Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (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.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). 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.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his 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 looks like 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’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the horse in narrative, I showed examples from classical myths and legends, culminating in that of Saint George and the dragon. This leads to the role of the horse in chivalry, with its origins in the crusades.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Walter Crane is one of the earlier artists to depict a late fifteenth century poem revived in a ballad from 1819 by John Keats. The Belle Dame Sans Merci is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, as the knight, clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand.

The same year that Keats wrote his ballad, Lord Byron wrote his poetic account of the legendary Mazeppa, who was bound naked to a wild horse and set loose as punishment for his affair with a Polish Countess.

Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa and the Wolves from 1826 shows the young victim during his wild ride that took him to the point of death before he was rescued.

Mykola Samokish’s watercolour of a Ukrainian Cossack on a Horse, or Haidamak on a Horse from 1899 shows a haidamaka, a Ukrainian insurgent who took part in uprisings against the ruling Polish Empire that governed west Ukraine in the eighteenth century. They were immortalised in an epic poem in 1841 by the father of Ukrainian literature Taras Shevchenko.

Horses are a longstanding feature of circuses, and individual showmen and women around the world.

Georges Seurat’s The Circus from 1891 is one of the masterpieces of Divisionism, and may depict a scene in the Cirque Fernando of Montmartre in Paris. Its internal contradiction is the artist’s choice of a painstakingly slow and mechanical method of painting, for a motif that is full of spontaneous movement and action.

In the millennia before the arrival of steam engines, horses were the fastest means of travel, and inevitably were used in racing.

In February 1817, Théodore Géricault witnessed the Roman Carnival, with its traditional horse race. Among the studies that he made of that event is Race of the Barberi Horses (1817), intended for a later large studio painting that he never started. This was a longstanding tradition of the Roman Carnival, where these horses were gathered in the Piazza del Popolo, then raced without riders to gallop down the Corso to be recaptured at the finish. The Barberi are a hardy North African breed popular among the Berbers, and are still bred today although this race has long since ceased.

More orderly horseraces have been popular events.

Géricault’s The Epsom Derby from 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air, legs in full extension, without contact with the ground beneath them. It wasn’t until early photographic studies demonstrated that this never occurred in real life that artists reluctantly changed their images.

The Derby Stakes is a flat-race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At this time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here. It was accompanied by a large fair, the subject of a later painting by William Powell Frith in 1858. I suspect that Géricault’s version was a significant influence on the later equestrian paintings of Edgar Degas.

The New World of the Americas grew their own stories about feats achieved by horses and their riders.

Grant Wood’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) was inspired by Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride (1860), telling of the American patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818) and his midnight ride on 18 April 1775, to alert colonial militia of the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is shown using a bird’s eye view giving it an air of unreality.

My last two paintings are even more unreal.

Long before Courbet’s well-known allegorical painting of his studio, Horace Vernet painted his as being just as crowded, rich in stories, and puzzling. In the centre, two young men fight one another with swords by a white horse, which is tethered to the wall. Immediately in front of the white horse is a pair of boxers, and another young man sits on the back of a chair to watch the fencing, holding a rifle against the left side of his body.

In the left background a couple of pupils are actually engaged in painting at easels, but the most prominent easel in the room is completely ignored by those present. Another painter is at work at the far left, apparently talking with three young men who are watching, and accompanied by a drummer. Another small group of young men is engaged in discussion against the wall to the left.

Henry Fuseli’s breakthrough painting of his career, The Nightmare from 1781 was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy, and remains the work by which he is best known. It shows a daemonic incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman, who is laid out as if in a deep sleep in bed, her head thrown back, and her arms above her head. Lurking in the darkness to the left is the head of a black horse, whose eyes appear unseeing. The incubus stares directly at the viewer in a manner which arouses discomfort.

For the last couple of millennia, the extra-marital affair of Dido Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Trojan refugee and patriarch of the Roman Empire, must have been among the most famous. First told in explicit detail in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, it has inspired at least a dozen operas, is referred to in seven of Shakespeare’s plays, and even pops up in two of the Civilization games.

Its outline is simple, and a prototype for uncountable literary works: girl meets boy on a mission; boy cannot deviate from mission; boy leaves girl; girl dies heartbroken. Ovid’s summary in his Metamorphoses is a little longer than that, and far more eloquent and poetic. Ovid also wrote a second and fuller account in his collection of fictional letters by famous women, Heroines, and it’s that examined here.

Dido and her brother Pygmalion (not the better-known Pygmalion who fell in love with his statue) were of royal blood, probably being the children and heirs of the King of Tyre. Dido married Sychaeus, but Pygmalion wanted their riches too, so had her husband murdered when he was at the altar in their own home.

Dido took her riches and fled to North Africa, seeking sanctuary on a plot of land she acquired from the Berber king Iarbas, whom she rejected as a suitor. He gave her as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide, so Dido ingeniously cut the oxhide up into thin strips, which she fastened end-to-end to enable her to circumscribe an entire hill.

