If you’ve left plates coated with egg for a while, you’ll know how difficult its residue can be to remove. No one knows when people first took advantage of this in paints, but earliest surviving examples date from late classical times. By the Renaissance, egg yolk was popular as a binder in artists’ paints, and the technique of egg tempera was used to create many of the masterpieces of the day.

Pure egg tempera technique uses the proteins, fats and other constituents of the yolk of fresh hens’ eggs as its binder; being water-based, water is its diluent. Applied thinly to an absorbent ground such as powdered chalk in a gesso, this quickly sets to form a hard if not brittle paint layer which, unlike glue tempera, can’t readily be removed by water.

Because egg tempera forms such a hard paint layer but is applied thinly, it’s prone to cracking unless the support is rigid and doesn’t change dimensions over time. Early egg tempera paintings were almost exclusively made on wood, but more recently stretched canvas has been used instead. That can lead to cracks and eventual mechanical failure of the paint layer. Egg tempera on wood panel was the favoured combination for easel paintings during the early Renaissance, particularly in Italy.

The finest paintings in egg tempera use only fresh eggs; as eggs age, particularly when they’re not refrigerated, separating the yolk becomes more difficult, and the resulting paint layer doesn’t appear as strong.

Since the nineteenth century, some paint manufacturers such as Sennelier have offered tubed paints with egg as their main binder, but with the addition of some drying oil to form an egg-oil emulsion. These have some of the properties of pure egg tempera, but are more versatile in their handling, and can be used like gouache and even, to a degree, like oil paints. These appear to have been derived from recipes recorded during the Renaissance.

Earliest European examples of egg tempera, such as Margarito d’Arezzo’s The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Scenes of the Nativity and the Lives of the Saints from the middle of the thirteenth century, often incorporate extensive gilding and today might appear ‘primitive’.

Even the earliest paintings in egg tempera can be remarkably well preserved, such as Duccio’s Healing of the Man born Blind from the early fourteenth century. Although it only forms a thin paint layer, egg yolk is sufficient to preserve high levels of chroma in the pigments.

As the modelling of flesh and clothing became more realistic, egg tempera proved more than sufficient for the task.

One of the finest early works painted entirely in egg tempera is the anonymous Wilton Diptych in London’s National Gallery. Thought to have been made in France at the end of the fourteenth century, its exquisite detail would have been painted in multiple thin layers using fine brushes, much like miniatures painted on vellum.

But it was in Italy that painting in egg tempera reached its apogee, with masters like Masaccio, in his Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece from about 1428-29 (above) and Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (below) of a decade later.

During the fifteenth century, egg tempera was progressively replaced by oils in Italy, as it had been earlier in the Northern Renaissance.

Uccello’s large panel of the Battle of San Romano incorporated some drying oils, including walnut and linseed, although it was still fundamentally painted in egg tempera.

By the end of the fifteenth century, many studios had changed to oils. Among the last large egg tempera paintings are Botticelli’s Primavera (above) and The Birth of Venus (below), from the 1480s. The craft labour involved in producing these large works must have been enormous. Although Primavera was painted on a panel, Venus is on canvas, making it more manageable given its size of nearly 2 x 3 metres (79 x 118 inches).

In the closing years of the fifteenth century, Michelangelo kept to the hallowed tradition of egg tempera on wood in this unfinished painting of the Virgin and Child known now as The Manchester Madonna. This shows how he painstakingly completed each of the figures before moving onto the next, and the characteristic green earth ground.

By this time, the only common use for egg tempera was in the underpainting before applying oils on top. This remains a controversial practice: performed on top of gesso ground it can be successful, but increasingly studios transferred to oils. Egg tempera didn’t completely disappear, though. With so many fine examples of how good its paintings both look and age, there were always some artists who have chosen it over oils.

Some nineteenth century movements that aimed to return to the more wonderful art of the past experimented again with egg tempera. In the late 1870s, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope started to use the medium, and made one of his finest works, Love and the Maiden (1877), using it.

A later exponent who was rigorous in his technique was Adrian Stokes, who used it to great effect in this landscape of Autumn in the Mountains in 1903.

But for my taste, the greatest painter in egg tempera since the Renaissance has to be one of the major artists of the twentieth century: Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). As his works remain in copyright, I recommend that you browse his official site, where you can see just how effective egg tempera can be in the hands of a great master. It may not be as popular as in the past, but egg tempera still has a great deal to offer.

