A new edition of the photographer’s 1988 book is even more relevant today.

Higher education cannot cede the space of public discourse and the free exchange of ideas.

President Trump’s approach to tariffs has unsettled many corporate leaders who believed he would use the levies as a negotiating tool. As it turns out, he sees them as an end in themselves.

Ovid has raced through the destruction of Troy and its nobility, including the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax.

As the Greek ships prepare to depart, Priam’s widow Hecuba is the last to board. Her youngest son Polydorus has been secretly in the care of King Polymestor in Thrace, who was paid a great sum to protect him. With Troy destroyed and that source of income lost, Polymestor slit the child’s throat and threw his body into the sea.

The Greek fleet shelters off the coast of Thrace, again waiting for favourable winds. While there, the ghost of Achilles appears and demands the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena in appeasement.

As with Iphigenia’s sacrifice a decade earlier, it’s now the turn of Hecuba’s daughter to be sacrificed to secure good weather. Polyxena is taken from the arms of her mother and put before the altar where Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, stands ready with his knife. Polyxena pleads eloquently for her body to be given to her mother without a ransom, a speech bringing even the priest to tears. Nevertheless, he thrusts the knife into her breast, and she falls to her knees, still resolute, but dead. The Trojan women mourn her and care for her body, so her mother can embrace her in final farewell. Hecuba then responds in a long speech of lament.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s fine painting of Hecuba and Polyxena, from after 1814, is superb in its treatment of fabrics, but more puzzling in its narrative. Hecuba, the older woman, appears to have fainted, presumably at the announcement of Polyxena’s imminent sacrifice, with her daughter kneeling at her feet.

Several paintings show the sacrifice of Polyxena, of which Charles Le Brun’s from 1647 is arguably the finest, and in superb condition. Polyxena is being led to the altar as Hecuba tries to hold her back. Behind Polyxena is the same Neoptolemus who threw Astyanax to his death, threatening to kill her where she is.

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena, from about the same time, shows the moment the priest is about to sink his knife into the woman’s breast. A young assistant, their head averted, kneels ready with a large bowl to catch the sacrificial blood.

Hecuba then walks down to the beach for a jar of seawater, and stumbles across the body of her son Polydorus. She is initially struck dumb, and freezes like a rock with the shock. As that subsides, her wrath grows. She makes her way to meet with Polymestor, on the pretext of wanting to show him some hidden gold. He immediately starts lying to her, so she flies at him, burying her fingers deep into his eyes to blind him. She is then stoned by Thracians, and is transformed into a dog, and that place is named Cynossema, the dog’s tomb.

The Vengeance of Hecuba is a magnificent Macao tapestry from the seventeenth century, showing Hecuba and three other women sealing Polymestor’s fate for his murder of Polydorus. Hecuba is poking his eyes out, as the others swing long wooden clubs at him.

Giuseppe Crespi probably painted his version of Hecuba kills Polymestor in the early eighteenth century. His skilful composition makes it a chilling but carefully implicit image, as a woman associate holds the king down, and Hecuba reaches up to remove his eyes. Crespi has minimised the amount of limb visible in the upper part of the painting, to keep the composition there clean and clear. He seems to have compensated for that in the legs of the lower half, made even more complex by deep shadow.

The goddess Aurora joins in the lament over the destruction of Troy. She had not only supported the Trojan cause, but her son Memnon had been killed by Achilles in combat. She is stricken with grief, and can’t bear to watch his cremation on the funeral pyre. She kneels before Jupiter and begs him that her dead son might be granted an honour. Jupiter agrees, and the smoke from Memnon’s pyre darkens the whole sky, as might have happened during a major volcanic eruption. That smoke is then transformed into a flock of birds, the Memnonides, in honour of Memnon.

Bernard Picart’s engraving from the early eighteenth century of Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus shows a young warrior in Egypt, looking into Aurora’s dawn light. He may be sat on his own sarcophagus too.

The two colossi at Al Bairat near Luxor in Egypt were known in classical times, and became popular motifs for ‘orientalist’ artists in the nineteenth century, several of whom show them in dramatic lighting.

