After they have talked with the notorious thief Vanni Fucci, Dante and Virgil move on and meet a centaur, identified by Virgil as Cacus, who had been killed by Hercules. Dante’s classical reference here is a little strange in that he gives an account of the killing of Cacus according to Livy, rather than Virgil’s version in his Aeneid.

The centaur flees, leaving the pair to meet three more tormented souls. A lizard-like creature then attaches itself to one of them named Agnello, a member of a prominent Florentine Ghibelline family, and their two bodies become one. Another is pierced by a serpent through his navel, and Dante witnesses other horrific reptilian transformations.

Having found five citizens of Florence in this rottenpocket of Hell, Virgil leads Dante through shattered rock to the eighth, where each of the souls is burning with fire in the pit in return for their fraudulent lives.

Virgil explains that among them are Ulysses and Diomedes, who are united in a single flame, telling an invented story of their final and fateful voyage. Dante didn’t have direct access to Homeric accounts of the adventures of Odysseus, so based this on Virgil’s contrasting retelling of the deception of the Trojan horse.

After that, another flame identifies itself as Guido da Montefeltro, and relates some of its life as a sly Ghibelline military leader who later repented and became a Franciscan friar.

Virgil takes Dante on to the ninth rottenpocket, where those who used fraud to incite division are suffering for their crimes. The gruesome sight awaiting them here is of gross mutilations, bodies chopped up and torn apart so that their organs spill out. They meet a succession of dismembered and dissected spirits, including Mosca de’ Lamberti, both of whose hands have been cut off. He had been responsible for creating the rift between Guelphs and Ghibellines that scarred Florentine history for so long. Another body passes by carrying its severed head like a lantern from one of its hands. The head tells them that he is Bertran de Born, a Provençal troubadour who sowed discord between King Henry II of England and his son Prince Henry.

Dante is so astonished by this display of butchery that he stands and stares at the bodies, but Virgil reminds him that they must move on.

The pair then reach a viewpoint over the last of the rottenpockets, from which arises a foul smell. The souls there are all covered with festering sores and scabs, and can only crawl over one another.

There they hear the story of Capocchio, an alchemist who falsely claimed to be able to transform base metals into gold.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

The Eurasian wolf has been subject to a general campaign of extermination across much of Europe since the Middle Ages. The last in England was killed by the end of the fifteenth century, in Scotland in 1684, Denmark in 1772, and Norway in 1973. This hasn’t deterred artists from reminding Europeans of their sinister reputation.

Early in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he tells of Lycaon, who was transformed into a wolf by Jupiter as punishment for cheating him.

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 (see below).

Wolves got a better press in the popular account of the origins of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. Numitor’s daughter, a Vestal Virgin, was discovered to be pregnant. Although that would by tradition have led to her death, Amulius’ daughter interceded, and she was merely kept in solitary confinement. She gave birth to twin boys, who were superhuman in their size and beauty. Amulius ordered one of his servants to take the twins away and drown them in the river, but they were put first into a trough that functioned as a boat. As a result they were washed ashore downstream still alive. A she-wolf then fed the babies, and a woodpecker watched over them; both were later considered to be sacred to the god Mars.

One of the frescoes in the Palazzo Magnani, probably painted by Ludovico Carracci and/or Annibale Carracci, shows the She-Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus (1589-92). The twins are still inside the trough in which they had survived their trip down the river, and on the opposite bank a woodpecker is keeping a close watch.

Peter Paul Rubens shows Romulus and Remus being discovered by Faustulus, in his painting of 1615-16. Not only is the she-wolf taking care of the twins, but a family of woodpeckers are bringing worms and grubs to feed them, and there are empty shells and a little crab on the small beach as additional tasty tidbits.

Despite that, the wolf had a fearsome reputation in Europe, no doubt amplified by those who sought its extinction.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 shows a shepherd being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

Christian associations can be more positive, particularly in the legend of Saint Francis of Assisi and the wolf of Agubbio, or Gubbio, a small mediaeval town in the Apennine Mountains in central Italy. The saint did a deal with the wolf, where the animal would stop terrorising the town, in return for its people providing it with food.

