Paintings of scenes from the hagiographies of Christian saints have been enduring favourites, particularly for churches dedicated to that saint, and for sponsors named after them. The lives of some saints are sufficiently complicated as to offer the artist a choice of different scenes, but in the case of Saint Anthony the Great (of Egypt, the Abbot, etc.), paintings are almost confined to his temptation by the devil.

Saint Anthony was born in 251 CE to wealthy parents in Lower Egypt. His parents died when he was 18. He then became an evangelical Christian, and gave his inheritance away to follow an ascetic life. For fifteen years he lived as a hermit. During this time the devil fought with him, afflicting him with boredom, laziness, and dreams of lustful women, before beating him unconscious.

Friends found him and brought him back to health, so he returned to the desert for another twenty years. This time the devil afflicted him with visions of wild beasts, snakes and scorpions, but again he fought back, eventually emerging serene and healthy. He went to Alexandria during the persecution of Christians there, to comfort those in prison. He returned to the desert, where he built a monastic system with his followers.

His attributes are a bell, a pig, a book, the Tau cross (like a capital T), sometimes with a bell pendant. He is commonly shown being tempted in a wilderness, often by naked women, and is associated with fire (“Saint Anthony’s Fire”).

The visionary nature of his temptation, and the temptations offered him, give a painter a wonderful opportunity to exercise their imagination, and to include content that might otherwise be excluded from places of worship. This weekend I show a selection of paintings of this unique story. This article covers paintings before 1650, and the next will cover the period from 1660 to the early twentieth century.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Antony Beaten by the Devils identifies the saint by his Tau crucifix. Three devils, clearly fallen angels by their wings, are beating him with clubs. Those devils are fairly conventional figures, part animal and part man, with horns.

Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony (c 1487–88) continues the theme. Saint Anthony is now being held aloft by ten or so devils, including a weird fish with many spines and a trunk-like snout. The devil at the lower left of the group has breasts and a face in its perineum, which almost makes it double-ended.

We then reach a watershed in the unique paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Records make it clear that he painted several different versions of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, of which it appears that the Lisbon triptych from about 1500-10 is the sole complete survivor, and there’s also the remains of another in a fragment in Kansas City.

Inside the triptych now in Lisbon, the left panel shows Saint Anthony being assisted by three others, as he crosses a small wooden bridge, in a state of complete exhaustion, perhaps after being beaten unconscious by the devil. In the countryside around that group are weird human and portmanteau animal figures. In the sky above, Saint Anthony is seen again, being flown around on the back of another invented animal.

The centre panel shows Saint Anthony in the middle, kneeling in prayer and surrounded by bizarre figures, creatures, and objects, as if in a vision of temptation. In the background a town is burning.

The foreground shows more scenes involving bizarre figures, creatures, and objects. At the left, a jumble of them emerges from the huge shell of a strawberry-like fruit. One of those figures is astride a goose, and playing a harp. In the middle is a small pond, in which a hybrid between a fish and a boat is floating, and a man is seen inside another strange creature.

The right panel shows Saint Anthony seated, with a book open in front of him. He is again surrounded by strange figures and creatures from a vision of temptation. The background shows a prominent windmill and towers, behind which is a wintry landscape with snow on the ground.

In the foreground, in front of the saint, is a circular table, half-covered with a white tablecloth. The table is supported by naked human figures, one of whom has his left foot in a large pot. Another wears an armoured glove brandishing a heavy scimitar, but a creature has passed a thin-bladed sword through its neck. At the left edge of the table, another naked human is blowing a curiously curved trumpet. To the right an abdomen with ears and legs, wrapped in a red cloth hat, has a sword stuck into it.

Matthias Grünewald’s slightly later diptych provides useful contrast between the conventional Visit of St Anthony to St Paul on the left, and his Temptation of St Anthony (c 1515) on the right. These daemons are different from Bosch’s, but are nevertheless highly imaginative in their appearance.

The outside of the left panel of Niklaus Manuel’s Antonius altar shows Demons Tormenting St. Anthony (1520). Its daemons, and the wooden clubs with which they attack the saint, are inventive, but still rooted in Stefano di Giovanni’s of a century before.

