Now debased by hyperbole and its association with drugs, ecstasy was intended to denote a trance-like state normally attained in two contrasting contexts: religion, and physical pleasure. This week I show how artists have depicted this intense emotional experience, starting today with paintings of Christian religious ecstasy.

This is a state most widely attributed to followers of Jesus Christ, particularly Mary Magdalene, and in paintings appears in the Renaissance when facial expression and body language became acceptable in art. Mary Magdalene is the subject of a tangle of legends, most of them the result of conflation, and many of them bizarre or outlandish. Paintings of her in religious ecstasy appear to have arisen from her penitence and mourning.

Elisabetta Sirani’s Penitent Magdalene is a powerful painting in which Mary’s eyes are closed in an understated ecstasy, despite the vision of Christ crucified on the left.

In Artemisia Gentileschi’s portrait of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy from 1613-20, her mouth and eyes are closed and her head thrown back as she directs her unseeing gaze to heaven.

The story of the conversion of Saul into Saint Paul does at least have a textual basis in the Acts of the Apostles, but the received account proved a difficult compositional problem in visual art.

Domenico Morelli’s Conversion of Saint Paul from 1876 tries a novel solution, and is perhaps the most successful. Accepting the contradictory demands, he puts Paul in a brilliant light, showing its origin in the heavens, but has him face away from it. Now blinded by that light, Paul looks with unseeing eyes of revelatory ecstasy towards the viewer, his right arm and hand outstretched.

The life of Saint Cecilia is almost unknown, and she isn’t reputed to have undergone any notable ecstasy. However, that didn’t stop the event from being celebrated in paint.

Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, painted between 1513-14, is one of his masterpieces, and probably secured the popularity of Saint Cecilia as the patron saint of music and musicians. Beside her are, from the left, Saints Paul, John the Evangelist (patron saint of the church for which this painting was destined), Augustine, who holds a crosier, and Mary Magdalene. Signs of her ecstasy are limited.

Andrés de la Concha’s later painting of Saint Cecilia from 1570-1610 shows her in more obvious ecstasy, and playing a substantial pipe organ, with angelic instrumentalists in the clouds above.

After Mary Magdalene, the best-known Christian religious figure who has been painted in ecstasy is Joan of Arc.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably from around 1850, is a composite of different episodes from her visions and life: Joan is clearly older than thirteen, and isn’t in her father’s garden, but apparently spinning while tending his sheep. In the distance, a town is burning, referring either to the war being waged by the English, or one of the actions in which Joan became involved. Instead of her eyes being closed, they’re wide open, and her arms tensed against her lower leg.

It’s Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s undated portrait of Joan of Arc that captures her in fullest ecstasy, with a rainbow behind her.

When the French Naturalist Luc-Olivier Merson was in Italy, he concentrated on religious and historical paintings, some of which are almost phantasmagoric in content. The Vision from 1872 combines an altered image of the Crucifixion with that of a nun in an apparent ecstasy, and an angelic musical trio. It’s strongly suggestive of the much later paintings of Surrealists, particularly those of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).

It wasn’t that long ago that it was most unusual to go out without wearing a hat. Although they’ve made something of a comeback in recent decades, in much of the world they’re still far from popular unless it’s unusually cold. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show a selection where reading the hats can be useful. However, I avoid two other types of headgear that commonly appear in art, as they’ve been covered elsewhere: helmets and halos.

People have put hats on their head since long before recorded history. Some distinctive forms of hat have unusual histories, and puzzling representations in art. Among the many quirks in the amazing paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are figures in or wearing funnels.

Their origin goes back to the Jewish diaspora of the Middle Ages, when Ashkenazi Jews (in particular) migrated to northern Europe, from about 800 CE. Predominantly Christian powers sought to make visible signs to distinguish Jews, and to a lesser extent Muslims, from local Christians, and for many centuries the migrants were persecuted, confined to Jewish ghettos, and generally kept in isolation as much as possible.

One common discriminatory technique employed in much of northern Europe was to require Jews to wear distinctive hats. This played on religious requirements for Jews to cover their heads, and the fact that most people wore hats when outdoors. The patterns of Jewish hat most often recorded are pointed or conical, and some have highly distinctive ‘bobbles’ at the top.

