Folding screens were first recorded in ancient China, where they were used as portable room dividers and as decorative furniture. They’re thought to have made their way to Europe in the late Middle Ages, and started to spread more widely during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Early screens were made of wood, but were soon covered with painted paper or silk. Kanō Hideyori’s magnificent Maple Viewers (紙本著色観楓図) (Muromachi, early 1500s) is painted on paper in the classical style of the Kanō school, then applied to a six-section folding screen.

In Europe, screens served several purposes in addition to dividing a larger space into two. They could be used to keep drafts away, provide privacy, hide a feature like a servant’s entrance to a kitchen, or purely for decoration.

In the fourth painting in William Hogarth’s moralising narrative series Marriage A-la-Mode, The Toilette (c 1743), Countess Squander is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. In the background at the right is a painted screen showing a masquerade ball.

It was the popularity of East Asian artefacts in the latter half of the nineteenth century that put folding screens in many homes and quite a few paintings. They featured in at least two of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s works from the mid-1860s.

Behind Whistler’s Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, is a painted screen from Japan.

A more elaborately painted screen forms the backdrop to Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen from 1864.

Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti’s The Duet (1870) attracted favourable reviews when exhibited at the Royal Academy. This features a decorated folding screen from East Asia in the left background. The artist was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister-in-law.

In 1872 William Quiller-Orchardson completed Dolce Far Niente, incorporating in its painted screen a contemporary flavour of Japonisme. His woman, dressed in sober black, reclines on a thoroughly European chaise longue, her open book and fan beside her as she stares idly out of an unseen window.

Like other artists of the day, Elihu Vedder developed a fascination for objets d’art from the Far East, which he assembled in this Japanese Still Life in 1879. This unusual collection may have been assisted by the fact that his brother was a US Navy doctor who was stationed in Japan as it was being re-opened to the West.

Bouderie, which means sulking, is a splendid and intimate portrait of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s friend and colleague Gustave Courtois, painted in 1880. Courtois is seen at one end of a large sofa, smiling wryly and staring into the distance. He holds his palette and brushes in his left hand, and what may be a long mahlstick in the right. At the opposite end of the sofa, turned with her back towards Courtois, is a young woman dressed in fashionable clothing, in black throughout, apart from white lace trim at the foot of her skirts. Also shown is a screen decorated with Japanese imagery, and on the floor the skin of a big cat, perhaps a lioness.

Pierre Bonnard developed his earlier Man and Woman in an Interior into his Man and Woman in about 1900. Marthe isn’t getting dressed here, but sits up in the sunshine. A folded wooden screen divides the painting into two. Bonnard stands at the right edge of the painting, his legs looking skeletal in the sunlight.

William McGregor Paxton’s Tea Leaves (1909) show two well-dressed young women taking tea together. The woman in the blue-trimmed hat seems to be staring into the leaves at the bottom of her cup, a traditional means of fortune-telling, and behind them is a large folding screen, whose details are intentionally blurred and vague.

The New Necklace from the following year is one of Paxton’s best-known paintings, and perhaps his most intriguing open narrative. A younger woman is sat at a narrow bureau writing. She has turned her chair to reach behind and hold out her left hand to receive the new necklace from a slightly older woman in a dark blue-green dress. Their backdrop is another folding screen, this time with its East Asian painting clearly visible.

My final screen is the painting itself.

Pierre Bonnard’s exquisite three-panelled Japoniste screen of The Stork and Four Frogs was painted at the outset of his career, in about 1889. Its story is contrastingly European, and based on one of Aesop’s fables retold by Jean de La Fontaine’s The Frogs who Demand a King.

The version retold by La Fontaine centres on a colony of frogs, who ask Jupiter for a king. The god’s first response to their request is a laid-back and gentle leader, whom the frogs reject as being too weak to rule them. Jupiter’s second attempt is a crane, who kills and eats the frogs for his pleasure. When the frogs complain to Jupiter, he then responds that they had better be happy with what they have got this time, or they could be given something even worse. Bonnard’s magnificent panel is traditionally interpreted not as showing the evil crane of the second attempt, but the first and gentle ruler.

Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently, professional painters have been cautious to stay within the bounds of what has been deemed decent for their time and society. One way to push those boundaries is to depict classical times.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of Ariadne on Naxos from 1913 shows a group of figures from classical myth on a symbolic, if not token, island. At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in ecstasy on Theseus’ left thigh, as shown in the detail below. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right. They are from the later part of this myth, after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island. Bacchus then turned up and the couple married.

Bacchic festivities or Bacchanals are another opportunity for a bit of physical ecstasy.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth painted this Bacchanal, with several of its participants staring heavenward with open mouths, clearly in physical ecstasy.

The ecstasy of love and sex was a trickier theme left for the brave or foolish, like Jacques-Louis David in 1809, when Napoleon was approaching the height of his power. David then chose to paint a legend that tells of the love of the poet Sappho for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was his great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance. Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

David’s Sappho and Phaon was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and an ecstatic gaze on Sappho’s face, resembling those of Corinth’s Bacchantes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was more coy in his pen and ink painting of Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber from 1857, taken from the seamy side of Arthurian legend. While Lancelot is brandishing his sheathed sword at knights on the other side of the door, Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen, already seems to be transported in ecstasy, to the consternation of her chambermaids behind. At least she conforms to Victorian standards of decency in being fully clothed, and doesn’t even expose her feet.

My remaining examples are taken from the transition of the story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom at the whim of Herodias, to the femme fatale of Salome in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Following Gustave Moreau’s startling paintings that changed the original post-Biblical story in The Apparition (c 1876), Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, published in 1893.

Richard Strauss saw Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera of the same name premiered in Dresden at the end of 1905. The following year, as an even more immediate inspiration for Franz von Stuck, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, featuring a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, and sparking the wave of ‘Salomania’ that swept Europe.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) is one of several similar versions. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery, naked to the waist and in ecstasy. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist.

Gustav Klimt had already conflated this novel Salome with Judith, who had killed the enemy general Holofernes.

Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience, and he returned to using gold leaf in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. In his Judith I from 1901 he emphasises her neck with a broad gold choker studded with gems, and echoed in a golden belt at the foot of this painting. Her glazed eyes are almost closed and her mouth open in overt ecstasy.

In 1909, Klimt followed that with greater ambiguity in what could be Judith II or Salome (1909). Below her is the severed head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist, in a disturbing link between erotic ecstasy and death.

To follow yesterday’s account of the painting patronage of Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Duchess of Mantua, today I look at her husband’s lover and one of the most famous femmes fatales, Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), Duchess of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. She had no aspirations as a patron of the arts, and instead has been portrayed in several paintings.

Her father was Cardinal Rodrigo de Borgia, later to become Pope Alexander VI, and her mother was one of his several mistresses who were kept discreetly outside the city of Rome. She was born on 18 April 1480, and received an unusually broad education, becoming proficient in four main languages, as well as being able to read Latin and Greek.

Before she was even eleven years old, marriage was arranged for her, first with a Valencian noble, then with the Count of Procida. After her father became Pope, that was changed again to a second-rank count in the House of Sforza. Lucrezia married him when she was just thirteen, for the Pope’s political gain.

The papal court soon lost interest in the Sforzas, so the Pope ordered her husband’s execution. Lucrezia warned him, enabling him to flee, and their marriage was annulled on the basis of non-consummation, sparing his life. It’s generally thought that, while awaiting the annulment, Lucrezia had an affair resulting in her pregnancy, and the birth of a son, Giovanni Borgia, although two papal bulls were issued contradicting that, and one another.