Luc-Olivier Merson’s marvellous painting of The Wolf of Agubbio from 1877 is set in the town’s central piazza, where it’s a cold winter’s day, so cold that the waters of its grand fountain are frozen as they cascade over its stonework. As the townspeople go about their business, there’s the large wolf of its title with a prominent halo, standing at the door of the butcher’s shop. Leaning out from that door, the butcher is handing a piece of meat to the wolf, as shown in the detail below.

A wolf may also appear in association with the Christian virtue of charity, as depicted by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

His Charity from 1887 is a personification of one of the seven Christian virtues set in timeless classical terms. She is the mother of twins, one of whom she holds by her breast. She is clasping the back of the neck of a dark wolf, lying beside her, adding an unusual touch. This had apparently become a popular motif, and only nine years previously had been painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in contrasting Academic style.

A wolf is one of the three fearsome animals to threaten Dante in the opening of his Divine Comedy. Camille Corot’s painting of Dante and Virgil from 1859 shows Dante as he started to walk up a hill, only to find his way blocked first by a leopard, then by a lion, and finally by a wolf.

Wolves have made their way into other legends and fables.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s undated The Wolf and the Lamb tells a popular story (Perry 155, La Fontaine I.10) in which a wolf tries to justify killing a lamb on the strength of its criminal record. The lamb proves each crime claimed by the wolf to have been impossible, so the wolf says that the offences must have been committed by someone else in the lamb’s family, therefore it can proceed to kill the lamb anyway.

Gustave Moreau revisited Aesop’s fables late in his career. The Wolf and the Lamb of 1889 is, I believe, a monochrome image of a painting made in full colour, whose wolf looks more threatening than Oudry’s.

Mediaeval folk mythology developed stories of humans turning into wolves, although these were temporary transformations associated with cannibalistic episodes. They became progressively refined and popularised into the Gothic ‘horror’ stories of werewolves feeding on human blood, although those didn’t reach painting until the twentieth century.

Stuart Pearson Wright’s magnificent Woman Surprised by a Werewolf (2008) was inspired by the movie An American Werewolf in London (1981), itself a further transformation of werewolf stories into comedy horror form. The artist intended “to explore that uncharted place where the mystery and sublime of the romantic landscape meets the high camp and melodrama of Hammer horror”, which has come a long way from Ovid’s original story of lycanthropy.

Finally, wolves can sometimes be depicted as hunting quarry.

Peter Paul Rubens’ Wolf and Fox Hunt from about 1616 is one of his brilliant series of hunting scenes, here featuring two large wolves.

The good news is that, since the 1950s, populations of wolves in Europe have been recovering, and with the exception of the British Isles, they’re gradually re-establishing themselves in those countries that had previously hunted them to death.

When a group of devils armed with long hooks threatens Dante, Virgil hurries him along towards the next rottenpocket in Hell. They work their way around some of the damage wrought by Christ’s harrowing of Hell following his crucifixion. With those devils still hanging around, they then reach a pit of boiling tar, in which the spirits of barrators are trapped. These had traded in public office and bought influence in courts of law.

The devils pull out one of the souls for Dante and Virgil to talk to, but quickly return to hacking with their hooks.

Unlike others, he springs free and escapes their lunges as he plunges back into the pitch.

Dante and Virgil leave the devils attacking other barrators, and walk on in silence. Dante reflects on one of Aesop’s fables about the frog, the rat and the hawk. He blames himself for the tormenting of the devils behind them, but as he looks back he sees them on the wing again heading towards them. As they cross into the next rottenpocket, they realise the pack of devils can’t pursue them beyond that point.

Next are hypocrites, who are dressed up in hooded habits like monks. Although those are coloured bright gold, they’re weighted with lead, forcing the hypocrites into eternal labour against the mass of their clothes.

Dante meets two Bolognese friars, Catalano de’ Malavolti and Loderingo degli Andalò, who formed a fake religious order. They point out a figure staked out naked on the ground, who is Caiaphas, the High Priest of Jerusalem who advised scribes and pharisees that Christ’s death would be a good solution.

Virgil moves Dante on towards the damaged crossing to the next rottenpocket for thieves. After negotiating their descent, Dante sees its pit full of snakes, binding the hands of the souls there and covering their naked bodies.