Virgil has led Dante into a gorge taking them from the heretics further into the depths of Hell. As they descend, Virgil advises they should take their time so they can become accustomed to the stench emanating from these depths. This allows him to explain to Dante the layout of the parts they are about to enter.

Within the next pit are three sub-divisions, catering for the sins of malice in their different forms. The first ring is for those of violent will, and is divided again into three, for homicides and bandits, for suicides, and blasphemers. Dante’s verbal descriptions of these sub-divisions can readily become confusing, and have been turned into diagrammatic maps by several artists.

One of the most famous is Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90, in which these lower zones are shown as a funnel at the bottom, leading to the Devil himself.

Jan van der Straet’s diagram from 1587 is similar in form, and packs these zones into the narrow section at the foot.

Dante opens Canto 12 as the pair are scrambling down boulders as if in the Alps, dislodged during the earthquake resulting from Christ’s harrowing of Hell, to meet the Minotaur from Crete.

Like so many of Dante’s beasts, the Minotaur is drawn from classical mythology. This monstrous cross between a bull and human was kept in the labyrinth on Crete, where it was periodically fed with young Greek men and virgin women. For George Frederic Watts, in his painting of The Minotaur from 1885, it represented the worst of Victorian society and its moral values, in the industry of child prostitution flourishing in London at the time.

Dante and Virgil hurry past the Minotaur when they can, and continue their descent through more fallen boulders and scree, to enter the seventh circle, for sins of violence. They are then hailed by one of a group of centaurs armed with bows and arrows. Virgil responds that they will discuss their mission with Chiron, rather than the hot-headed Nessus. Chiron was a centaur in mythology, but one known for his wisdom, and for teaching the young Achilles. Nessus was another centaur, who tried to abduct Heracles’ wife Deianeira and was killed for that, but laid a plot that led to Heracles’ death.

Chiron directs Nessus to aid Virgil and Dante in their passage.

They pass along the rocks beside the damned souls, who are immersed in boiling blood to a depth appropriate to their sins. Dante recognises some as they go: Alexander the Great, Dionysius the Elder and tyrant of Syracuse, one of the d’Este family who was suffocated by his own son. Further on are Attila the Hun, Pyrrhus, Sextus son of Pompey, and a couple of infamous contemporary highwaymen.

Virgil then leads Dante into a strange wood, whose thorn trees form the nests of Harpies. These composite creatures have the heads of humans and the bodies and talons of birds, and live in sub-ring number two. In classical legend, the Harpies inhabited the Strophades, islands where they attacked Aeneas and his companions in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Virgil tells Dante to break a small branch from one of the trees. When he does, the tree screams out in pain, and the wound oozes blood. The tree explains that they were once people, but had taken their own lives. In this case, Dante is talking to the poet Pier della Vigna, who was ruined by envious rivals.

Dante is filled with pity for the spirit, who can only look forward to the Day of Judgement, while they are tortured by the Harpies feeding on their leaves. After learning of another two suicides from Siena and Florence, Dante moves on in profound sorrow.

The artists

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

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but these weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

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

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

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

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

Few small pieces of cloth have such a broad range of associations, from the blindfold used in teasing games, to that covering the eyes of someone about to be shot. In paintings a blindfold is also the clearest visual statement that its wearer can’t see.

From classical civilisations onwards, it has been widely held that love is blind, and accordingly depictions of Cupid often show him wearing a blindfold.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco showing Cupid Blindfolded (1452-66) illustrates both the ancient saying and the Roman concept of an infant archer with spectacular wings.

This is maintained by Botticelli in the Cupid shown at the top of his Primavera (Spring) (c 1482).

The controversial Félicien Rops transferred this into a contrasting image.

Pornocrates, or Woman with a Pig from 1878 is his best-known work, showing a nearly-naked woman being led by a pig tethered on a lead like a dog. She wears a blindfold, and an exuberant black hat, suggesting she is a courtesan or prostitute. In the air are three winged amorini, and below is a frieze containing allegories of sculpture, music, poetry and painting.

The other classical figure likely to be blindfolded is the personification of Fortune.

Giovanni Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) may look weird, but features the following symbols:

• the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
• ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
• the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
• abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.

In history paintings, a blindfold is almost universally the sign of seriously bad fortune.