Gustav W. Seitz’s Egypt: the Statues of Memnon, seen here as a colour lithograph of his original watercolour, is highly atmospheric, and an excellent demonstration of the moon illusion.

The colours in Charles Vacher’s watercolour of The Statues of the Memnons (1864) are superb.

Finally, Albert Zimmermann’s oil painting of The Memnon Statues captures the heat haze, and a snake moving through the water.

Most religions centre their ceremonies and worship around a raised horizontal surface, a stone slab, table or platform referred to as an altar. In some pre-Christian religions altars are used for libations, the pouring out of liquid as an offering, and sacrifice. Most Christian churches use them for a collection of symbolic objects such as candles and crucifixes, and the vessels used to celebrate the Eucharist. They can be a modest alcove in a home, or the focus of a grand cathedral. In this and tomorrow’s sequel I offer some examples that are significant in the reading of paintings.

Alfred-Henri Bramtot’s painting of The Death of Demosthenes from 1879 shows the suicide by poisoning of this Greek statesman and orator. His limp body is supported from falling in front of an altar to the god Neptune. At the left edge is the characteristic altar tripod, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it. He charged his pen with poison, and used that to administer it to himself.

This surviving version of Angelica Kauffmann’s Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe in front of an altar to the goddess Diana, with Acontius behind. He holds his ingeniously inscribed apple high above her, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to drop it in front of her. Instead of the altar flame burning at the top of a tripod, it’s here shown in a carved stone slab, at the left. Behind the statue of Diana are two of her priestesses.

In the seventeenth century, Domenicus van Wijnen explored the theme of witchcraft in The Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight, set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with ‘the dark arts’, and takes place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs. Clustered in front of the altar at the right is a soldier in armour, who is looking in a mirror at the image of another, and a woman who is kneeling and holding a snake in her right hand. The surface of the altar has been prepared with bread and wine, and there is a small chimera by it.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Many artists associated with German Romantic and Symbolist movements painted groups of worshippers within ancient trees, often under similar titles to Arnold Böcklin’s Sacred Grove, from 1882. The nine figures here are shrouded in white habits indicating their religious association. On top of a stone altar is a bright flame, at which three of them are bent low and kneeling in obeisance.

Charles William Mitchell’s best-known painting is that of Hypatia, completed and exhibited in 1885. It shows a naked woman, her long tresses clasped to her right breast, leaning back against a carved stone altar, on which there is a crucifix and a bowl, on an altar cloth. She holds her left arm up, her hand open and gesturing towards a mosaic on the wall behind her, and looks anxious.

On either side of the altar are burning candles, long on tall floor-standing candlesticks. The flame of that at the left is being blown towards the altar, implying that a door to the left, in the direction of the woman’s gaze, is open.

The walls are decorated with mosaics; although the images of them shown are only fragmentary, they appear to be of religious motifs. That behind the woman shows a right foot that could be from an image of Christ crucified. A curtained door leads to a room behind the altar. Scattered on the floor are a white robe (presumably removed from the woman), a candlestick holder, and other debris.

A Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Hypatia was a pagan philosopher who headed the Neoplatonic school there. Known for her dignity and virtue, she became embroiled in a bitter feud between Orestes, Roman governor of Alexandria, and Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, over local Jewish dancing exhibitions. A fanatical Christian mob kidnapped Hypatia, took her to a Christian church, where she was stripped, tortured to death, and her body mutilated and burned.

Although Mitchell may well have been aware of the historical origin of this story, he was probably most influenced by Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, published in 1853. In that version, Hypatia is on the verge of being converted to Christianity when she is attacked by the Christian mob. She is then dragged to a Christian church, stripped naked by the mob, and torn apart under a large image of Christ. Modern criticism of the novel stresses its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

If country folk were to be drawn into towns and cities, those urban areas had to provide paid work. During the early decades of the industrial revolution those jobs were often in mills and factories near the source of their raw materials or power. Towns grew rapidly across the coalfields of northern Europe as mines were sunk to extract the coal, and again where iron ore was readily available. As canals and railways enabled supplies to be moved further and faster, towns and cities flourished as centres of manufacturing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, large scale iron production had already started in North America. In 1857, investors opened a site for the production of iron primarily for the growing railways across Canada, and a few years later William Armstrong painted those Toronto Rolling Mills (1864). By this time, it was the largest iron mill in Canada, and the largest manufacturing industry in the city, but it was soon surpassed by steel mills and shut down in 1873.