When she was eighteen, Lucrezia was married a second time, to Alfonso d’Aragon, the Neapolitan half-brother of her brother-in-law. The following year it was she, rather than her husband, who was appointed governor of Spoleto, and a year later, in 1500, her husband was murdered, apparently on the orders of Lucrezia’s brother Cesare because of changing political allegiances.

Her father, the Pope, then arranged a third marriage, to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, which proved both more lasting and productive of eight children. However, neither husband nor wife was faithful in the slightest: Lucrezia had a long and thoroughly physical affair with her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, Isabella d’Este’s husband, which he had to terminate when his syphilis became too overt to hide any longer.

Lucrezia also had a more emotional affair with the poet Pietro Bembo, who is now commemorated in the font of that name. She fell seriously ill after the birth of her tenth child in June 1519, and died on 24th of that month.

The closest that we have to a portrait of Lucrezia is this panel attributed to Dosso Dossi, and claimed to show Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara from some time between 1519-30. Inevitably that remains a matter of dispute, and doesn’t match contemporary descriptions of her having long and thick blonde hair.

It has been proposed that Lucrezia modelled for the title role of Pinturicchio’s wonderful fresco of St Catherine’s Disputation in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican Palace. She would therefore be the woman wearing a red cloak over a patterned blue dress to the left of the centre foreground. As this was painted between 1492-94, she would only have been 12-14 at the time, and in the throes of her first marriage.

There are two other contemporary portraits claimed to be of Lucrezia, both painted by Bartolomeo Veneto, and otherwise unidentified.

Veneto’s early Portrait of a Young Lady, probably from about 1500-10, has been thought to have a Ferrarese origin, and one of the beads worn by her is inscribed ‘SAP’. Her hair isn’t blonde, and she’s dressed in sombre clothing bearing emblems of the Passion. If the dating of this work is correct, Lucrezia would have been in her twenties at the time.

The second of Veneto’s paintings claimed to show Lucrezia is more scandalous, and was probably completed shortly after her death. Known as an Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora (c 1520), it does at least show a blonde, but the Duchess of Ferrara exposing her left breast?

Had those been the only paintings possibly of Lucrezia Borgia, she would hardly have made her mark in art. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed an obsession with her, and revived her image on several of his watercolours in the late nineteenth century.

In the first, The Borgias painted in 1851, Rossetti has Lucrezia playing a lute in the midst of her family, two of her children dancing in front. All the figures look disturbingly sinister, particularly the man leaning on her right shoulder.

In 1860, Rossetti returned to her when his interest in her family was rekindled. In Lucrezia Borgia (1860–61), he shows Lucrezia washing her hands in a small sink after she has poisoned her husband Alfonso d’Aragon in 1500. Shown in cameo, in a reflection in the upper left, are Lucrezia’s father, the Pope, helping her husband to walk in order to hasten the effects of the poison and bring about his death. Rossetti revised her face at a later date.

Ten years later, in 1871, Rossetti returned to this same scene and composition, and painted Lucrezia Borgia again. The only minor change is the decoration on the tall pot under the sink.

Among Lucrezia’s children who survived to adulthood, one was the Duke of Ferrara for over fifty years, a second became Archbishop of Milan, and another – Leonora d’Este – was a nun and probably the composer of religious motets. The d’Este family, particularly Isabella, wife of Lucrezia’s lover and brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, were major patrons of art in the Renaissance. Isabella was patron to Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Dosso Dossi, and others, but it was Lucrezia who inspired artists as recent as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Reference

Wikipedia.

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.

The city of Florence in Tuscany, to the north-west of Rome, has long been a centre of art. Even before the Renaissance, its painters were among the most prominent in southern Europe, and it’s often referred to as being the ‘Cradle of the Renaissance’, or the ‘Athens of Italy’. Since then its unique collections of Renaissance art have attracted artists from all over the world, and encouraged them to paint views of the city. This weekend I show paintings of the city of Florence, today concerning its history. Tomorrow I’ll conclude with some landscape views.

