There are few greater challenges to the figurative artist than painting figures in movement when they’re dancing. This week’s two articles about reading visual art consider the significance of rising to that challenge, and how we should read that dancing. I have already looked at paintings associated with death in the Danse Macabre, and won’t be revisiting that here.

As a rhythmic physical activity, dance has long been associated with the natural rhythm of time, particularly the hours of the day.

Nicolas Poussin’s brilliant Dance to the Music of Time (c 1634-6) shows four young people dancing, who are sometimes interpreted as being the seasons. That probably isn’t the case, as they’re most likely Poverty (male at the back, facing away), Labour (closest to Time and looking at him), Wealth (in golden skirt and sandals, also looking at Time), and Pleasure (blue and red clothes) who fixes the viewer with a knowing smile. Opposite Pleasure is a small herm of Janus, whose two faces look to the past and the future. Above them, in the heavens, Aurora (goddess of the dawn) precedes Apollo’s sun chariot, on which the large ring represents the Zodiac. Behind the chariot are the Horai, the hours of the day.

Gaetano Previati’s Dance of the Hours from 1899 shows the Horai dancing in the air around a golden ring, with the orbs of the moon in the foreground and the sun far beyond. Every fine brushstroke is rich in meaning: in the Horai they give the sensation of movement, elsewhere they form a third dimension, or give texture to the ether.

In addition to this association with the Horai, when they’re not playing their musical instruments, the Muses are often depicted as dancing.

Andrea Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, known better as Parnassus, (1496-97) refers to the classical myth of the affair between Mars and Venus, the latter being married to Vulcan, who caught them in bed together and cast a fine net around them for the other gods to come and mock their adultery. The lovers are shown standing together on a flat-topped rock arch, as the Muses dance below. To the left of Mars’ feet is Venus’ child Cupid aiming his blowpipe at Vulcan’s genitals, as he works at his forge in the cave at the left. At the right is Mercury, messenger of the gods, with his caduceus and Pegasus the winged horse. At the far left is Apollo making music for the Muses on his lyre.

More unusual is Hans Thoma’s Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies from 1886, which most probably shows the sirens dancing to their alluring voices.

Putti and their relatives such as amorini are also prone to dance, usually in the sky, presumably with the joy of love.

Thoma’s Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898) shows a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She’s surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti dancing in the sky.

Similarly, the little people in ‘faery’ paintings are adept at formation dancing.

Richard Dadd’s Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) refers to William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, rather than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was exhibited with the descriptive quotation:
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands,
Curt’sied when you have, and kissed
(The wild waves whist).
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites the burden bear.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, expressing the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, that had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, when so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis resulting in so many deaths of young people. The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

This leads us to country and folk dancing, which in northern Europe has long been associated with traditional mid-summer feasts.

One of Jules Breton’s major paintings from the 1870s is The Festival of Saint-Jean, shown in the Salon of 1875; I’ve been unable to locate a suitable image of that finished painting, but this study for it, The Feast of Saint John (1875) may give you an idea of its magnificence.

Anders Zorn’s major painting of 1897 was Midsummer Dance, capturing the festivities in his home town in Sweden, with women and men dancing outdoors in their uniform country dress.

The title of Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of folk dancing, Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House, appears confusing. Although it names this dance as the Oberek, the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka, the first word Kołomyjka makes it clear that this is what’s now known as kolomyika (Ukrainian: кoлoмийкa). That’s a combination of a fast and vigorous folk dance with music and rhymed verse. It originated in the Hutsul town of Kolomyia in Ukraine, but has also become popular in north-eastern Slovenia and parts of Poland.

Hans Thoma’s eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Tomorrow I’ll start with the most formalised expression of dancing, at the ballet.

The countryside around the city of Rome has played a vital role in the history of landscape painting. For nearly a century, from the 1780s until the development of Impressionism, painting oil sketches in this area became a mandatory phase in the training of all good landscape painters in Europe. This weekend I show some of the best examples of these exercises undertaken early in the careers of some of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century, from Valenciennes who started it, to Corot and Böcklin.

It was the co-founders of landscape painting in Europe, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (c 1600-1682), who started painting the Roman Campagna, from about 1624 onwards. Although both were born in France, they spent almost their whole careers based in Rome, where they went out and sketched in front of the motif. They then used those studies to assemble composite idealised landscapes for their studio oil paintings, leaving little trace of their original sketches.

It was Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), another pioneer French landscape artist who worked for many years in Rome, who first recommended to the young Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) that he should follow this practice by painting oil sketches en plein air in the Campagna. In about 1782 Valenciennes started to amass his personal image library of sketches of the Roman countryside, and when he returned to France in 1785 he used those for his studio paintings.

