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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of lightning in paintings, I showed examples drawn from mythical and religious narratives. Today I start with a symbolic use, then consider the depiction of lightning in landscape art.

Just as in spoken language, images of thunderstorms and lightning may have symbolic or allegorical meaning. For Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by a Lightning Stroke (1842) formed an allegory of his wife’s death. Although painted at the dawn of photography, Vorobiev couldn’t have had the benefit of images of lightning with brief exposure times, and his accurate representation can only have come from observation.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

Francisque Millet was a seventeenth-century Flemish landscape artist who followed in Poussin’s manner, but painted views less idealised and closer to topographical reality. His Mountain Landscape with Lightning from about 1675 shows a violent but localised storm far away from his native Low Countries, and closer to the Alps, which he may well have crossed when he travelled to Italy.

Eugène Delacroix painted this dramatic watercolour of a Horse Frightened by Lightning in 1825-29. The heavy clouds have made it almost as dark as night, and the contortion of his rearing stallion enhances the effect.

For realist painters of the middle and late nineteenth century, awe and impact were to be achieved by less romantic and more objective accounts.

Dry prairies can catch alight when struck by lightning, as in this scene painted by Charles Deas in his Prairie on Fire from 1847. A bolt of lightning at the far right tells us how the prairie came to be aflame. From this low viewpoint, the fire itself is unimpressive, but is close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight.

Perhaps the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is indoors, where you can stand and marvel at the sight outdoors.

In painting six from Louis Janmot’s Poem of the Soul, Fatherly Roof, his subject’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by the flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.

Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa was briefly popular in paintings during the first half of the nineteenth century, but was by no means his only work to have been painted. When Byron was on his Grand Tour of Europe in 1810-11, he wrote what he described as “a Turkish Tale” of The Giaour, published in 1813.

That inspired Eugène Delacroix to paint The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan in 1826. The name Giaour is based on an offensive Turkish word for infidel, and Byron’s poem describes the revenge killing of Hassan by the Giaour for killing the latter’s lover. After their deadly combat, the Giaour is filled with remorse and retreats into a monastery. This painting was rejected by the Salon of 1827, but Delacroix went on to paint later versions.

Nearly a decade later, in 1835, Delacroix returned to Byron’s poem, and painted this version of the Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. This time he had the benefit of watching Moroccan cavalry manoeuvres, and a commission from the Comte de Mornay. The resulting composition is radically different from his earlier version, and although Mornay seems to have been pleased with the result, the critics remained unimpressed.

In May 1810, Lord Byron, then only twenty-two, swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) between Abydos and Sestos, in a recreation of the myth of Hero and Leander. Three years later, the poet used the same Abydos as the setting of his heroic poem of The Bride of Abydos (1813). This was the literary basis for four of Eugène Delacroix’s paintings.

The young and beautiful Zuleika had been promised by her old father Giaffir to an old man, but fell in love with her supposed half-brother Selim. The couple elope to a cavern by the sea, where he reveals that he’s the leader of a group of pirates who are waiting to hear his pistol shot as a signal to them. When Giaffir and his men approach, Selim fires his pistol, but is killed by Giaffir, and Zuleika dies of sorrow.

Delacroix’s Bride of Abydos from 1843-49 shows the moment of climax as Selim is preparing himself to defend against Giaffir’s attack.

Although Delacroix was probably the painter most frequently influenced by Byron’s poetic stories, he was by no means the only one. In 1816-17, Byron wrote what many consider to be an autobiographical poem, Manfred, that inspired Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in musical compositions.

This followed Byron’s ostracisation over alleged incest with his half-sister. Its hero Manfred is tortured by guilt in relation to the death of his beloved Astarte. Living in the Bernese Alps, where Byron was staying at the time, Manfred casts spells to summon seven spirits to help him forget and sublimate his guilt. As the spirits cannot control past events, he doesn’t achieve his aim, and cannot even escape by suicide. In the end, he dies.

John Martin’s watercolour of Manfred and the Alpine Witch (1837) shows Manfred conjuring a witch from a flooded cave in the mountains. Unusually light and sublime but not apocalyptic, it is perhaps one of Martin’s most beautiful works, and reminiscent of Turner’s alpine paintings.

In 1821, when Byron was living in Ravenna, Italy, with his lover Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, he composed a historical tragedy as a play in blank verse, Sardanapalus. This relies on an account in the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian, and Mitford’s History of Greece, telling of the last of the great Assyrian monarchs, who ruled a large empire from his palaces in Nineveh. However, a rebellion grew against him, and the story reaches its climax in the fifth and final act of Byron’s play.

At the time, the river Euphrates was in high flood, which had torn down part of the protective walls of the city of Nineveh. Once the river started to fall again, this left no defences against the rebels. Their leader offered to spare Sardanapalus his life if he would surrender, but he refused, asking for a cease-fire of just an hour. During that period he had a funeral pyre built under his throne. He released his last faithful officer to flee for his life, and climbed the pyre. As he did so, his favourite wife Myrrha threw a lighted torch into the pyre, and climbed up after him, where they both burned to death.