Paul Delaroche’s convincing painting of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) shows the fate of a contender for the crown of England following the early death of King Edward VI at the age of just 15 in 1553. As he had no natural successor, he had drawn up a plan for a cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to become Queen. Her rule started on 10 July 1553, but King Edward’s half sister Mary deposed her on 19 July. She was committed to the Tower of London, convicted of high treason in November 1553, and executed on Tower Green by beheading on 12 February 1554 at the age of just 16 (or 17).

Lady Jane Grey and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Bridges, take the centre of the canvas. She is blindfolded, the rest of her face almost expressionless. As she can no longer see, the Lieutenant is guiding her towards the executioner’s block, in front of her. Her arms are outstretched, hands with fingers spread in their quest for the block. Under the block, straw has been placed to take up her blood.

At the right, the executioner stands high and coldly detached, his left hand holding the haft of the axe which he will shortly use to kill the young woman. Coils of rope hang from his waist, ready to tie his victim down if necessary. At the left, two of Lady Jane Grey’s attendants or family are resigned in their grief. Lady Jane Grey wears a silver-white gown which dominates the entire painting, forcing everything and everyone else back into sombre mid tones and darker.

Although Delaroche made one major alteration to history, as she was actually executed in the small court-like space within the Tower known as Tower Green, he otherwise appears to have been faithful.

Antonio Gisbert’s huge painting of The Execution by Firing Squad of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888) shows a terrible scene: the summary execution of nearly fifty people on 11 December 1831.

General José María de Torrijos y Uriarte was highly successful in his military career, and during liberal government in 1820-23 was Captain General of Valencia, and Minister for War. When that regime came to an end in 1823, General Torrijos first fled to France, then to England, where he lived in London, being assisted by the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister.

From 1827, the liberal Spanish exiles organised themselves for a popular uprising in Spain, and in 1831, Torrijos and his followers travelled to Gibraltar in readiness. They supported several attempts at insurrection in early 1831, each of which was brutally suppressed by the absolutist government under Ferdinand VII. The Governor of Málaga then tricked General Torrijos into believing that he was a supporter of the planned insurrection. On the morning of 2 December, General Torrijos and fifty-nine others landed at Málaga after a surprise attack by the ship Neptune. They intended to encourage a liberal uprising, and had brought a printed manifesto and several proclamations which they intended to promulgate.

They were eventually ambushed after several days of walking, on 4 December, and surrendered, hoping that the situation in Málaga had improved. They underwent no trial, but at 1130 on Sunday 11 December 1831, all 49 who had been captured were shot dead by a firing squad on the beach.

Our sense of sight is celebrated in a peculiar, ancient, and widespread game played by children and adults alike: blind man’s buff (or bluff). This involves putting a blindfold on the ‘victim’, who is then required to ‘tag’ one of the sighted players. It was recorded in ancient Greece, and more recently is known from much of Asia, including Japan, throughout Europe, and the Americas.

The game also rejoices under many fascinating names: in ancient Greece it was known as copper mosquito, in Bangladesh as blind fly, in Germany as blind cow, and in France as Colin-Maillard, after a tenth century warrior.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Blind-Man’s Buff (1750-52) shows a red-faced young woman wearing the blindfold, being teased by her young man, and a child using a simple fishing rod. Her torso is tightly constricted by a tubular corset which gives her what appears to be an anatomically impossible figure, and if she’s not very careful, she will fall down the stone steps in front of her.

Francisco Goya shows a more usual form of Blind Man’s Buff (1788), in which the sighted players hold hands and form a ring around the blindfolded ‘victim’. Although this should provide them with more safety, this group has chosen to play on the bank of a river.

Konstantin Makovsky’s Игра в жмурки (Blind Man’s Buff) (c 1895) shows another variant being played indoors.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, following the publication of his illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Walter Crane was becoming more involved in teaching. He lectured at the Manchester School of Art, and for a short period was principal at the Royal College of Art in London. He also travelled, and in 1900 paid a successful visit to Budapest in Hungary to promote a retrospective exhibition of his work.

His watercolour portrait of the beautiful woman knight Britomart from 1900 was probably a sequel to his Spenser project, as she is one of the major figures in that epic, and an allegory of virtue. She is shown on a very English beach, with the chalk cliffs of the south coast behind her, staring wistfully into the distance, her chin propped on the heel of her right hand. She wears full armour, mixed with more feminine clothing. Her left arm rests on her shield, there’s an enchanted lance beside her, and her helmet on a dune behind her.

