Facial expressions are a rich source of information about our emotions, state of mind, and when we are in pain. While heroes always grin and bear it, and sometimes the most unlikely person appears remarkably stoical, the grimace of pain is an important feature in some narrative paintings. In some this has become so uniform as to become a stereotype.

In Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes from about 1598-9, he tells most of this story in facial expressions alone. Judith’s combines anxiety with repulsion, revealing her ambivalence in killing her victim, while the expression of her aged maid is even stronger in its grim determination. Holofernes’ face is grimaced in shocked agony, just as death is freezing it in place, and his arms show a futile effort to press himself up from his bed. The artist is believed to have used a Roman courtesan, Fillide Melandroni, as the model, and to have recalled what he had seen earlier at the public execution of Beatrice Cenci.

Jacob Jordaens’ Prometheus Bound from about 1640, features an almost identical expression on the face of Prometheus as an eagle feeds from his liver.

Later rottenpockets in Dante’s Inferno contain thieves, those who gave fraudulent counsel, those who sowed discord, and falsifiers and imposters of various kinds. In Joseph Anton Koch’s fresco in the Casa Massimo, Rome, thieves are attacked repeatedly by snakes and grimace in their agony.

This expression continued well into nineteenth century history painting, in Jules-Élie Delaunay’s Ixion Plunged into Hades from 1876. This shows Ixion writhing in agony in the Underworld, as he is bound to a wheel by snakes, his expression still conforming to Caravaggio’s Holofernes.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus the centaur is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, and the centaur’s face has the same open mouth grimace of pain, now a full three centuries since Caravaggio.

Some still found scope for more studied and original expressions of pain.

Rembrandt’s early painting of The Operation, from his late teens in 1624-25, shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head. This is most likely to have been the lancing of a boil or removal of a tumour from the scalp or pinna of the ear. In the absence of any form of anaesthesia, this visibly resulted in considerable pain for the long-suffering patient, whose eyes and mouth are closed, and his arms are tensed with fists clenched.

Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows physical punishment in a contemporary school. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, as he is already wiping tears from his eyes. A girl in the middle of the canvas is grimacing in sympathy.

I finish with two animal curiosities.

A Courtesan Pulling the Ear of a Cat, Allegory of the Sense of Touch was painted in Jan van Bijlert’s workshop around 1625-70, and is clearly composed on the theme of touch. A florid courtesan plays with her cat, pulling its ear, resulting in its grimace of pain and anger.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1878, August Friedrich Schenk’s Anguish, painted in 1876-78, shows a ewe lamenting the death of her lamb in the snow, as a thoroughly menacing murder of crows assembles around the defiant mother. Although the ewe’s face isn’t contorted, her open mouth and visible breath cries pain and anguish.

Most religions centre their ceremonies and worship around a raised horizontal surface, a stone slab, table or platform referred to as an altar. In some pre-Christian religions altars are used for libations, the pouring out of liquid as an offering, and sacrifice. Most Christian churches use them for a collection of symbolic objects such as candles and crucifixes, and the vessels used to celebrate the Eucharist. They can be a modest alcove in a home, or the focus of a grand cathedral. In this and tomorrow’s sequel I offer some examples that are significant in the reading of paintings.

Alfred-Henri Bramtot’s painting of The Death of Demosthenes from 1879 shows the suicide by poisoning of this Greek statesman and orator. His limp body is supported from falling in front of an altar to the god Neptune. At the left edge is the characteristic altar tripod, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it. He charged his pen with poison, and used that to administer it to himself.

This surviving version of Angelica Kauffmann’s Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe in front of an altar to the goddess Diana, with Acontius behind. He holds his ingeniously inscribed apple high above her, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to drop it in front of her. Instead of the altar flame burning at the top of a tripod, it’s here shown in a carved stone slab, at the left. Behind the statue of Diana are two of her priestesses.

In the seventeenth century, Domenicus van Wijnen explored the theme of witchcraft in The Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight, set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with ‘the dark arts’, and takes place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs. Clustered in front of the altar at the right is a soldier in armour, who is looking in a mirror at the image of another, and a woman who is kneeling and holding a snake in her right hand. The surface of the altar has been prepared with bread and wine, and there is a small chimera by it.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Many artists associated with German Romantic and Symbolist movements painted groups of worshippers within ancient trees, often under similar titles to Arnold Böcklin’s Sacred Grove, from 1882. The nine figures here are shrouded in white habits indicating their religious association. On top of a stone altar is a bright flame, at which three of them are bent low and kneeling in obeisance.