Lucas van Leyden’s painting of about 1530 appears to have been directly influenced by Bosch. Leading its small procession of strange creatures is a man with a bird’s head, and a long bill, wearing ice-skates, clearly derived from the creature bearing a note in the foreground of the left wing of Bosch’s triptych. There are several other familiar features in those creatures, but the rest of the painting is more conventional.

By about 1540, Cornelis Massijs was still content to paint an almost completely realist image, showing Saint Anthony with two naked women, and another who may be their procuress. But once again there are some small decorations – a pot-bellied man, a creature with an inverted funnel on its head, and a little group at the right – that seem to have invaded from the mind of Bosch.

When we reach Pieter Coecke van Aelst in 1543-1550, the emphasis has changed completely. There are still three normal human figures, of the saint, a tempting nude, and her procuress behind, but the rest of the painting is filled with Bosch derivatives, such as the nun with wings biting someone’s leg, in the foreground. The burning town also makes an appearance in the left distance.

Paolo Veronese’s interpretation from 1552-53 is difficult to read, but the saint is almost completely obscured under a well-muscled devil and a woman whose left breast is exposed. Anthony is sprawled on his back, in his brown habit, his left hand fending off the woman’s hand, his right clutching a book. The devil is holding him down with his left hand, and about to strike him with a club held in his right.

Pieter Huys’s painting of 1577 is more obviously a derivative from Bosch. Saint Anthony could almost have been copied from one of the earlier paintings, and most of the strange figures and creatures have been borrowed and re-interpreted. Musical instruments such as the lute and harp make an appearance, but many of the symbols have been changed. For example, where Bosch’s triptych features round tables with a white cloth, Huys opts for a rectangular table, and the background has a town burning even more violently.

Maerten de Vos’s vision of 1591-4 follows a more traditional line again, although it contains some strange elements that appear more personal. He shows one Saint Anthony apparently carrying another, unconscious Saint Anthony in his arms, rather than the saint supported by friends. There’s a third version of the saint flying in the air, surrounded by daemons, too. That unconscious saint points to a pig, a recognised attribute, but nearby is a pair of lions. One of the more Bosch-like creatures in the right foreground is a portmanteau of human and bird, wears an inverted funnel on its head, and is reading sheet music.

Just a century after Bosch painted his triptych, Jan Brueghel the Elder combines a cavalcade of more traditional figures with a foreground of more bizarre ones derived from Bosch, including an old person’s head with four human legs, and a bird with two heads, one of a cockerel and the other a duck with a clarinet-like bill. A second image of the saint appears in the sky, surrounded by daemons, and a church is on fire in the background.

By about 1650, Joos van Craesbeeck was using some of Bosch’s iconography with his own developments. The use of a human head as a container is probably derived from Bosch’s tree-man and similar devices, but here has become even more realistic. To the right of that, a naked man sits facing backwards on a duck-horse: he is playing a stringed musical instrument, and wearing an inverted funnel on his head. Van Craesbeeck’s humans seem to have grown small red tails too. Oddly, van Craesbeeck doesn’t place the Greek letter Tau on the saint’s robes, but the Roman letter A, perhaps monogrammed with Tau. That appears unique to this painting.

Throughout much of Europe, bread has been a staple food for the whole of recorded history, and has become a symbol of life in both language and visual art.

For the classical civilisations of the Mediterranean, this was embodied in the goddess of Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65. She stands, her breasts swollen and ready for lactation, her hair adorned with ripe ears of wheat, a sickle in her right hand to cut the harvest, and a traditional winnow to separate grain from chaff in her left hand. At her feet is a basketful of bread, with ground flour and cut sheaves of wheat behind. The background shows the wheat harvest in full swing, right back to a group of grain- or hay-stacks and an attendant wagon in the distance.

Bread and its sharing is one of the central symbols of Christian beliefs, most notably in the Last Supper, the meal shared by Christ with his disciples before his crucifixion.

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. Arrayed along the front of the table is a series of round bread rolls and small glasses of red wine.

After his crucifixion and resurrection, Christ appeared several times to his disciples. In The Supper at Emmaus, painted here by Paolo Veronese, two disciples had travelled on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus as pilgrims, and recognised Christ as he “sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave it to them.”

