The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

Ovid ends Book 7 of his Metamorphoses with one of his best stories. It’s told by Cephalus, the envoy from Athens, to the sons of King Aeacus on the island of Aegina, following the king’s account of the Myrmidons.

Having told Cephalus of the plague and the Myrmidons that followed it, King Aeacus falls asleep, so his son Phocus takes Cephalus and his companions to their accommodation. There Phocus notices the unusual javelin carried by Cephalus, with its gold tip on a shaft of wood that he cannot identify. This leads Cephalus to tell him that the javelin killed his wife, and so to explain the circumstances.

Within two months of his marriage to the beautiful Procris, when he was laying nets to catch a deer at dawn, Aurora saw Cephalus and tried to abduct him (she has a track record of affairs with humans). Cephalus protested and told Aurora of his love for his wife, so she let him go, warning him that if she saw him again, he would regret ever marrying Procris.

Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (1630) shows the dawn scene of Cephalus trying to avoid the obviously amorous intentions of the goddess Aurora, who is seated and nearly naked. Behind Cephalus is the winged horse drawing the chariot of the dawn. A winged putto is holding up an image for him to view, presumably showing Procris, to help his resolve. At the left is a river god. Beyond the horse is another deity bearing a coronet: although difficult to see, that might be Diana, given her association with hunting and her role in this myth.

Peter Paul Rubens’ oil sketch of Aurora Abducting Cephalus was probably made in 1636-37, late in Rubens’ life, for his workshop to complete as a painting for King Philip IV of Spain’s hunting lodge at Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. In addition to showing the willing Aurora trying to persuade the reluctant Cephalus to join her in her chariot, it includes some details at odds with Ovid’s story: Diana’s hunting dog and javelin, which Procris gave to her husband after their reconciliation, later in the story. Here they may be intended as attributes to confirm his identity.

Over the following couple of centuries, there was a steady stream of paintings showing the abduction of Cephalus, but to my eye the next major work using this theme was Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s romantic Aurora and Cephalus (1810). Instead of a substantial chariot, the seductive figure of Aurora is bearing a sleeping Cephalus aloft on a bed of cloud, as dawn breaks over the mountains below.

Forty years later, Pierre Claude François Delorme uses a similar motif recomposed into his Cephalus Carried off by Aurora (c 1851). This features ingeniously interlocking arms and embraces: Aurora cradles Cephalus’ shoulder and chest, Cephalus reaches out to Cupid, and Cupid back to Cephalus.

As he went back to his wife, Cephalus started to worry whether his wife had been unfaithful to him. He became aware that Aurora had changed his appearance, and entered the city of Athens unrecognised. When he got home, his household and wife didn’t recognise him either, so Cephalus put Procris to the test: with his wife still thinking him a stranger, he offered her great riches to spend a night with him, and managed to get her to waver with uncertainty.

He then revealed himself to be her husband, and accused her of being unfaithful. She said not a word, but fled to the mountains, where she joined the followers of Diana.

Cephalus yearned for his wife, so begged her forgiveness, and admitted that he too would have given way when made such an irresistible offer. Procris returned to him, and the couple lived happily again together. She brought back with her gifts from Diana: a hunting dog who outran all other dogs, and that unusual javelin.

Then the city of Thebes was once again put into difficulty, after Oedipus had broken the siege imposed by the Sphinx. This time the problem took the form of a wild beast that ate all its livestock. All the younger men, including Cephalus, went to hunt the beast, but it eluded them and their dogs. Cephalus then unleashed Diana’s hound to chase the beast. The dog caught it, but it broke free again. Cephalus prepared to throw his javelin, then noticed that his dog and the beast had suddenly been transformed into marble statues.

Cephalus returned to his now blissfully happy marriage with Procris. He went hunting alone at dawn, always feeling safe with his javelin. As the heat of the day came on, he would call on an imaginary zephyr of the cool breeze, talking to it as if it was a real nymph. One day he must have been overheard, and word was taken back to Procris that he was meeting a woman when he was supposed to be hunting. His wife was shocked, but refused to accept the story without herself witnessing her husband’s deceit.

The following morning, Cephalus was out hunting at dawn again, and when he grew hot, he rested and spoke to his imaginary zephyr as usual. He thought that he heard a sound nearby, which he suspected was an animal. He turned and threw his javelin at that noise.

He next heard his wife’s voice, rushed towards it, and found her mortally wounded, with his javelin buried deep in her chest. He took her up into his arms and tried in vain to stop blood from pouring from the wound. Knowing that she was dying, Procris implored him not to take the zephyr as his wife. He then realised the fatal misunderstanding, that Procris believed that he had been unfaithful. As Procris died in his arms, Cephalus tried to explain to her that the zephyr was only imaginary, and that seemed to bring her some comfort in her last moments.

In the foreground of Paolo Veronese’s account from about 1580, Procris has fallen, the javelin embedded in her upper abdomen, and her life is fading fast. Cephalus isn’t embracing her, though, merely holding her hand as he tries to plead his innocence. Veronese leaves us with two small puzzles too. The first is the large hunting hound behind Cephalus’ right shoulder, remembering that Diana’s dog was turned into stone while hunting the beast of Thebes. More puzzling is another figure, and a second dog, in the distance, at the left edge of the painting. These might represent the first part of the scene, before Cephalus throws his javelin, in multiplex narrative.