In the same year, Death, the Reaper may have drawn inspiration from faerie paintings of the previous century, in particular those of Richard Dadd, in the tiny humans cavorting among the wild flowers. Crane invokes one of the most exaggerated moon illusions I’ve seen, to add more atmosphere.

A Masque for the Four Seasons, painted in oils between 1905-09, is one of Crane’s most overtly Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and possibly his last major work in oils. Drawing on his memories of Botticelli’s Primavera, it uses a similar frieze of figures before a dense woodland background, and copious displays of seasonal wild flowers. The four Grace-like women wear loose classical robes, and are colour-coded. From the left they represent Spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Gaps in the trees provide two cameo glimpses of appropriately seasonal agriculture, with Spring ploughing on the left, and the grain harvest in the centre. At the right is Father Time playing the pipes, his hourglass beside him. This coincided with Evelyn De Morgan’s similar frieze The Cadence of Autumn, shown below, also from 1905.

Crane appears to have travelled more widely in the early twentieth century, as far as Colombo in modern Sri Lanka, where he painted this gouache Under the Palms at the Galle Face, Ceylon on 17 February 1907.

Original artwork for illustration can become more difficult to classify, as shown in this watercolour and ink drawing for The Mirror, one of Crane’s illustrations for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales from 1909.

Although Crane’s Race of Hero Spirits Pass from 1909 may have been in preparation for an illustration to accompany Charles Kingsley’s poem The World’s Age (1849), it was painted in tempera on canvas, suggesting it may have been intended as a standalone easel painting. This was accompanied by the quotation:
“Still the race of Hero-spirits
Pass the lamp from hand to hand;
Age from age the Words inherits –
‘Wife, and Child, and Fatherland.'”

The fourth modern Olympic Games had been held in London the previous year (1908), and may have been his inspiration.

The Judgment of Paris, painted in 1909 in watercolour, returns to the Pre-Raphaelite frieze. Although competent, it lacks the flair and innovation of his earlier depictions of myth.

On 27 February 1910, Crane was on his travels again, this time in North Africa, where he painted this watercolour of Porte de France, Tunis.

I also have two interesting undated paintings I suspect may have come from Crane’s later years.

Painted in a combination of transparent watercolour and gouache, A Diver is an unusual and challenging motif.

His more illustrative watercolour of Nyads and Dryads melds its Dryads in with their trees, puts the ‘Nyads’ or Naiads (water nymphs) in the water, and has a river god watching from the reeds in the distance.

Late in 1914, after the start of the First World War, his wife Frances became unwell and went on a ‘rest cure’ in Kent. She then suffered an episode of acute mental illness and killed herself. Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915, at the age of 69. Although his paintings had already lost their popularity, as a children’s illustrator his accomplishments live on.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

In the nineteenth century many painters paid the bills by illustrating books, often those intended for children. Two in particular are now known as illustrators, overlooking their fine art: Gustave Doré and Walter Crane. In this series of three articles I look at the work and career of the latter, who was one of the leading children’s illustrators who shaped how children’s books would look well into the twentieth century.

Crane was also an accomplished and recognised painter, an enthusiastic fan of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, a close friend of William Morris, a key member of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an overt and active Socialist.

He started his training as an apprentice to the wood-engraver William James Linton, between 1859 and 1862. In 1863 Edmund Evans employed him to illustrate ‘toy books’ for children, and he continued to create book illustrations until well after 1900. In the later years, he extended his repertoire to include special editions of the Faerie Queene, a volume of Arthurian legends, and a book about the New Forest.

His career in painting had started slightly earlier, though, when his first work was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1862, and he continued to paint independently of his illustrations.

Crane was one of the first artists to base a painting on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem The Lady of Shalott, published in 1833 and 1842. This tells part of the Arthurian legends, that of Elaine of Astolat, as given in an Italian novella from the 1200s.

The Lady of Shalott lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She’s subject to a mysterious curse confining her to weaving images on her loom, and must not look directly at the outside world. One day, while she sits and weaves, she catches sight of the knight Lancelot. She stops weaving and looks out of her window directly towards Camelot, invoking the curse. She abandons her castle, finds a boat on which she writes her name, then floats downriver to Camelot, dying before she arrives. Lancelot sees her body, and the poem ends:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Crane’s Lady of Shalott from 1862 shows her white in death, laid out in her boat, tresses and flowing sleeve draped over its gunwhales into the still water at the river’s edge. This is set in an ancient wood, in dramatic twilight, presumably dusk. This painting was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and must have influenced JW Waterhouse’s much better-known version just over 25 years later (below).