The painting contains separate passages to cue this narrative: on the far left is an asynchronous ‘flashback’ referring to the journey to Emmaus. Christ is in the centre of the painting, identified by his halo, and in the midst of breaking bread. With him at the table are the two bearded figures of the disciples, dressed as pilgrims and bearing staves. On Christ’s right is a servant, acting as waiter to the group. The onlookers dressed in contemporary costume are an aristocratic Italian family of the day, whose portraits are combined.

Christian rites reiterate the Last Supper in Eucharist, and the blessing of bread plays other roles in its religious ceremonies.

Mykola Pymonenko’s Waiting for the Blessing (1891) shows the scene at a country church in Ukraine at dawn on Easter Sunday. The local population is crowding inside, while the women gather with their Paska, traditional ornamental bread that must be blessed before it can be eaten as a brunch.

Bread appears elsewhere as a symbol of life, particularly in the context of poverty and charity.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Charity of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary from about 1895 shows a famous woman who built a hospital where she personally served the sick. Born in 1207, she died in 1231 at the age of only twenty-four. Leighton doesn’t show her in a nursing role, though, but handing out loaves to feed the poor.

Elizabeth Nourse painted some social realist works looking at the lives of the rural poor. Among these is The Family Meal from 1891, which was awarded a medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and is seen here as an engraving in its catalogue. Parents sit with their two young children at an almost bare table. Their meal consists of a pot of soup and the remains of a loaf of what appears to be stale bread. The older child looks expectantly at her mother, who stares despondently at the table. Her husband stares down at his empty bowl.

The wonderfully named Philip Hermogenes Calderon painted his “Lord, Thy Will Be Done” in 1855. This quotation is derived from the Gospel account of what became the Lord’s Prayer, and has subsequently been used on many Christian religious occasions.

A young mother cradles her baby on her lap, looking up to the left. She’s living in difficult circumstances, but isn’t destitute, and wears a wedding ring on her left hand. The carpet is badly worn, and the coal scuttle empty, but there’s a loaf of bread on the table: she has her ‘daily bread’, another reference to the Lord’s Prayer. A portrait of a fine young man hangs above the mantlepiece, indicating her husband and the baby’s father is currently absent on military service. Several issues of The Times newspaper are scattered on the floor at the right, as if the woman has been following news of a military campaign overseas. Under the table is a letter, most probably from her husband.

Christian Krohg’s The Struggle for Existence, also translated as The Struggle for Survival from 1889 shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. These people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers in which to put the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it.

Next week I will show paintings of bread as food.

Many of the greatest paintings succeed in part because they use optical effects in their paint layer. This takes advantage of the fact that thinner layers of paint aren’t completely opaque, so allow some light to pass through them. In watercolours, transparent paints are often referred to as transparent watercolour, while those that are opaque are known as gouache or body colour. In oils, different pigments result in degrees of opacity, expressed as their covering power.

This cross-section of the paint layer from Honoré Daumier’s The Strongman (c 1865) demonstrates how many oil paintings consist of a series of layers, with several pigments present through their depth. Generally, the most opaque are applied first, and on top of those come a series of thinner transparent layers or glazes. Together these allow complex combinations of reflection and refraction of light, generating optical effects.

Layered oil painting technique is best seen in paintings that have been abandoned before completion.

The British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds received a conventional training in traditional and conservative methods with roots dating back to the late 1600s. He painted in layers, starting with dead colouring, the laying in of shadows and lights, then blending in transitions of shading and colour wet-on-wet. Highlights were then brought out, and shadows glazed, to produce a series of thin layers of oil paint, and a smooth, finished paint surface.

Those early stages are shown well in this abandoned portrait of Mrs Robinson from about 1784, where most of the paint layer is sufficiently thin as to allow the texture of the canvas to show through. When used with ‘lean’ paint, this dried quickly and complies with the longstanding edict of applying ‘fat’ over ‘lean’, so that the lowest layers dry first.

Richard Parkes Bonington’s unfinished Venice: The Piazza San Marco (1827-28) shows signs that it might have been among his best. Its buildings have a golden glow from the setting sun, but those colours would undoubtedly have been enhanced by rich glazes had he lived long enough to complete it.

Occasionally the paint layer develops problems that demonstrate the effects of glazes.