To aid in its visualisation, this is a map of the city engraved by William Barnard Clarke in 1835. Numbers mark some of the landmarks we’ll see:

1. The Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose construction started in 1296, with its dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi finished in 1436.
2. San Niccolò Weir, on the River Arno.
3. Boboli Gardens.
4. Ponte Santa Trinita, over the River Arno.
5. Ponte alle Grazie, over the River Arno.

Dante and his Divine Comedy have inspired and influenced a great many paintings, some of which have depicted the poet in the city of his birth.

The year after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s death in 1882, Henry Holiday painted the second occasion on which Dante claimed he had met with his beloved Beatrice, in Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinita (1883). Holiday devoted great effort to making this view of the Ponte Vecchio (the most famous of Florence’s bridges) and the River Arno in central Florence as authentic as possible. In 1881, he travelled to Florence to make studies, and researched the buildings at the time, that he turned into clay models for a 3D reference. He also got John Trivett Nettleship, a noted animal painter, to paint the pigeons so that they too were faithfully depicted.

Rossetti’s more fictionalised watercolour of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853) shows Dante being comforted as he is drawing an angel on that day of remembrance for his beloved. This is situated in central Florence according to the view through the window at the right, but looking out of the door at the left, there’s an incongruous country garden.

Dante Aligheri died in 1321, and the next major event in the history of Florence is linked with Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written by 1353. Giovanni Boccaccio was born in the nearby town of Certaldo.

Doubt has been cast that Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death that struck Florence in 1348 was based on his personal experience, but few alive at the time could have escaped witnessing its deadly consequences. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, Luigi Sabatelli made this engraving to illustrate an edition of the Decameron, in his undated Plague of Florence in 1348.

The Decameron opens with a description of the horrific conditions and events that overwhelmed the city when it was struck by the Black Death, then takes us to a group of seven young women who are sheltering in one of its great churches. They decide to leave the city rather than waiting amid its rising pile of corpses, to spend some time in the country nearby. To accompany them, they take a few servants, and three young men.

Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decide that they will pass their self-imposed exile by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each tells one story on every weekday, providing the total of one hundred forming The Decameron.

Raffaello Sorbi shows the group of ten during one of the story-telling sessions in The Decameron from 1876, with Florence in the distance.

A notable absence from the skyline of those paintings of the city before 1420 is the distinctive brick dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) that crowns Florence Cathedral, the Duomo, or more properly the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. Sorbi’s backdrop is anachronistic in that it shows the dome.

Brunelleschi was a central figure in the Southern Renaissance, an architect and civil engineer generally credited with developing the first geometrically correct perspective projection for use in 2D drawings and paintings. It was he who both designed and supervised the construction of this prominent landmark, and he died in the city on 15 April 1446.

His death and achievements are commemorated by Frederic, Lord Leighton, who follows convention in locating the event in a building in Florence, the window opening to a view of the cathedral’s dome. Brunelleschi is shown half-recumbent in extremis in a chair, as if flattened onto a two dimensional plane. The complex array of buildings seen between the window and the dome appear to defy correct perspective projection, but have in fact been meticulously projected, and contrast with the flatness of the dying man.

Leighton had earlier painted Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853-55). Cimabue (c 1240-1302) was born and probably trained in Florence, and is claimed to have been the teacher of Giotto; both are key figures in the development of the early Renaissance.

Inside the Duomo is Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and the Divine Comedy, the poet’s 1465 memorial. It shows Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy as he points out sinners descending to Hell. Behind him is the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which is Paradise. To the right is the city of Florence, complete with the dome whose construction wasn’t started until a century after Dante’s death.