A snake strikes one of the sinners at the back of the neck, causing the ghost to burst into flames then turn into ash, which falls onto the ground and reconstitutes itself.

There they talk with one of the thieves by the name of Vanni Fucci, a black Guelph from Pistoia near Florence who had stolen holy objects from a chapel and betrayed an accomplice for execution in his place. The snakes then take charge of him, winding their coils around his neck and body, and putting him into a reptile straightjacket.

Dante and Virgil move on and meet a centaur.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was a Roman illustrator and engraver who provided illustrations for a great many books, and specialised in the city of Rome. He made 145 prints to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, most probably in the early nineteenth century.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

The appearance of new objects or unexpected phenomena in the sky was an event of great significance in the past, and often considered to be a portent of the future, good or bad. This article considers the few that were recorded in paintings, and starts with the most famous of all, the star of Bethlehem that appears in many depictions of the birth of Christ.

The linked stories of the birth of Christ in a shed at Bethlehem, and the subsequent adoration of the infant by three wise men, kings or Magi “from the east”, are among the most popular and enduring among paintings in the Christian canon. The outlines given in the Gospels of Luke, chapter 2, and Matthew, chapter 2, have conventionally become elaborated.

Three wise men had seen a new star, possibly a comet or an unusually bright planet, which they believed would lead them to the birth of a great prophet. They travelled by the guidance of that star, to arrive at Bethlehem. There they found the newborn Christ with Mary his mother, paid homage to him in the shed in which the holy family was lodging, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi from about 1305 shows the star as a celestial ball of fire streaking across the sky, and the three wise men pay their respects to the newborn Christ and his mother.

Above Bosch’s view of the local Brabant countryside in his Adoration of the Magi of 1490-1500 he places a more modest and stationary star shining bright over its distant city, as shown in the detail below.

Blake’s version of the Adoration of the Kings is conventional in showing the three wise men presenting their gifts to Jesus and his parents. At the left, outside, shepherds are tending to their flocks of sheep beneath a stylised star, and at the right are the ox and ass.

There remains controversy over what celestial event might have occurred at the time.

Very few paintings show known events in the sky, and I know of only one depicting a full solar eclipse.

Although many painters, particularly the Impressionists, have shown fleeting effects of light and the occasional rainbow, Enrique Simonet took the opportunity of a solar eclipse on 30 August 1905 to paint his Eclipse (1905). This was visible across eastern and northern Spain between about 1300 and 1320 UTC, and this painting is one of its few remaining records.

Realistic paintings of comets are also rare, and unimpressive.

Generally acclaimed as William Dyce’s finest painting, Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (c 1858) shows this bay on the Kent coast, during a family holiday visit: a coastal scene worked up into a large finished oil painting. Although not easily seen in this image, there’s a small point of light high in the middle of the sky which is Donati’s comet, not due to return until 3811. Couple that with the inclination of the sun and the state of the tide, and you should be able to place this view precisely in both time and space, and confirm that it does indeed show this bay on 5 October 1858.

A few paintings show impossible celestial events.

John Martin’s painting of The Deluge from 1834 has two points of reference: the Biblical account of the flood, and Martin’s personal belief in prior catastrophe. As the sciences became ascendant during the nineteenth century, some educated people believed that in the past there had been an alignment of the sun, earth, and moon, and the collision of a comet resulting in global flooding. This was promoted by the French natural scientist Baron Georges Cuvier, and subscribed to by Martin.

True to form, his painting is dark and apocalyptic: near the centre, tiny survivors are just about to be overwhelmed by an immense wave bearing down at them from the left and above. The misaligned sun and moon barely penetrate the dense cloud, and to the top right is a melée of rock avalanche and lightning bolt. This was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1835.

Several of Paul Nash’s surrealist landscapes show the moon in its phases, among them Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (III) from 1944, which presents the impossible view of a full moon and the sun visible close together and just above the horizon.

In their descent into the depths of Hell, Virgil and Dante have just entered circle eight for those who committed fraud in its broadest sense. This consists of what Dante refers to as malebolge, best translated as rottenpockets, a series of ten deep trenches each of which caters for a different type of fraud. Dante compares these to the defensive earthworks surrounding the outer walls of castles of the day.

