people and moored yachts in the distance.

In the summer of 1913, the Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring and his family holidayed in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing, perhaps not such a far cry from the armies of long past.