Dragonflies have suffered a bad press for too long. Commonly known on both sides of the Atlantic as the devil’s darning needles, they’re more widely associated with evil, biting people, or even sewing their eyelids together, all categorically untrue. In reality they should be our friends, as they’re insectivorous, and amazingly effective at consuming biting flies.

Unfortunately, their associations in paintings are as bad as those old wives’ tales, and they have been depicted infrequently.

Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614, during the early years of the Dutch Golden Age. At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects appears haphazard, but they merit a deeper reading. The flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth, which could never, at that time, have bloomed at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them, confirming that it’s a vanitas painting.

In 1653, Jan van Kessel the Elder painted this collection of insects and berries in oil on copper. The dragonfly shown appears to be a southern hawker (Aeshna cyanea), one of the most common large species found throughout Europe, although its thorax is unusually pale, suggesting it might be a young adult (teneral), or had discoloured after death.

The large meal seen in the centre of Bruno Liljefors’ Chaffinches and Dragonflies. Five studies in one frame (1885) is another common European species, the beautiful demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo). This is considerably smaller than the hawker seen above, and is more correctly termed a damselfly, as its pairs of wings are of equal length, and when resting are folded back against its body.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Fall of the Titans from 1588-90 might seem a strange painting in which to find flying insects. This shows the classical myth in which the gods have defeated the Titans who preceded them. As a result the Titans fell from the heavens and were imprisoned in Tartarus, or Hell, as shown here. It was claimed that flying insects were associated with the fire of the underworld, although the two butterflies and one dragonfly here appear quite incongruous.

Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora from 1734-35 refers to Ovid’s account in his Metamorphoses, and to Botticelli’s Primavera, with Zephyrus in flight with his arm around Flora, just about to crown her with a garland. Unusually, Zephyrus is given the wings of a dragonfly.

In the Roman religion, Fortuna (Greek equivalent Tyche) was the goddess of fortune and luck, both good and bad. More usually depicted as being veiled and/or blind, to indicate the chance involved, she was the embodiment of capriciousness. In this updated portrait of the goddess, Elihu Vedder shows her as a carefree, happy-go-lucky woman, with the wings of a dragonfly, sat next to a sack of gold coins. Vedder first visited Italy in 1858, and lived there from 1906 until his death seventeen years later, so he may well have been referring to Tiepolo’s Zephyrus, which was and remains in Venice.

My last painting of a dragonfly is by far the most complex, and was made by Richard Dadd between 1855-64, when he was a patient in the Bethlem and Broadmoor psychiatric hospitals, after he had murdered his father.

Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke has its origins in Shakespeare’s plays, with its main content drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This looks through fine stalks of Timothy grass at a foreground of scattered hazelnuts and plane tree fruit. Although its perspective is flattened, the figures in the lower half of the painting are stood on a gently rising grassy sward, behind which is a steeper bank and stone walling. Those in the upper third of the painting appear to be on another level, which rises more steeply towards the top edge.

The scene is set in the night-time, although daisy flowers are still unnaturally open, and there is night sky visible at the upper left. The feller himself, a hewer or fellow, seen at the centre, is about to cleave a hazelnut with his axe to provide a new carriage for Queen Mab (pronounced Maeve, to rhyme with rave), who replaces Titania as the queen of fairyland.

Even the distant upper section of the painting is rich in its array of characters. Trumpeters at the left include two boys, given as a ‘tatterdemalion’ and a ‘junketer’, and an insect intended to be a dragonfly. To the right of them are the characters from the still-popular child’s counting saying, of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, and thief, although not quite in that order. The dragonfly may have been based on another large species found throughout Europe, the emperor (Anax imperator).

Mosaics, composed of small fragments of coloured stone, glass or ceramic in a matrix of plaster or mortar, have ancient origins in the civilisations of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Although widely viewed as being decorative, some of the best examples transcend that to become fine art.

This breathtaking mosaic in the vault of the chapel of San Zeno, in Santa Prassede, Rome, created in 817-824 CE, goes well beyond mere ceiling decoration.

At the end of 1903, Gustav Klimt visited one of the major collocations of mosaics in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw and was deeply impressed by the spectacular Byzantine mosaics of Justinian I and the Empress Theodora in the Basilica of San Vitale. They inspired a portrait he completed four years later.

His first Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907) is the most extreme and startling work from Klimt’s Golden Phase. Apart from her bust and arms, which are painted in oils, the rest of his canvas is, like the mosaic of the Empress Theodora, encrusted with gold and silver. Its decorative patterns include symbols of eyes, flowers, whorls, ellipses divided into halves, and rich textures worked into the gold leaf.

A few accomplished painters also created mosaics, usually later in their career.

Between about 1890-1910, the French Naturalist painter Luc-Olivier Merson created this extraordinary mosaic of Christ in Majesty in the apse of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacré-Cœur) of Paris in Montmartre. This is thought to be one of the largest mosaics in the world.

At about the same time, the American painter Elihu Vedder was creating a mosaic in the central arched panel leading to the Visitor’s Gallery of the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.

His Minerva of Peace (1897) shows this Roman goddess of wisdom, the guardian of civilisation, and sponsor of arts, trade, and strategy. Vedder stresses that this was attained by warfare, and shows a miniature statue of Nike, the Greek winged goddess of victory, known to the Romans as Victoria. Nike holds the palm frond of peace and the laurel of victory.

Minerva’s helmet and shield rest on the ground, but she remains ever-vigilant in holding a spear in her right hand. Her left hand holds a scroll listing the fields of learning, from Agriculture to Zoology and Finance. These reveal her association with wisdom and knowledge. To the left of Minerva’s right knee is an owl, symbolising wisdom.

The inscription below, Nil invita Minerva, quae monumentum aere perennius exegit, means Not unwilling, Minerva raises a monument more lasting than bronze, and is quoted from Horace’s Ars Poetica.

Other artists painted in the style of mosaics.

In The Hutsul Madonna from 1909, Kazimierz Sichulski used a combination of tempera and pastel to create passages that appear to be mosaics, while others look more like stained glass, in a luminous Art Nouveau style.

Above is the left panel, and below is its centre panel.

Some of the Divisionists, notably Paul Signac, applied their paint in small rectangular patches termed tesserae, the same word for the coloured pieces used to compose mosaics.

Signac adopted these by 1905, and continued to use them for the rest of his career. They’re shown above in his painting of The Lighthouse at Groix from 1925, and in the detail below. These are oriented to help form each object.

Although these create a distinctive effect, they don’t follow Georges Seurat’s original intention of optical mixing of colours in fine dots, although they’re much quicker to apply, and refer back to the great Byzantine mosaics.