Virgil leads Dante into the first of these rottenpockets, where souls are being lashed by demons to keep them moving constantly. These are pimps and seducers, among whom is a Bolognese man, a Guelph, who pimped his sister, the beautiful Ghisolabella, for political gain.

The pair move on past other sinners being scourged, where they see Jason, who seduced then abandoned the young Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, and later did the same with Medea. They then enter the second rottenpocket, for flatterers, who are wallowing in excrement.

They find a contemporary figure from Lucca, and see Thaïs, a Greek courtesan who notoriously flattered her partners. She is now covered in filth and thoroughly crabby.

In the third rottenpocket, Dante and Virgil come across corrupt religious leaders or Simonists, who sold church privileges, and are trapped headfirst in rock holes, their protruding feet being roasted with flames. The key figure here is Pope Nicholas III, who at first confuses Dante with Pope Boniface VIII, who is also in the same rottenpocket. Pope Nicholas was known for his nepotism, which included appointing three of his own family as cardinals.

Virgil carries Dante on to the fourth rottenpocket, reserved for soothsayers. Their heads are turned to face backwards, so that the tears streaming from their eyes wet their buttocks.

Virgil identifies several of them from classical times, including the Theban Tiresias; Dante recounts how he became a soothsayer after he had twice changed gender, as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The list concludes with three near-contemporaries: Michael Scot, a scholar and astrologer to Emperor Frederick II, and two well-known Italians.

The fifth rottenpocket they find to be filled with corrupt public officials, or barrators, who sold public appointments and are immersed in a sea of boiling pitch, while being further tormented by a pack of vicious devils known as malebranche, ‘evil-claws’.

The latter are armed with long hooks, which they use to push the souls down into the pitch, much as you might push down lumps of meat that rise to the surface of a stew. Those devils are so evil as to threaten Dante, so Virgil whisks him on to the next rottenpocket for hypocrites.

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is not only intentional, but of their own making.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Giotto di Bondone (c 1267–1337) was one of the great masters who bridged between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. He was born near Florence, and is reputed from about 1296 to have painted a cycle of frescoes in the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, in Assisi. This is hotly disputed though, and those may have been painted by Cimabue instead. The scene of The Devotion of the Devils from Arezzo shows what may, directly or indirectly, have been an inspiration to Dante, although I don’t know whether there is any evidence that the poet ever visited Assisi.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Spades are agricultural tools of ancient origin, with a flat blade in line with its shaft, and used for digging. Their closest relative is the shovel with a broader blade for moving loose earth, gravel and snow, and the hoe whose blade is mounted at a right angle to the shaft. In some common applications, such as lifting potatoes and other root crops, a fork with three or more tines is normally preferred.

As a well-known tool for digging, the spade is often associated with the digging of graves, and appears in some religious paintings depicting the imminent interment of Christ’s body following the Crucifixion.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 shows a man digging a conventional grave, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

A spade may also appear in depictions of Christ’s subsequent resurrection, in his appearance to Mary as a gardener, often known by the Latin words from the Vulgate as Noli Me Tangere, “touch me not”, the words attributed to Christ in the Gospels.

In her Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene from 1581, Lavinia Fontana re-locates this encounter between Mary and Jesus, dressing him in the garb of a mediaeval Italian gardener, and holding a fine gardener’s spade with his left hand.

The eccentric Alessandro Magnasco painted his Noli Me Tangere (1705-10) over a background of ruins made by a collaborator. Christ is shown standing, holding a long-hafted spade with his left hand. Mary is on her knees, a small urn in front of her. Their clothes are rough, and Christ’s appear to be his burial linen, blowing in the wind.

Spades are not uncommon in paintings set in the countryside.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s On Forbidden Roads from 1886 shows one of the core themes of Naturalist painting: itinerant workers making their way through neglected corners of the countryside. These two men are equipped for forestry, with a two-man saw, axes, and spades. Almost hidden among the vegetation at the far left is a third figure, who looks anxiously towards them. Maybe none of them should really be there at all.

