Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.

Plus, the theme park wars heat up.

Aeneas has been rowed through the Straits of Messina, avoiding the rock pinnacle that Scylla had been transformed into. From there he heads north-west until he meets a fierce northerly storm that blows him and his crew south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid breezes through what takes Virgil almost a whole book in the Aeneid, in a brief summary of the affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage. This ends with him abandoning her to fall upon the sword he had given her, and her body to be consumed on her funeral pyre.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815, is probably the standard work showing the beginnings of their romance. Unfortunately it doesn’t give any clues to its tragic outcome.

In about 1875, when Paul Cézanne was still experimenting with narrative genres, he first drew a compositional study, then painted Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage. The queen is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, who had been abandoned by Aeneas as the family fled the burning city of Troy.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it’s surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

Dido’s spectacular death is shown best in what is perhaps Henry Fuseli’s most conventional history painting, known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

After a close call with the Sirens, Aeneas reaches the land of the Cercopes, who had been transformed into apes by Jupiter because of their treachery. The ship continues to the north-west along the coast of Italy, passing Naples.

This has been shown only by those like Antonio Tempesta who engraved for illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses. Tempesta’s Jupiter Changing the Cercopians into Monkeys from around 1600 shows Jupiter at the right, accompanied as ever by his huge eagle, with the transformed monkeys.

Once past Naples, Aeneas and his crew land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. He needs her assistance to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises. The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. The two of them travel to the underworld bearing that golden bough, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity. When Apollo had invited her to wish for anything, she had pointed to a pile of sand, and asked to live as many years as there were grains, but forgot to wish for eternal youth to accompany that.

Apollo offered her eternal youth as well, but she declined and remained a virgin. After seven hundred years, with another three hundred still to go, she is well into old age, infirm, and steadily vanishing as her body wastes away until only her voice will remain. With that, the pair reach Cumae, and Aeneas sets sail.

This is depicted in one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity. Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a forward reference to Aeneas’ future visit, although that would have been seven centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle the first part of this story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, but is set at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story. Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this later scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition. True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance are Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno. The Sibyl, who doesn’t show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings. The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch, with the golden sickle used to cut that branch, in her right hand. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around a white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen, although he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps. In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

As Ovid nears the end of Book 13 of his Metamorphoses, Aeneas and his companions are in transit across the Mediterranean, heading towards Italy and destiny. He rushes them through a rapid succession of adventures before bringing them to Sicily for the closing stories in this book.

Ovid summarises much of Virgil’s Aeneid in just a few lines, taking Aeneas from Crete through Ithaca, Samos, Dodona, and Phaeacia, to land on Sicily, where Scylla and Charybdis threaten the safety of mariners. Scylla is combing the hair of Galatea, as the latter laments her tragic love-life. Wiping tears from her eyes, Galatea then tells us her story.

When he was only sixteen, Galatea had fallen in love with Acis, the son of the river nymph Symaethis, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The Cyclops did his best to smarten himself up for her, while remaining deeply and murderously jealous of Acis.

Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye, as told in a separate story in Homer’s Odyssey. This inevitably upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there playing his reed pipes. Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach.

Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, he grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was buried by the side of a mountain hurled by the Cyclops. The blood of Acis was turned into a stream that gushed forth from a reed growing in a cleft in the rock, with him as its river-god.

Claude’s wonderful Coastal Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657) is first and foremost a coastal landscape, but also tells Ovid’s story faithfully. Polyphemus is seen at the right, watching Acis and Galatea in their makeshift shelter down at the water’s edge, with Cupid sat beside them. Additional Nereids are tucked away in the trees at the left.

Nicolas Bertin’s Acis and Galatea from around 1700 also follows Ovid’s detail. At its centre, the two lovers are behind a rock pinnacle, with three cupids sealing their love. Polyphemus is already in a rage at the upper right, although he hasn’t yet armed himself with the huge boulder. Below the couple Bertin provides a link into Ovid’s greater narrative, with Scylla and Charybdis, and possibly the goddess Venus with her son Cupid by her breast.

