© Marcy Rheintgen, via Associated Press
This weekend I look at two Italian duchesses, today Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Duchess of Mantua, and tomorrow her rival Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, and lover of Isabella’s husband.
Isabella d’Este was an unusually well-educated woman who became one of the best-known of all the Renaissance patrons of art. She was born to the Duke of Ferrara and his wife Eleanor of Naples in 1474, the oldest and favourite of their children. Her mother ensured she received an excellent education, even by male standards of the day, emphasising the classics including Greek and Latin. She seems to have struggled more in learning to read Latin, and in adult life received additional lessons to help her reading skills. She was particularly fond of music, singing and dancing, and learned to play several instruments including the lute and harpsichord. Her taste in music was predominantly secular.
When she was only six years old she was betrothed to Francesco, who was expected to succeed as Marquess of Mantua, a city and small province in Lombardy, about a hundred miles (160 km) from Venice. They were married by proxy ten years later, by which time the young Francesco had inherited both title and realm, which he was to rule until his death in 1519. He was also the commander-in-chief of the army of the Republic of Venice, which frequently took him away from their palace in Mantua. In 1509, he was held captive as a hostage in Venice, and wasn’t released for three years.
Although Isabella had eight children between 1493-1508, six of whom survived into adult life, a remarkably high figure for the time, her marriage was blighted by Francesco’s sexual incontinence. His most famous affair was with the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, which started in 1503, and only came to an end when Francesco contracted syphilis from his contacts with prostitutes.
In contrast, Isabella seems to have lived a virtuous life and became an accomplished statesman and diplomat, with shrewd political judgement even when dealing with the likes of Cesare Borgia. She saw Mantua promoted to a Duchy, and ruled it from the death of Francesco in 1519 until her son Federico came of age some years later. She still hankered after political involvement, and in 1527 moved to Rome. On her return to Mantua, she promoted the education of girls and finally took charge of the town of Solarolo until her death in 1539, at the age of 64.
Isabella started to collect objets d’art soon after she moved to her palace in Mantua. As far as paintings are concerned, she was foremost a collector who relied on the advice of others in the court, rather than a connoisseur in her own right. Surprisingly, her purchases had to be made from her own wealth, which was quite limited, and in times of hardship she resorted to pawning jewellery to raise funds. Her patronage concentrated mainly on music and sculpture. She was unusual for promoting women as singers and placing them in choirs. Her literary sponsorship was limited: she seems to have enjoyed swashbuckling stories of chivalry, such as those in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and was a loyal supporter of his work.
Her sponsorship and taste in paintings is largely reflected in the works she commissioned for her private study, her famous studiolo, which thankfully have been well preserved as they passed to the French Kings, and most are now in the Louvre as a result. Combined with records in her copious correspondence and a crucial inventory, her studiolo has been reconstructed in detail. Her period of collecting covered the appointments of two court painters in Mantua: Andrea Mantegna until his death in 1506, thereafter Lorenzo Costa. When Isabella was most active in collecting paintings in the early 1500s, Mantegna was around 70 years old, and Costa in his forties.
Mantegna arranged to be recommended to Isabella through her former tutor, but his first attempt to impress her with a portrait in 1493 met with a stony reception: Isabella declined it as being so badly painted that it didn’t resemble her.
Despite that discouraging start, her first commission for a painting for her study was awarded to Mantegna, for his painting of Mars and Venus, known better as Parnassus (1496-97). She had apparently grown to like his finely finished and old-fashioned tempera paintings, and the artist probably painted this largely in tempera, only for it to be repainted using oils after his death.
This 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.
It’s an unusual theme for a woman of the time to have chosen, although it has largely been interpreted with reference to a contemporary poem that seems less concerned with the underlying story of adultery exposed.