There’s a more complex story behind Brendekilde’s People by a Road from 1893. The group at the left are old road-workers, breaking larger rocks into coarse gravel. They lived out under the wooden shelter behind them, as they made their way slowly around the country roads. The woman holds what is either a small shovel or spade used in their work. Standing and apparently preaching to them is a cleanly dressed carpenter, his saw held in his left hand. The building behind them, on the opposite side of the road, is a church, from which a large congregation has just emerged.

One of the most physically demanding tasks of the year was clearing snow in the winter. Brendekilde’s The Rest (1887) shows a younger man taking a short break from cutting a track through to the elderly lady’s farmhouse. The blade of his spade is flat, confirming that it’s used to dig through compacted snow and pile the slabs seen behind him.

In Brendekilde’s Home for Dinner from 1917, a young girl holding some fresh fish stands talking to a man with a spade.

The following year, Brendekilde painted a gardening story, in Afternoon Work (1918). A younger man is out on his finely tilled vegetable patch in front of his thatched cottage, wielding his spade as a weapon. Standing just outside the door, behind him, is his young daughter, and through the window is an older woman, presumably his wife. Both are watching him intently, with an air of fear at what he is about to do. He is about to attack a small crop of molehills that have appeared freshly in the midst of his seedling vegetable plants.

As Europeans and Americans started taking to the beaches, they realised how much fun it is to dig sand and build sandcastles using small buckets and spades.

This is William Dyce’s finely detailed view of Pegwell Bay, Kent, on the coast of south-east England, out of season, at the end of a fine day in early October. Visitors to the beach are wrapped for warmth as well as modesty. In the distance, a group of donkeys are being taken to graze for the night, after the day’s work being hired out for children to ride. In the foreground, at the left, a child holds a spade, although there is precious little sand suitable for sandcastles.

Later in the nineteenth century, at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time shows progress in the development of beach costume and culture. A young girl in the left foreground is playing with her bucket and spade, while her older brother is admiring the fashionable young woman parading her new clothes. A far cry indeed from the grave-digger.

The humble domestic chicken is probably the most common and widely distributed farm animal. It originated in about 8,000 BCE in south-east Asia and spread its way steadily across every continent except Antarctica. It probably reached Europe before the Roman Empire, and since then has been commonplace. Perhaps because of its small size and frequent presence, it features in relatively few paintings.

The cruel sport of cockfighting accompanied its spread, and is depicted in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s first successful painting in 1846.

This motif had started from a relief showing two adolescent boys facing off against one another. Gérôme felt he needed to improve his figurative painting, and after Delaroche’s advice decided to develop that image by replacing one of the boys with a girl. In both Greek and English (but not French) the word cock is used for both the male genitals and a male chicken, and the youthful Gérôme must have found this combined visual and verbal pun witty and very Neo-Greek.

There’s a curious ambivalence in its reading too: two cocks are fighting in front of the young couple. Is one of the birds owned by the girl, and if so, is it the dark one on the left, which appears to be getting the better of the bird being held by the boy? Either way, it’s a lightly entertaining reflection on courtship and gender roles, and a promising debut. The Cock Fight earned Gérôme a third-class medal, and he sold the painting for a thousand francs. With the benefit of favourable reviews from critics, the following year brought him lucrative commissions, and a growing reputation.

A dead chicken plays a significant role in one of Rembrandt’s most famous group portraits.

His vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a curious symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

For a young child, cockerels can appear large and threatening, as used by Gaetano Chierici in a delightful visual joke.

His undated painting of A Scary State of Affairs calls on our experience of the behaviour of cockerels and geese. An infant has been left with a bowl on their lap, and their room is invaded first by cockerels, then by those even larger and more aggressive geese. The child’s eyes are wide open, their mouth at full stretch in a scream, their arms raised, and their legs are trying to fend the birds away.

Being among the most humble and everyday domestic species, chickens seldom make the limelight in religious narratives.

Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds from about 1650 is an exception featuring unusual additional details including the old woman carrying a basketful of eggs, and chickens in front of the kneeling shepherd.

In most paintings including chickens, though, they are just extras in the farmyard.

Paulus Potter’s Figures with Horses by a Stable (1647) includes finely painted horses, chickens, a dog, and distant cattle, with a magnificent tree in the centre and a sky containing several birds.