Charles William Mitchell’s best-known painting is that of Hypatia, completed and exhibited in 1885. It shows a naked woman, her long tresses clasped to her right breast, leaning back against a carved stone altar, on which there is a crucifix and a bowl, on an altar cloth. She holds her left arm up, her hand open and gesturing towards a mosaic on the wall behind her, and looks anxious.

On either side of the altar are burning candles, long on tall floor-standing candlesticks. The flame of that at the left is being blown towards the altar, implying that a door to the left, in the direction of the woman’s gaze, is open.

The walls are decorated with mosaics; although the images of them shown are only fragmentary, they appear to be of religious motifs. That behind the woman shows a right foot that could be from an image of Christ crucified. A curtained door leads to a room behind the altar. Scattered on the floor are a white robe (presumably removed from the woman), a candlestick holder, and other debris.

A Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Hypatia was a pagan philosopher who headed the Neoplatonic school there. Known for her dignity and virtue, she became embroiled in a bitter feud between Orestes, Roman governor of Alexandria, and Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, over local Jewish dancing exhibitions. A fanatical Christian mob kidnapped Hypatia, took her to a Christian church, where she was stripped, tortured to death, and her body mutilated and burned.

Although Mitchell may well have been aware of the historical origin of this story, he was probably most influenced by Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, published in 1853. In that version, Hypatia is on the verge of being converted to Christianity when she is attacked by the Christian mob. She is then dragged to a Christian church, stripped naked by the mob, and torn apart under a large image of Christ. Modern criticism of the novel stresses its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

Given how common stairs are, they only rarely feature in paintings of interiors, and when they do, they’re usually glimpsed to the side or in the background rather than central to the picture. Stairs are normally constructed of a series of steps, alongside which are one or more rails for the hands to grasp, and to prevent folk from falling over the edge. Supporting that rail are vertical balusters, and together they form a balustrade or banisters.

I’ve recently shown William Frederick Yeames’ painting of the death of Amy Robsart (1877) in suspicious circumstances. On the morning of 8 September 1560, when staying at a country house near Oxford, she dismissed all her servants, and was later found dead, as shown here, with a broken neck at the foot of the stairs. In the gloom above her body is Anthony Forster, one of her husband’s men, leading his manservant down the stairs when they discover Amy’s body. Was he the cause?

A few artists have used stairs for portraits of children.

Briton Rivière’s Sympathy, from about 1878, shows a girl who has been sent to sit at the top of the stairs in disgrace, as her pet dog comforts her. The steps themselves are carpeted, and beside her is a heavy wooden balustrade. At the top of the flight is a closed door, its key dangling on a chain.

Olga Boznańska’s Portrait of Two Children on the Stairs (1898) shows siblings dressed in matching smocks, sat on a bare wooden staircase with a decorative wrought iron balustrade.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s undated Girl on Stairs has just descended this narrow winding staircase and is about to emerge from the doorway at its foot.

The most compact type of stairway short of a ladder is constructed in a spiral, with early examples dating back to around 400 BCE. These came to flourish in town houses of the Dutch Golden Age.

Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows their sinuous curves seemingly defying gravity as they rise to the storey above.

Isaac Koedijck shows another early example in his Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot (1649-50), although these seem even more impossible.

Over two centuries later, spiral stairs appeared in one of Edgar Degas’ early paintings of ballet dancers.

Degas’ Dance Class from about 1873 is an elaborately composed example of the works that were to make up half his total output. It shows well his meticulous draughtsmanship, and the strange effect of ballet dress in apparently dismembering the dancers, who become head, arms and legs with a white blur of chiffon between. This is most intense in the tangle of legs making their way down the spiral stairs at the upper left, and in the group of dancers just to the right of those. Like many modern spiral stairs, these are built of wedge-shaped steps known as winders joined in a central column, and probably cast in iron.

Grand buildings deserve grand stairs, as shown in Louis Béroud’s early painting of The Staircase of the Opéra Garnier (1877).

Finally, stairs are a recurrent feature of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of prints of an Imaginary Prison.

The Round Tower is the first plate in the first edition, with its fearsome Gothic flights of stairs.