A couple of years later, Isabella returned to commission Mantegna to paint a more moralistic allegory of The Triumph of the Virtues, or Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (1499-1502), again largely in tempera. The scene is a garden with a pond, near a river meandering down to a lush valley in the distance. Inside its arched perimeter Pallas Athena, at the left with her distinctive helmet and shield, is chasing away figures representing the Vices.
At the far left is a tree representing Virtue Deserted, and to the right of Athena’s feet is the armless Vice of Idleness. Also in the pond is a centaur who carries a standing figure, usually read as Diana, on its back. At the far right is the Virtue of Prudence represented as a message from within her prison, and in the sky are the Virtues of Justice, Temperance and Fortitude.
An unusual and personal twist indicating the extent of Isabella’s involvement in this composition is Athena’s spear. Although one of her normal attributes, its head has broken off and rests on the ground. This is a reference to a broken lance that Francesco presented to Isabella following his command of the Holy League (Venetian) forces at the Battle of Fornovo in 1495.
After Leonardo da Vinci had painted The Last Supper, he visited the court at Mantua, where he made this chalk Portrait of Isabella d’Este (c 1499-1500). Isabella apparently disliked wasting time sitting for portraits, and this elegant profile is one of few known to have been made of her. Leonardo and Isabella corresponded afterwards, she inviting him to undertake commissions for her including one for a painting of Christ at the age of twelve, but he turned her offers down.
She was also unsuccessful in getting Giovanni Bellini to paint a proper commission for her. She had originally asked him in 1496 to paint an allegory, no doubt destined for her study, but by late 1502 she reluctantly wrote that she’d settle for a Nativity so long as it included Joseph, “the beasts” and Saint John the Baptist. Bellini refused to include the last of those, which she finally agreed to. His painting arrived in 1504, but that work now appears to be lost. Isabella asked Bellini a third time in 1505, promising not to hold him to any detailed description of the painting, but nothing came of that.
Isabella’s third painting was made by another artist reaching the end of his career, Pietro Perugino (1448–1523), who is believed to have taught Raphael. The latter may have been working for Perugino at the time that his former master painted The Combat of Love and Chastity in 1503, using Mantegna’s favourite medium of tempera despite Perugino’s accomplishment in oils.
Mantegna worked in Mantua, so little of Isabella’s correspondence gives insight into the process of his commissions. She had to write to Perugino, though, and there’s a trail of letters revealing how much detail she specified about this work, even supplying a drawing. Its theme is literary, as laid down in the contract by Isabella’s court poet, and shows a fight between the personifications of Love and Chastity, which may have worked well in words but doesn’t translate into visual art at all well.
It features a gamut of mythological figures in no particular order, including Apollo and Daphne, Jupiter and Europa, Polyphemus and Galatea, and Pluto and Proserpina – all couples in which the man abducted and/or raped the woman. In front is Pallas Athene about to kill Eros with a lance, and a more even match between Diana with her bow and Venus, who is singeing the huntress with a burning brand. Isabella laid out strict instructions, for example requiring that Venus, who is traditionally shown naked, was clothed. Even the owl perched in the branches of the sacred olive tree at the left was prescribed in the commission. When Perugino didn’t follow these, she protested, and on completion she wrote that it should have been better finished to set alongside her Mantegnas, and was clearly unimpressed. For this the artist was paid a mere 100 ducats.
Isabella then turned to Lorenzo Costa (1460–1535) for The Garden of the Peaceful Arts or The Crowning of a Female Poet (1504-06), painted in oil and tempera. Mantegna had originally been commissioned to paint this, but died before he could make much progress. Costa started from scratch, and under Isabella’s direction according to her poet’s literary theme produced this strange painting often known as an allegory of Isabella’s coronation, or construed as an account of Sappho’s career.
Figures identified include Diana, at the front on the right, and Cadmus, but reading this work coherently now seems impossible.
Another commission that Mantegna had started to work on before he died was completed by Costa in 1511, The Reign of Comus, again using tempera for a complex composition. Comus, ruler of a land of bacchanalia, sits talking to a near-naked Venus in the left foreground. Just to the right of the centre foreground, Nicaea is lying unconscious through alcohol, against Dionysus (Bacchus), who got her into a stupor so that he could rape her.