Peter Paul Rubens offers another oil sketch, of Cephalus and Procris (1636-37), showing the couple just before Cephalus throws the fateful javelin, which rests at his side.

There is another painting that has been claimed to show The Death of Procris, but which is more accurately titled A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph, made by Piero di Cosimo in about 1495.

A brilliant painting, it uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to a dying or dead nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. But there’s no reason to show Cephalus as a satyr; Procris was impaled in the chest by the javelin; Procris was behind cover, where she was spying on Cephalus, not out in the open; and Cephalus had only one hound, a gift from Diana, which had in any case already been turned to marble. It’s a superb painting of a different story.

Ovid ends the book with Cephalus and his audience in tears, as Aeacus arrives with his other two sons and the army which they have been raising to counter the forces of Minos, setting the scene for the start of the next book.

There are three events that have been widely depicted in European art that can readily be confused, and a fourth that doesn’t often appear in paintings. Each involves the elevation of a heroic figure from this earthly world into the heavens:

• Apotheosis, when a pre-christian hero is elevated to the status of god or goddess;
• Catasterisation, when a mortal is changed into a celestial body such as a star or constellation;
• Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven;
• Ascension, when Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven, and sometimes available to saints on their martyrdom.

This article considers the first of those, and its sequel tomorrow tackles the second and third. The last has seldom appeared explicitly in paint, except as the final scene in a series depicting the Passion and Crucifixion.

Strictly speaking, apotheosis was only open to demi-gods and -goddesses, one of whose parents were divine and the other mortal. However, it later became open to anyone whose achievements were sufficiently heroic that they merited promotion to deity.

What happened to Hercules at the end of his life, when he threw himself on his pyre, has resulted in confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, often portrayed as a saintly ascension. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister, as classical deities were wont to do.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god. Aeneas qualified on the grounds that he was the son of Aphrodite/Venus by his mortal father Anchises.

Charles Le Brun painted The Deification of Aeneas in about 1642-44. This is a faithful depiction from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the river god Numicus sat in the front, and Venus anointing Aeneas with ambrosia and nectar to make him immortal as the god Jupiter Indiges. At the right is Venus’ mischievous son Cupid, trying on Aeneas’s armour, and the chariot towed by white doves is ready to take the hero up to join the gods.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus. Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

Jean-Baptiste Nattier is perhaps the only artist to have painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him. Romulus qualified by virtue of his father being Mars, while his mortal mother was Rhea Silvia.

In post-classical history and legend, apotheosis was opened up more, and became an opportunity to fill a painting with an array of memorable figures in what’s more of a tribute than an elevation to heaven.

JAD Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer from 1827 gathers together all those figures for whom Ingres had greatest respect, and were major influences. Although its own narrative is very simple, it invokes and pays tribute to those who Ingres saw as the great masters of narrative.

The group is posed on the steps in front of a classical Greek theatre, in formal symmetric composition. Homer sits at its centre, being crowned with laurels by the winged figure of the Universe.

Among those standing at the left are Dante, Virgil, Raphael, Sappho, Apelles, Euripides, Sophocles (holding a scroll), and the personification of the Iliad (seated, in red); in the lower file are Shakespeare, Tasso, Poussin, and Mozart.

From the right are, among others, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Hesiod, Aesop (under the lyre), and the personification of the Odyssey (seated, in green, with an oar); in the lower file are Gluck, Molière, and others less known today.

Henry de Bourbon, King Henry IV of France, was the son of Jeanne III of Navarre and her husband Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, neither of whom had any claim to deity. When Peter Paul Rubens was painting his vast cycle for Marie de’ Medici, he started its second half with Henry’s apotheosis or assumption, following the king’s assassination on the day after Marie’s coronation ceremony.

This is shown more clearly in this oil study (above) now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Below is the finished painting now in the Louvre’s dedicated gallery.

As in the rest of the cycle, Rubens doesn’t depict a real scene from history, but shows it in allegorical terms, using figures from classical mythology mixed with those from real history. Instead of painting a scene of Henry’s assassination, he made The Apotheosis of Henry IV and Homage to Marie de’ Medici, one of three landscape-format canvases in the series.

The left side of the painting shows the assassinated king being welcomed into heaven as a victor by the gods Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, as king of the Olympian gods, is Henry’s divine counterpart; Saturn, holding a sickle in his right hand, marks the end of Henry’s earthly existence. Below them is Bellona, an ancient Roman goddess of war, who is stripped of her armour and appears tormented.

On the right side, Marie is seated on her throne as Regent, wearing black widow’s weeds, as the personification of France kneels in homage and presents her with an orb of office. Behind the Regent, at the far right, is Minerva bearing her Aegis, the shield emblazoned with the image of Medusa’s head. Also present are Prudence and Divine Providence, and her court are paying tribute from below.

For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art.

Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg is one of Albrecht Altdorfer’s five known pure landscape paintings, and was made between about 1528-30. This develops repoussoir, following the foreground – middle distance – far distance convention, with a low horizon to accommodate the framing trees and allow a dramatic cloudscape, laying the foundation for so many landscapes of the future.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of Nicolas Poussin’s late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably all part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats, which are grazing erratically at the borders of a track meandering down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There is nothing which appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

All the clues given by the artist point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c 1636) is one of Peter Paul Rubens larger landscapes from the end of his career. As the sun is rising off to the right, a man drives a cart, on top of which a woman is perched precariously, away from Ruben’s castellated mansion. Beside that stream, a hunter is stalking game with his gun and dog.

A small group of people are on the grass in front of the house: a woman is seated, perhaps nursing an infant; next to her is another woman, and a man. Another man is fishing in the moat, from the bridge which connects its main entrance with the outside world. At the far right, a milkmaid walks out to a small herd of cows. There are birds in the sky, and some small tits and others on the scrub in the foreground. Beyond, a great plain of meadows and woods sweeps far to the horizon. The day has begun.

The similarities in his composition with those of nearly twenty years earlier are remarkable. However, there’s one big difference: while undoubtedly idealised, this painting is based on a real and known geographical location just outside the city of Antwerp.

Some landscape painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Before Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes sketched in oils in front of his motifs in the Roman Campagna, in around 1782, very few landscape paintings were made in front of the motif. Valenciennes not only assembled himself a library of sketches such as this magnificent View of Rome, but wrote an influential treatise advocating this as a technique. This paved the way for greater fidelity in views and ultimately Impressionism.

JMW Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from 1839 anticipates Impressionist style. It retains several conventional features, though, using repoussoir at the right, and a parade of buildings to lead the eye past the mass of the Colosseum into the distant mist. He uses staffage extensively in the foreground, with a group of three goats at the right and sundry figures at the left. As this is a view from elevation looking down, the horizon is for once well above its midline.

Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Wave, painted on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882, is inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and takes Impressionism to its limits in the dissolution of form.

In the late nineteenth century, landscape painters including Camille Pissarro transferred their attention to cities like Paris, in his case primarily because of eye problems. In January 1897, Pissarro painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes. His Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

Ferdinand Hodler’s view of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light, painted a few months before he died in 1918, completed his reduction of this view into bands consisting of water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Paul Nash’s Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion in 1942. Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

I hope you have enjoyed this series celebrating different aspects of landscape painting.

Painters have often used collections of nude women in or near water to appeal to their male patrons, but relatively few have depicted people actually swimming. In this and tomorrow’s articles I examine paintings whose emphasis is on swimming, diving and the like, rather than the beauty of nudes.

The most prominent legend centred on swimming is that of the hapless lovers Hero and Leander. Legend tells that Leander, a young man living in Abydos on the south-eastern (Asia Minor) bank of the Hellespont, and Hero, a beautiful young woman living in Sestos on the north-western (European, Thracian Chersonese) bank, fell deeply in love.

But in fear of Leander’s parental disapproval, they had to meet in secret, so he took to swimming that hazardous mile each evening that he visited Hero, and later its return. Their relationship developed, and was consummated, and they appear to have established a reliable routine. Leander navigated his way across not using the stars, but by the light that Hero provided on top of the tower where she lived, in an ancient lighthouse.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (c 1885) places Hero down on the shore, holding a small torch aloft, looking out for her lover as he makes his way through the choppy water. There is a red thread, wool perhaps, running from her clothing, under her left hand, probably a reference to the thread of life, or that of time, but there’s no sign of any swimmer.

One dark and stormy night, as Leander was midway in his crossing to Hero, her light was extinguished by the weather, and Leander drowned.

JMW Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (1837) is a dramatic and complex work with elements of both the precursor to the climax, and the climax itself. Sestos is on the left, with a couple of towers visible on the coast, neither of which contains Hero’s light. Leander is seen swimming across the narrow strait (its width shown far smaller than in reality), from right to left, to join Hero. Behind him on the bank at Abydos are spirits emerging, indicating his imminent death.

Hero saw her lover’s lifeless body, so threw herself from the top of her tower to join her lover in death.

Peter Paul Rubens’ youthful account in his Hero and Leander of about 1604 is big on storm and drama, but difficult to read. Leander’s body is being brought through the huge waves by a team of Naiads, as Hero, wearing a brilliant red gown, plunges to her death at the right.

Domenico Fetti’s slightly later Hero Mourning the Dead Leander (1621-22) features curiously calm waters. A more modest group of Naiads in the centre are tending to Leander’s corpse, as a winged Cupid cries over them. At the right, Hero falls head-first from her tower to inevitable death. On the left, Fetti provides a couple of evil-looking sea monsters, and Venus making her way on her large clam shell.

Another less-known narrative involving swimmers is that of the Ship of Fools, drawn from a section in Plato’s Republic, where the ancient Greek philosopher uses an allegory to criticise systems of government based not on experts but on (a flawed) democracy.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools, a fragment from a larger Wayfarer triptych painted in 1500-10, is actually a small boat, into which six men and two women are packed tight. Its mast is unrealistically high, bears no sail, and has a large branch lashed to the top of it, in which is Bosch’s signature owl. The occupants are engaged in drinking, eating what appear to be cherries from a small rectangular tabletop, and singing to the accompaniment of a lute being played by one of the women.