John Ferguson Weir took his dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time, the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown here is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by the Union forces during the Civil War. This was located to the north of New York City, where there was a rich supply of timber, local iron ore, and water power.

Weir’s Forging the Shaft is a replica painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed by fire. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict.

Adolph von Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill from 1875 gives a good impression of the crowded, sweaty, and dangerous environment in which iron and steel workers spent, and sometimes lost, their lives.

Production of steel on an industrial scale started after 1857, with the introduction of the Bessemer Process. Constantin Meunier’s undated Steel Foundry must therefore have been painted during the 1860s or later.

The dangers of iron and steel work are obvious today, and claimed many casualties at the time. Few employers had any concern for the safety of those who worked in these conditions, as there was a steady supply of young and able men to keep production rolling and profits accruing.

Not all industries were heavy, hot or sweaty. Charles Frederic Ulrich painted a young apprentice drinking during a moment’s pause in his work in The Village Printing Shop, Haarlem (1884).

Christian Ludwig Bokelmann’s oil sketch of a Lead Mine in Selbeck (1888) has a more subtle social message for an ancient industry that had long recognised the toxicity of the lead it worked with, but continued to employ children.

The Naturalist artist Jean-Eugène Buland tackled more complex issues in his Un Patron, or The Apprentice’s Lesson (1888). After France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, efforts were made to make France more industrial and more modern. Here a young boy is being trained by the foreman to make a cogwheel, when many would have preferred him still to be at school.

Painting men and women at work was by no means confined to Naturalists, with their attention to fine detail. Alessandro Milesi’s undated The Spinners is a much looser oil sketch that could qualify as being an Impression. This shows one of the lighter industries that employed predominantly women.

Maximilien Luce painted many works showing people at work, as his style moved on from Neo-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism during the 1890s. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is one of a long series he painted showing those working in heavy industry in this city in the mining area of Belgium.

With the decline of Naturalism in the early twentieth century, the emphasis on workers weakened, and artists like Hans Baluschek returned to painting heavy plant and processes in his Steel Rolling Mill (1910).

Finally, Robert Sterl’s Ironworkers of 1919 is an oil sketch showing workers at one of the Krupp plants in Germany. Their only protective clothing is a heavy leather apron.

For those used to agricultural work, factories were relentlessly demanding. Workloads didn’t change with season, and each year passed without the celebration of harvest home. Few employers had easier work available that might offer those recovering from illness or injury a little respite, and as age took its toll on their bodies the only alternative was unemployment.

With so many artists flocking to see paintings of the Renaissance masters in Florence, it was only a matter of time before they stayed a little longer and stepped out into the open to paint views of the city before they left. Far less popular than views of the canals of Venice, and lacking a Canaletto to market them to tourists, you have to look a bit harder to find these marvellous landscapes.

To aid in their visualisation, I again include this map of the city engraved by William Barnard Clarke in 1835, showing:

1. The Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose construction started in 1296, with its dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi finished in 1436.
2. San Niccolò Weir, on the River Arno.
3. Boboli Gardens.
4. Ponte Santa Trinita, over the River Arno.
5. Ponte alle Grazie, over the River Arno.

Gaspar van Wittel’s undated View of Florence from San Niccolò Weir from the late seventeenth century is among the earliest. This looks west from Varlungo, near 2 on the map, along the north bank of the River Arno, with the centre of the city and the dome to the right.

With the rise in oil sketching en plein air during the late eighteenth century, it was only a matter of time before a landscape painter broke away from the Roman campagna and travelled north.

Camille Corot painted this oil sketch View of Florence from the Boboli Gardens in 1835, on one of his return trips to Italy, when he visited Venice and Florence. These gardens are on the south bank of the river, 3 on the map, and afford this fine view to the north of the Duomo on the opposite bank, and the Tuscan hills in the background.

