The federal judiciary is being forced to confront a fundamental question: What to do when its orders are defied?

In this second of my three articles devoted to paintings of Easter, I cover the Crucifixion, from Christ’s ascent to calvary bearing his cross, to the entombment of his body.

Way of the cross

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Ascent to Calvary (E&I 128) is unusual among paintings of this phase of the Passion for its inclusion of all three of those to be crucified bearing their crosses. Christ is naturally prominent in the upper half of a composition dominated by diagonals, formed by the winding path and the crosses themselves. He and the two thieves are each given assistants who help them with the burden of the crosses.

In the upper distance are banners declaring the oversight of the Roman authorities, in their inscriptions of SPQR. Tintoretto links this with the Crucifixion with the inclusion of the tradesmen and their tools who were shortly to be responsible for the mechanics of the executions. Here the thick ropes bind the figures together, as they are used to attach the crosses to their bearers, and to draw the three along to their deaths.

Lovis Corinth’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1909) explores Christ’s Passion in real terms. Although this contains most of the usual elements seen in traditional depictions, his language is contemporary, almost secular. Two men, one of them apparently African, are helping Christ bear his exhausting load, while a couple of soldiers are whipping him on, and threatening him with their spears. A third soldier is controlling the crowd at the upper left, and behind is a mounted soldier and one of the disciples.

Crucifixion

Tintoretto’s Crucifixion (E&I 123) (1565) is over 5 metres (17 feet) high, and 12 metres (40 feet) across. The artist makes use of space with a narrative technique based on the traditional ‘multiplex’ form popular during the Renaissance: its single image shows events at more than a single point in time, in an ingenious and modern manner.

Naturally, the painting centres on Christ crucified, but the two thieves executed beside him are not shown, as would be traditional, already hanging from their crosses. Instead, to the right of Christ, the ‘bad’ thief is still being attached to his cross, which rests on the ground. To the left of Christ, the ‘good’ thief is just being raised to the upright position.

Spaced out around the canvas are relevant sub-stories from that whole. At the foot of Christ’s cross is his group of mourners, including the Marys. Each of the crosses has attendant workers, busy with the task of conducting the crucifixion, climbing ladders, hauling on lines, and fastening each victim to his cross. This mechanical and human detail brings the scene to life, adding to its credibility and grim process.

James Tissot’s What Our Lord Saw from the Cross is a uniquely innovative and narrative depiction of the crucifixion.

Descent from the Cross

Peter Paul Rubens painted a huge panel showing the Crucifixion, although in this case it’s strictly speaking a Deposition: this centre panel, Descent from the Cross (1612-14), is from his triptych commissioned by the Confraternity of the Arquebusiers of Antwerp for the Cathedral of Our Lady in that city. This remains one of Rubens’ greatest religious paintings.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of Lovis Corinth’s major paintings from his time in Munich, and won a gold medal when it was exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich, in 1895. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to this classical theme, in its framing, composition, and the faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his paintings.

Pietà

Gustave Moreau painted several versions of the Pietà (c 1876), this one on a tiny panel. It incorporates some of the more radical imagery which was appearing in his mythological paintings, with a blue wing in the centre.

Entombment

William Blake’s The Entombment (c 1805) refers to the gospel of Luke, chapter 23 verses 53 and 55:
And he took it [the body of Jesus] down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

Easter is one of the two landmarks in the Christian calendar. This weekend I devote three articles to paintings of the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Although these don’t sync perfectly with the calendar, they should provide better coverage of events that are the most painted in European art. Today, on Good Friday, these cover the Passion prior to the Crucifixion; tomorrow, paintings show the Crucifixion itself, and on Easter Sunday I end with the Resurrection.

Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem

Now known almost exclusively for his fine engravings for books, Gustave Doré was in his time as well known for his paintings. This is a preparatory sketch for one of his several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. This shows the conventional Christian account in the Gospels, of Christ entering Jerusalem in triumph, on the back of a donkey, as the start (‘Palm Sunday’ because of the palm fronds usually involved) of the series of processes leading to his Crucifixion. A popular biblical narrative in European painting, few finished works can match Doré’s at 6 by 10 metres size.

Cleansing of the Temple

Gaetano Previati’s undated and sketchy painting of Christ Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple appears to predate his Divisionism. It shows the Cleansing of the Temple, in which Jesus expelled merchants and money-changers from the Temple of Jerusalem, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 21, verses 12-17.

