The first twenty or so chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’ groundbreaking modern novel Don Quixote consist of a series of largely self-contained comic misadventures. After the knight and his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza release a group of convicts, they fear for their safety, so head for the mountains. Once there, events become more interrelated and complex, presenting even greater challenges to those who tried to paint them in standalone works, rather than illustrations accompanying the text.

The pair find a hoard of gold coins apparently abandoned with a notebook in a travel bag. Then Don Quixote catches a glimpse of a man leaping around the bushes half-naked, and suspects that he’s the owner of the bag and its coins. A little way around the hillside, they find a dead mule whose owner they think had carried that bag.

This scene must have fascinated the French artist Honoré Daumier, who painted a series of oil sketches of it in about 1867.

In the first, the knight leads his squire towards the dead mule.

This rough oil sketch shows them drawing even closer.

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in the Sierra is more generic, and omits the dead mule altogether.

A little later, Sancho Panza’s donkey is stolen, so the knight dispatches him on his own horse Rocinante to obtain three replacement donkeys, and deliver a letter to the Lady Dulcinea, Quixote’s semi-imaginary ‘lady’ of his chivalric quests. Meanwhile, the knight laments and feigns madness for the lady. Panza meets their village priest and barber, and they agree to deceive Quixote in a bid to persuade him to return to the village for his madness to be treated.

As the three head back towards Don Quixote, they meet Dorotea, who had previously been tricked and seduced. She agrees to dress up as a fine lady and pose as Princess Micomicona, who purports to have come all the way from Guinea to ask a boon of the knight.

Pedro González Bolívar’s painting of The Introduction of Dorotea to Don Quixote from 1881 shows their meeting. Without that background information, this would prove impossible to read.

Don Quixote is persuaded to leave the mountains and return home with them, but that’s the start of another series of misadventures. During these, Dorotea’s true identity is revealed, and at dinner Don Quixote gives a long and impassioned speech in which he argues surprisingly rationally in favour of the pre-eminence of arms over learning.

This is recorded in Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters from 1884. Sancho Panza stands immediately behind the knight, at the head of the table, on the right. Seated along the table’s length are a man who has just arrived from Algiers with a Moorish woman, the village priest, and others.

Don Quixote’s madness only continues, and eventually he has to be bundled into an oxcart and taken home.

On a Sunday when all the locals are out in the square, the oxcart bearing Don Quixote enters his village at noon, as shown in Hippolyte Lecomte’s undated Don Quixote’s Homecoming. At the left, Don Quixote’s niece or housekeeper holds her hands up in horror at his condition. To the left of the cart are the priest and barber, still mounted. Sancho Panza is riding his donkey, and has been greeted by his wife and their children, who are more interested in how many fine skirts he brought back for her, and how many pairs of shoes for their children.

The priest and barber leave Don Quixote alone to recover for a month after their return, then reassess him, as shown by Miguel Jadraque in this Visit of the Priest and Barber to Don Quixote from 1880. Don Quixote is becoming animated with them as he sits up in bed. In the left background are the knight’s niece and housekeeper, praying in vain for his recovery.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza then leave on their third sally, which first takes them on a futile mission to El Toboso in quest of the Lady Dulcinea. After that, they head towards the city of Saragossa, and meet a cart full of players in costume, who create mayhem.

Carlos Vásquez Úbeda shows this encounter in his undated painting of Don Quixote. At this stage, the pair are still on their mounts, but shortly afterwards a clown causes Rocinante to bolt and throw Don Quixote, and one of the other players rides off on the squire’s donkey. For once, Sancho manages to persuade his master not to retaliate, and they continue on their way without coming to grief.

Later, they meet a group from a village, and are invited to attend a wedding there the following day.

The wedding brings an elaborate deception in which the bride’s first suitor appears to impale himself on his own sword so that he can marry the bride as his dying wish, but then miraculously comes back to life, to cheat the groom from marrying the bride as had been expected. Manuel García Hispaleto’s painting of The Marriage of Basilio and Quiteria from 1881 shows the priest officiating in the centre, as the bride to the right is married to the dying suitor, who is supported by Don Quixote with his lance. The groom stands at the front of the tent at the right, staring in disbelief at what’s going on.

The newlyweds entertain Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for three days, enabling them to visit the Cave of Montesinos and the Lakes of Ruidera nearby. Gustave Doré, whose illustrations for the whole book have been used by others as the basis for further illustrated editions, painted this non-narrative scene of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria in about 1863.

In the middle of Cervantes’ second book of Don Quixote, the knight and his squire Sancho Panza become guests of a Duke and Duchess who had already read Cervantes’ first book, and set out to trick the pair into further comical misadventures. Soon after their arrival, the Duke’s chaplain asserts that Don Quixote isn’t a knight errant at all, causing the knight to deliver a searing riposte.

Out of the blue, maids arrive to wash and lather the knight’s beard, and that of the Duke, in a procedure that defuses a tense situation by transforming it into the absurd. Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro’s painting of Don Quijote in the Duke’s House from 1878 shows this bizarre moment, with the rotund figure of Sancho Panza at the left, the gaunt Don Quixote in the centre, and the Duke and Duchess seated at the right, in obvious amusement.

Although Cervantes had completed Don Quixote in 1615, and it quickly became popular across Europe, it appears to have been painted infrequently before the nineteenth century. Only Valero Iriarte seems to have painted its comical adventure stories in the previous century. Although Eugène Delacroix painted the non-narrative Don Quixote in his Library in 1824, Cervantes’ novel was generally ignored by the major narrative artists of the nineteenth century, who continued depicting mostly classical myth.

These paintings demonstrate how modern fiction can form the basis for successful narrative painting, even though that has remained unusual.

With Medea finally consigned to oblivion and Theseus united with his father, King Aegeus of Athens, Ovid’s Metamorphoses rushes on to a little-known group of myths explaining the origins of Minos and the fearsome Myrmidons who were later to fight for Achilles in the war against Troy.

The delight of King Aegeus in meeting his son at last proved short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there. When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, Aeacus its king refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.

King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague that had almost destroyed the people of Aegina. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably also named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague sent against the people of the island. Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like one of the many outbreaks of the plague that have struck Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.

Aeacus saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being transformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh. They hailed Aeacus as king, and immediately went on to labour hard on the land and to become the fearsome band of warriors known as Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex).

Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, from where Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them with him to the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.

The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.

That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, showing Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.

If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he, together with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.

Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.

Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.

Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a thoroughly radical vision.

Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.