The following year he chose a story from the Old Testament. According to various sources in the Bible, Boaz was a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem who noticed Ruth, a widow in such difficult financial circumstances that she came to glean grain from his fields. Boaz invited her to eat with him and his workers, and started deliberately leaving grain for her to glean. Because they were distantly related, Ruth then asked Boaz to exercise right of kinship and marry her. They had children, and David was their great-grandson.

Crane’s painting, which is in oils despite resembling a watercolour illustration, shows the couple at the end of lunch, during Ruth’s gleaning. Their dress is an odd composite of the Biblical and Arthurian. She is looking down at her hands, as if contemplating grain held in her left palm. He has turned and looks towards her. In the background Boaz’s workers continue the harvest, and saddled horses are idle, a castellated house set in the crag behind them.

Two years later he was one of the first artists to depict John Keats’ ballad of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, written in 1819, and later revised slightly. It gives a simple story of love and death, including the verses:
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

The ‘belle dame’ of the title is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, and the knight, clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand. This appears to have inspired later paintings by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee.

There’s some dispute over whether this triptych from about 1870 shows The Danaïdes, or Europe, Asia, Africa, or maybe both. The fifty daughters of Danaus were forced to marry the sons of their uncle Aegyptus, but their father told them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. All but one followed his instructions, for which they were condemned to eternally carry water in leaking vessels. Alternatively, the woman on the left could be African, that on the right Asian, and the woman in the middle European.

Crane married in 1871, and the couple travelled in Europe for the next two years. They visited Florence where they must have seen some of Botticelli’s paintings.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c 1486) is one of the world’s most famous paintings, and shows the goddess Venus, when she was born from the waters as an adult, arriving at the shore.

Crane bases his Renaissance of Venus (1877) on Botticelli’s painting, and links her rebirth back to the Renaissance. She is stood at the edge of a placid sea, the water just above her ankles. Three attendant graces are also getting out of the water in the middle distance, but appear to have been bathing. A train of white doves flies down and behind Venus, to start landing on the shore at the right. In the distance are the remains of a classical building at the water’s edge, and what appears to be a section of Mediterranean coastline. Further out at sea, a sailing boat passes by. Crane painted this in tempera, just as Botticelli did.

In classical Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is the queen of the underworld. She acquired that role when Hades, god of the underworld, was overcome with love and lust from one of Cupid’s arrows, and had seen Persephone picking flowers with friends. Hades then abducted her to be his queen.

Crane’s Fate of Persephone from 1878 shows her at the moment of abduction. She had been picking spring flowers in the meadow with the three other women shown at the left. Hades brought his chariot, complete with its pair of black horses symbolising the underworld, and is seen gripping Persephone’s right arm, ready to move her into the chariot and make off.

It’s remarkable that, although their body language is emphatic and clear, each of the five figures has a completely neutral facial expression. This helps its appearance as a frieze, an effect enhanced by Crane’s use of oil and tempera. The horses appear in complete contrast, champing at their bits and poised to set off at a gallop.

The following year he’s believed to have painted this elaborate setting of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, seated in the gardens at Naworth Castle, Cumbria, with a companion, standing holding a book. However, it was later signed clumsily by “E Burne Jones”, possibly in an attempt to pass it off as a more valuable work.

This couple had married in 1864, and were ardent supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and friends of Crane since they were both students, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Howard was an accomplished painter who had trained at Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, and later became a trustee of the National Gallery in London.

Edward FitzGerald’s translation of a selection from the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was published in 1859, was popularised from 1861, and appreciated by several of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Walter Crane’s painting from 1882 was accompanied by the following quotation from FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat:

Would that some winged angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Ah love! could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

A male winged angel is on bended knee before the figure of Time, who holds his scroll recording the destiny of all mankind. The angel’s hands are intertwined with those of Time: both right hands grasp the quill used to record destiny, both left hands are at the other end of the scroll. The angel looks up pleading at Time, but Time looks down at him with a frowning scowl. In front of the dais on which the angel kneels and Time sits is an hour glass. The whole is set inside a circular building revealing the stars through its roof, like a planetarium.

