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Reading Visual Art: 221 Club and skin B

By: hoakley
8 August 2025 at 19:30

In the first of these two articles I showed paintings of Hercules (Heracles) brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, as a stereotype of the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero. That association was strong enough to make its way into some more Christian images.

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Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642), Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (1633), oil on panel, 142 x 210.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

In Frans Francken the Younger’s composite painting of Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice from 1633, the upper section of Paradise sets heroes including Hercules, to the left of centre with his trademark club and lion-skin, in an idealised landscape. Above them is an angelic musical ensemble serenading the figures below. This clearly was a Paradise for the artist’s patron, not the common person.

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Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642), Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (detail) (1633), oil on panel, 142 x 210.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

Clubs also appeared in other examples of hand-to-hand combat drawn from classical mythology.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38), oil on canvas, 182 × 290 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ finished painting of The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) the figure at the upper right is just about to bring his club down on this wedding feast that turned into a pitched battle.

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Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734), The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs (c 1705), oil on canvas, 138.4 × 176.8 cm, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Wikimedia Commons.

Sebastiano Ricci’s Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 uses multiplex narrative to tell the same story. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and a centaur in the centre foreground is swinging his club at one of the Lapiths.

Although the original story of the death of Orpheus at the hands of Bacchantes has them club him with their thyrsi, more modern interpretations are content with ordinary clubs.

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Louis Bouquet (1885–1952), The Death of Orpheus (1925-39), oil on canvas, 98 × 131 cm, Private collection. Image by Jcstuccilli, via Wikimedia Commons.

Louis Bouquet’s The Death of Orpheus (1925-39) transports this scene to a beach, where the naked Bacchantes are armed with clubs, and just starting to tear the body of Orpheus with their bare hands and teeth.

Some earlier paintings of Christian devils show them with clubs.

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Stefano di Giovanni (1392–1450), St Anthony Beaten by the Devils (1430-32), media and dimensions not known, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, Siena, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Anthony Beaten by the Devils identifies the saint by his Tau crucifix. Three devils, clearly fallen angels by their wings, are beating him with clubs. Those devils are fairly conventional figures, part animal and part man, with horns.

In contrast, Hercules’ lion-skin developed different associations, and involved other species.

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Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), The Siege of Paris (1870), oil on canvas, 53.5 x 70.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s romanticised view of The Siege of Paris from 1870 combines almost every symbol relevant to the city’s distress, and dresses the symbolic figure of Marianne in a lion-skin against a battle-worn flag.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animal skins had gone from the uncouth to the mildly erotic, as seen in several of John William Godward’s paintings of doing nothing, or Dolce Far Niente.

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John William Godward (1861–1922), Dolce Far Niente (1897), oil on canvas, 77.4 x 127 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

This first from 1897 returns to a classical Roman setting, and adds a brilliant green parakeet to accompany this woman on a tiger-skin, in her diaphonous dress.

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John William Godward (1861–1922), Dolce Far Niente (Sweet Idleness) (or A Pompeian Fishpond) (1904), oil on canvas, 50.8 x 76.2 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Seven years later (in 1904), Godward painted his more complex version, also known as Sweet Idleness, or A Pompeian Fishpond. More modestly clad, his lone woman rests with her knees drawn up into a sleeping (near-foetal) position on another animal skin, with a peacock-feather fan in the foreground.

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John William Godward (1861–1922), Dolce Far Niente (1906), oil on canvas, 36.2 x 73.7 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

A couple of years after that (in 1906), Godward’s beautiful woman is stretched out on an animal skin on marble, a colour-co-ordinated garden and distant Mediterranean waterscape beyond: a far cry from the uncouth Hercules.

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