Anointing of Jesus by a woman

William Blake’s Mary Magdalene Washing Christ’s Feet is one of the biblical series he painted for his patron Thomas Butts in about 1803-05. It shows the scene during the supper at the house of Martha and Mary, which prefigured the Last Supper in several ways. This is told in the gospel of John, chapter 12 verses 1-8:

Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him, “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.”

Presumably the man sat in the centre, wearing blue, is intended to be Lazarus; Mary and Jesus look awkward together: it has been proposed that this results from meanings that Blake attached to left and right, but here it’s almost inevitable given the composition. This does, though, provide a full view of the curved and compacted figure of Mary, and her wiping of Jesus’ feet using her luxuriant hair.

The Last Supper

The most famous painting of The Last Supper, and one of the best-known works in the European canon, is of course Leonardo da Vinci’s. Giampietrino’s copy from about 1520 gives the closest impression today of what the original must have looked like. Even this copy has been horribly mutilated: the upper third was cut off, and its width reduced, but at least what remains gives a better idea of the original’s appearance.

Leonardo’s composition wasn’t entirely revolutionary for the time. Previous paintings of The Last Supper had spread the apostles along the length of a table, with Christ at its centre. However, Judas Iscariot was usually placed alone on the near side, his back to the viewer, and sometimes with his bag of silver visible behind his back.

Leonardo shows the moment of surprise and denial when Christ announces that one of those sat around the table would betray him. In this he was perhaps the first artist to assemble the apostles into small groups, a feature that has been repeated in innumerable images following this. For not only must this be one of the greatest works of European art, it must also have spawned more copies and parodies than any other.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s version from 1563-64 is so radically informal that it still shocked John Ruskin when he saw it three centuries later. Its table is almost square and low-set, with Jesus leaning back and talking quite casually. Twelve apostles sit, lounge, slump and lean around the table, of which one at the right is even eating his meal from his lap. There’s a rough assortment of seating, with a chair resting on its side under the table, as if hurriedly abandoned, which is perhaps a reference to Judas Iscariot.

The Garden of Gethsemane

This has posed the greatest problems for paintings, in that the action in the garden took place in the dark.

William Blake’s The Agony in the Garden is an unusual moment from the popular sequence of the Passion. Although much of it is inevitably dark, Blake’s imagery is as radical as those in his watercolours. The story is a composite from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and shows the instant just before Christ’s betrayal by Judas and his arrest. An angel appeared from heaven, to strengthen Jesus, and “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

Christ’s head is tilted in the extreme to face the angel, who grasps him under the armpits. The angel has descended from a brilliant red burst at the top of the painting, while the disciples are seen asleep among the dark tree-trunks.

The Trials of Jesus

James Tissot’s huge series of watercolours showing the life of Christ includes the Passion in great, and sometimes graphic, detail. Jesus Before Pilate, First Interview shows the episode from Luke 23:1-4 and John 18:33-38 in which Pilate, the Roman governor at the time, questions Jesus and concludes that there is no basis for any charge against him. Technically one of the most brilliant paintings of the series, it is easy to mistake this for being painted in oils.

Crowning with Thorns

In Hieronymus Bosch’s The Crowning with Thorns from about 1490-1500, there are four men around the head and body of Jesus Christ. At the top left, a crossbowman dressed in a green cloak and wearing full armour on his right hand holds, in that hand, the crown of thorns, so as to place it on Christ’s head. At the top right, an older man, whose right arm rests on Christ’s right shoulder, has a more concerned expression, his brows knitted, almost as if trying to reassure Christ.

At the lower right, another older man is seen in profile, looking up at Christ, and clutching at his white robe with both hands. At the lower left, a much older man also appears in profile, looking up at Christ, his left hand holding the top of a stick, his right touching Christ’s body. Christ looks directly at the viewer, his face appearing calm and resigned. He wears a thin, white linen robe, from which his right hand protrudes.

Antonello da Messina’s Christ at the Column, painted in about 1478, is one of the masterpieces of European oil painting. The head of Christ here is almost identical to that of the artist’s pieta, to the point where he is thought to have used the same cartoon for both, but here showed the eyes open and looking up to the heavens.

Amazingly, this painting didn’t appear until 1863, when it was bought by the chief curator at the South Kensington Museum in London from a dealer in Granada, Spain. It was originally attributed to Andrea Solario, and wasn’t recognised as Antonello’s until the twentieth century. After display in the National Gallery in London, it was bought by the Louvre in 1992.