In Abraham Bloemaert’s The Adoration of the Magi from 1624, the cloak of the Virgin Mary appears to use two different blues, with its lower passages painted in the duller hue of indigo, which has faded. The dullest areas are those that had the thinnest ultramarine glazes applied, much of which have now abraded away during subsequent cleaning of the painting. The unprotected indigo has therefore suffered sufficient exposure to fade, as well as losing those rich glazes.

JMW Turner’s Approach to Venice (1844) was painted with very thin transparent glazes over thick white impasto, creating a distinctive flickering effect in its highlights.

Despite the artist’s efforts to get the white impasto to dry more quickly, the glazes dried first, and cracked as they became stressed over the white that was still wet. This hasn’t been helped by the later conservation process of lining, which places an additional layer on the back of the canvas to help the support do its job.

Although a wide range of pigments have been used successfully in glazes, some were developed specifically for the purpose. From the fifteenth century onwards, verdigris pigment was mixed with natural resins for use in glazes. This produces a different pigment from regular verdigris, as the copper combines with the resin acids to form what is known as copper resinate.

A popular technique among many masters to produce an intense green was to paint an underlayer using verdigris, over which several glazing layers of copper resinate were then applied. Although generally reliable and stable, verdigris and copper resinates have a tendency to turn brown on the surface. Thankfully this affects relatively few paintings.

Tintoretto used copper resinate glazes in several of his paintings, most notably the rich, varied, and often lush vegetation in his Saint George and the Dragon from about 1555.

Studies at the National Gallery, London, have found copper resinate in three of the four paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In the third of these, Respect (c 1575), the pigment was found in the man’s intense green cloak, and the duller gold-brown brocade patterning on the wall behind his hand (detail below). The surface of that wall has superficial brown discoloration of the paint layer.

One of the last major uses of copper resinate is in Arnold Böcklin’s Triton and Nereid from 1874. This is reported as being painted in tempera, but copper resinate glaze appears to have been used to develop the intense green patterns on the sea monster in the foreground. This is consistent with Böcklin adhering to traditional techniques despite working in the late nineteenth century.

During that century, painting slowly in multiple layers with glazes progressively fell from favour. By the end, many oil painters had adopted techniques in which much or all of a painting was made at once, known as direct, alla prima or au premier coup.

In the first of these two articles showing paintings of Spartans from the city-state in ancient Greece, I illustrated some of the laws laid down by the founder of its warrior tradition, Lycurgus.

When those laws were all in place and in practice, Lycurgus told an assembly of all Spartans that he needed to return to the oracle at Delphi to consult on one final measure. He made the Spartans take an oath to abide by these unwritten laws until his return, then departed for Delphi. There he obtained the approval of the oracle, which he recorded in writing and sent back to Sparta.

This undated painting of Lycurgus Gives the Laws to the Spartans has been attributed to either Jacopo Palma il Vecchio (c 1480-1528) or Bonifazio Veronese (1487-1553). It shows an elderly Lycurgus apparently giving a volume of written law to the Spartans in the marketplace, but could equally be of Lycurgus addressing his last assembly of all Spartans before he left for his second visit to Delphi.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s portrait of Lycurgus of Sparta from 1828 also shows him as an older man, here with written scrolls on his right thigh. Given the oral nature of Lycurgus’ laws, this can only be interpreted as the moment that Lycurgus has written his message reporting the oracle’s approval of his laws, ready to send it back to the city.

Lycurgus then did something extraordinary in its selfless ingenuity: having put the whole of Sparta under oath to keep his laws until his return, he then starved himself to death, ensuring that oath could never expire. The laws of Lycurgus lasted through fourteen kings, and five hundred years, without change, until gold and other spoils of war entered Sparta during the reign of King Agis.

The single most celebrated event in Spartan history is the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, in which three hundred Spartan soldiers, with 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans, were claimed to have kept over one hundred thousand Persians at bay for three days. This is the more remarkable for the fact that the Spartans and their supporters fought to the death, following which the Persians overran Boeotia and captured Athens. It is thus an example of self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds, resulting in most noble defeat.

The only major painting that I have been able to discover of this is Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814). Leonidas, the Spartan King and commander of the force, is at the exact centre of the painting, the viewer fixed in his emotionless gaze. Around him are his three hundred Spartan warriors, with supporting trumpeters, a lyre hanging on the tree, and laurel crowns being handed round.