One man at the bow is vomiting overboard, near a large fish which is strung from the branch of a small tree. Another of the passengers holds a large spoon-like paddle, which would be of little or no use either for propulsion or steering. There are four additional characters, all men: two are swimming by the side of the boat, one, dressed as a fool, is perched high up forward in among the rigging, and the fourth has climbed a tree on the bank to try to cut down the carcass of a chicken from high up the mast. The vessel flies a long red pendant from high on its mast, with a gold crescent moon on it.

This Ship of Fools has been depicted only rarely, and in 1830-32, William Etty painted a large canvas that might at first appear to be drawn from the same allegory.

His Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm (1830-2) has some similarities, but uses a poem by Thomas Gray as its literary reference, not Plato. This is apparently inspired by a metaphor in Gray’s poem The Bard (1757). This compares the initially bright start to King Richard the Second’s reign, which rapidly became notoriously bad, to a gilded ship whose occupants were blissfully unaware of an approaching storm. The artist said that he intended this to be a moral warning about the pursuit of pleasure, and in doing so populates his ship with cavorting nudes. He does at least show the approaching storm in the background, together with two women swimming by the vessel’s prow.

Ary Renan’s Le Plongeur (The Diver, The Coral Fisherman) was completed in 1882 and exhibited in the Salon of that year, and is among the first of his distinctive paintings. A male coral diver has just returned to the surface, and is resting against rocks, his eyes closed with exhaustion. His right hand holds a shell and a long stream of coral mixed with seaweed, which he has presumably just taken from the bottom of the sea by those rocks. Standing by him is a partially clad young woman, whose robes are blowing in the breeze. She stares impassively, not at the diver, but into the distance. His clothes are draped on the rocks behind her, and near her feet are several fragments of coral. Its underlying narrative remains obscure.

Paintings only too easily become separated from their original titles. Devoid of that crucial clue, Evelyn De Morgan’s full-length portrait of an overtly troubled woman, above, becomes an insoluble mystery. We see a classically-dressed woman, walking slowly in a non-descript landscape. Both her hands rest on the top of her bowed head, as if she’s wrestling with inner turmoil. She stares down at the ground just in front of her feet. The wind has blown loose robes high over the top of her.

Even when we know the title, which is just her name, Deianira, we are little the wiser. The only well-known story involving her is of her attempted abduction by the Centaur Nessus. With neither Nessus nor her husband, Hercules/Heracles, shown, the painting is no less cryptic.

Evelyn Pickering, as she was then, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in University College, London, between 1873-76; the Slade’s first professor was Sir Edward Poynter, who taught there from 1871-75, and painted several unusual if not obscure classical motifs.

Looking at a short and incomplete list of Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings, there are five showing Ovid’s Heroines, characters for whom he wrote fictional letters in his Heroides:

• Ariadne in Naxos (1877) – letter 10,
• Deianira (1878) – letter 9,
• Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (1885) – letters 18, 19,
• Medea (1886 or 1889) – letter 12,
• Helen of Troy (1898) – letters 16, 17.

With Poynter her inspiration, Evelyn De Morgan seems to have dipped into Ovid’s unique collection of stories about women. So why should Deianira appear so troubled?

Considering how frequently Hercules is reported to have had relationships with women and men, his marriage to Deianira was one of his most enduring. For some artists, it was very physical: Jan Gossaert’s Hercules and Deianira (1517) spares little to the imagination.

Some of Hercules’ relationships were unusual, to say the least. One episode which Ovid’s letter alludes to is a period spent as a cross-dressed slave to Queen Omphale.

As Lucas Cranach the Elder’s bizarre Hercules and Omphale (1537) shows, this paragon of manly attainment, most notably in his twelve labours, was dressed as a woman, and performed womanly tasks such as spinning.

To make sense of Deianira’s story, we must return to the incident involving her attempted abduction by the Centaur Nessus when he was carrying her across the river Euenos, in western Greece.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank where Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and chest well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest.

To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is marvellously clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Heracles, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Heracles’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

The attempted abduction by Nessus set a trap which was later to bring about the deaths of both Hercules and Deianira. As he lay dying, Nessus gave Deianira a vial of his blood, advising her that it ‘would ensure that Hercules was true to her forever’. Well-versed readers at the time of Ovid would have recognised this immediately, knowing how toxic the blood of a Centaur is, but Deianira was too naïve to know that, and took the Centaur’s words at face value.

Years later, when she heard that Hercules was having an affair with Iole, Deianira decided to try Nessus’ parting gift on her errant husband. When he called for a tunic (or shirt, or similar), she impregnated the garment with some of the blood, and sent it to Hercules. This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510. It is at this stage that Ovid’s fictional letter from her to Hercules starts.

As soon as Hercules donned the impregnated tunic, he suffered intense pain from the poison, and he was unable to remove the garment from his skin. The pain wasn’t so severe as to stop him from murdering Lichas, the herald who had brought him the tunic, by throwing him into the sea. But Hercules was unable to find any relief, and resolved to burn himself on his own funeral pyre in desperation.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Its most famous depiction, though, is in Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful The Death of Hercules (1634). Using chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio, Zurbarán shows what can only be a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

What happened to Hercules on his pyre has resulted in even more confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, often portrayed as a saintly ascension to Heaven. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister.