The president’s threat to fire Jerome Powell is more than a personal spat. It’s a direct challenge to the economic foundation that has helped America prosper.

Beijing is using a mix of carrots and sticks to try to prevent other countries from siding with the United States in isolating China.

After years of building relationships with congressional Republicans and conservative think tanks, officials in Somaliland believe President Trump will grant their ultimate wish: statehood.

As today is the first day of April, it’s a double danger: as the first of the month you should say rabbit or white rabbit when you first wake up, and it’s All Fools’ Day as well. I have no hoaxes for you this year, I promise, but I do have rabbits, some of them white, and a few hares as well. Rabbits and hares are relatively infrequent in paintings, and where they do occur they seldom have any deeper reading.

Because they’re so familiar, they appear in animal gatherings.

In the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c 1495-1505) is a curious mixture of real and imaginary creatures. There’s an elephant and a giraffe, both early depictions of those species, together with monkeys, brown bears, rabbits, and more, even a white unicorn drinking at the lake on the left.

Among the many superb animal paintings of Paulus Potter, Orpheus and Animals from 1650 is one of his most unusual, showing a wide range of different animal species, some of which weren’t well-known at that time, and one of which (the unicorn) didn’t even exist. Those seen include a Bactrian camel (two humps), donkey, cattle, ox, wild pig, sheep, dog, goat, rabbit, lions, dromedary (one hump), horse, elephant, snake, deer, unicorn, lizard, wolf, and monkey.

In Tintoretto’s Creation of the Animals, the first of his Old Testament cycle for the Scuola della Trinità in Venice, God flies along as he creates pairs of different species of bird, fish, and animal, from cormorants to rabbits.

Among their leading roles is in Elihu Vedder’s delightful painting of the unfortunate Marsyas.

Late in 1877, Carrie Vedder, the artist’s wife, recorded in a letter that her husband had been thinking about Marsyas, and considered that, before the contest with Apollo, Marsyas must have proved his skill with the aulos. He therefore came up with the idea that this must have at least been charming hares with the instrument. He started this painting early in 1878, setting it in the New England winter. This was shipped to Paris for show at the Exposition Universelle later that year, but Vedder was disappointed that it didn’t do well there.

The hare is known from fable for its speed, although not so much when racing against a tortoise.

At some time during the first half of the seventeenth century, Frans Snyders painted the still popular Fable of the Hare and the Tortoise. The tortoise and the hare disputed which of the two was the faster, so agreed to run a race against one another. Although the hare was much faster when running, he laid down beside the path and slept. The tortoise, being aware of his relative slowness, ran as fast as he could, past the sleeping hare, until he won. Snyders shows the hare at full pelt, and the tortoise crawling away in the distance, giving little clue as to the surprising outcome or its cause.

JMW Turner alludes to this fable in his Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway from 1844.

Running ahead of this very early steam locomotive as it crosses the River Thames at Maidenhead is a hare, barely visible at the lower right.

Perhaps the most famous painted hare appears in one of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour masterpieces, dated to 1502.

Following this tradition, one of Bruno Liljefors’ favourite species was the elusive hare. This page of Hare Studies from 1885 shows a tiny part of the image library he assembled, as well as their spring antics.

Unlike the common rabbit, some hares become white for the winter. This is one of the many paintings that Liljefors made of a Winter Hare, here from 1910.

Both hares and rabbits have been traditional meats, and there are several still life and hunting paintings depicting them dead and being prepared for a meal.

Several of Chardin’s small output of about 200 paintings included hanging game, here an undated Rabbit and Copper Pot, elsewhere hares and others.

The rise of the sciences during the nineteenth century didn’t spare rabbits from being used in physiological experiments.

Following the death of the physiologist Claude Bernard, the Sorbonne (where he had taught) commissioned Léon Lhermitte to paint his portrait in 1886. Sadly I’ve been unable to trace an image of the original, but Claude Bernard and His Pupils is a faithful copy of the painting that Lhermitte exhibited at the Salon in 1889. This shows Bernard in the midst of performing an experiment on a rabbit, his students discussing its results, and one writing the experimental observations in the laboratory daybook.

Rabbits have been favourites with children, and kept as domestic pets. From there they appear in some of the most surprising places.

