In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

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

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

Ovid starts the seventh book of his Metamorphoses with myths concerning Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece. Although these take up the first half of this book, he only summarises long and complex stories told more fully elsewhere. They also present a problem in consistency of theme. For the Metamorphoses to provide reasonably comprehensive coverage of all the major contemporary myths, they’re essential, but lack the transformations promised by the title.

The book drops us into the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece just as Jason has learned of the three tasks he must complete to obtain the prize. Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, considers that her father’s demands are too harsh, and is torn between desire and reason. She recognises that she has fallen in love with Jason, and is already considering wild thoughts of marriage to him.

She thus resolves to provide him with every aid that she can to assist his mission, in the hope that this will ensure their marriage and secure her future glory. Medea therefore goes to an old shrine to Hecate, where she meets Jason and teaches him how to use magic herbs to accomplish the tasks.

Several artists, notably those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have explored Medea’s role, and her relationship with Jason at this stage of the story. In John William Waterhouse’s Jason and Medea (1907), she’s depicted as a sorceress, preparing the potions Jason was about to use to accomplish his tasks. He appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge.

Frederick Sandys shows Medea (1866-68) at work, preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a toad, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo.

The following day, watched by the king, Jason succeeds in his first task of yoking a team of fire-breathing bulls, and using them to plough a field which had never been ploughed before, enabled by a herbal ointment provided by Medea.

As he is ploughing, Jason sows the teeth of a dragon, required for his second task. As with those sown by Cadmus before he founded the city of Thebes, those teeth instantly grow into an army who point their spears at Jason. Medea tells him to throw a large rock into their midst, to draw their attention so they kill one another instead of Jason.

Jason moves on to his final task, to provide him with the Golden Fleece, but first has to get past the dragon guarding it. He sprinkles another of Medea’s herbal preparations on the guardian and recites a magic spell three times to put the dragon to sleep.

The frescoes of the Palazzo Ghisilardi Fava in Bologna give a superb account through eighteen separate images. Although directed by Annibale Carracci, it’s thought that his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico also made significant contributions during the painting between about 1583-84.

This uses elaborate multiplex narrative to summarise much of Ovid’s account: at the left, two of the fire-breathing bulls are still yoked, in front of King Aeëtes. The army sprung up from the dragon’s teeth appear behind the wall, armed still with spears but no longer fighting. In the foreground, Jason has put the dragon to sleep using Medea’s magic concoction, and is unhitching the Golden Fleece while he can. At the right, two of the Argonauts offer to help Jason (shown a second time) carry the fleece away.

In Jean François de Troy’s The Capture of the Golden Fleece from 1742, Jason reaches up to take the Golden Fleece from a branch of an oak tree. The artist has interpreted this prize as a lamb of rather modest size. However, the hero’s left foot rests on the body of the dragon, whose nostrils emit steam. To the left of Jason is Medea, dressed as an eastern princess, and surrounding them are the Argonauts, whose ship is seen at the far left, preparing to set sail.

Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865) oddly excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, a standard tool of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s later rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that’s not borne out by the only clues provided by Moreau in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Cooke has deciphered their Latin as reading:
nempe tenens quod amo gremioque in Iasonis haerens
per freta longa ferar; nihil illum amplexa timebo
(Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing)
et auro heros Aesonius potitur spolioque superbus
muneris auctorem secum spolia altera portans
(And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil)

These imply we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, while Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was irretrievable amid his surfeit of symbols.

This is the sort of narrative you might have expect Rubens to have painted, and he did prepare some sketches of the motif. It was his pupil and collaborator Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607–1678), though, who produced this finished painting of Jason and the Golden Fleece in 1630, probably within Rubens’ workshop.

Once the dragon is slumbering deeply, Jason seizes the Golden Fleece, and sails with Medea and his prize to his home port of Iolcus.

Herbert James Draper shows one account of the tactics employed in The Golden Fleece from 1904: as Jason and his Argonauts are sailing away, Medea throws her brother into the sea, forcing her father to stop to recover him, so allowing the Argo to escape from the pursuit.

Monkeys and apes are some of the oldest motifs in European painting, and have been significant features in every century’s art since the 1400s. Until little more than a century ago, though, they were only human-like, and not considered to be our nearest relatives.

The earliest known example of monkeys in European art is this lavish fresco of Blue Monkeys found in the ruins of Thera, on the modern island of Santorini in Greece. This Cycladic civilisation was destroyed by a massive volcanic explosion in about 1627 BCE, so we know that these paintings are well over 3,500 years old.

Although now known as the fresco of the Blue Monkeys, these images make them look rather grey, and that may have been their intended colour. Presumably these monkeys had been introduced locally from North Africa.

The ruins on Santorini weren’t excavated until very recently, and these blue monkeys were concealed for the period from 1627 BCE until the late 1960s. Despite that, the next notable appearance of monkeys in European art shows animals that are eerily similar.

The reverse of Botticelli’s painting of Judith with the Head of Holofernes bears an unfinished work from about 1470 that has been given the title of Deer and Monkeys. Where the artist had seen these pale blue monkeys isn’t clear, although the background landscape shows a coastline on the Mediterranean.

