The classical Greek hero Theseus had travelled overland to be reunited with his father Aegeus, King of Athens, where he narrowly escaped death by Medea’s poison. Following the example of his hero Heracles, he then killed the Marathonian Bull, in preparation for his most famous accomplishment, killing the half-bull, half-human Minotaur living at the centre of the Labyrinth on the island of Crete.

King Minos of Crete had been exacting a tribute of nine young men and nine maidens from Athens every nine years, who were taken to the Labyrinth to die. On the third such call for eighteen of Athens’ finest, its citizens accused Aegeus of being its cause. Although a matter of dispute as to how he accomplished it, Theseus went to Crete as one of those eighteen.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur in 1885 as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain. Those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Because the Athenians knew that their young people weren’t going to return, the ship carrying them to Crete had black sails. On this occasion, though, Theseus gave its crew a white sail, telling Aegeus and the crew that when they returned, if he had been successful in killing the Minotaur, they would set that white sail as a sign.

Gustave Moreau’s painting of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855) shows the victims as they were preparing to enter the Labyrinth. Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Left to his own devices, Theseus’ chances were not good. However, Minos’ daughter Ariadne had fallen in love with him when she saw him compete in the funereal games preceding the act of sacrifice, and promised to assist in return for his hand in marriage afterwards. It was she who provided Theseus with a ball of thread which he deployed as he entered the Labyrinth, enabling him to retrace his steps once he had killed the Minotaur at its centre.

In Henry Fuseli’s spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20), Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne resembles a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He is almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has saved. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

There are conflicting stories as to what happened next, but Theseus and Ariadne departed from Crete, ending up on the island of Naxos, where Theseus abandoned her and sailed on. This has been depicted by many painters, although most have naturally concentrated on the jilted Ariadne rather than her betrayer Theseus.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Dionysus.

Paulus Bor’s portrait of Ariadne, painted in the period 1630-35, can only show her on Naxos, immediately after she has been abandoned, still clutching the thread by which she thought she had tethered him, now hanging at a loose end. On the wall above her are sketches she has made of her lover. She looks deeply lost in thought and gloom.

Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos (1913) is one of his most sophisticated and masterly mythical paintings, inspired by the first version of Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). The left third of the painting (detail below) shows Ariadne lying in erotic langour on Theseus’ left thigh. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right.

Having called in briefly at Delos, Theseus and his ship returned to Athens. But in their delight and celebration, they forgot to hoist the white sail to indicate the success of their mission. Seeing their ship with its black sail still set, Theseus’ father King Aegeus threw himself from a cliff in despair, and died.

Theseus’ return to Athens thus brought an odd mixture of celebration at his success, and lamentation at the death of his father. Their ship was carefully preserved as a monument to Theseus’ accomplishment, and he set about transforming and growing the city by settling all the citizens of Attica in it. He promised government without a king, by means of democracy, making himself its commander in war and the guardian of its laws. He also had its currency struck into coins, and instituted the Isthmian (Olympic) Games.

Back on the island of Naxos, Ariadne went on to marry Dionysus, the couple had many children, and lived happily ever after.

For Theseus, life wasn’t going to be as simple.

Seventeenth century Europe was ravaged by war. Between 1618 and 1648, much of what is now Germany suffered the Thirty Years’ War, with widespread famines, epidemic disease, and the slaughter of battle. This spilled over to the Netherlands and Belgium, and beyond. Warfare at that time used weapons which individually had limited killing power, but wherever there was war, largely mercenary armies stripped the land of food and supplies, laying waste to large tracts of countryside, and bringing infectious diseases to kill many of the local population.

In the midst of that, some of the old Masters managed to flourish, among them Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), arguably the greatest narrative painter in Western art, and an accomplished international diplomat.

Rubens was no stranger to the consequences of religious persecution, conflict, and war. His Protestant parents had fled Antwerp for Cologne before his birth, he returned to Antwerp with his widowed mother in 1589 to be raised as a Catholic, and from 1600 he travelled throughout Europe, including Italy, Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries.

In 1629, he returned from a period in Madrid where he had worked with Diego Velázquez, then spent a little time back in his workshop in Antwerp before travelling to London, where he stayed until April the following year. A relatively peaceful country during the war on the European mainland, England’s stable period during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign had ended with her death in 1603; two years later Guy Fawkes and conspirators had tried to blow up the House of Parliament, and the Civil War broke out in 1642.

Rubens was now in his early fifties, internationally successful, and able to choose his own motifs. He had developed his sophisticated visual language of narrative over three decades of painting stories. Acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain, he was trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England. Among his tools was one of his greatest narrative paintings, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars or Peace and War, painted when he had been in England and left there as a gift to its king.

Rubens’ painting, now in the National Gallery in London, is crowded with more than a dozen figures drawn from classical myths. Until you have identified them and understood their roles and meaning, its reading remains elusive.

Its central figures are those of Ceres, here in the role of Pax, personification of peace, and Minerva behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto, with sundry Bacchantes, a satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.

