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.

This week’s two articles about reading paintings consider some of the more famous and unusual depictions of the likenesses of three or more people. Individual portraits have long been popular, and for many artists have brought in the income they’ve needed to paint as a career. Painting three or more portraits in a single image presents greater challenges, and in many cases complicates their reading considerably. Among the paintings included in today’s article are some of the hardest of all to read, that remain controversial.

The first and key step in starting to read a group portrait is to discover who, where and when. For some, a little digging around in contemporary historical records may be sufficient.

When Lavinia Fontana was in Rome, she painted the remarkable family Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli with six of her children (1604-5), showing this nobleman’s wife, five of her sons, and her daughter Verginia, whose image is labelled to distinguish her from her brothers. The mother died in September 1605 after giving birth to her nineteenth child. Their lapdog was a sign of fidelity, and Fontana’s depiction of clothing exquisite.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. The members of this group are all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter, and are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues aren’t looking at the dissected forearm.

A decade later, Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of them all, although it’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to paint this for display in the great hall of the guards.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

Portraits of royal families have been regular commissions for their court painters. The best of these have greater artistic merit. Diego Velázquez’ Las Meninas, translated as The Maids of Honour, from about 1656-57 is another well-known example of a group portrait. In what is overtly a depiction of eleven people and a dog in a room in the Alcázar Palace, he uses composition and gaze to tell us more. Much depends on what we believe most of the figures are looking at. Reflected in the rectangular plane mirror on the far wall are King Philip IV and his wife Queen Mariana of Austria.

There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them. In this reading, the most important people not in the painting only appear in reflection and the gaze of others.

In April 1800, Francisco Goya was commissioned by King Carlos IV to paint a family portrait, which proved to be the last of his royal commissions before the war with France, and his most important. It’s often said that Goya’s inspiration for his large canvas of Carlos IV of Spain and His Family (1800-01) was Las Meninas, but what he has painted is different in almost every respect other than the fact that the artist has taken the opportunity to include a self-portrait of himself painting the painting, as it were. Goya captures a moment of optimism when Spain and France were allies, and portrays his royal figures in stark reality.

In the mid-nineteenth century Gustave Courbet’s Painter’s Studio proved a turning point. One of the most unconventional group portraits, it influenced successors including Henri Fantin-Latour.

The Painter’s Studio from 1855 is one of the great ‘problem paintings’ that has been extensively analysed and ‘explained’ as allegory. Those classical approaches have recently been challenged by Herbert, who argues that trying to determine whether it is allegorical or realist is asking the wrong question.

The figures in the painting show individuals who had influence over Courbet’s life and artistic career. At the right are the artist’s friends and admirers, including his first patron Alfred Bruyas, critics Champfleury and Baudelaire who had been so positive in their reactions to his work, and others. At the left, a man with dogs has been interpreted as an allegory of the Emperor Napoleon III. Behind him are figures who were long assumed to be allegorical, but Hélène Toussaint has identified them as contemporary people, most of whom had been supporters of the Emperor’s regime.

Following a long series of studies, Henri Fantin-Latour’s first group portrait Homage to Delacroix was completed almost ten years later, in 1864. Its figures include two, Champfleury and Baudelaire, who had appeared in Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, together with those who Fantin rated as the brightest and best among modern painters, including his friends Whistler and Manet. Inevitably he included himself among such distinguished company.

But Fantin neither poses the puzzle of Courbet’s allegory, nor the social gathering of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries. Instead we have seven men looking at the viewer, and three gazing somewhere else. It almost looks like a ‘real’ group portrait, but lacking interactions between the figures, it’s clear that it’s eleven individual portraits, including that of Delacroix.

Fantin pressed on with his unusual group portraits, here in Studio at Les Batignolles from 1870, showing his friend Manet painting with a small group of friends peering over his shoulders. Its debt to Courbet is palpable. The figures were identified by the artist as:

• Otto Schölderer (standing, left),
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• Émile Zola,
• Edmond Maître,
• Frédéric Bazille,
• Claude Monet (standing, right),
• Édouard Manet (seated, left)
• Zacharie Astruc (seated, right).

As a window into history, this is unique, showing Manet, Renoir, Zola, Bazille (who was to die that November in the Franco-Prussian War) and Monet in a fictional snapshot; it also inspired Bazille to paint a response and seems to have struck a chord with both artistic circles and the critics of the day. Although Fantin has integrated his figures better than in earlier paintings, this begs many questions such as what they’re all doing together, and whether the painting is about homage to Manet, who was still very much alive, or the meeting of an imaginary gentlemen’s club.

The sixth and last of Fantin’s group portraits, Around the Piano from 1885, shows members of a Wagner fan club in Paris at the time. They are each gazing at something different and not interacting in the least. Emmanuel Chabrier is playing the piano without looking at its keyboard or the music, and its other figures (bar one) appear distracted.

Maurice Denis was one of the few artists to take a deep interest in the late paintings of Paul Cézanne, and in 1900 paid his respects (although Cézanne didn’t die until 1906) in this Homage to Cézanne. The artist to whom this group of Nabis are paying their respects is represented by a painting, Cézanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples. Although not entirely cohesive as a group, there are clear interactions taking place, and gazes reflect that, with Odilon Redon at the left and Paul Sérusier (foreground, at the right edge of the painting) clearly engaged with one another.

In 1902-03, Félix Vallotton painted a smaller group of Nabis in his Five Painters. Only Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel seem to be joined in discussion, and there’s a strange array of hands around the centre of the canvas.

Tomorrow I’ll look at more conventional group portraits, including some featuring the families of artists.

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.