Johann Eleazar Zeissig shows A Family Making Chinese Shadows in his painting from the late 1700s. A family are entertaining themselves late in the evening with the aid of a lamp as a point source of light. An older boy is tracing the silhouette of his mother on a sheet of paper which he holds on the wall behind her. At the upper right are examples of his ‘shadowgraph’ drawings. Three younger children are holding up their hands to form the silhouettes of a rabbit and a cat, clichés of childhood.

August Macke’s Little Walter’s Toys from 1912 includes two of the favourite family pets, a rabbit and guinea pig.

My last guest appearance of a white rabbit is the most curious of all.

JMW Turner painted this narrative landscape of The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl in 1823. Apollo is on the left, with his lyre, and the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She’s holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains. Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.

Maybe it was just the first day of the month.

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.

If there’s one thing sure to put the fear of God into someone it’s a nearby bolt of lightning. One of the most understandable associations of lightning is thus with deities, particularly those who are as swift to anger and avenge as a sudden thunderstorm. In the myths of classical Greece and Rome, that could only mean Zeus or Jupiter, whose bundle of thunderbolts has even survived into computer technology.

Jan Cossiers’ impressive Jupiter and Lycaon from about 1640 shows Jupiter’s eagle vomiting thunderbolts at Lycaon, who is hurrying away as he is being transformed into a wolf, becoming the prototype for the werewolf of the future. These thunderbolts resemble arrows with shafts that zigzag like lightning in the sky, and are preserved today in the symbol used for Thunderbolt.

Tintoretto’s Jupiter and Semele (1545) shows an early moment in the myth of the mortal woman who was raped by the god, then destroyed by his thunderbolts when in late pregnancy. She reclines naked under a red tent. Jupiter has evidently just revealed himself, and rolls of cloud are rushing out from him. There are thunderbolt flames licking at Semele’s tent, and around the clouds surrounding Jupiter, but no sign of them touching Semele yet.

The myth of Philemon and Baucis also revolves around Jupiter visiting mortals, this time in innocuous human form and in company with Mercury. After the elderly couple have entertained the two gods, they go outside and ascend a mountain while the land below becomes flooded.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis (c 1625?) is a dramatic landscape with storm-clouds building over the hills, bolts of lightning, a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside, and the four figures on a track at the right. Philemon and Baucis are struggling up the track with their sticks, as they’re being taken to safety from the rising flood by Jupiter and Mercury.

Richard Wilson’s Destruction of Niobe’s Children from 1760 is a classical history-in-landscape, with a bolt of lightning in the centre far distance, a chiaroscuro sky, and rough sea below. Wilson shows this myth when Apollo is still killing Niobe’s sons. The god is at the top of a steep bank on the left, with Niobe among her children down below.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover. She is clearly distraught.

The apocalyptic British painter John Martin told the semi-historical story of The Destruction of Tyre in this relatively small painting of 1840. Tyre was the great Phoenician port on the Mediterranean coast, claimed to have been the origin of navigation and sea trade. The prophet Ezekiel (chapter 26) foretold that one day, many nations would come against Tyre, would put the city under siege, break her walls down, that the fabric of the city would be cast into the sea, and it would never be rebuilt. Martin brings the forces of nature in to help destroy the port, with a storm great enough to sink many vessels, leaving their prows floating like sea monsters. In the distance is his standard lightning bolt.

Poussin used the great flood in Genesis as the underlying narrative in his late painting of Winter (c 1660-64), from his series of the four seasons. Lightning crackles through the sky as a few survivors try to escape the rising waters.

In Norse mythology it’s the god Thor who wields the thunderbolts. Mårten Eskil Winge’s painting of Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) shows this lesser-known battle in rich detail, including the two goats drawing the god’s chariot, and lightning bolts playing around his mighty hammer, the cause of thunder.

In Dante’s Inferno, when the author visits Hell with Virgil as his guide, there’s a lightning strike where souls are being ferried across to eternal torment. As the pair are trying to convince the ferryman Charon to take them both across, there is a violent gust of wind, a red bolt of lightning, and Dante becomes unconscious. This is shown in Alexander Litovchenko’s painting of Charon Carrying Souls Across the River Styx from 1861.

In John Martin’s 1820 painting of the witches scene from William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, three witches materialise from a swirl of mist and lightning bolts on the left, and Macbeth and Banquo appear surprised at their sudden arrival. Winding around the shores of the distant lake is the huge army, and Martin has turned the Scottish Highlands into rugged Alpine scenery as an indication of the much greater outcome of this meeting.

Tomorrow I’ll show a range of landscape paintings featuring lightning.