This detail from the centre panel of Bosch’s Haywain Triptych from about 1510-16 shows some unusual headgear probably derived from the appearance of the Jewish hat.

They’re also to be seen in more recent historically accurate depictions of the Middle Ages, as shown by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in the right of his wonderful large history painting of Valdemar Atterdag Holding Visby to Ransom, 1361 (1882). There’s a rich range of military helmets, and one obvious conical hat being worn by a Jew, seen in the detail below.

In time, conical hats remained visible signs of discrimination. Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows the range of hats worn by children, and at the far right a dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

As with all forms of clothing and personal decoration, hats have long been objects of fashion, used by individuals to distinguish and adorn, and feed their personal vanity. One of the best examples of this is in Bartholomäus Strobel’s long panoramic view of the Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist at Herod’s Banquet from about 1630-33.

Gathered in this grand banquet are many ranks of nobility wearing contemporary dress with an astonishing range of headgear, from armoured helmets to feathery confections. At the far right, the executioner stands by John’s headless corpse, a large pool of bright blood on the ground where its head once lay. A young woman (who might be Salome) looks up to heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, while an older woman (presumably Herodias) chats with the executioner.

During the English Civil War of 1642-51, hats assumed an even greater importance, to distinguish the two sides, so-called Cavaliers and Roundheads.

William Frederick Yeames’ And when did you last see your Father? indicates this in the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title, for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act that’s bringing anguish to his sisters and mother.

Not to be outdone by their subjects, Kings and their bishops had to have their own hats in the form of crowns and mitres.

Probably the most famous depiction of any major coronation is that of Raphael and his workshop in this fresco of the Coronation of Charlemagne from 1514-15, with its serried ranks of mitres and just the one crown to rule them all. The rows of bishops here wear what is the exact opposite of the monks’ bare tonsured heads.

It didn’t take long for the church and other organisations to express rank and superiority in subtle variations of hat.

Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 pays particular attention to the surface textures of the fabrics. Three quite distinct fabrics are shown in the cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta on his head, the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), and the luxuriant folds of his white rochet (vestment). In that scarlet biretta is great power.

Some well-known characters in paintings are instantly recognisable by their hat, in this case the Florentine poet Dante, shown below with Virgil as they are being ferried in the Inferno.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted this Barque of Dante, one of his finest narrative works, showing Dante and Virgil crossing a stormy river Acheron in Charon’s small boat. Dante is inevitably wearing his signature red chaperon. This had evolved before 1200 as a hooded short cape, and developed into variants that remained popular until becoming unfashionable in about 1500. For his part, Virgil wears a laurel wreath honouring an epic poet of his stature.

Some of these ancient hats have been perpetuated in formal dress, such as that worn by academics for ceremonial.

In Jean Béraud’s undated The Thesis of Madeleine Brès or The Doctoral Jury he shows us one of the early woman doctoral students defending her thesis before the academic jury, who are wearing what might now appear to be fancy dress hats. At the time this was a major landmark in the improvements in women’s rights, and the archaic headwear serves to emphasise that change.

Finally, hats aren’t always good signs, but can signify the sinister and worse. Although most of us associate the silk top hat with elegant opulence, in its day it gained some dark associations.

Jean-Louis Forain’s Dancer and Admirer Behind the Scenes from 1903 whispers its disturbing message of the association between the top hat and white tie, and under-age prostitution that was rife at the time among dancers of the Paris ballet. It’s not just the hat, but the context in which it’s worn.

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.

Curtains, drapes of fabric suspended from rails or lines, have been around a long time, but have only recently become popular for providing an internal screen for windows. Although they have other purposes in paintings, they’re primarily used to conceal or to reveal when drawn back. Unusually, they can be depicted as part of the content of a picture, or added to it as a deception, a trompe l’oeil, to fool the viewer into thinking the curtain isn’t in the picture, but is real.

It was Raphael who was probably the first painter to attempt a trompe l’oeil using curtains, in his Sistine Madonna from 1512-13.

Now recognised as one of Raphael’s greatest and most important paintings, it was donated by Pope Julius II to the Benedictine basilica of San Sisto in Piacenza. The two saints shown are Saint Sixtus II and Saint Barbara, whose relics were preserved there. The Madonna and saints are painted superbly, but it’s the rest of the image that is most fascinating. The two cherubs with tousled hair at its foot are gentle touches of humour for a congregation as they looked at this image.