One of the finest and the best-known of all Valenciennes’ oil sketches is this showing Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees reputedly from an earlier visit in 1780. This shows a Renaissance villa now in the centre of the city of Rome, although here its park setting makes it look as if it is out in the country. It was built in 1506-10 for a banker, and appropriately contains superb frescoes by Raphael and others. It is now owned by the state and most is open to visitors.

View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines is a superb view of what’s known as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli, again in central Rome. This is on the top of the Campidoglio, and affords the view over the city appearing behind the pine on the right. It’s situated close to the Forum.

This untitled sketch shows a different view over the city.

Several of these surviving oil sketches are brilliant studies in the effects of light, such as Rome: Houses and a Domed Church above.

I’m not sure if anyone has identified the buildings shown in Rooftops in the Shadows, but suspect that this too is close to the centre of Rome, perhaps on one of its hills. Is this the first plein air painting of washing on the line?

Around forty years later, John Constable sketched clouds and weather in what he called ‘skying’. Here’s one of Valenciennes’ groundbreaking sketches from the early 1780s, in Rome: Study of Clouds. He wasn’t the first plein air painter by any means, nor the first to make sky studies, but it was he who established the practice among landscape artists, both in his direct teaching and in his book published in 1800.

The Louvre has most of Valenciennes’ surviving oil sketches, but by no means all of them. This superb Italian Landscape is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has another of his sky sketches, this Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, in Ohio, has this magnificent View of Rome, which I think compares with the Villa Farnese above in its quality. Notable here is the depiction of the clouds of dust and smoke rising from the streets of the city, which surely qualify it as an ‘impression’.

Ovid closed Book Twelve of his Metamorphoses with the death of the great Greek warrior Achilles at Troy. As was customary, his arms and armour were then to be passed on to a successor. As they had been made specially for him by the god Vulcan (Hephaestus), they were particularly sought-after. Two contenders emerged, Ajax the Great and Ulysses. Agamemnon therefore summoned his leading warriors to determine who was to be given these unique arms and armour.

Ovid uses the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses as a means of quickly summarising some of the action that had taken place in the war against Troy up to this moment.

Ajax puts his case first. He claims that, when Hector tried to set fire to the Greek fleet, it was he who stayed to fight the Trojans. He mentions that Ulysses was late joining the combat, as his rival had feigned madness, but he had been there from the start. When his colleague Philoctetes was dying, Ulysses had abandoned him to die alone. Ajax even had to save Ulysses on the battlefield, and finally he says that he needed a new shield as his current one was worn out with fighting, but Ulysses’ shield had barely been used.

Ajax concludes by proposing that the two should settle the matter in a fight, in which he feels Ulysses would stand no chance. This elicits applause from the surrounding crowd.

Ulysses doesn’t play to that gallery, but when he steps up, he delivers an eloquent argument to the leaders who are to make the decision. He says that he found Achilles hiding on the island of Scyros, and brought him to the war, so can claim Achilles’ successes as his. It was he who convinced Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigenia in the first place, so enabling the thousand ships of the Greek fleet to sail on Troy. He had worked hard at diplomatic solutions during the first nine years of the war, when Ajax had done nothing. He had also convinced both Agamemnon and Ajax not to abandon the campaign.

Ulysses had killed a Trojan spy, Dolon, and unlike Ajax had been wounded in battle. He also denies Ajax’s claim to have saved the fleet from fire, arguing that had been Patroclus in disguise. Ulysses had later carried Achilles’ dead body from the battlefield, and will recover that of Philoctetes.

To emphasise that, at least in Ovid’s world of Metamorphoses, it is words that carry greater weight than deeds, Achilles’ armour is awarded to Ulysses.

Ajax’s response is sudden and shocking: he literally falls on his sword, and like Hyacinthus before, his blood is turned into the purple hyacinth flower, its leaves marked with the letters AI, both the start of Ajax’s name and a cry of grief.

This, created by the ‘Taleides Painter’ in about 520 BCE, shows the warriors being held apart as they vie for the arms and armour.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Just a year or two later, Ajax’s suicide appeared prominently in one of Nicolas Poussin’s greatest narrative paintings: The Empire of Flora.

Poussin painted this in early 1631 for someone named Valguarnera, who turned out to be a thief of uncut diamonds, whose prosecution in court enables its unusually precise dating. At that time it was simply known as Spring. It’s set in a garden, with trees in the left background, a flower-laden system of pergolas, a large water feature, and dancing putti. In this are a series of well-known characters, one of whom is Ajax, shown in the act of falling on his sword.

Poussin has already used the purple hyacinth for the death of Hyacinthus, so here places under Ajax a white carnation which will shortly turn blood red.

Ovid races through the final destruction of Troy and its nobility: the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax, Hector’s young son, who is thrown from one of the city’s towers.