Johann Heinrich Tischbein prefers a plainer account in his Acis and Galatea from 1758. Galatea is almost naked in the arms of Acis, as Polyphemus peers at them, a voyeur behind a tree trunk. There are now no cupids or other distractions.

Alexandre Charles Guillemot’s The Love of Acis and Galatea (1827) doesn’t pursue the theme of Polyphemus’ voyeurism, but returns to a more conventional composition of the Cyclops sitting on a distant hill. He also sows potential confusion: Polyphemus is holding his reed pipes, although they are harder to see, and the pipes on Acis’ back are extras that are perhaps a little too obvious.

Later in the nineteenth century, emphasis switched from the jealousy of Polyphemus at the sight of the couple together, to Tischbein’s theme of voyeurism.

Gustave Moreau’s first Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked, alone in the countryside with her eyes closed, as the Cyclops plays sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be more appropriate for a sea-nymph. Acis is nowhere to be seen.

Moreau’s second Galatea from near the end of his career in 1896 is dark, and shows Galatea and Polyphemus hemmed in within a deep canyon. Around her aren’t flowers but the seaweeds and corals more appropriate for a sea-nymph.

One of the masterpieces of Symbolism, Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops from about 1914 follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of voyeurism. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis absent.

Curiously, none of the above paintings shows the moment of climax, or peripeteia, in which Polyphemus murders Acis.

Only Pompeo Batoni’s Acis and Galatea from 1761 shows the Cyclops, his reed pipes at his feet, hurling the boulder at Acis, so making clear the couple’s tragic fate.

The countryside around the city of Rome has played a vital role in the history of landscape painting. For nearly a century, from the 1780s until the development of Impressionism, painting oil sketches in this area became a mandatory phase in the training of all good landscape painters in Europe. This weekend I show some of the best examples of these exercises undertaken early in the careers of some of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century, from Valenciennes who started it, to Corot and Böcklin.

It was the co-founders of landscape painting in Europe, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (c 1600-1682), who started painting the Roman Campagna, from about 1624 onwards. Although both were born in France, they spent almost their whole careers based in Rome, where they went out and sketched in front of the motif. They then used those studies to assemble composite idealised landscapes for their studio oil paintings, leaving little trace of their original sketches.

It was Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), another pioneer French landscape artist who worked for many years in Rome, who first recommended to the young Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) that he should follow this practice by painting oil sketches en plein air in the Campagna. In about 1782 Valenciennes started to amass his personal image library of sketches of the Roman countryside, and when he returned to France in 1785 he used those for his studio paintings.

One of the finest and the best-known of all Valenciennes’ oil sketches is this showing Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees reputedly from an earlier visit in 1780. This shows a Renaissance villa now in the centre of the city of Rome, although here its park setting makes it look as if it is out in the country. It was built in 1506-10 for a banker, and appropriately contains superb frescoes by Raphael and others. It is now owned by the state and most is open to visitors.

View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines is a superb view of what’s known as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli, again in central Rome. This is on the top of the Campidoglio, and affords the view over the city appearing behind the pine on the right. It’s situated close to the Forum.

This untitled sketch shows a different view over the city.

Several of these surviving oil sketches are brilliant studies in the effects of light, such as Rome: Houses and a Domed Church above.

I’m not sure if anyone has identified the buildings shown in Rooftops in the Shadows, but suspect that this too is close to the centre of Rome, perhaps on one of its hills. Is this the first plein air painting of washing on the line?

Around forty years later, John Constable sketched clouds and weather in what he called ‘skying’. Here’s one of Valenciennes’ groundbreaking sketches from the early 1780s, in Rome: Study of Clouds. He wasn’t the first plein air painter by any means, nor the first to make sky studies, but it was he who established the practice among landscape artists, both in his direct teaching and in his book published in 1800.

The Louvre has most of Valenciennes’ surviving oil sketches, but by no means all of them. This superb Italian Landscape is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has another of his sky sketches, this Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, in Ohio, has this magnificent View of Rome, which I think compares with the Villa Farnese above in its quality. Notable here is the depiction of the clouds of dust and smoke rising from the streets of the city, which surely qualify it as an ‘impression’.