Ceres and Minerva are at the heart of the painting. Rubens shows Ceres expressing milk from her left breast, which arcs into the mouth of her son Plutus, the god of wealth, who is grasping her left arm.

The figures of Ceres and Plutus are almost identical to those of Venus and Cupid in Rubens’ earlier Venus, Mars and Cupid (c 1633), which introduces ambiguity to her figure. However, in this painting Cupid is shown with wings, and his traditional bow and arrows. In Peace and War, the infant is clearly not Cupid as he has neither wings nor bow and arrows: there he is Plutus.

Being the goddess of agriculture, grain crops (hence cereal), and maternal relationships, Ceres stands for values strongly associated with the benefits of peace: bread rather than starvation, fertility rather than barrenness and pestilence. Her son Plutus represents the growth of wealth in times of peace.

Although the figure immediately behind Ceres might be mistaken for a man (Mars, perhaps), her staff and helmet are characteristic of Minerva, the goddess with a curiously mixed portfolio of wisdom, industry, and war, a hangover from her part-Etruscan origins. Immediately above her is a winged putto carrying a caduceus, a short staff with wings at the top and entwined snakes, normally an attribute of Mercury, but also associated with commerce. That putto leans forward to place a laurel wreath, the crown of the victor and a symbol of peace, on Ceres’ head.

Minerva is pushing away the bearded figure of Mars, god of war, who is wearing his characteristic black armour. Rubens painted Mars not infrequently, and was flexible with his age and appearance, which vary according to context. With Venus and Cupid above, he is a young, clean-shaven man.

In Venus and Mars (1632-35) he appears more like an ageing general than a warrior, and Venus is also past the beauty of her youth. Perhaps they had succumbed too often to the temptations of Bacchus, seen behind brandishing an empty glass.

At the far right of Peace and War is Alecto, the Fury responsible for dealing with the moral offences of humans, usually by driving them mad. Rubens refrains from giving her snakes in her hair, but emphasises madness, the madness of war.

On the opposite (left) side of the painting is a Bacchante holding her tambourine (tympanum) aloft, and another bearing earthly riches at her left side. A satyr crouches low over a leopard, and proffers a cornucopia filled with fruit to the figures at the right.

This group is associated with Bacchus. Although he is not present, his chariot is normally drawn by leopards or similar big cats, and he is accompanied by Bacchantes. This is shown well in Lovis Corinth’s marvellous painting of Ariadne on Naxos (1913) below.

Bacchus’ age and appearance are remarkably variable. In Ruben’s later Bacchus (1638-40), he is old and grotesquely obese, but still accompanied by his big cats.

This painting was completed not long before Rubens’ death from the consequences of gout, and may be the artist’s personal reflection on the result of sustained familiarity with Bacchus.

On the other side of the cornucopia from the Satyr is a small group of children, and a winged putto or Cupid, led by Hymen, who bears his characteristic torch. The god of marriage has led the products of marriage to the fruit of peace and plenty. These figures were painted from the children of one of King Charles’ diplomats, Sir Balthasar Gerbier, who was both an artist and Rubens’ host while he was in England.

Rubens’ story is clear: push war and its associated madness away, and you will enjoy peace, prosperity, and a thriving, well-nourished population.

King Charles made peace with France and Spain, but couldn’t get on with his own parliament; he therefore ruled England without a parliament for the “eleven years’ tyranny”. Collapse of power was inevitable after that: he faced Scottish and Irish rebellions, then in 1642 found himself in a civil war. He was executed on 30 January 1649.

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1630, where he painted a second masterwork on the subject of peace and war, the centrepiece of tomorrow’s article.

In 2003, the psychologists Marco Bertamini, Richard Latto and Alice Spooner published a paper in which they described a known phenomenon in the perception of paintings, and named it the Venus Effect. Their definition is: “The Venus effect occurs every time the observer sees both an actor (eg Venus) and a mirror, not placed along the observer’s line of sight, and concludes that Venus is seeing her reflection at the same location in the mirror that the observer is seeing.”

Although they dismissed optical “mistakes” as being of less interest, they were intrigued by “the situations in which we as observers read the scene in a certain way, but the mirror itself is used (deliberately or not) to lead us down the wrong path. More specifically, the mirror shows us something that we accept as the view available to the actor in the scene. However, the actor has a different vantage point
from us and therefore the laws of optics imply that he/she cannot be seeing what we see in the mirror.”

In this article, I explore what I believe to be the artist’s intention in this effect, of revealing the face of the subject of a painting in its reflection rather than in the original, a popular form of mirror play.

Frans Floris’s Allegory of Sight was probably painted around 1550, making it an early and quite sophisticated entry to the subject. The face of its figure is shown reflected in the only appropriate optical instrument of the day: a simple mirror, carefully angled to project most of the face. Although only a small feature, that reflection looks fiendishly difficult, given the wildly different angle between the mirror and the picture plane. In this case, what’s shown in the mirror is optically plausible, although the subject is looking at the viewer rather than the reflection.