In Chickenfeed from 1867, Hans Thoma tackles this genre scene in a traditional and detailed realist style.

Alberto Pasini’s Market Scene from 1884 has an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the artist’s signature melons.

Évariste Carpentier’s undated Eating in the Farmyard, an example of the rural deprivation which sparked Naturalist art, shows two kids surrounded by animals and birds in this much-used space.

Here, Carpentier’s old woman is busy Feeding the Chickens.

Friedrich Eckenfelder’s Zollernschloss, Balingen from about 1884-5 shows a small yard just below the back of this castellated farm in Germany, with its lively flock of chickens.

Gustav Klimt had probably painted his first small landscapes between 1881-87, and returned to the genre more seriously in about 1896. This work, variously known as After the Rain, Garden with Chickens in St. Agatha, or similar, is thought to have been painted when Klimt stayed in the Goiserer Valley with the Flöge family in the summer of 1898.

Very occasionally, a chicken may come as something of a surprise.

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. Its 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. A man has climbed a tree on the bank to try to cut down the carcass of a chicken from high up the mast.

Virgil has led Dante into a gorge taking them from the heretics further into the depths of Hell. As they descend, Virgil advises they should take their time so they can become accustomed to the stench emanating from these depths. This allows him to explain to Dante the layout of the parts they are about to enter.

Within the next pit are three sub-divisions, catering for the sins of malice in their different forms. The first ring is for those of violent will, and is divided again into three, for homicides and bandits, for suicides, and blasphemers. Dante’s verbal descriptions of these sub-divisions can readily become confusing, and have been turned into diagrammatic maps by several artists.

One of the most famous is Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90, in which these lower zones are shown as a funnel at the bottom, leading to the Devil himself.

Jan van der Straet’s diagram from 1587 is similar in form, and packs these zones into the narrow section at the foot.

Dante opens Canto 12 as the pair are scrambling down boulders as if in the Alps, dislodged during the earthquake resulting from Christ’s harrowing of Hell, to meet the Minotaur from Crete.

Like so many of Dante’s beasts, the Minotaur is drawn from classical mythology. This monstrous cross between a bull and human was kept in the labyrinth on Crete, where it was periodically fed with young Greek men and virgin women. For George Frederic Watts, in his painting of The Minotaur from 1885, it represented the worst of Victorian society and its moral values, in the industry of child prostitution flourishing in London at the time.

Dante and Virgil hurry past the Minotaur when they can, and continue their descent through more fallen boulders and scree, to enter the seventh circle, for sins of violence. They are then hailed by one of a group of centaurs armed with bows and arrows. Virgil responds that they will discuss their mission with Chiron, rather than the hot-headed Nessus. Chiron was a centaur in mythology, but one known for his wisdom, and for teaching the young Achilles. Nessus was another centaur, who tried to abduct Heracles’ wife Deianeira and was killed for that, but laid a plot that led to Heracles’ death.

Chiron directs Nessus to aid Virgil and Dante in their passage.

They pass along the rocks beside the damned souls, who are immersed in boiling blood to a depth appropriate to their sins. Dante recognises some as they go: Alexander the Great, Dionysius the Elder and tyrant of Syracuse, one of the d’Este family who was suffocated by his own son. Further on are Attila the Hun, Pyrrhus, Sextus son of Pompey, and a couple of infamous contemporary highwaymen.

Virgil then leads Dante into a strange wood, whose thorn trees form the nests of Harpies. These composite creatures have the heads of humans and the bodies and talons of birds, and live in sub-ring number two. In classical legend, the Harpies inhabited the Strophades, islands where they attacked Aeneas and his companions in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Virgil tells Dante to break a small branch from one of the trees. When he does, the tree screams out in pain, and the wound oozes blood. The tree explains that they were once people, but had taken their own lives. In this case, Dante is talking to the poet Pier della Vigna, who was ruined by envious rivals.

Dante is filled with pity for the spirit, who can only look forward to the Day of Judgement, while they are tortured by the Harpies feeding on their leaves. After learning of another two suicides from Siena and Florence, Dante moves on in profound sorrow.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but these weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still continuing in use. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted as well. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, that were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Few small pieces of cloth have such a broad range of associations, from the blindfold used in teasing games, to that covering the eyes of someone about to be shot. In paintings a blindfold is also the clearest visual statement that its wearer can’t see.