Prostitution isn’t the only occupation that has been claimed to be the earliest, and that claim wasn’t even made until the late nineteenth century. However, it certainly was one of the most common ways for women to earn a living in the growing cities of Europe during the nineteenth century. Like bars and places of entertainment, prostitution only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money. London and Paris were renowned for the number of women who worked as prostitutes, catering for all classes and pockets.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window looking out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, in Chatham Place.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak with some white lace hangs. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She’s dressed for the bedroom, with her long red hair let down, and looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, at the time a popular haunt for prostitutes.

In Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1863), the profligate woman in the foreground wears a torn and tattered red dress (detail below), although it’s faded rather than full scarlet. With her gaggle of unruly children and a babe in arms, she’s portrayed as a prostitute.

Like Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863) before, the contemporary surroundings and heap of clothes beside Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) ensured it was deemed immoral by the Salon jury. This was inspired by a poem by Alfred de Musset about a prostitute, and Gervex depicted her asleep in bed as her client gets dressed the following morning. In the end, the artist got a commercial gallery to exhibit this painting, where it attracted far more attention than it would have in the Salon.

Jean-Louis Forain’s candid view of endemic prostitution shown in his watercolour The Client (1878) surpassed those of Edgar Degas, and were later to inspire the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

One response to the popularity of Naturalism was Félicien Rops’ tender portrait of a low-end prostitute Down and Out in 1882. While she stands next to a sheet on the wall headed TARIF making clear her trade, a single small red flower adorns her flaunted cleavage.

In Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation from 1880-85, the man settling his bill is only seen by the hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive, looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade. This is one of a series by Gandolfo depicting the poor in the city of Catania on Sicily.

The theme of prostitution dominates many of the paintings of the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, who was also an author.

Just before Christmas 1886, Christian Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted other scenes from the book.

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is, of course, exactly what happens.

Albertine isn’t the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer: Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

During Joaquín Sorolla’s period of Naturalist painting, he depicted the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain. His White Slave Trade (1895) is set in a bleak railway compartment, where four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of an older woman. In contrast to their guardian who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which the title refers is the movement of prostitutes between brothels, in this case from the city of Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was another Norwegian who took up the cause with Krohg. He had been born in Hammersborg, a poor suburb of Oslo, but his paintings weren’t exhibited until after his death in 1922.

Forced into Prostitution, also known as Night Wanderer, from 1915, shows the artist’s wife Anna in the role of a prostitute in the city of Oslo. Here an odious-looking client with bushy eyebrows and a thick-set face is pressing against her from behind, wanting to pick her up.

Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his son Ascanius. For a Roman reader, Aeneas needs no introduction; like so many classical heroes, he’s the product of a union between a god and a mortal. His case is unusual, as it wasn’t Jupiter to blame, and Aeneas’ father was the mortal Anchises, now being carried on the shoulders of his son, and his mother was the goddess Venus.

Venus and Anchises, painted by William Blake Richmond between 1889-90, shows this legend. Jupiter challenged Cupid to shoot an arrow at his mother, causing her to fall in love with Anchises when she met him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. Aeneas was the result of that union, and the legend is the explanation for Venus watching over the safety of Aeneas during his prolonged journey from Troy.

There have been many fine paintings of Aeneas fleeing the sacked city with his family.

Unusually, one of Adam Elsheimer’s paintings of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy was made in gouache. Of all these depictions, this seems to be the only one based on a reconstruction with models, as the method of carrying is not only feasible, but practical. Note how Aeneas is grasping a robe acting as his father’s seat, and Anchises has interlocked his fingers on his son’s forehead.

That doesn’t, though, appear to have been a study for Elsheimer’s finished work The Burning of Troy (c 1600-01) painted in oil on copper. The pair, with young Ascanius and his mother to the right, are seen in the left foreground. Elsheimer’s backdrop of the burning city includes the Trojan Horse, to the left of the upper centre, and hints with subtlety at the vast tragedy taking place.

Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy from about 1635 shows the family group in close-up. From the left are Creusa, Aeneas’ wife who dies before she can leave the city, Aeneas, Anchises, and a very young Ascanius. This is the start of their flight, as Aeneas and Creusa are persuading Anchises to let Aeneas carry him to safety.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is already falling slightly behind, and looks particularly distressed.

Oddly, Ovid doesn’t mention Creusa’s fate in the Metamorphoses, although a Roman reader would have been well aware of the detail in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is left behind. By the time the hero reaches the city gates with his father and son, his wife is nowhere to be seen. Aeneas re-enters the burning city to look for her, but her ghost tells him that his destiny is to reach Hesperia, where he will become a king and marry a princess.

Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius then sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to reach Delos, site of a temple to Apollo, whose priest and ruler of the island is Anius. He shows them the temple and city, and the two trees that the goddess Latona had held onto when she gave birth to the twin deities Apollo and Diana.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving of Aeneus Meets Anius (c 1639), for an illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might appear generic, but is actually carefully composed. Aeneas stands upright, his spear almost vertical, in its centre. To the right his father Anchises embraces his old friend Anius, and to the left is the young Ascanius. In the right background is the city, with its imposing temple at the edge.

This singular painting is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos from 1672. This was the first of half a dozen works that Claude painted in the final decade of his life, based primarily on Virgil’s account in the Aeneid. Its meticulous details are supported by a coastal landscape of great beauty.

The twin trees at its centre, an olive and palm according to myth, are those that Latona held when she gave birth to Apollo and Diana, and now provide shade for a shepherd and his flock of sheep.

The king and priest Anius is at the left of the group, wearing priestly white, and pointing out the twin trees to his guests. To his right is Anchises in blue, then Aeneas holding his spear, and his young son Ascanius, with a suitably shorter spear in his right hand.

Claude’s fine details tell further stories too.

The relief at the top of the temple, immediately below a couple of casual onlookers, tells the story of Latona’s twins killing the giant Tityus, who had tried to rape their mother. Tityus is seen at the right of the relief, fallen down and wounded by the arrows of Diana (centre) and Apollo (left). Similarly to the Titan Prometheus, Tityus was sentenced to spend his time in the Underworld with two vultures feeding on his liver, which regenerated each night.

Anius then entertains his guests to a feast in their honour. Anchises asks what happened to Anius’ four daughters and one son. Anius replies that he is now almost childless, with his son far away on the island of Andros, and his daughters taken from him by Agamemnon. Bacchus had given his girls the remarkable gift that whatever they touched was transformed into food, wine, and oil. Because of that, the Greeks departing from their conquest of Troy abducted them to feed their army. When the daughters begged Bacchus to release them, the god turned them into white doves of Venus, Aeneas’s mother.

Anius and his guests continue to tell tales before retiring to sleep for the night. In the morning Aeneas goes to the oracle of Phoebus, who cryptically tells him to seek his ancient mother, and head for ancestral shores. They then exchange gifts, including a decorated krater (wine bowl) telling another story. The image on the krater shows the death of Orion’s daughters in Thebes. Their funeral procession took the bodies to the great square, for their cremation on pyres. From their ashes rose twins known as the Coroni.

After that, Aeneas and his companions sail on to Crete.

It wasn’t that long ago that it was most unusual to go out without wearing a hat. Although they’ve made something of a comeback in recent decades, in much of the world they’re still far from popular unless it’s unusually cold. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show a selection where reading the hats can be useful. However, I avoid two other types of headgear that commonly appear in art, as they’ve been covered elsewhere: helmets and halos.

People have put hats on their head since long before recorded history. Some distinctive forms of hat have unusual histories, and puzzling representations in art. Among the many quirks in the amazing paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are figures in or wearing funnels.

Their origin goes back to the Jewish diaspora of the Middle Ages, when Ashkenazi Jews (in particular) migrated to northern Europe, from about 800 CE. Predominantly Christian powers sought to make visible signs to distinguish Jews, and to a lesser extent Muslims, from local Christians, and for many centuries the migrants were persecuted, confined to Jewish ghettos, and generally kept in isolation as much as possible.

