Butterflies are now most strongly associated with their beauty, fine summer weather, and the transience of their existence. In visual art, they have other interpretations that seem strange today. This article and its sequel tomorrow try to unravel some of those, starting with oddest by far.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 might seem a strange painting in which to find butterflies. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It’s claimed that flying insects, including butterflies, were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly here appear quite incongruous.

Another early painting of butterflies is also unusual. Dosso Dossi shows the senior of the classical gods painting butterflies in a pseudo-Christian act of creation in his Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue from 1524. The underlying myth stems from a quarrel between Virtue and Fortune, a case brought by Virtue to Jupiter. But he is too busy painting the wings of butterflies, so Mercury tells her to wait before pleading her case. Jupiter’s painting is so real, like that of Apelles, that as he completes each butterfly it takes life and flies off. Behind him is a rainbow providing the brilliant colours for his painting, making it an allegory of painting as well.

Edward Poynter’s painting of Psyche in the Temple of Love from 1882 tells a story from classical mythology that has been painted with butterflies on several occasions. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract a butterfly as her attribute, although the common and prosaic small white rather than anything more exotic. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as shown by the doves in the temple behind her.

By the early nineteenth century, Europeans were travelling overseas to look for exciting new species of butterfly. Carl Spitzweg’s The Butterfly Catcher from about 1840 shows every hunter’s dream: discovering the largest, most spectacular butterflies ever seen. Compare the size of the hunter’s net with the unrealistically large butterflies in the foreground.

Winslow Homer’s Butterflies from 1878 shows a young woman hunting eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies with her net. This swallowtail species is widespread in the eastern USA, and related to the Old World swallowtail found across Europe. She’s carrying a box in which to place her specimens, in which they’d be killed, ready to mount in a glass cabinet. Collecting butterflies was considered sufficiently ladylike, because of their beauty, while less aesthetically satisfying insects such as beetles were left to male entomologists.

Sophie Anderson entered the faerie painting sub-genre with Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things from 1880. The title is taken from some verse allegedly by Charles Ede, although the only literary person of that name who I can identify was born long after this work was completed. Not only are there butterflies adorning this fairy’s hair, but she also appears to have butterfly wings.

The ephemeral lives of butterflies made them a popular candidate for vanitas paintings expressing a weariness of earthly life.

The first of those started to appear in the early sixteenth century. In Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40, an androgynous angel with butterfly wings cradles a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Those wings were modelled after the swallowtail butterfly.

A few years later, an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch painted Christ among the Doctors (c 1545), with a large butterfly settled in the foreground.

Many other paintings of butterflies simply represent their beauty.

Pisanello’s egg tempera Portrait of a Princess, showing Ginevra d’Este in 1435-49, surrounds her with flowers and four butterflies. The two on the left are red admirals, and one of the right is a swallowtail, two of the larger and more spectacular species that are abundant in southern Europe.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated A Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century, is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Jan van Os’s Flowers from about 1780 is a much later example, featuring a peacock, swallowtail and red admiral. Each would have been painted from a dead specimen in a collection; collections became popular as the Age of Enlightenment encouraged the better-educated to take an active interest in developing sciences such as entomology.

Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ended with several obscure myths that have been painted little, but Book 10 opens with one of the greatest and most enduring stories of the European canon: that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Ovid links to this through Hymen, the god of marriage, and the wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus. It was a wedding marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, just as the bride was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Among the earliest paintings of this story in the post-classical era is Jacopo da Sellaio’s superb panel showing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus from 1475-80. This is one of a series that’s now dispersed across continents. It employs multiplex narrative to show the start of the story, with Orpheus left of centre, tending a flock of sheep, as his bride is bitten by the snake. At the far right, Orpheus, with the assistance of Aristaeus, puts Eurydice’s body in a rock tomb.

One of Poussin’s most famous narrative works, Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice (c 1650-53) shows Orpheus with his lyre at the right, and Eurydice standing in white, as a snake approaches from the left. Poussin had a thing about snakes, and painted other landscapes with snakes threatening people, and his enigmatic Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). Here his normally peaceful rustic landscape is showing ominous signs of falling apart: the distant castle is on fire, with smoke billowing into the sky.

In Eurydice and the Serpent, a pastel from 1915, Ker-Xavier Roussel shows them just a moment before the bite, with the snake seen on the ground in front of her.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice is one of his early works from about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. His lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He came across Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he too would stay in the Underworld with her. He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen. Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock that he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Henri Regnault’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1865) was probably based more on the popular opera by Offenbach, first performed in 1858. Orpheus is seen at the left, his lyre in his hand, singing to the dead. Behind him, at the left edge, are two of the heads of Cerberus, who guards the entrance to the Underworld, and sat on the double throne at the upper right are Persephone, who only spends half the year in the Underworld, and Hades himself.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above could he look back, or she would be returned to the Underworld for ever.

Peter Paul Rubens’ atmospheric painting of the flight of Orpheus and Eurydice (1636-38) was made during his later years of retirement, a few years before his death. Orpheus, clutching his lyre, is leading Eurydice away from Hades and Persephone, as they start their journey back to life. He opts for an unusually real-world version of Cerberus at the bottom right corner.

Camille Corot’s Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) shows the couple as they near the light at the exit of the underworld. He is instantly recognisable by his lyre held high in front of him, and both are moving towards the right edge of the painting, the edge of the dark wood. Rather than use an abstract form to represent the underworld, Corot has used a wood, with a pool in the middle distance. Behind that are spirits of the dead, some still grieving their death.

Edward Poynter’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) takes the couple on an arduous journey, striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside. While he looks straight ahead, she seems to be struggling to keep up.

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx (1878) takes the couple further still, onto the bank of the River Styx, where Orpheus is summoning Charon the boatman to take them back across the water. He clutches her closely and still looks straight ahead, the couple bound together by the black sash of the Underworld.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did she melted away back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at empty air. She was gone.

It’s hard to know whether George Frederick Watts’ undated painting of Orpheus and Eurydice shows Orpheus embracing the dead body of Eurydice immediately after she has been bitten by the snake, or (more probably) Orpheus clutching in vain at her spirit as it melts away back into the Underworld, after he has looked back.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years shunning the company of women, despite their attraction to him, and brought shade to an exposed meadow with his singing, leading to the next myth.

The final painting in this series is Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice (c 1891), showing the bard, his ghostly lyre slung from the dead treestump behind him, lamenting the loss of Eurydice after his failed attempt to bring her back from the Underworld. Moreau painted this dark and funereal work to mark his own inconsolable grief at the death of his partner, Alexandrine Dureux.