The Deianira of Ovid’s Heroides and Evelyn De Morgan’s painting was then left in deep trouble. Hearing the news of Hercules’ death in the midst of writing her letter, she had but one option: suicide. With Hercules a god, and even Iole being cared for by Hercules’ son, Deianira was left alone, to die by her own hand. No wonder she looks troubled.

Following Ovid’s long account of the grim story of the rape and mutilation of Philomela, he brings Book 6 of his Metamorphoses to its end on a lighter note, forming a bridge to the opening theme for the next book, Jason and the Argonauts.

Ovid’s tenuous link to introduce the north wind Boreas is that Philomela and Procne were the daughters of Pandion, who died prematurely as a result of the events of the last myth. He was succeeded by Erechtheus, who had four sons and four daughters. Of his daughters, two were egregiously beautiful: Procris, who married Cephalus, and Orithyia, who was betrothed to Boreas.

After the disgrace of Tereus King of Thrace, Boreas, another Thracian, was rejected by Erechtheus. This was despite Boreas’ attempts to reform his habits that normally made him bitterly cold, stormy, and damaging. Boreas decided to take matters into his own hands, unfurled his wings, flew down and abducted Orithyia, who was pledged to be his wife and to bear him twins.

Ovid gives only a brief summary of this vivid story which was popular in classical times, to the point of being the subject of a play that has since been lost. The myth has remained popular in paintings since, and makes an interesting theme with which to trace the history of painting, at least from the Renaissance to the dawn of the twentieth century.

Rubens painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia in about 1620, when he was at the peak of his career. Boreas is shown in his classical guise, as a roughly bearded old man with wings. He is sweeping Orithyia up in his arms, while a cluster of Cupids are engaged in a snowball fight, a lovely touch of humour, and a subtle reference to winter.

A few years later, probably in about 1640, Giovanni Francesco Romanelli painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia. Here Boreas has made his getaway with Orithyia, and is flying over a wintry landscape with a Cupid escort.

Sebastiano Conca’s Boreas Abducting Orithyia from about 1720 shows Boreas taking off with Orithyia from a riverbank and her friends, some of whom are decorating a herm statue at the right.

Francesco Solimena seems to have been the first painter to depict Boreas as a much younger man, in his Boreas Abducting Orithyia, Daughter of Erechtheus from 1729. He has also elaborated the scene considerably, with Orithyia’s friends tugging at Boreas’ cloak to try to restrain him, Cupid preparing to shoot one of his arrows at Orithyia, and general panic ensuing.

François Boucher delivers a full Rococo interpretation in Boreas Abducting Orithyia (1769). The lead actors are less engaged, with Boreas devoting his efforts to blowing his wind at Orithyia’s friends, and the ground to the right bears witness to his destructive force.

In 1822, Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon’s romantic interpretation of Boreas Abducting Orithyia strips out all the other figures, and shows just the couple. Boreas is now quite youthful, and Orithyia’s eyes are closed as if swooning.

Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 returns to a fuller and more classical account. Although not as old as in earlier paintings, Boreas is no longer a stripling. Orithyia is trying to push his head away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne. Around them the spring flowers and trees are being blasted by his north wind.

My final selection is Evelyn De Morgan’s Boreas and Orithyia from about 1896. Boreas is now bearing Orithyia aloft, above rugged hills and water. He is younger again, and looks decidedly miserable. In addition to a pair of magnificent wings on his back, he has accessory wings on each heel, and long white and blue sheets wind calligraphically around the couple.

Ovid then closes the book by telling us that their twin sons, Calais and Zeto, grew up to join Jason’s Argonauts.

If you find geese daunting, then what about swans? Although usually seen as graceful if not regal, fully grown adults can weight over 15 kg (33 pounds), and can put up a real fight. They feature in one well-known myth that must have seemed incredible even to the ancients, that of Leda and the swan.

Leda, wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta, was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan, at about the same time that she was also impregnated by her husband. Her twin pregnancies thus resulted in two eggs: one hatched into Castor, who was human because his father was Tyndareus; the other hatched into Polydeuces (Latin Pollux), who was divine as his father was Zeus, and the twins were known as the Dioskuroi.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises a later account involving Helen’s unique birth, with two eggs and a fourth baby, Clytemnestra. Later paintings, perhaps wisely, concentrated on Leda and Zeus, and skipped the incredible egg phase altogether.

Tintoretto and his workshop painted Leda and the Swan in about 1578-83, and wittily include two caged birds, a duck and what appears to be a parrot, with a cat taunting the duck.

Gustave Moreau started his early Leda in 1865 but abandoned it incomplete in 1875.

Moreau’s later watercolour of Leda and the Swan (c 1882) revisits this myth as another static display of female beauty, with the added twist of a large, dark aquiline bird by Leda’s feet. Although this could be an eagle, the bright red at its base suggests the flames of a phoenix just starting to self-combust. This is a curious combination of symbols of self-renewal through cyclical combustion, and a woman who laid eggs.

Joseph Stella’s Leda and the Swan (1922) follows a more modern tradition.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leda and the Swan is drawn not from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but direct from older Greek mythology. He shows over twenty young children, some of them winged amorini, bringing the swan to Leda as she wades into a river.

