Given the great many paintings commissioned as altarpieces, it’s perhaps surprising that relatively few others depicted Christian altars. When you might expect them to, for example in Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the sacrament of Eucharist, they often avoid it. In this second article showing examples of altars in paintings, I start with one of Raphael’s magnificent frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican Palace.

Traditionally, the first of his series is the Disputa, or Disputation of Holy Sacrament, completed in the period 1509-10. This doesn’t represent what we know as a dispute, but a theological discussion on this aspect of the Christian faith. Its apex contains the Holy Trinity of God the Father (top), Jesus Christ flanked by the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, with the white dove of the Holy Spirit below. The tier with Christ at its centre represents the elect, a group of the most revered saints, and figures from the Old Testament including Adam, David, Abraham, Moses and possibly Joshua.

The lower tier is earthly, centred on an altar and simple monstrance containing the Holy Sacrament. Seated beside that are the Roman Fathers of the Church, including Gregory, Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose. In the flanks are many other figures who were important to the church at the time. Notable among these is Dante, seen in profile mid-right, with a laurel wreath on his head and red robes.

Altars also feature in several paintings of Joan of Arc (c 1412-1431), patron saint of France and heroine of the French nation.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand. To the right is an altar, on which her left hand is resting. At its back is a triptych altarpiece.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance, from 1863, shows Joan kneeling at an altar, where she stares up and into the future, while pressing her lips to her sword. This is one of the few paintings of Joan showing her wearing jewellery.

Altars were central to many coronations and similar acts of dedication.

Friedrich Kaulbach painted his romantic vision of the Coronation of Charlemagne in the nineteenth century. As Pope Leo III raises the imperial crown to place it on Charles’ head, his biographer Einhard records the event in words, at the lower right, and the emperor’s family watch on. Behind the pages and bishops to the right is an ornate altar with a large crucifix.

Edmund Blair Leighton exhibited The Dedication in 1908. A knight and his lady are kneeling before the altar of a country church seeking a blessing on the knight’s sword, presumably before battle. His squire stands outside, tending the knight’s charger.

One of the strangest events depicted at an altar must be Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s most controversial painting, of St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation (1891).

It shows Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) prostrate before an altar, and completely naked, with two nuns and two monks behind her. At present, this painting is so dark that it is hard to see its details. The overlightened image below makes it more clear how shocking this must have appeared at the time.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil was probably painted towards the end of the nineteenth century, or possibly in the early twentieth. Taken from the well-known story in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Lisabetta is here kneeling before her pot of basil at an altar, with a crucifix behind.

Of the many wonderful paintings that Harriet Backer made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church from 1909.

Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the distant altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar, where there’s a painting of the Last Supper. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

The city of Florence in Tuscany, to the north-west of Rome, has long been a centre of art. Even before the Renaissance, its painters were among the most prominent in southern Europe, and it’s often referred to as being the ‘Cradle of the Renaissance’, or the ‘Athens of Italy’. Since then its unique collections of Renaissance art have attracted artists from all over the world, and encouraged them to paint views of the city. This weekend I show paintings of the city of Florence, today concerning its history. Tomorrow I’ll conclude with some landscape views.

To aid in its visualisation, this is a map of the city engraved by William Barnard Clarke in 1835. Numbers mark some of the landmarks we’ll see:

1. The Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose construction started in 1296, with its dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi finished in 1436.
2. San Niccolò Weir, on the River Arno.
3. Boboli Gardens.
4. Ponte Santa Trinita, over the River Arno.
5. Ponte alle Grazie, over the River Arno.

Dante and his Divine Comedy have inspired and influenced a great many paintings, some of which have depicted the poet in the city of his birth.

The year after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s death in 1882, Henry Holiday painted the second occasion on which Dante claimed he had met with his beloved Beatrice, in Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinita (1883). Holiday devoted great effort to making this view of the Ponte Vecchio (the most famous of Florence’s bridges) and the River Arno in central Florence as authentic as possible. In 1881, he travelled to Florence to make studies, and researched the buildings at the time, that he turned into clay models for a 3D reference. He also got John Trivett Nettleship, a noted animal painter, to paint the pigeons so that they too were faithfully depicted.

Rossetti’s more fictionalised watercolour of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853) shows Dante being comforted as he is drawing an angel on that day of remembrance for his beloved. This is situated in central Florence according to the view through the window at the right, but looking out of the door at the left, there’s an incongruous country garden.

Dante Aligheri died in 1321, and the next major event in the history of Florence is linked with Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written by 1353. Giovanni Boccaccio was born in the nearby town of Certaldo.

Doubt has been cast that Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death that struck Florence in 1348 was based on his personal experience, but few alive at the time could have escaped witnessing its deadly consequences. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, Luigi Sabatelli made this engraving to illustrate an edition of the Decameron, in his undated Plague of Florence in 1348.

The Decameron opens with a description of the horrific conditions and events that overwhelmed the city when it was struck by the Black Death, then takes us to a group of seven young women who are sheltering in one of its great churches. They decide to leave the city rather than waiting amid its rising pile of corpses, to spend some time in the country nearby. To accompany them, they take a few servants, and three young men.

Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decide that they will pass their self-imposed exile by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each tells one story on every weekday, providing the total of one hundred forming The Decameron.

Raffaello Sorbi shows the group of ten during one of the story-telling sessions in The Decameron from 1876, with Florence in the distance.