Under the arch is the unmistakable two-faced Janus with Hermes, apparently repelling potential newcomers to the bacchanal. In the centre is a small group of musicians, and various naked figures are cavorting in the waters behind.
Isabella is believed to have commissioned other paintings that weren’t destined for her study, including some religious works.
One surviving painting that appears to have been commissioned by Isabella but remained outside the private world of her study is by Francesco Bonsignori (1460–1519), who made this chalk study of Isabella d’Este in 1519.
Bonsignori’s painting of the Blessed Osanna Andreasi followed later that year. This beatified Mantuan woman was the daughter of a Gonzaga, who started reporting visions when she was only six. She rejected an arranged marriage and secretly took orders, becoming a Dominican tertiary. She developed stigmata, learned to read and write in a miracle, and became a mystic. She died in Mantua in 1505, and Isabella led the campaign for her veneration.
Isabella is shown in profile, kneeling at the left, with her lifelong friend Margherita Cantelma. On the right, among the Dominican nuns, is Isabella’s daughter Ippolita, one of three of her children who took holy orders.
Late additions to Isabella’s study were a pair of tempera allegories by Antonio da Correggio (1489–1534), Allegory of Vices (1529-30) above, and Allegory of Virtues (1531) below. The latter reflects a detailed commission, as it shows once again Pallas Athena holding the broken spear that Francesco had brought back from battle for Isabella.
Inevitably, her portrait was painted by Titian (1490–1576). The original version from 1523 was made from life, but in about 1536, when she was in her early sixties, she sent an old portrait made by Francia in 1511 for Titian to paint from, with suitably updated fashionable dress of the day. The result is the anachronistic Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Mantua, which flatters more than it reveals.
With few exceptions, Isabella’s commissions were very personal, so much so that their elaborate stories and allegories are now elusive. More than one of the artists who painted for her must, at some stage, have wished that she had learned to paint. Those masters were used as proxy craftsmen, to turn the words of her court poet into images for her study. No doubt she amazed distinguished guests by explaining their symbols and references when they were taken on a tour of her collection.
Isabella’s understanding of visual art was limited, her paintings fascinating, but of no consequence to the Renaissance or the history of painting. For the great masters of the day, who were changing art history by their paintings, Isabella’s commissions were to be avoided like the plague. They would have been archaic in style, stifled original creation, and could only have led to great dissatisfaction for all concerned.
Isabella d’Este was an outstanding example of what education and ability can achieve, and a great woman of any age. But as far as painting is concerned, her reputation as a great and influential patron is at best misleading.
References
Alison Cole (2016) Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power, Laurence King, ISBN 978 1 78067 740 8.
Christine Shaw (2019) Isabella d’Este, A Renaissance Princess, Routledge, ISBN 978 0 367 00247 3.
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.
Although of ancient origin, in Europe the idea of laying carpet on the floor is surprisingly recent. Woven and backed textiles resembling modern carpets appear to have originated in the Caucasian area and in Anatolia, and first made their way to western Europe with the Crusades. It was another seven centuries before Europeans realised they weren’t only intended to be hung from walls or placed on tables. Their wider adoption as floor coverings may have been limited by the difficulties in cleaning by beating them outdoors.
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Carpet Merchant (of Cairo) from 1887 shows a contemporary trading scene in almost photographic detail. Standing on and among crumpled up carpets in this corner of a souk is a group of traders and their customers, admiring one particularly fine example hanging from a balcony as they haggle over price. As an image within an image, Gérôme paints the calligraphic design of the carpet in painstaking detail.
You could easily mistake Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment for another by his contemporary Gérôme, although by this time (the period 1894-1914) Rochegrosse was often far more painterly in his style. It shows a dancer with musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords. Under her feet is a large and brilliant scarlet carpet.