But Raphael’s visual feat is the curtains. He was by now confident that his realism was sufficient to pull off a trompe l’oeil, and fool the viewer into thinking that they were looking at a painting behind real curtains, at least until they got close. Having fooled them once, they’re now more receptive to the image beyond the curtains.

Those curtains also have theological significance: they mark the separation between the physical and spiritual worlds. As they are painted and not real, though, access through them is always open. No one can come along, draw them closed, and stop the ordinary person from accessing Christ. In a world where almost everything else, apart from air, was heavily controlled, this was and remains an empowering message.

Curtains are bold moves in some other religious paintings, including Oleksandr Murashko’s breathtaking Annunciation from 1907-08. Apparently, he was first inspired to paint this when he saw a girl part light curtains to enter his house from the terrace outside, and saw a parallel with the entry of the Archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation.

Their role in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin from 1848–9 is less convincing. This contains some archaic devices, such as the gilt and lettered halos, and an oddly-proportioned angel, but shows what Rossetti envisaged might have been the pictorial reality of the Virgin Mary during her youth. She works on embroidery with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine. Those are shown realistically with an abundance of symbolic objects, but the curtains seem merely a background.

A curtain formed from an outsized handkerchief is concealing in Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea – A Deception (c 1822). This was a visual criticism of the small-minded attitude to the display of paintings of nudes at the time.

With curtains concealing what shouldn’t be seen, they provide a means for the voyeur to peep through them.

The story of Susanna (or Shoshana) and the Elders is told in the Old Testament book of Daniel, chapter 13, and centres on voyeurism, blackmail, and justice. Susanna was a beautiful married woman who was bathing in her garden one afternoon, having dismissed her servants. Two lustful elders spied on her, and as she returned to her house they stopped her, and threatened that, unless she agreed to have sex with them, they would claim that she had met her lover in the garden. Being virtuous, Susanna refused their blackmail, and was promptly arrested, charged with promiscuity, and awaited her execution.

It was only after the intervention of the young prophet Daniel that the elders’ conspiracy was revealed, Susanna was acquitted of the charge, and the elders executed instead. Lovis Corinth’s early Susanna Bathing from 1890 adopts a traditional approach, where Susanna is seen in the flesh, being spied on by a peeping elder from behind a curtain.

Pedro Américo’s Faust and Gretchen from 1875-80 uses this in the context of the seduction of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust. The shadowy figure of Mephistopheles is eavesdropping behind the curtain at the right, and white lilies, a symbol of her virginity, lie fallen on the floor.

While peeping is implicitly non-consensual and unwelcome, curtains can also be used for revelation.

One of Millais’ last paintings, before his death the following year, was Speak! Speak! (1895), which is also one of his most enigmatic. Millais’ son reported that this scene is set in ancient Rome. The young man had spent much of the night reading through the letters of his lost love. At dawn, the curtains were parted to reveal her, dressed for her bridal night, gazing upon him with sad but loving eyes. The title of the painting is therefore the words that he said to her spectre.

The mere presence of curtains denotes separation, particularly that between performers and their spectators.

Antoine Watteau adds a scarlet curtain both for colour and as the conventional separator between The Italian Comedians (1720) and their audience.

Ludwig Knaus shows the scene Behind the Curtain of a small itinerant circus in 1880. Performers were often colourful in both their costume and character, with many incongruities, such as the clown seen in the centre feeding a baby, and looking straight at the viewer. Their curtain is also rough and ready.

Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’s Fable from 1939 refers to Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825), who wrote the first biography of George Washington shortly after the latter’s death. This contains several apocryphal stories, including the legend of the cherry tree, which didn’t appear until its fifth edition.

According to this, when Washington was six, he was given custody of a hatchet, which he used to cut through the bark of a superb young English cherry tree. When this was discovered the next day, Washington’s father asked the boy if he knew who had killed the cherry tree, to which George Washington admitted his guilt, saying that he couldn’t tell a lie. His father was overjoyed at his son’s honesty. Sadly, the story is generally considered to be a fabrication.

Wood’s ingenious treatment places Parson Weems at the right, holding open a stage curtain, as if narrating the story to the viewer.