A notable absence from the skyline of those paintings of the city before 1420 is the distinctive brick dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) that crowns Florence Cathedral, the Duomo, or more properly the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. Sorbi’s backdrop is anachronistic in that it shows the dome.

Brunelleschi was a central figure in the Southern Renaissance, an architect and civil engineer generally credited with developing the first geometrically correct perspective projection for use in 2D drawings and paintings. It was he who both designed and supervised the construction of this prominent landmark, and he died in the city on 15 April 1446.

His death and achievements are commemorated by Frederic, Lord Leighton, who follows convention in locating the event in a building in Florence, the window opening to a view of the cathedral’s dome. Brunelleschi is shown half-recumbent in extremis in a chair, as if flattened onto a two dimensional plane. The complex array of buildings seen between the window and the dome appear to defy correct perspective projection, but have in fact been meticulously projected, and contrast with the flatness of the dying man.

Leighton had earlier painted Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853-55). Cimabue (c 1240-1302) was born and probably trained in Florence, and is claimed to have been the teacher of Giotto; both are key figures in the development of the early Renaissance.

Inside the Duomo is Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and the Divine Comedy, the poet’s 1465 memorial. It shows Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy as he points out sinners descending to Hell. Behind him is the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which is Paradise. To the right is the city of Florence, complete with the dome whose construction wasn’t started until a century after Dante’s death.

Among the many major artists of the Florentine Renaissance is Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better-known as Sandro Botticelli, who was born in the city in about 1445 and spent almost his entire life in the same part of town, leaving it for just two brief periods when he painted in Pisa and Rome.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s Botticelli’s studio: The first visit of Simonetta presented by Giulio and Lorenzo de Medici (1922) imagines an event that could only have taken place before Easter in 1478, when Botticelli could have been no older than 33. The artist stands at the left, in front of an exquisite tondo he is working on. Bowing to him at the centre is Giuliano de’ Medici, who is accompanied by Simonetta Vespucci, wearing the green dress. Behind her is Lorenzo de’ Medici, often known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, and behind him are Giovanna Tornabuoni and her attendants. The view through the window shows the Palazzo Vecchio in the centre of Florence.

Lorenzo de’ Medici is the subject of Girolamo Macchietti’s undated portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was born in 1449 into the banking family, the grandson of Cosimo de’ Medici, one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Europe. Lorenzo was groomed for power, and became the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic when his father died in 1469.

He survived a vicious attack by members of the Pazzi family, in the Duomo on Easter Sunday 1478, when his brother Giuliano was stabbed to death. This led to his excommunication, and invasion by forces of the King of Naples. He resolved that, and died in 1492, when he was forty-three.

Odoardo Borrani was a nineteenth century Florentine artist whose painting of The Body of Jacopo de’ Pazzi from 1864 shows the more grisly side of Florence in 1478. Jacopo de’ Pazzi was the head of the noble banking family who led that conspiracy against the ruling de’ Medici family, by attempting to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and overthrow the government of Florence.

De’ Pazzi escaped from the city, but was hunted down, brought back, tortured and hung beside the corpse of another conspirator. His body was initially interred in the family chapel of Santa Croce, but was then exhumed to be thrown in a ditch, as shown here. Eventually his head was used as a door knocker, and the rest of his family were sent into exile.

The Florentine painter Fabio Borbottoni (1820–1902) spent much of his career creating historical landscapes showing the city in Renaissance times. This undated view of the Ponte alle Grazie and the Loggia of the Uffizi is among the large collection of his work now in the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. The Uffizi complex was built for Cosimo I de’ Medici, initially by the painter and early art historian Giorgio Vasari in 1560. It first opened fully to the public in 1769, and is one of the largest art collections in the world.

Sewing pieces of textile or other sheet materials dates back to the Stone Age if not before, and needles fashioned from bone are among man’s oldest tools. Until the nineteenth century, all forms of sewing were performed using the hands. Since then machines have gradually become available, and were popularised in the twentieth century, although a great deal of sewing is still done by hand. Across much of Europe and the Western world, sewing has traditionally been one of the key skills of women, although it has also been a professional task for men from sailors to surgeons. This article looks at those whose sewing goes beyond simply joining fabrics using thread, and tomorrow’s looks more broadly at sewing as an activity.

Although weaving has played an important role in several classical myths, sewing wasn’t as prominent. Even in Christian religious painting, it has only become a feature in more recent times.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine, by that time a thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.

The most common narrative role of sewing in paintings is that of a woman supporting a cause or a person.

The patriot leader Giuseppe Garibaldi adopted the red shirt as an improvised uniform for his supporters, particularly the Garibaldini, who followed him in the Expedition of the Thousand of 1860, that led to unification of Italy. Odoardo Borrani’s Sewing Red Shirts for Volunteers (1863) shows four middle-class lady supporters eagerly doing their bit for Garibaldi’s cause.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of a castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, perhaps.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Tennyson’s account of this story in his Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Sir Lancelot’s shield.

Mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen provided their shoreside support, as shown by Anna Ancher in this Fisherman’s Wife Sewing from 1890.

Joaquín Sorolla’s Sewing the Sail from 1896 shows a scene on a patio at Valencia’s El Cabañal beach, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of that year. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically challenging supporting tasks ashore.

Just as fishermen’s wives weren’t allowed to go to sea, other women sewing in supporting roles were also left behind. In the case of Wenzel Tornøe’s Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, that may not have been intentional. This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted, with an oil lamp still lit beside her.

Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.