Carpets were also in widespread use as floor coverings throughout Turkey and the Middle East, as shown in Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting of Reciting the Quran from 1910. At its foot is a wonderful deep blue carpet.
In Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” from 1855, the small and threadbare piece of carpet tells you more about this young mother’s financial and social status than any other object in the room.
Among the early depictions of floor carpets is James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s chinoiserie interior painted in 1863-65, which might give rise to geographical confusion.
Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is shown above and in the detail below. The model’s features are European rather than Oriental (she was actually from an Italian family), but she’s wearing a fine silk kimono and holding a fan. Behind her is a painted screen from Japan, and under her feet is a lush white and blue carpet.
This is the painting at the focal point of the lavish dining room of the London house of Frederick Richards Leyland, a shipping magnate. Whistler and Leyland fell out over changes the artist made to the original design, and Whistler was forced into bankruptcy as a result. The contents of the room were purchased in 1904, moved to the USA, and exhibited in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, from 1923.
In Giovanni Boldini’s Peaceful Days (The Music Lesson) from 1875, a younger boy sits on a vividly decorated carpet studying an epée, with a cello behind him. Judging by their dress and surroundings, these two are at least comfortably off, and certainly well-carpeted.
There’s also something indulgent and sensuous about lying back on an exotic carpet, in the way that this woman is in John William Waterhouse’s Dolce Far Niente or The White Feather Fan (1879). She’s plucking feathers from the fan and watching them rise through the air, a perfect way to while away the time, it seems.
William Merritt Chase’s paintings of his studio acted as a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art. Under her feet is a wonderful blue carpet, no doubt ready to transport her into the scenes shown in Chase’s book.
By the turn of the century, and Félix Vallotton’s disturbing domestic scenes such as Interior, Bedroom with Two Figures (1904), the prosperous were having wall-to-wall carpets fitted in their houses. The lady of the house is standing on a patterned carpet that runs under the bed, and at the left extends to the wall.
Colours and patterns soon became vibrant if not gaudy.
In Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in Bathtub from about 1938-41, the flooring dazzles, and Marthe’s brown dog has its own mat.
Eric Ravilious’ Farmhouse Bedroom (1939) overwhelms the viewer with the patterns in its flooring that contradict rather than complement its walls.
Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa was briefly popular in paintings during the first half of the nineteenth century, but was by no means his only work to have been painted. When Byron was on his Grand Tour of Europe in 1810-11, he wrote what he described as “a Turkish Tale” of The Giaour, published in 1813.
That inspired Eugène Delacroix to paint The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan in 1826. The name Giaour is based on an offensive Turkish word for infidel, and Byron’s poem describes the revenge killing of Hassan by the Giaour for killing the latter’s lover. After their deadly combat, the Giaour is filled with remorse and retreats into a monastery. This painting was rejected by the Salon of 1827, but Delacroix went on to paint later versions.
Nearly a decade later, in 1835, Delacroix returned to Byron’s poem, and painted this version of the Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. This time he had the benefit of watching Moroccan cavalry manoeuvres, and a commission from the Comte de Mornay. The resulting composition is radically different from his earlier version, and although Mornay seems to have been pleased with the result, the critics remained unimpressed.
In May 1810, Lord Byron, then only twenty-two, swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) between Abydos and Sestos, in a recreation of the myth of Hero and Leander. Three years later, the poet used the same Abydos as the setting of his heroic poem of The Bride of Abydos (1813). This was the literary basis for four of Eugène Delacroix’s paintings.
The young and beautiful Zuleika had been promised by her old father Giaffir to an old man, but fell in love with her supposed half-brother Selim. The couple elope to a cavern by the sea, where he reveals that he’s the leader of a group of pirates who are waiting to hear his pistol shot as a signal to them. When Giaffir and his men approach, Selim fires his pistol, but is killed by Giaffir, and Zuleika dies of sorrow.