This painting of Sight has been attributed to Abraham Janssens, and could date to any time between about 1590 and 1632. It appears to have been inspired by Floris’s Allegory of Sight, and the reflection of the woman’s face in the mirror doesn’t appear optically correct. She does appear to be looking at her reflection, although that’s optically impossible.

Hans von Aachen’s David and Bathsheba of about 1612-15 introduces a figure standing behind Bathsheba, holding a mirror in front of her face with his outstretched left arm. A glance at that reflection says that something is seriously amiss: von Aachen has painted a reflection in which Bathsheba is looking to the left, although her face is actually looking to the right. No single plane mirror could ever achieve that optical impossibility.

Although often illustrated by one of Titian’s paintings of Venus, the canonical example must be Velázquez’ Venus at Her Mirror, also known as The Toilet of Venus or the Rokeby Venus, from 1644-48. It shows the goddess Venus, whose face is blurred in a false reflection in a mirror being held by her son Cupid. The theme was common, seen in paintings by Titian and Rubens, with Venus sat upright. Giorgione and others had posed her reclining and facing the viewer, making her pose here unusual. Most other paintings of Venus set her in a landscape: here she rests on luxurious even sensuous fabrics.

No matter how convincing her face might appear in the mirror, a moment spent placing yourself in the same position confirms that the image in the mirror is wholly imaginary, and optically incorrect. Yet, according to Bertamini and others, the majority of viewers succumb to the Venus Effect and believe that Venus is looking at that image of her face.

JW Waterhouse’s Mariana in the South from about 1897 stands her in front of a full-length mirror revealing her face to the viewer, but she too is looking at her own reflection.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s A Knock at the Door, also from 1897, shows an attractive young woman checking that she is looking at her best in a mirror, before receiving a visitor. Once again it is the reflection that shows her face, and we’re struggling to be sure whether this is optically correct, although in this case the artist has at least brought closer alignment between the two optical axes.

Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table (1909) also uses closer alignment to appear more optically plausible, as this nude apparently studies herself in the mirror.

Walter Crane made this watercolour and ink drawing of The Mirror for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales, published in 1909. Although there are clear disparities between the alignment of face and chest with their reflection, this too appears plausible.

Lovis Corinth’s At the Mirror from 1912 complicates this further by raising the viewer well above the subject and her reflection, and revealing the artist standing behind her.

There are a few paintings where the artist has overtly declined to employ the Venus Effect.

Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders from about 1555 goes further with mirror play. Susannah has been caught as she is drying her leg after bathing in the small pool beside her, looking at herself in a rectangular mirror, which is propped up against a rosy trellis in a secluded part of her garden. Unlike in other paintings of nudes, neither the image seen in the mirror nor the reflection on the water show anything more of Susannah.

A mask is a cover worn over part or all of the face. Covering the face more generally has been considered in this previous article. Here I’ll concentrate on masks that represent the face, and those used in the theatre, carnivals and masked balls.

Masks have been associated with acting and the theatre since ancient times, and can be seen as symbolic of drama and the stage.

Georges Rochegrosse painted this Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in about 1900, including three masks taken from Japanese Noh theatre at the left edge. Bernhardt was one of the most famous actresses of this period.

Some of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the late nineteenth century were unearthed at Tanagra in Greece around 1874, and included numerous painted terracotta figurines that Jean-Léon Gérôme featured in several of his paintings.

Sculpturae Vitam Insufflat Pictura (Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture) (1893) is a combination of a manifesto for Gérôme’s own polychrome sculpture, and a celebration of those discoveries at Tanagra. In addition to painted figurines, there’s a wooden box of masks in the foreground, and some on the shelves behind.

Gérôme’s Atelier of Tanagra from the same year includes a wider range of figurines and masks in a similar setting. These are typical of classical masks, where the face with mouth agape stands for tragedy, and the smiling face for comedy.

If his painting of The Artist’s Model from 1895 is to be believed, Gérôme kept several masks as props in his own studio, where he’s working on full-size sculpture of his model Emma.

Emil Orlík painted this unusual Model in 1904. She appears to have become shy or distressed. Her gown, screen, floor and hanging masks are evidence of the artist’s Japonisme.

Masks worn for balls seldom covered the whole face, and their primary purpose has been to disguise identity, thus to encourage extra-marital relationships, even promiscuity.

Marià Fortuny’s Masquerade (1868) is a marvellously loose watercolour showing an open-air masked ball, presumably held in Italy in the autumn, which is arousing the interest or bemusement of two swans. Dress is liberal to say the least, with the masked woman in the centre baring her breasts and holding a parasol.

Despite its title, Lovis Corinth’s Witches (1897) isn’t a depiction of sensuous rites taking place in a coven. Instead the women are preparing a younger woman to attend a masked ball. Their subject has just got out of the wooden tub in the foreground, has been dried off, and is about to don the fine clothes laid over the chair at the left, including the black mask.

Fernand Pelez’s La Vachalcade (The Cow-valcade) from 1896 shows young revellers taking part in a carnival procession, perhaps one of those in Montmartre at the time. Several are wearing full masks.