One common discriminatory technique employed in much of northern Europe was to require Jews to wear distinctive hats. This played on religious requirements for Jews to cover their heads, and the fact that most people wore hats when outdoors. The patterns of Jewish hat most often recorded are pointed or conical, and some have highly distinctive ‘bobbles’ at the top.

This detail from the centre panel of Bosch’s Haywain Triptych from about 1510-16 shows some unusual headgear probably derived from the appearance of the Jewish hat.

They’re also to be seen in more recent historically accurate depictions of the Middle Ages, as shown by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in the right of his wonderful large history painting of Valdemar Atterdag Holding Visby to Ransom, 1361 (1882). There’s a rich range of military helmets, and one obvious conical hat being worn by a Jew, seen in the detail below.

In time, conical hats remained visible signs of discrimination. Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows the range of hats worn by children, and at the far right a dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

As with all forms of clothing and personal decoration, hats have long been objects of fashion, used by individuals to distinguish and adorn, and feed their personal vanity. One of the best examples of this is in Bartholomäus Strobel’s long panoramic view of the Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist at Herod’s Banquet from about 1630-33.

Gathered in this grand banquet are many ranks of nobility wearing contemporary dress with an astonishing range of headgear, from armoured helmets to feathery confections. At the far right, the executioner stands by John’s headless corpse, a large pool of bright blood on the ground where its head once lay. A young woman (who might be Salome) looks up to heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, while an older woman (presumably Herodias) chats with the executioner.

During the English Civil War of 1642-51, hats assumed an even greater importance, to distinguish the two sides, so-called Cavaliers and Roundheads.

William Frederick Yeames’ And when did you last see your Father? indicates this in the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title, for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act that’s bringing anguish to his sisters and mother.

Not to be outdone by their subjects, Kings and their bishops had to have their own hats in the form of crowns and mitres.

Probably the most famous depiction of any major coronation is that of Raphael and his workshop in this fresco of the Coronation of Charlemagne from 1514-15, with its serried ranks of mitres and just the one crown to rule them all. The rows of bishops here wear what is the exact opposite of the monks’ bare tonsured heads.

It didn’t take long for the church and other organisations to express rank and superiority in subtle variations of hat.

Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 pays particular attention to the surface textures of the fabrics. Three quite distinct fabrics are shown in the cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta on his head, the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), and the luxuriant folds of his white rochet (vestment). In that scarlet biretta is great power.

Some well-known characters in paintings are instantly recognisable by their hat, in this case the Florentine poet Dante, shown below with Virgil as they are being ferried in the Inferno.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted this Barque of Dante, one of his finest narrative works, showing Dante and Virgil crossing a stormy river Acheron in Charon’s small boat. Dante is inevitably wearing his signature red chaperon. This had evolved before 1200 as a hooded short cape, and developed into variants that remained popular until becoming unfashionable in about 1500. For his part, Virgil wears a laurel wreath honouring an epic poet of his stature.

Some of these ancient hats have been perpetuated in formal dress, such as that worn by academics for ceremonial.

In Jean Béraud’s undated The Thesis of Madeleine Brès or The Doctoral Jury he shows us one of the early woman doctoral students defending her thesis before the academic jury, who are wearing what might now appear to be fancy dress hats. At the time this was a major landmark in the improvements in women’s rights, and the archaic headwear serves to emphasise that change.

Finally, hats aren’t always good signs, but can signify the sinister and worse. Although most of us associate the silk top hat with elegant opulence, in its day it gained some dark associations.

Jean-Louis Forain’s Dancer and Admirer Behind the Scenes from 1903 whispers its disturbing message of the association between the top hat and white tie, and under-age prostitution that was rife at the time among dancers of the Paris ballet. It’s not just the hat, but the context in which it’s worn.

全英火车票折扣大促强势来袭（链接）！这次大促是为了庆祝今年英国铁路迎来200周年。本次铁路特卖会涵盖几乎所有英 […]