Delacroix’s Bride of Abydos from 1843-49 shows the moment of climax as Selim is preparing himself to defend against Giaffir’s attack.
Although Delacroix was probably the painter most frequently influenced by Byron’s poetic stories, he was by no means the only one. In 1816-17, Byron wrote what many consider to be an autobiographical poem, Manfred, that inspired Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in musical compositions.
This followed Byron’s ostracisation over alleged incest with his half-sister. Its hero Manfred is tortured by guilt in relation to the death of his beloved Astarte. Living in the Bernese Alps, where Byron was staying at the time, Manfred casts spells to summon seven spirits to help him forget and sublimate his guilt. As the spirits cannot control past events, he doesn’t achieve his aim, and cannot even escape by suicide. In the end, he dies.
John Martin’s watercolour of Manfred and the Alpine Witch (1837) shows Manfred conjuring a witch from a flooded cave in the mountains. Unusually light and sublime but not apocalyptic, it is perhaps one of Martin’s most beautiful works, and reminiscent of Turner’s alpine paintings.
In 1821, when Byron was living in Ravenna, Italy, with his lover Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, he composed a historical tragedy as a play in blank verse, Sardanapalus. This relies on an account in the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian, and Mitford’s History of Greece, telling of the last of the great Assyrian monarchs, who ruled a large empire from his palaces in Nineveh. However, a rebellion grew against him, and the story reaches its climax in the fifth and final act of Byron’s play.
At the time, the river Euphrates was in high flood, which had torn down part of the protective walls of the city of Nineveh. Once the river started to fall again, this left no defences against the rebels. Their leader offered to spare Sardanapalus his life if he would surrender, but he refused, asking for a cease-fire of just an hour. During that period he had a funeral pyre built under his throne. He released his last faithful officer to flee for his life, and climbed the pyre. As he did so, his favourite wife Myrrha threw a lighted torch into the pyre, and climbed up after him, where they both burned to death.
Delacroix painted two versions of this famous work: the huge original in 1827, now hanging in the Louvre, and a smaller more painterly replica in 1844, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Delacroix departs considerably from Byron’s narrative to invite us to see Sardanapalus in a different light. In this, the original version, his brushwork is tight and the huge canvas intricately detailed.
When he painted this smaller replica seventeen years later, it wasn’t intended to please the Salon, and he was far more painterly in its facture; Instead of showing Sardanapalus and Myrrha mounting the funeral pyre, Delacroix places the king on a huge divan, surrounded by the utter chaos and panic as his guards massacre wives and courtesans.
The last and greatest of Lord Byron’s works to be painted by the masters is Don Juan, an epic poem that he started writing in 1819 and left incomplete on his death in 1824. Based on traditional Spanish folk stories of the life of an incorrigible womaniser, Byron portrays his hero as a victim easily seduced by women. Despite its seventeen cantos, the attention of painters has concentrated on events in the second canto, after Don Juan’s first love affair with a married woman. As a consequence of that, Don Juan’s mother sends her errant son to travel in Europe, and that results in shipwreck, from which he is the sole survivor.
For Eugène Delacroix, the shipwreck became an obsession, linking back to the masterwork of his mentor Théodore Géricault, The Wreck of the Medusa (1818–19).
In Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan from 1840, Don Juan and his companions have run out of food, so draw lots to determine who will be sacrificed to feed the other survivors.
At some time prior to the Salon of 1847, Delacroix revisited the shipwreck in his Castaways in a Ship’s Boat (c 1840-47). The boat has shrunk in size and the number of survivors is falling steadily.
Ford Madox Brown’s watercolour of The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée from 1869-70 shows Haidée, a Greek pirate’s daughter, and her maid Zoe discovering the apparently lifeless body of the hero on a beach. Inevitably, Don Juan falls in love with Haidée, despite them having no common language. Her father takes a dislike to Don Juan, and has him put into slavery.