Monkeys are sometimes included in assemblies of different species, such as those of the Garden of Eden.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Cornelis van Haarlem’s wonderful painting of The Fall of Man (1592) counts a monkey in with the many different species it shows in the Garden of Eden. These include familiar species such as dog, fox, sheep, cat, frog, and slug.

Between the legs of Adam and Eve is a touching passage of a small monkey embracing a cat. There are obvious relationships between the monkey and Adam, and between the cat and Eve, but van Haarlem may also have been invoking the fable of the cat’s paw.

Edwin Henry Landseer’s account of the fable of The Cat’s Paw from about 1824 shows the moment of climax in the retelling by Jean de La Fontaine in 1679. Bertrand the monkey is roasting chestnuts in the embers of a fire. Rather than risk burning himself retrieving the nuts from the heat, he promises Raton the cat a share of them if the cat will scoop them out for him. The cat agrees: as Bertrand eats the chestnuts when they emerge from the fire, the cat’s paw becomes more and more burned. Before the cat can claim its reward, they’re disturbed by a maid. The monkey then profits from the cat’s efforts and suffering, but the cat is cheated from enjoying its share. Landseer shows the chestnuts roasting on the top of a stove, and the monkey using the cat’s paw to hook them back in to him, as the cat wails in pain.

Painters have long been attracted to the spectacle of humans who look different. In Agostino Carracci’s case, he combined three strange examples in his Hairy Harry, Mad Peter and Tiny Amon, completed between 1598-1600, not long before his death. From the left are Tiny Amon (Rodomonte) the dwarf, Arrigo Gonzalez the hirsute (Hairy Harry) from the Canary Islands, and Mad Peter (Pietro the buffoon). Accompanying them are a large parrot, a couple of dogs, and two monkeys.

Monkeys were also relatively common in Vanitas paintings, such as Clara Peeters’ Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1615-20). A monkey is busy feeding from nuts, while gazing at a small pile of dead birds. I’m not sure how monkeys fit in with the symbolic associations with death in Vanitas compositions, though.

They have had other more symbolic associations, typically with mischief and mayhem.

In Pierre Bonnard’s large painting of Pleasure or Games from 1906, one of four panels he made for Misia and Alfred Edwards’ apartment in Paris, decorative edging includes images of birds and monkeys, whose innocent playfulness is seen as being pleasurable.

At least one monkey appears in the riotous assembly shown in Lovis Corinth’s painting of The Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1908. This radically different depiction of this episode in the saint’s life was painted after Gustave Flaubert, and exceptionally shows Anthony as a young man, a highly inventive account.

For Ovid’s next myth about the lesser-known goddess Latona, he steps back in time to when her twins, Apollo and Diana, were born, in a story about divine retribution of a less savage kind.

Long ago in Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey, country people scorned the worship of Latona. The unnamed narrator of this myth was taken by his father to see an old altar dedicated to the goddess, located among reeds, and marking the birth of her twins. Latona had fled here to give birth in the heat, where she could avoid Juno.

When the twins had drunk her milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, Latona saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Latona told them that drinking the water was a common right, and she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults, before stirring up the mud at the bottom of the lake, to literally muddy the water. Latona’s thirst was replaced by anger, and she cursed them to remain in that pool forever by turning them into frogs, who foolishly muddy their own pools.

Tintoretto’s simple panel of Lycian Peasants Changed Into Frogs from 1541-42 tells this story in just five figures. This was one of a series of which fourteen have survived, telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They were the artist’s first substantial commission, and decorated a room in a palace near San Marco in Venice.

Tintoretto’s lovely panel of Latona Changing the Lycian Peasants into Frogs from 1545-48 is one of the earliest of modern accounts of Ovid’s story. Latona rests a baby on each hip as she tries to enlist the co-operation of the Lycians, who are becoming more froglike but haven’t yet been transformed.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is truly masterly. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is set in a dense forest, probably quite inappropriate for Lycia, where the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Latona, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the infants.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 tells the story well, showing the Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

Francesco Trevisani’s Latona and the Frogs from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century is, like Tenier’s, painted in oil on copper. Even as his peasants are turning into frogs, they’re still refusing to let Latona drink from their lake.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis, or any frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

Johann Georg Platzer’s Latona Turning the Lycian Peasants into Frogs (c 1730) is another fine work on copper showing the key elements of the story, including the macabre appearance of the peasants as they are transformed.

The artist who painted this Italian Landscape with Latona and the Lycian Peasants sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century hasn’t been identified. However, it depicts the story well, with the heads of two peasants already assuming the form of frogs.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Latona and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, which minimises her divinity. The peasants are here engaged in muddying the waters.

Guay was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, and went on to become a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first painting was accepted for the Paris Salon in 1873, making this one of his earlier works. Despite winning silver medals at the Universal Expositions in Paris in 1889 and 1900, and sustained success at the Salon, his work is now almost entirely forgotten.