Delacroix painted two versions of this famous work: the huge original in 1827, now hanging in the Louvre, and a smaller more painterly replica in 1844, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Delacroix departs considerably from Byron’s narrative to invite us to see Sardanapalus in a different light. In this, the original version, his brushwork is tight and the huge canvas intricately detailed.

When he painted this smaller replica seventeen years later, it wasn’t intended to please the Salon, and he was far more painterly in its facture; Instead of showing Sardanapalus and Myrrha mounting the funeral pyre, Delacroix places the king on a huge divan, surrounded by the utter chaos and panic as his guards massacre wives and courtesans.

The last and greatest of Lord Byron’s works to be painted by the masters is Don Juan, an epic poem that he started writing in 1819 and left incomplete on his death in 1824. Based on traditional Spanish folk stories of the life of an incorrigible womaniser, Byron portrays his hero as a victim easily seduced by women. Despite its seventeen cantos, the attention of painters has concentrated on events in the second canto, after Don Juan’s first love affair with a married woman. As a consequence of that, Don Juan’s mother sends her errant son to travel in Europe, and that results in shipwreck, from which he is the sole survivor.

For Eugène Delacroix, the shipwreck became an obsession, linking back to the masterwork of his mentor Théodore Géricault, The Wreck of the Medusa (1818–19).

In Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan from 1840, Don Juan and his companions have run out of food, so draw lots to determine who will be sacrificed to feed the other survivors.

At some time prior to the Salon of 1847, Delacroix revisited the shipwreck in his Castaways in a Ship’s Boat (c 1840-47). The boat has shrunk in size and the number of survivors is falling steadily.

Ford Madox Brown’s watercolour of The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée from 1869-70 shows Haidée, a Greek pirate’s daughter, and her maid Zoe discovering the apparently lifeless body of the hero on a beach. Inevitably, Don Juan falls in love with Haidée, despite them having no common language. Her father takes a dislike to Don Juan, and has him put into slavery.

In this weekend’s two articles, I look at paintings of the poems of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Lord Byron, known best for his gripping tales and the epic Don Juan. Today I concentrate on the story of Mazeppa, a Cossack who became Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the seventeenth century, and tomorrow I’ll cover several other poems including Don Juan.

Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) was a figure in history who became a ‘Prince’ of the Holy Roman Empire, one of Europe’s largest landowners, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and a patron of the arts. In spite of those achievements, he’s best remembered for his youthful indiscretion with Madam Falbowska at the Polish royal court, that almost led to his early death.

Over time, fact became embroidered in its retelling into the legend of an affair with a Countess married to an older Count, who punished the young Mazeppa (who also acquired an extra ‘p’ in the process) by strapping him naked to the back of a wild horse, and setting the horse loose. That legend gained sufficient credence for it to be recorded in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731), where it seems to have caught Lord Byron’s imagination when he was seeking inspiration for a narrative poem. What emerged from his pen was further embroidery, and proved almost instantly successful with some of the great painters of the day.

Byron’s Mazeppa, published in 1819, served as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa, and had an affair with a Countess Theresa. Much of the poem details the suffering and endurance of Mazeppa during his long journey on the back of the horse. Most significantly, Byron’s account was immediately translated into French.

Théodore Géricault was probably the first artist to be inspired by that French translation, and within a few months had painted his first study.

Géricault’s initial Mazeppa is a nocturne from about 1820. The wild horse has just swum across a river at night, and is now climbing up the bank. The viewer is almost guaranteed to wince in sympathy with the young Cossack’s cold and pain.

In what must have been one of his last paintings, Géricault revisited the same scene in Mazeppa from 1823, the year before his death.

The following year, when his friend and mentor Géricault died, the young Eugène Delacroix painted Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, showing the Cossack’s mount on its last legs.

Two years later, in 1826, Horace Vernet painted Mazeppa and the Wolves, a different scene with an ingenious composition and the added danger of a pack of wolves lurking in ambush. This is one of many paintings showing a horse galloping with both fore and hind legs simultaneously in full extension, a position demonstrated later in the century by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) to be fictional.

A former signwriter, John Frederick Herring’s talent was recognised during the 1820s, and he painted portraits of racehorses. I don’t know when he saw Vernet’s painting, but in 1833 Herring made a copy that’s now in the Tate: Mazeppa Pursued by Wolves (after Horace Vernet).

Herring also painted Mazeppa Surrounded by Horses (after Horace Vernet) at about the same time; if it too was a copy of a Vernet, then the original seems to have been lost. Mazeppa’s mount has here finally reached its journey’s end, and the Cossack is undoing his bonds.

Nathaniel Currier used Herring’s second painting as the basis for his lithograph of Mazeppa Surrounded by Wild Horses in 1846. This is one of a set of four that were apparently commercially successful.

Byron’s poem ends when Mazeppa wakes up in bed, after he had been rescued from unconsciousness by a “Cossack Maid”, who then tends his wounds.

It wasn’t until 1851 that Théodore Chassériau anticipated this ending in A Young Cossack Woman Finds Mazeppa Unconscious on a Wild Horse. As in Byron’s poem, there are ravens flying overhead, waiting to feed on Mazeppa’s corpse.

Just as suddenly as paintings of Byron’s Mazeppa had appeared, so they vanished in the later nineteenth century.