Endymion was a classical Greek mythological character, an Aeolian shepherd. Although accounts differ, some tell that Selene, Titan goddess of the moon and in Roman terminology, Diana, fell in love with Endymion, when she found him asleep one day. Selene asked Zeus to grant him eternal youth, resulting in him remaining in eternal sleep. In spite of his somnolence, she still managed to have fifty daughters by him. In Crane’s beautiful pastoral watercolour of Diana and Endymion from 1883, he is fast asleep in a meadow. Diana is in her hunting role with her dogs, bow and arrows. Endymion’s flock of sheep is in the distance.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

Dante lost consciousness just before he was expecting to be ferried across the River Acheron in Charon’s boat, from Hell’s Gate to its First Circle.

Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 shows these stages of their descent at the very top: highest are the woods through which Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area in which the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat then crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and his guide Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

Dante is woken by thunder, and realises that he’s on the edge of the abyss that is Hell. Virgil leads him down into darkness, where there is no grief or pain, and explains that the multitude there never sinned at all, but none was baptised in faith as they had lived before the Christian era. This is where Virgil’s ghost now inhabits, for despite his merit and attainments, he never revered the Christian God.

Dante asks whether any of those in Limbo, as this circle is known, have ever been blessed and been able to leave. This allows Virgil to explain the Harrowing of Hell by Christ after his crucifixion. This occurred not long after Virgil’s death: following his crucifixion, Jesus Christ descended into Hell, where he reached the First Circle, blessed and liberated from it the many Old Testament figures who had been faithful to the God of the Jews, also known as Anastasis.

The descent of Christ into Limbo and his Harrowing of Hell was a popular theme in religious painting until the end of the Renaissance, and would have been familiar to Dante’s readers. Here is a small selection of some of the finest paintings of this, from 1530 to 1600.

Virgil then introduces the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers, in an ambitious piece of self-promotion.

The group walk on to the Dome of Light, and further to a castle surrounded by seven curtain walls and a moat. When they enter that they see many ancient heroes, including Electra, Hector, Aeneas, and other figures from classical history and legend. Next Dante notices a group of philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and others. Finally, he sees other learned figures from the past, including Euclid, Ptolemy and Hippocrates.

Here Dante and Virgil bid farewell to the spirits of those great figures as they move onward to the next circle.

The artists

Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486–1551) was one of the last of the Sienese School of Painting, which contrasted with the better-known Renaissance painting of Florence. He has been aptly summarised as “a mediaeval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.”

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

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but those weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 that were engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who specialised in floral still lifes. The painting shown above was made in collaboration with the figure painter Hans Rottenhammer, a relationship that lasted between 1595-1610. At the time of this painting, Brueghel had returned to Antwerp, and Rottenhammer was in Venice.

Pablo de Céspedes (1538–1608) was a Spanish polymath from Córdoba, who was an accomplished painter, poet and architect who worked for twenty years in Italy, largely because he fell foul of the Inquisition of Valladolid in Spain. He was also a linguist and theologian.

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

Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625) was a German figure painter who worked in Italy from 1593-1606. Later during that period, when he was in Venice, he collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder on the work shown above. He was probably responsible for the early training of Adam Elsheimer, and for introducing him to the technique of painting on a small scale using oil on copper plate.

Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594) was one of the three grand masters working in Venice in the middle and late sixteenth century, alongside the more senior figure of Titian, and Paolo Veronese. Primarily a religious painter, I have looked in detail at his major works and biography. His painting shown above was made to accompany his Crucifixion for the church of San Cassiano in Venice.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

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

Blue pigments used in painting include some of the oldest used by man, and others that led the change to modern synthetic pigments driven by the arrival of chemistry in the eighteenth century. This weekend I look at two examples, today the queen of pigments, ultramarine, and tomorrow the first synthetic chemical, Prussian blue.

Originally made by crushing and grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, the cost of ultramarine has exceeded that of gold. Seen in paintings, it produces a rich slightly reddish blue which stands the test of time, as distinctive and effective today as when it was first used. And its use has a history of unmasking fakes and forgeries.