Swans appear in the supporting cast of some other myths.

After the scorched remains of Phaëthon were buried by Naiads in a distant tomb, his mother Clymene was left to mourn his death. Phaëthon’s lamenting sisters were then transformed into poplar trees, and their tears into amber (electrum). Phaëthon’s beloved friend Cycnus was transformed into a swan who shuns the heat by taking to the water that extinguishes fire. His name lives on in the genus to which swans belong, Cygnus.

Santi di Tito’s fresco of The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars, from about 1570, shows the four young women with leaves sprouting from their hands and heads, as they lament the death of their brother. A swan makes a cameo appearance in the foreground, referring to the transformation of Cycnus.

The chariot of Venus is sometimes described as being drawn by white swans, as shown in Antoine Coypel’s painting of The Alliance of Bacchus and Cupid from about 1702, below.

Swans have also made the occasional transfer into modern legend, including that of King Arthur.

N. C. Wyeth’s illustration from 1922 accompanies the text “And when they came to the sword that the hand held, King Arthur took it up.” As three swans fly low behind them, Arthur and Merlin approach the hand in the lake that is presenting Arthur with his sword.

Other mythical themes have been attended by swans.

The association between Pegasus and the Muses was revived in one of Gustave Moreau’s ‘new’ history paintings, of Hesiod and the Muses in 1860. This is the first of a series of works showing Hesiod, generally considered to be the first written poet in the Western tradition to exist as a real person. He is shown to the left of centre, as a young man holding a laurel staff in his right hand. The Muses are squeezed in together, and one is on her knee to present Hesiod with a laurel wreath. There are four swans on the ground, and one in flight above Hesiod, a winged Cupid sat on the left wing of Pegasus, and a brilliant white star directly above the winged horse.

In 1896, Mikhail Vrubel met the operatic soprano Nadezhda Zabela, and they married shortly afterwards. His patron invited her to perform in his theatre, and in 1900 she sang in the role of Tsarevna Swan-Bird, or The Swan Princess (1900), in the world première of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, based on the poem of the same name by Pushkin.

Unfortunately, swans have also been consumed by royalty and nobles, in the infamous dish Swan Pie.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Taste (or Allegory of Taste) (1618), with figures painted by Rubens, is an extensive catalogue of what was then considered to be edible, including a well-prepared swan.

Frans Wouters’ Allegory of Taste was painted in 1635–59, and clearly inspired by Brueghel’s painting. Instead of the lavish jam-packed collation in that earlier work, Wouters seems to have had a smaller budget, or perhaps wished to avoid the sin of gluttony. There is still the infamous Swan Pie on the table.

There are even a few paintings where swans are just swans, including this wonderfully painterly watercolour by Marià Fortuny.

His Masquerade (1868) shows an open-air masked ball, presumably held in Italy in the autumn, which is arousing the interest or bemusement of two swans. Dress is liberal to say the least, with the woman in the centre baring her breasts while holding a parasol, but she has none of the grace of those swans.

Ovid’s last substantial story in Book 6 of his Metamorphoses continues the gory trend of the slaughter of the Niobids and the flaying of Marsyas, in one of his grimmest stories of rape and its vengeance.

Ovid links from the story of Pelops with a short iteration of kings, bringing him to King Tereus of Thrace, who was descended from Mars. He married Procne, daughter of King Pandion of Athens, but from the outset their marriage seemed ill-fated. Juno, Hymen and the Graces were absent from the ceremony, but the Furies held their wedding torches instead, and a screech-owl sat on the palace roof, an ill omen indeed.

Tereus and Procne had a son, Itys, and the whole of Thrace celebrated. Five years later, Procne pleaded with her husband to let her visit her sister in Athens, or even better, for her sister to come to visit her in Thrace. Tereus agreed, and set off without her to put this request to Pandion himself. However, when Tereus met his sister-in-law Philomela, he was beguiled by her beauty and immediately lusted after her.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Philomela (1861) is a delightful Salon-style portrait of Tereus’ sister-in-law, who is shown clutching a lyre and wearing a laurel wreath. I cannot see any reference in this painting to Ovid’s story, nor any trace of narrative.

In the same year, on another tondo, Bouguereau painted a double portrait of the sisters, Philomela and Procne (1861). This time they at least appear to be involved in some sort of Bacchantic festivity, with Procne holding a tambourine. This painting was even copied and slightly elaborated by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1837–1922), although again its relationship with Ovid’s story appears tenuous to say the least.

Tereus was therefore delighted when it was agreed that Philomela should return to Thrace to visit Procne. Pandion trusted Tereus with his unmarried daughter, and the two set off to return to Thrace by sea. Once they arrived there, Tereus dragged Philomela off to a cabin in the forest, where he raped her. Philomela was understandably horrified, shocked, and immediately told Tereus that she would shout out the truth of what he had done to her, when her father had trusted his son-in-law to take care of her.

Tereus drew his sword and grasped Philomela by the hair. She hoped that he was going to kill her, and offered him her throat. Instead of cutting her throat, he grasped her tongue with tongs, cut it out, and raped her again. Tereus then returned to Procne, who immediately asked about her sister; her husband then lied, and told her that her sister had died. Procne went into mourning for her.