David leaves some clues to his narrative in inscriptions, which have unfortunately become barely legible. A soldier has climbed up to carve an inscription in Greek at the upper left, the word HERAKLEOS appears on a plinth to the left of Leonidas, and by his right foot is an anachronistic piece of paper bearing more Greek words.

More subtle, perhaps, are the small groups driving pack animals along a narrow path at the upper right: the Persians were shown a mountain path around the narrow pass at Thermopylae, enabling them to gain an advantage over the Spartans.

Recent artistic interest in Thermopylae seems to have started around 1960, and first reached popular culture in Rudolph Maté’s 1962 movie, The 300 Spartans, which has been interpreted as comment on the Cold War at the time. This in turn inspired Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, which was first published in 1998, and made into a highly successful movie of the same name by Zack Snyder, released in 2006.

In contrast, Sparta’s three wars against the state of Messenia are little-known. Gustave Moreau’s fascination for esoteric ancient history led him to start painting a scene from the Second Messenian War in about 660-650 BCE.

Moreau seems to have worked on Tyrtaeus Singing During the Combat in the early 1860s, abandoned it, then returned to have it enlarged in about 1883, and work it further for a period, before finally giving it up altogether.

This detail shows much of his original painting, which is full to bursting with androgynous and near-naked young men. The priestess-like figure to the left of the centre appears to be Tyrtaeus, an elegiac Greek poet whose verse exhorted the Spartans to fight bravely against the Messenians. He is shown here in action, inspiring the young Spartan warriors to victory. The strange collage-like effect is a combination of Moreau’s emphasis on establishing the form of his figures, and I suspect edge-enhancement in the image’s processing.

Spartans also played a central role in the war with Troy, the result of Paris’s abduction of Helen, a Spartan woman whose origins are the subject of dispute. Later Roman accounts, the basis of most more recent paintings, claim she was the outcome of the union of Leda, wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta, with Zeus, in the form of a swan. Those dating back to the time of the Cypria and the Epic Cycle are more complex, and make Helen’s mother Nemesis, the personification of public disapproval.

In the Greek version, Zeus appeared to Leda as a swan. Both he and Tyndareus impregnated Leda at about the same time, but as Zeus was then in the form of a swan, her twin pregnancies 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. Despite their different fathers, the twins were known as the Dioskuroi, who were later to rescue Helen.

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 the later account of 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.

According to most accounts, when Helen was still under age, she was abducted by Theseus, the ‘hero’ who abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos. Helen’s adopted brothers the Dioskuroi were unimpressed by this, so they paid Theseus a visit, and persuaded him to return their step-sister. In return for her son’s offence, Aethra, mother of Theseus, was made Helen’s slave, and wasn’t freed until after the fall of Troy many years later.

Jean-Bruno Gassies’ painting of Castor and Pollux Rescuing Helen was runner-up in the Prix de Rome in 1817. The woman being escorted away at the left may have been intended to be Theseus’ mother Aethra, although she appears remarkably young.

Helen’s beauty only grew over time, and her hand was sought by many suitors in a contest organised by her brothers Castor and Polydeuces. Among those suitors were many prominent figures, including Odysseus. Helen’s father, King Tyndareus, feared that in choosing between her suitors he would offend and cause trouble. The suitors therefore agreed to swear an oath, under which they would all defend the successful suitor in the event that anyone should quarrel with them, the crucial Oath of Tyndareus. Under that, Menelaos, King of Sparta, was chosen as Helen’s husband.

Helen was the bribe offered by Aphrodite to Paris for judging her the winner of the golden apple of discord. For nine days, Helen’s husband Menelaos entertained Paris as a guest, while Paris plied her with gifts. On the tenth day, Menelaos was called away to Crete for his grandfather’s funeral. He left his house in Helen’s charge, reminding her to ensure their guests were well cared-for, although clearly not in the way that Paris was intending.

For Tintoretto, The Rape of Helen (1580) was nothing short of war. As an archer is about to shoot his arrow, and another Trojan fends off attackers with a pike, Helen, dressed in her finery, is manhandled onto Paris’s ship like a stolen statue.

Thus the Spartans were at the centre of the Trojan War.