Among the many major artists of the Florentine Renaissance is Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better-known as Sandro Botticelli, who was born in the city in about 1445 and spent almost his entire life in the same part of town, leaving it for just two brief periods when he painted in Pisa and Rome.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s Botticelli’s studio: The first visit of Simonetta presented by Giulio and Lorenzo de Medici (1922) imagines an event that could only have taken place before Easter in 1478, when Botticelli could have been no older than 33. The artist stands at the left, in front of an exquisite tondo he is working on. Bowing to him at the centre is Giuliano de’ Medici, who is accompanied by Simonetta Vespucci, wearing the green dress. Behind her is Lorenzo de’ Medici, often known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, and behind him are Giovanna Tornabuoni and her attendants. The view through the window shows the Palazzo Vecchio in the centre of Florence.

Lorenzo de’ Medici is the subject of Girolamo Macchietti’s undated portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was born in 1449 into the banking family, the grandson of Cosimo de’ Medici, one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Europe. Lorenzo was groomed for power, and became the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic when his father died in 1469.

He survived a vicious attack by members of the Pazzi family, in the Duomo on Easter Sunday 1478, when his brother Giuliano was stabbed to death. This led to his excommunication, and invasion by forces of the King of Naples. He resolved that, and died in 1492, when he was forty-three.

Odoardo Borrani was a nineteenth century Florentine artist whose painting of The Body of Jacopo de’ Pazzi from 1864 shows the more grisly side of Florence in 1478. Jacopo de’ Pazzi was the head of the noble banking family who led that conspiracy against the ruling de’ Medici family, by attempting to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and overthrow the government of Florence.

De’ Pazzi escaped from the city, but was hunted down, brought back, tortured and hung beside the corpse of another conspirator. His body was initially interred in the family chapel of Santa Croce, but was then exhumed to be thrown in a ditch, as shown here. Eventually his head was used as a door knocker, and the rest of his family were sent into exile.

The Florentine painter Fabio Borbottoni (1820–1902) spent much of his career creating historical landscapes showing the city in Renaissance times. This undated view of the Ponte alle Grazie and the Loggia of the Uffizi is among the large collection of his work now in the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. The Uffizi complex was built for Cosimo I de’ Medici, initially by the painter and early art historian Giorgio Vasari in 1560. It first opened fully to the public in 1769, and is one of the largest art collections in the world.

Sewing pieces of textile or other sheet materials dates back to the Stone Age if not before, and needles fashioned from bone are among man’s oldest tools. Until the nineteenth century, all forms of sewing were performed using the hands. Since then machines have gradually become available, and were popularised in the twentieth century, although a great deal of sewing is still done by hand. Across much of Europe and the Western world, sewing has traditionally been one of the key skills of women, although it has also been a professional task for men from sailors to surgeons. This article looks at those whose sewing goes beyond simply joining fabrics using thread, and tomorrow’s looks more broadly at sewing as an activity.

Although weaving has played an important role in several classical myths, sewing wasn’t as prominent. Even in Christian religious painting, it has only become a feature in more recent times.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine, by that time a thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.

The most common narrative role of sewing in paintings is that of a woman supporting a cause or a person.

The patriot leader Giuseppe Garibaldi adopted the red shirt as an improvised uniform for his supporters, particularly the Garibaldini, who followed him in the Expedition of the Thousand of 1860, that led to unification of Italy. Odoardo Borrani’s Sewing Red Shirts for Volunteers (1863) shows four middle-class lady supporters eagerly doing their bit for Garibaldi’s cause.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of a castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, perhaps.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Tennyson’s account of this story in his Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Sir Lancelot’s shield.

Mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen provided their shoreside support, as shown by Anna Ancher in this Fisherman’s Wife Sewing from 1890.

Joaquín Sorolla’s Sewing the Sail from 1896 shows a scene on a patio at Valencia’s El Cabañal beach, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of that year. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically challenging supporting tasks ashore.

Just as fishermen’s wives weren’t allowed to go to sea, other women sewing in supporting roles were also left behind. In the case of Wenzel Tornøe’s Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, that may not have been intentional. This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted, with an oil lamp still lit beside her.

Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.