There are many paintings showing the sacking and destruction of Troy, of which my favourite, for its truly apocalyptic vision, is this, attributed to Gillis van Valckenborch.

The story of Astyanax is a relatively recent addition, and probably developed well after 700 BCE.

The clearest narrative painting showing this is Edouard-Théophile Blanchard’s winning entry for the Prix de Rome in 1868, The Death of Astyanax. It breaks convention in depicting Neoptolemus, Achilles’ vicious son, as a North African. Given that Achilles was the king of Thessaly, in central Greece, that seems a stretch of the imagination. Andromache pleads on her knees with the warrior to spare her son, her left hand vainly trying to prevent him from being slung from the wall. Two men cower in fear in the background. Two of Troy’s famous towers are shown, but there is no smoke or other evidence of a sacking in progress, neither is there any sign of King Priam.

Georges Rochegrosse enjoyed great success at the Salon in 1883 with Andromache, a huge and gruesome painting nearly nine metres (27 feet) high. She is at the centre, being restrained by four Greeks prior to her abduction by Neoptolemus. Her left arm points further up the steps, to a Greek warrior in black armour holding the infant Astyanax, as he takes him to the top, where another Greek is shown in silhouette, to murder him. There is death and desolation around the foot of the steps: a small pile of severed heads, a jumble of living and dead, and the debris of the sacking.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre won the Prix de Rome in 1861 with his Death of Priam; Georges Rochegrosse was later to become one of his students. A thoroughly conventional and Spartan Neoptolemus is just about to swing his sword at the prostrate figure of King Priam, who is lying on the floor by the altar to Zeus. Priam looks up at his killer, knowing that he has only seconds to live. Behind Neoptolemus is another body, presumably that of Priam’s son Polites. To the right, in the darkness behind, Queen Hecuba tries to comfort other Trojans. At the left, a young Trojan is trying to sneak away, back into the burning city, with smoke twisting its way into the dark sky.

If there’s one thing sure to put the fear of God into someone it’s a nearby bolt of lightning. One of the most understandable associations of lightning is thus with deities, particularly those who are as swift to anger and avenge as a sudden thunderstorm. In the myths of classical Greece and Rome, that could only mean Zeus or Jupiter, whose bundle of thunderbolts has even survived into computer technology.

Jan Cossiers’ impressive Jupiter and Lycaon from about 1640 shows Jupiter’s eagle vomiting thunderbolts at Lycaon, who is hurrying away as he is being transformed into a wolf, becoming the prototype for the werewolf of the future. These thunderbolts resemble arrows with shafts that zigzag like lightning in the sky, and are preserved today in the symbol used for Thunderbolt.

Tintoretto’s Jupiter and Semele (1545) shows an early moment in the myth of the mortal woman who was raped by the god, then destroyed by his thunderbolts when in late pregnancy. She reclines naked under a red tent. Jupiter has evidently just revealed himself, and rolls of cloud are rushing out from him. There are thunderbolt flames licking at Semele’s tent, and around the clouds surrounding Jupiter, but no sign of them touching Semele yet.

The myth of Philemon and Baucis also revolves around Jupiter visiting mortals, this time in innocuous human form and in company with Mercury. After the elderly couple have entertained the two gods, they go outside and ascend a mountain while the land below becomes flooded.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis (c 1625?) is a dramatic landscape with storm-clouds building over the hills, bolts of lightning, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, as they’re being taken to safety from the rising flood by Jupiter and Mercury.

Richard Wilson’s Destruction of Niobe’s Children from 1760 is a classical history-in-landscape, with a bolt of lightning in the centre far distance, a chiaroscuro sky, and rough sea below. Wilson shows this myth when Apollo is still killing Niobe’s sons. The god is at the top of a steep bank on the left, with Niobe among her children down below.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover. She is clearly distraught.

The apocalyptic British painter John Martin told the semi-historical story of The Destruction of Tyre in this relatively small painting of 1840. Tyre was the great Phoenician port on the Mediterranean coast, claimed to have been the origin of navigation and sea trade. The prophet Ezekiel (chapter 26) foretold that one day, many nations would come against Tyre, would put the city under siege, break her walls down, that the fabric of the city would be cast into the sea, and it would never be rebuilt. Martin brings the forces of nature in to help destroy the port, with a storm great enough to sink many vessels, leaving their prows floating like sea monsters. In the distance is his standard lightning bolt.

Poussin used the great flood in Genesis as the underlying narrative in his late painting of Winter (c 1660-64), from his series of the four seasons. Lightning crackles through the sky as a few survivors try to escape the rising waters.

In Norse mythology it’s the god Thor who wields the thunderbolts. Mårten Eskil Winge’s painting of Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) shows this lesser-known battle in rich detail, including the two goats drawing the god’s chariot, and lightning bolts playing around his mighty hammer, the cause of thunder.