The sole source of lapis lazuli in Europe and the West were quarries in Badakshan, described by Marco Polo and now in Afghanistan. It appears that wall paintings made around 507-554 CE adjacent to the great Buddahs of Bamiyan were the first to have used the mineral as a pigment. It was then used in early Persian miniatures, and in early Chinese and Indian paintings too. Tragically, these wall paintings in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were damaged by the Taliban in 2001 when the two statues were destroyed, and their restoration has made little progress since.

The powdered pigment had made its way, first along the Silk Road, then by sea, to traders in Venice by about 1300. By the Renaissance, it was established as one of the most important and precious of all the pigments used in European art.

Because of its beauty and high cost, ultramarine blue was used for the robes of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Duccio’s panels from the Maestà Predella, including this of The Healing of the Man born Blind, show this tradition in its earliest years, around 1307-11. As a pigment, it proved practical in egg tempera as here, and in oils, watercolour, and fresco.

Ultramarine blue has been found in the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece from about 1432 (above), and particularly in its most famous panel, The Mystic Lamb, below.

Sandro Botticelli’s early tempera on panel painting Adoration of the Kings from about 1470, apparently made with Filippino Lippi, shows two different blue colours and purple. He painted the purple with an opaque underpainting of lead white tinted with a red lake derived from madder, to create pink. That was then glazed with quite coarse particles of ultramarine blue, so the pigment was thinly dispersed.

Peter Paul Rubens used ultramarine blue widely in his magnificent triptych now in Antwerp Cathedral. In its centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), it has been found combined with indigo and other pigments.

In van Dyck’s Charity from 1627-8, its most obvious use is in the blue cape, where ultramarine blue was painted over indigo, applied as both a tint and as a glaze over the top.

Visit any of the larger galleries with substantial collections of paintings made before 1700, and you will see works with drapery that I can only describe as arresting in the brilliance of their ultramarine blue. One stunning example in the National Gallery in London is Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer from 1640-50. The Virgin’s cloak looks as if it was painted only yesterday, and that colour makes you stop in your tracks and draws you into the painting, like no other pigment can.

Given its importance, and limited supply, considerable effort was devoted to ensuring that natural ultramarine blue was of the highest quality, and alternative sources were sought. Deposits in the Chilean Andes, and near Lake Baikal in Siberia, weren’t developed until the nineteenth century, and attempts to make synthetic ultramarine proved unsuccessful until 1828, when Jean Baptiste Guimet was awarded a prize of six thousand francs for his discovery. Almost simultaneously, C G Gmelin of Tübingen discovered a slightly different method.

Commercial production had started by 1830, and it became known as French ultramarine, to distinguish it from the natural pigment. Although almost identical in colour and performance, there are significant differences between natural and synthetic ultramarine when tested in the laboratory. This has enabled the examination of paintings to determine the source of their pigment, and has brought some surprises. These most often relate to later overpainting during restoration. For example, two areas of much later painting have been discovered in the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece.

Examination of Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert, from 1878-80, has shown that he used synthetic ultramarine in its blue passages, for example.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, from about 1881-86, uses synthetic ultramarine in a methodical fashion. The first stage in its painting used only cobalt blue, but in its second stage synthetic ultramarine was applied extensively.

Vincent van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889) contains synthetic ultramarine in its deepest blues, and in some areas of green, although it’s unusual to find ultramarine mixed to form green. Before synthetic pigment became available, this would have been far too expensive a way of making any significant amount of green, but once much cheaper pigment came onto the market, that became more feasible, if still unusual.

The ability to distinguish synthetic ultramarine, which didn’t exist before about 1828, and the natural pigment has proved important in detecting some forgeries. Only the most ignorant would attempt to pass off a painting made with synthetic ultramarine as being very old, but a few fakes fell at that hurdle.

Han van Meegeren was far too knowledgeable and cunning to be caught so easily. He used natural ultramarine, for example when he sold The Men at Emmaus (1937) to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen as a Vermeer. What no one knew at the time was that his ultramarine looked genuine, but had been contaminated with a small amount of cobalt blue, which wasn’t discovered until 1803-04, and was first used as a pigment in 1806.

In 1960, the modern artist Yves Klein worked with the paint supplier Edouard Adam to ‘invent’ a paint he termed International Klein Blue (IKB). Although its formulation is a secret, it’s almost entirely synthetic ultramarine blue pigment in a polyvinyl acetate binder.

Like all the best queens, ultramarine blue has an unnerving habit of revealing the truth.

Reference

Joyce Plesters (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.