There, Dido built the city of Carthage, into which she drew those who had fled with her, local Berbers and many others. The city grew to be wealthy and powerful, as she remained its queen.

JMW Turner depicts this in one of his works inspired by Claude Lorrain: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Dido is on the left bank, dressed in blue, and opposite her is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.

Although a simple reading of this painting follows its title, it could equally show Aeneas as the man to the left of Dido, in which case the masts behind them would be those of Aeneas’ ships, and the painting would show their first meeting.

Aeneas was a refugee from the city of Troy, who had fled the city with his father Anchises, wife Creusa, and son Ascanius, as the city was burning and being sacked by the Greeks. Together with other refugees, Aeneas, his father and son had sailed away, then undertook a protracted journey across the Mediterranean in search of his destiny.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is starting to fall slightly behind, and becoming distressed.

Aeneas’ mother was Venus, making him Cupid’s brother. Also interested in Aeneas was Juno, the senior goddess, who wanted to thwart his reaching Italy, and her husband Jupiter, who wanted Aeneas to reach his destination, where his descendants Romulus and Remus would ultimately found Rome. When Aeneas and his men left the island of Sicily heading north towards the Italian mainland, Juno intervened by bringing a northerly gale driving them south to the coast of North Africa, and the city of Carthage.

Once ashore in Carthage, Aeneas met Dido, as shown in Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815. He told her the story of his escape from the ruins of Troy, and of his guilty secret: his wife Creusa had become separated from the rest of the family. Aeneas claimed that he had gone back to look for her, and she then appeared to him in ghostly form, telling him to leave without her, which he did.

It’s Paul Cézanne, in his watercolour sketch of Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, painted in about 1875, who expresses this situation most clearly. Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Creusa.

Dido had sworn to her late husband that she would love no other, but as she and Aeneas got to know one another, both Juno and Venus (through her other son, Cupid) conspired to develop that into love. Venus wanted Dido to provide her son with a safe haven, and Juno wanted to halt his progress. This came to a head when the couple went out with a hunting party, and took shelter in a cave from a torrential rainstorm, brought by Juno. Both Virgil and Ovid make it explicit that they made love in that cave.

As so often happens, Dido and Aeneas made love under different assumptions. For Dido, given her commitment to her husband, she consented on the basis that this was also the act of union in marriage. For Aeneas, who had made no such commitment to his wife, who had disappeared in dubious circumstances anyway, there was no such agreement, and he remained free to pursue his destiny.

The next external influence on the couple’s relationship then came into play: Jupiter, wanting to chivvy Aeneas on his journey to start the founding of Rome and to appease Dido’s rejected suitor, sent Mercury his messenger to tell Aeneas that he must not delay with Dido, but must prepare to sail, leaving her behind. In complete secrecy, Aeneas instructed his crew to get their ship ready to resume its journey. He then went to Dido to break the news to her, only to find that she already knew of his intention to desert her and abandon her just as he had previously abandoned Creusa.

Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Dido and Aeneas (1747) draws on ambiguity in an ingenious way. It could be read as showing the couple after their lovemaking in the cave, with Dido still partly undressed, and Aeneas adjusting his clothes.

However, the presence of Aeneas’ ship in the left background implies that this is the moment that Aeneas has returned to break the news to Dido that he must sail shortly. Behind the couple is Dido’s sister Anna. In Virgil’s account, she goes to Aeneas to plead Dido’s case before the queen’s suicide; in Ovid’s version in his Heroines, Anna takes Aeneas the letter written for her by Ovid.

Dido’s letter, as supposed by Ovid, is a tour de force, and truly elegiac. It expresses her side of the story and her view of their relationship brilliantly. She points out that she could well be pregnant with a brother for Aeneas’ son Ascanius. She appeals to the emotions in a calculating and crafted way. And most of all, she raises questions about Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa, which should have had greatest impact on his heart. No matter what Mercury might say, how could Aeneas abandon a second wife too?

But Mercury intervened again, and Aeneas was driven to sail immediately. When Dido saw this, her only option was to fall on her sword, taking her own life.

Here I show two of the most vivid paintings of the climax of this story. In Joseph Stallaert’s The Death of Dido (1872), the queen has fallen on the sword given by Aeneas, and now lies dying on the couch on which the couple had previously made love, pointing at his ship leaving harbour by the light of the early dawn.

Resting her hand on Dido’s chest wound, her sister Anna comforts the queen in her dying moments, as the queen’s nurse and a maidservant are in attendance. There’s no sign of a funeral pyre, but suggestive smoke is made by the small altar at the extreme left.

Henry Fuseli’s Dido (1781) has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and history moves to the founding of Rome.

Was it Dido? Aeneas? Or the pair of them? Ovid implies, but dares not state, that it was all down to the play of the gods. Given the conflicting interests of Venus, Juno, and Jupiter, their relationship was surely doomed from the start.