A year later, still kept captive in the cabin in the forest, Philomela wove her story in red lettering on white cloth, using an old loom. She persuaded a woman to take it to the queen, who then read the truth as to what had happened to her sister.

Edward Burne-Jones made this pencil and watercolour study of Philomela in 1864, which appears to have been abandoned. The subject is holding a weaving showing not her account in words, as stated by Ovid, but a cartoon-like sequence of images, which refer to her imprisonment, but not to her rape. Philomela’s left index finger points to her mouth, to indicate that she is mute.

It wasn’t until the last few years of his life that Burne-Jones seems to have fully realised an image of Philomela (1896). This wood engraving was an illustration of The Legend of Goode Wimmen in the Kelmscott Chaucer. Philomela is shown at work on her weaving, which this time does bear some text, labelling the figures in its multiplex narrative. As in his earlier study, the story shown stops short before her rape, but shows Tereus and Philomela standing outside the entrance to a cave.

It was just coming up to the three-yearly festival of Bacchus, so Procne’s overpowering desire for revenge against her husband was channeled into that occasion. Procne found the cabin, broke into it, dressed Philomela up as a Bacchante, and took her back with her to the palace. In her rage Procne proposed to cut Tereus’ tongue out, gouge his eyes out, and castrate him.

Just then, her small son Itys came up to Procne. Mother noticed how closely her son resembled his father, and a new plan was quickly hatched. Procne pounced on her son like a tigress and stabbed him; Philomela finished the job by cutting the boy’s throat. They then cooked parts of him ready to serve.

That night, Procne dismissed the servants, and convinced Tereus that he should dine alone on his ancestral throne. Procne there served him with the flesh of his own son, which he unwittingly ate. Tereus then called for Itys, and Procne revealed that he had just eaten him. Philomela, still spattered with the boy’s blood, rushed in and threw the boy’s severed head at his father, also her rapist.

Artemisia Gentileschi painted her Procne and Philomela Showing Tereus the Head of his Son Itys in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows the climax of Ovid’s story, when the sisters’ revenge is revealed to Tereus. One of the sisters, presumably Philomela, thrusts Itys’ severed head into the face of Tereus, who shields his eyes with his forearm. Sadly the quality of this image is too poor to read the details around them, but in front of the king’s left foot is a large platter on which are some of the cooked remains of his son.

Rubens uses a similar composition for his Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636-38). The two sisters are still dressed as Bacchantes, with one carrying her thyrsus with her left arm, and their breasts are bared. Tereus is just reaching for his sword with his right hand, and his eyes are wide open in shock and rage. In the background, a door is open, and one of the court watches the horrific scene.

Tereus was beside himself with grief and anger, and chased the sisters with his sword, but they were changed into swallows, who still bear red feathers on their breast because of the murder. Tereus was turned into a hoopoe.

One contemporary insight provided by Ovid is the importance of oral testimony in a largely illiterate society. As Philomela was unable to communicate once Tereus took her power of speech away, she was driven to use the same medium as had formed Arachne’s downfall earlier in this book: that of weaving her story into tapestry, although this time using words rather than images.

We’re not travelling far for this weekend’s paintings, just out to the backyard to meet the gardeners who tend the flowers and care for the cabbage patch. Although gardens have long been owned by the rich, as part of their estate, on a smaller scale cottage gardens have supplemented the family’s diet, and most recently a well-tended garden has become a suburban status symbol.

In the seventeenth century the most popular tale about a gardener was the myth about Vertumnus and Pomona. The latter was an enthusiastic gardener, who was seduced by Vertumnus, god of the seasons, gardens and plant growth. At first the god tried disguising himself as an old woman, without success, and it was only when he resumed his normal form as a young man that Pomona fell for him.

Hendrik Goltzius gets close up in his Vertumnus and Pomona from 1613, and arms Pomona with a vicious-looking pruning knife. There’s a wonderful contrast between the two women’s faces and hands here, making this a fine study of the effects of age.

Abraham Bloemaert’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1620) uses gaze to great effect: while the persuasive Vertumnus looks up at Pomona, her eyes are cast down, their lids nearly closed.

Anthony van Dyck and Jan Roos collaborated in painting Vertumnus and Pomona in about 1625, which is remarkable for its rich symbolism and visual devices. Pomona has her left arm around Vertumnus, but in her right hand holds a silver sickle. She gazes wistfully into the distance, as if in a dream. Vertumnus is again looking up, pleading his case with the young woman, and his left hand (on a very muscular and masculine arm) is behind Pomona’s left knee, between her legs. At the right, Cupid grimaces at the deception, his back turned, pointing at what is going on with apparent disapproval.

Adriaen van de Velde’s fine Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670 has been marred by the fading of the yellow used to mix some of his greens, turning some of its foliage blue. He avoids any dangerous allusions, and returns to a more distant view of the pair talking together.

Peter Paul Rubens hints at the outcome in his late oil sketch of Vertumnus and Pomona of 1636. There’s now no pretence that Vertumnus is a woman: he lacks breasts, and even has heavy beard stubble. However, the embrace of his right arm still brings Pomona to push him away with her left arm.