In this weekend’s two articles, I look at paintings of the poems of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Lord Byron, known best for his gripping tales and the epic Don Juan. Today I concentrate on the story of Mazeppa, a Cossack who became Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the seventeenth century, and tomorrow I’ll cover several other poems including Don Juan.
Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) was a figure in history who became a ‘Prince’ of the Holy Roman Empire, one of Europe’s largest landowners, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and a patron of the arts. In spite of those achievements, he’s best remembered for his youthful indiscretion with Madam Falbowska at the Polish royal court, that almost led to his early death.
Over time, fact became embroidered in its retelling into the legend of an affair with a Countess married to an older Count, who punished the young Mazeppa (who also acquired an extra ‘p’ in the process) by strapping him naked to the back of a wild horse, and setting the horse loose. That legend gained sufficient credence for it to be recorded in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731), where it seems to have caught Lord Byron’s imagination when he was seeking inspiration for a narrative poem. What emerged from his pen was further embroidery, and proved almost instantly successful with some of the great painters of the day.
Byron’s Mazeppa, published in 1819, served as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa, and had an affair with a Countess Theresa. Much of the poem details the suffering and endurance of Mazeppa during his long journey on the back of the horse. Most significantly, Byron’s account was immediately translated into French.
Théodore Géricault was probably the first artist to be inspired by that French translation, and within a few months had painted his first study.
Géricault’s initial Mazeppa is a nocturne from about 1820. The wild horse has just swum across a river at night, and is now climbing up the bank. The viewer is almost guaranteed to wince in sympathy with the young Cossack’s cold and pain.
In what must have been one of his last paintings, Géricault revisited the same scene in Mazeppa from 1823, the year before his death.
The following year, when his friend and mentor Géricault died, the young Eugène Delacroix painted Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, showing the Cossack’s mount on its last legs.
Two years later, in 1826, Horace Vernet painted Mazeppa and the Wolves, a different scene with an ingenious composition and the added danger of a pack of wolves lurking in ambush. This is one of many paintings showing a horse galloping with both fore and hind legs simultaneously in full extension, a position demonstrated later in the century by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) to be fictional.
A former signwriter, John Frederick Herring’s talent was recognised during the 1820s, and he painted portraits of racehorses. I don’t know when he saw Vernet’s painting, but in 1833 Herring made a copy that’s now in the Tate: Mazeppa Pursued by Wolves (after Horace Vernet).
Herring also painted Mazeppa Surrounded by Horses (after Horace Vernet) at about the same time; if it too was a copy of a Vernet, then the original seems to have been lost. Mazeppa’s mount has here finally reached its journey’s end, and the Cossack is undoing his bonds.
Nathaniel Currier used Herring’s second painting as the basis for his lithograph of Mazeppa Surrounded by Wild Horses in 1846. This is one of a set of four that were apparently commercially successful.
Byron’s poem ends when Mazeppa wakes up in bed, after he had been rescued from unconsciousness by a “Cossack Maid”, who then tends his wounds.
It wasn’t until 1851 that Théodore Chassériau anticipated this ending in A Young Cossack Woman Finds Mazeppa Unconscious on a Wild Horse. As in Byron’s poem, there are ravens flying overhead, waiting to feed on Mazeppa’s corpse.
Just as suddenly as paintings of Byron’s Mazeppa had appeared, so they vanished in the later nineteenth century.
We all rely on our Macs to perform scheduled tasks, such as backing up, tidying up its working files such as the log, and a myriad of other things we’d rather not know about. Those were few in number in the days of Classic Mac OS, and generally left to individual apps, or entrusted to the user. When Mac OS X came it brought with it the cron service and its timetable crontab, but that was soon intended to be replaced by a new process manager launchd, then being developed by Dave Zarzycki, and released in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005.
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launchdIn this new model, one of the early tasks of the kernel after it has started booting is to load launchd, which then becomes the master launcher and launches everything else, in conjunction with launchctl and property lists in LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents folders in Library folders. In replacing cron, launchd took on the responsibility of running scheduled background activities too.