In Dante’s Inferno, when the author visits Hell with Virgil as his guide, there’s a lightning strike where souls are being ferried across to eternal torment. As the pair are trying to convince the ferryman Charon to take them both across, there is a violent gust of wind, a red bolt of lightning, and Dante becomes unconscious. This is shown in Alexander Litovchenko’s painting of Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx from 1861.

In John Martin’s 1820 painting of the witches scene from William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, three witches materialise from a swirl of mist and lightning bolts on the left, and Macbeth and Banquo appear surprised at their sudden arrival. Winding around the shores of the distant lake is the huge army, and Martin has turned the Scottish Highlands into rugged Alpine scenery as an indication of the much greater outcome of this meeting.

Tomorrow I’ll show a range of landscape paintings featuring lightning.

In a complete contrast to the death of Orpheus, the opening myth in Book Eleven of the Metamorphoses, Ovid continues with two lighter and humorous tales about King Midas.

Once Bacchus had turned the murderous Bacchantes into an oak wood, he left the scene and wandered to the River Pactolus. As was usual, the god was in the company of his friends, although Silenus was absent until he was retrieved by King Midas. To celebrate the return of Silenus, Bacchus invited the king to ask for whatever he wanted as a boon. Midas responded by wishing that everything he touched was turned to gold.

That wish was granted, and at first Midas was delighted and amazed with his new power. He turned a twig to gold, then a stone, a lump of earth, ears of wheat, and an apple. When he put his hands into running water, it too flowed gold. But when he tried to eat, the food he touched turned to gold before he could put it into his mouth, so too the wine that he was going to drink. Midas admitted to Bacchus how his boon was proving such a disaster, and pleaded for his power to be removed. Bacchus told him to go and wash his crime away in the headwaters of the River Pactolus, which coloured that river and its sands gold from contact with the king.

Walter Crane’s book illustration of King Midas with his Daughter, published in 1893, seems to be one of the few works telling this directly. It shows the hapless king, surrounded by all the gold objects he has touched, with his daughter dead on his knee, cold and gold.

Nicolas Poussin (probably) painted a remarkable and subtle work showing Midas Washing Himself in the Source of the Pactolus in 1627. Midas is almost out of sight at the left, but his touchmark gold is seen on the wreaths crowning the others present, and glowing on the nose of rock above them.

Having told us that unusual story in which one of the mortal characters performs all the transformations, albeit with the aid of a god, and accounting for natural gold in a river, Ovid moves on to the less known myth of Midas and a music contest. Despite similarities with that between Apollo and Marsyas, this has a humorous rather than gruesome ending.

Having developed a real loathing for riches, Midas led an outdoor life with the god Pan, but continued to do stupid things. Pan sang and played his pipes, making music he claimed was even better than that of the god Apollo, a boast that resulted in a contest between them, with Tmolus as the judge.

Pan played first, then Apollo, and inevitably Tmolus gave his verdict in favour of Apollo’s lyre, so Midas took exception to that, considering it unjust. Apollo responded by transforming the king’s ears into those of an ass, forcing him to hide them with a purple turban to spare him the laughter they caused. A servant who came to cut the king’s hair witnessed his secret, and told it to the earth in a hole that he dug. A grove grew where that hole had been, and when the south wind blew, the grove whispered the secret of the king’s ears.

Domenichino included The Judgement of Midas as part of the superb frescoes he and his workshop painted in the Villa Aldobrandini in 1616-18. Midas stands proud in his folly, his ass’s ears plain to see, with Apollo and Pan on each side. Amazingly, seven chalk drawings made for this have survived, and are in the British Royal Collection.

This jewel of a painting by Hendrick de Clerck, showing The Contest Between Apollo and Pan was painted in about 1620, just after Domenichino’s frescoes. Pan holds his pipes and dances at the right, and Apollo is seen bowing an early form of violin just to the left of centre. Between them are Tmolus, the judge next to Apollo, and Midas, with his ass’s ears. Seven Graces are also present, and Minerva is talking to Apollo.

A few years later Nicolas Poussin (probably) painted his version of Midas and Bacchus (1629-30), showing a different group. The centre trio are, from the left, Apollo, Pan (with his pipes), and King Midas, with fairly regular ears. At the far left, Bacchus has nodded off at the table, presumably from his customary excess of wine. In front could be Venus, perhaps, and there are sundry figures scattered, including two putti wrestling with a black and white goat.

Émile Lévy’s painting of The Judgement of Midas was completed in 1870, and is as clean and uncluttered as Crane’s later illustration. Apollo stands in disdain. Seated with his ass’s ears and a facile smile all over his face is King Midas, who is passing a gold laurel crown, a reference to his earlier golden touch, to Pan, who holds his pipes aloft in victory.