In Rubens’ earlier and finished Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19, Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes. Rubens even provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

Another well-known narrative featuring a gardener is the encounter between the resurrected Christ and Mary Magdalene, who sees him as a gardener in a scene known as Noli me tangere, from the Latin translation of the words that Christ is recorded as saying.

This painting of Noli me tangere from around 1368-70 has been attributed to Jacopo di Cione, and shows Mary Magdalene kneeling with her hands outstretched towards the resurrected Christ. He is carrying an adze, a reference to Mary’s initial confusion of him with a gardener.

In her Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene from 1581, Lavinia Fontana re-locates the ‘noli me tangere’ encounter between Mary and Jesus, giving him the garb of a mediaeval Italian gardener.

By the seventeenth century, these stories had become less popular, but gardeners appeared to mark the season of Spring.

In Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s undated version of Spring, gardeners are planting out a formal Italianate flower-garden, a sight probably inspired during the artist’s visit to Italy. It has been suggested that this composition is even more ingenious, in showing March in the foreground, April behind, and May at the furthest end of the garden.

Tomorrow we’ll travel forward to the nineteenth century, and gardens humble and lavish.

In every continent except Antarctica, the letter t in this alphabet of landscape painting can only stand for trees, whether in distant forests, framing the painting in repoussoir, or the subject of a portrait. Because of their frequency and importance, this week’s subject extends to two articles.

The depiction of trees has long been a popular subject for instructional texts about painting. Without exception, at least until the twentieth century, these have taught an anatomical method, where the structure of the tree is built up from its trunk and branches before applying foliage. This is best learned by painting studies of trees in front of the motif, before transferring those to finished paintings in the studio.

Like many artists since, Peter Paul Rubens made studies of trees to support his studio paintings in oils. This, known simply as Landscape (c 1635-40), is a careful and detailed sketch in gouache of a group of trees on the bank of a small river. The evidence, from the tree in the mid-right, is that he constructed them anatomically, putting in the structural curves and lines of the branches, then laying down areas of foliage.

Back in the studio, Rubens used those studies to assemble larger paintings in oils, such as Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon (c 1630-40). They are still constructed using the anatomical method, and in some sections of foliage the underlying branches can be seen. Although they’re backlit and shown in the gathering dusk, he places gestural highlights on some trunks, and uses tonal range to give the foliage depth.

Many of Nicolas Poussin’s paintings employ foreground trees to frame the view in repoussoir, enhancing the sense of depth. His Landscape with Two Nymphs and a Snake from about 1659 is unusual in that the trees on the right are more than a framing device, and are established as an important part of the whole view.

Seen in this detail view, Poussin has varied the amount of detail shown in the foliage, as well as its tone and colour, to ensure that the trees don’t appear flat like a proscenium arch. Fine detail on the lower trunks gives them realistic texture, as an alternative to the highlights that would have been shown had they been in different light. This also shows evidence of Poussin’s use of the anatomical method.

Thomas Gainsborough was arguably more accomplished in his depictions of trees than he was of the portraits that earned him his living. His Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Shepherd (1748-50) is dominated by a single tree, whose wonderfully gnarled and lichen-encrusted bark threatens to subsume the shepherd at its foot. Sadly, the tree’s rather thin foliage appears to have become more transparent over time. However, this does reveal the whole of its tortuous branch system, and demonstrates clearly his use of the anatomical method: each branch could have come from a textbook on the painting of trees.

John Constable was a great fan of Gainsborough’s trees and landscapes, and an avid plein air sketcher using both watercolours and oils. This Landscape at East Bergholt (c 1805) is a quick watercolour sketch, but he still took time and care to ensure that its trees, particularly the dominant one filling the right half of the paper, are carefully constructed on anatomical lines.

Constable’s finished studio paintings are inevitably richer in fine detail. The Vale of Dedham (1828) employs a similar compositional form to his East Bergholt sketch, although the trees and distant setting are different. Textural detail in the bark of the lower trunks is meticulous rather than gestural, and unlike Poussin, the level of detail in the foliage varies little. Constable’s more painterly style is seen in his oil studies, particularly the final full-size studies for his ‘six footers’, where it often appears more effective than his finished works.

As Constable was painting his later works, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was starting his career by becoming the most skilled plein air painter of his generation. Although his Ville-d’Avray: Entrance to the Wood (c 1825) was clearly painted at speed, and lacks Constable’s detail, it’s unlikely to have been completed in a single sitting.

Most of Corot’s landscapes feature trees, and his approach to them varies considerably. In this painting there’s an intermediate level of detail, sufficient for him to structure marks forming the leaves of the smaller tree in the right foreground, but the central and dominant tree has its foliage shown en masse.

A few years later, Samuel Palmer’s The Weald of Kent (c 1833-4) uses a tree to construct deep repoussoir, where the motif forms but a small area in the very centre of the painting. Palmer’s billowing foliage looks more solid and less leafy, and glows rich gold in the autumn sun.

The brilliant colours of autumn gave George Inness inspiration for Across the Hudson Valley in the Foothills of the Catskills (1868). Here the contrasting gold, red, and green trees are so marked as to appear almost unreal. He also provides good visual evidence of his use of the anatomical method in their construction.