The first couple of years with launchd had their moments, as it took a while before it became reliable. Just over two years later, when Apple released Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5, its hourly backups were scheduled using launchd. The disadvantage of that was that, like cron, launchd isn’t flexible on timing: the moment it decides to run a large backup could coincide with intense user activity, resulting in noticeably slowed response and prolonged backup duration.
By far the best way of adding to or tweaking the property lists used by launchd is using a GUI editor such as Peter Borg’s Lingon X, shown below in one of its early incarnations in 2016.
A service that runs every day might be set up like this Adobe service. Each time that my Mac starts up, and every twenty-four hours afterwards, this will automatically run the background service named AGSService. You could configure a similar service to synchronise the contents of a working documents folder with that on a file server, for example, in the same way. Instead of using a repeat interval like this, you could set a fixed time each day, perhaps.
In 2014, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple introduced a whole new system designed to schedule background activities more flexibly, Duet Activity Scheduler (DAS). This is related to CoreDuet, a subsystem concerned with monitoring environmental and process load conditions. DAS maintains a list of scheduled activities, and frequently evaluates those activities to determine which should be run next. It does that by scoring them, taking into account the window in which the activity should occur, its priority expressed in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), current load on CPU cores, and environmental conditions.
Those are combined to produce a score: when that exceeds a threshold, DAS decides to run that activity, and will in turn tell Centralized Task Scheduling (CTS) to do so via lightweight inter-process communication (XPC). Once that’s complete, the next run will be scheduled with DAS, which puts that activity back into its scheduling list. This and other processes are summarised in the following diagram, based on what happens when scheduling routine hourly backups using Time Machine, in 2023.
In the example of periodic automatic Time Machine backups, the activity is specified in a LaunchDaemon property list, where it’s set to be repeating, at a given time interval and priority. Its configuration file com.apple.backupd-helper.plist schedules an XPC service com.apple.backupd-auto with the following key-value pairs for its background activity:
During startup, these property lists and their dictionaries are assembled into a list of activities for DAS. Those for most if not all macOS background activities are put in the group com.apple.dasd.default. Entries contain the contents of the dictionary for each activity for DAS to use when rescoring activities to determine which should proceed, and which should not.
During startup, in this case before the user logs in, the settings in that property list are used to register the activity with CTS, which then creates a new activity and submits that to DAS for scheduling. DAS uses the settings passed to determine that activity’s optimal score, and adds it to its list of activities.
Periodically, typically every minute or less, DAS rescores activities in its list to determine whether each can be run, or shouldn’t be run at that time, given its policy scores. There’s no way to examine that activity list except by inspecting it in the log whenever DAS chooses to write details there. If an expected activity doesn’t occur, the only way to try to determine whether it has been scheduled by DAS is to browse the log.
Scoring is weighted by policies that may include:
where the figure given for each is a typical value of its weighting in the overall scoring system.
DAS had a troubled start, rumoured to be the result of a slow memory leak. In macOS Sierra, Macs backing up using Time Machine that were left running for more than a week usually stopped making those backups after a few days. DAS even admitted to these in the new Unified log, in entries stating that “conditions are deteriorating”, followed by ominous silence. The only solution was to restart the Mac, and restore normal function to DAS. This was only fixed in High Sierra, and still afflicts Sierra.
These days, DAS is busier than ever, normally dispatching from a list of hundreds of activities. It’s just as well that it runs far more reliably.
With launchd‘s daemons and agents, and DAS-CTS dispatching tasks, routine housekeeping in macOS ceased using periodic as it still does in some versions of Unix. For example, the introduction of the Unified log in Sierra brought a new log maintenance service logd to manage its log files. macOS Sequoia finally removed periodic, although cron remains available for the traditionalist, but is disabled by default. Maybe cron‘s days are also numbered and XPC will rule the tasks.