The American landscape painter Thomas Cole visited Italy during his Grand Tour of Europe in 1842, so I suspect the claimed date of 1837 for his View of Florence may not be accurate. His vantage point appears to be in the Giardino Bardini, on the south bank, looking north over the Ponte Vecchio, Duomo and other major buildings in the central city on the opposite bank.

Carl Gustav Carus seems to have painted this View of Florence (1841) from the window of his accommodation when he was visiting. The dome of the Duomo appears slightly exaggerated in height.

Twenty years later, in November 1861, the aspiring landscape painter John Brett first visited Florence, but it was another year before he left England to paint what must be a unique view of the city, and one of very few Pre-Raphaelite landscape masterworks.

Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) was probably started in January 1863, painted without the aid of significant preparatory studies, and entirely from the motif. His viewpoint at Bellosguardo is slightly over a kilometre to the south-west of the centre. Even with Brett’s apparent eye for fine detail at a distance, much of it must have been painted with the aid of a telescope, and it has been suggested that he may also have used a camera lucida and/or photographs. Regardless of how he managed to paint such great detail, it’s a triumph of painting, both technically and artistically, and it came as a shock when it was rejected by the Royal Academy later that year.

Thankfully for Brett, the painting was purchased in May by the National Gallery, and he was acclaimed in the press as ‘head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school’, although by that time he was probably the last of its practitioners. Brett had also intended the painting as homage to the poet Robert Browning, who lived in Florence at the time, and had provided him great support.

My Terrace, Florence (1865) shows the terrace of the Florentine painter Odoardo Borrani’s home, against the city’s unmistakeable skyline.

Telemaco Signorini was another local artist, who studied drawing from life at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. In 1855 he started meeting with the Macchiaioli, and travelled to Venice, where he met Lord Leighton. After military service and a period in Paris he returned to his home city to paint en plein air, when he made this view of Via Torta in Florence (c 1870). He was appointed Professor at the Florence Academy in 1892.

Karl Kaufmann’s undated and unusual view of central Florence shows the Ponte Santa Trinita crossing the River Arno, from the east, marked as 4 on the map above. This bridge was built using stone from a quarry in the Bobolino Gardens by Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1567-69, and its ornamental statues of the seasons were added in 1608 to mark the marriage of Cosimo de’ Medici to Maria Magdalena of Austria.

When visiting the city in 1880, the wonderfully named British landscape artist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon painted this oil sketch of Florence.

In about 1885-87, Odoardo Borrani returned to the Pazzi family’s history with this view of The Pazzi Chapel, Cloister of Santa Croce in Florence, a contrastingly peaceful scene compared to his earlier accounts of their downfall following their conspiracy to overthrow the de’ Medicis in 1478.

With William Merritt Chase and other young American artists, Frank Duveneck visited Florence when he was training in Europe. He had already met and taught the American Elizabeth Boott in Paris when he travelled to Florence. She had been born in Boston but raised in the Villa Castellani (c 1887) overlooking the square of Bellosguardo, near where John Brett had painted his view of the city.

This villa has achieved literary fame in two of Henry James’ novels, Portrait of a Lady in which it is Gilbert Osmond’s residence, and The Golden Bowl in which Adam and Maggie Verver were modelled on Elizabeth Boott and her father Francis, a classical composer. Duveneck married Boott in 1886, but she tragically died just two years later from pneumonia.

Via Calimala from 1889 is another of Telemaco Signorini’s vivacious street scenes of the city.

My last painting may come as something of a surprise: although only in the background, the city of Florence features in at least one Nabi painting.

While he was one of the Nabis, Paul Sérusier remained close friends with artists he had worked alongside when he had been in Pont-Aven, who were largely followers of Gauguin. Among them was Émile Bernard, who by 1893 had allied himself with Symbolists such as Odilon Redon, and travelled to Italy and the Middle East. Sérusier must have accompanied Bernard at least as far as Florence, where he painted this Portrait of Emile Bernard in Florence (1893). There again is that unmistakable red brick dome that Brunelleschi had designed almost half a millennium earlier.