From classical civilisations onwards, it has been widely held that love is blind, and accordingly depictions of Cupid often show him wearing a blindfold.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco showing Cupid Blindfolded (1452-66) illustrates both the ancient saying and the Roman concept of an infant archer with spectacular wings.

This is maintained by Botticelli in the Cupid shown at the top of his Primavera (Spring) (c 1482).

The controversial Félicien Rops transferred this into a contrasting image.

Pornocrates, or Woman with a Pig from 1878 is his best-known work, showing a nearly-naked woman being led by a pig tethered on a lead like a dog. She wears a blindfold, and an exuberant black hat, suggesting she is a courtesan or prostitute. In the air are three winged amorini, and below is a frieze containing allegories of sculpture, music, poetry and painting.

The other classical figure likely to be blindfolded is the personification of Fortune.

Giovanni Bellini’s Allegory of Winged Fortune (1490) may look weird, but features the following symbols:

• the blindfold represents Fortune’s salient characteristic, her blindness in dispensing good fortune and misfortune;
• ill fate is normally associated with a peacock tail, wings, and lion’s paws;
• the two pitchers represent the dispensation of good and bad fortune;
• abundant and long hair at the front of the head, and little at the back, symbolises Kairos, the moment of opportunity, which can be seized by the hair when approaching, but once passed cannot.

In history paintings, a blindfold is almost universally the sign of seriously bad fortune.

Paul Delaroche’s convincing painting of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) shows the fate of a contender for the crown of England following the early death of King Edward VI at the age of just 15 in 1553. As he had no natural successor, he had drawn up a plan for a cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to become Queen. Her rule started on 10 July 1553, but King Edward’s half sister Mary deposed her on 19 July. She was committed to the Tower of London, convicted of high treason in November 1553, and executed on Tower Green by beheading on 12 February 1554 at the age of just 16 (or 17).

Lady Jane Grey and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Bridges, take the centre of the canvas. She is blindfolded, the rest of her face almost expressionless. As she can no longer see, the Lieutenant is guiding her towards the executioner’s block, in front of her. Her arms are outstretched, hands with fingers spread in their quest for the block. Under the block, straw has been placed to take up her blood.

At the right, the executioner stands high and coldly detached, his left hand holding the haft of the axe which he will shortly use to kill the young woman. Coils of rope hang from his waist, ready to tie his victim down if necessary. At the left, two of Lady Jane Grey’s attendants or family are resigned in their grief. Lady Jane Grey wears a silver-white gown which dominates the entire painting, forcing everything and everyone else back into sombre mid tones and darker.

Although Delaroche made one major alteration to history, as she was actually executed in the small court-like space within the Tower known as Tower Green, he otherwise appears to have been faithful.

Antonio Gisbert’s huge painting of The Execution by Firing Squad of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga (1888) shows a terrible scene: the summary execution of nearly fifty people on 11 December 1831.

General José María de Torrijos y Uriarte was highly successful in his military career, and during liberal government in 1820-23 was Captain General of Valencia, and Minister for War. When that regime came to an end in 1823, General Torrijos first fled to France, then to England, where he lived in London, being assisted by the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister.

From 1827, the liberal Spanish exiles organised themselves for a popular uprising in Spain, and in 1831, Torrijos and his followers travelled to Gibraltar in readiness. They supported several attempts at insurrection in early 1831, each of which was brutally suppressed by the absolutist government under Ferdinand VII. The Governor of Málaga then tricked General Torrijos into believing that he was a supporter of the planned insurrection. On the morning of 2 December, General Torrijos and fifty-nine others landed at Málaga after a surprise attack by the ship Neptune. They intended to encourage a liberal uprising, and had brought a printed manifesto and several proclamations which they intended to promulgate.

They were eventually ambushed after several days of walking, on 4 December, and surrendered, hoping that the situation in Málaga had improved. They underwent no trial, but at 1130 on Sunday 11 December 1831, all 49 who had been captured were shot dead by a firing squad on the beach.

Our sense of sight is celebrated in a peculiar, ancient, and widespread game played by children and adults alike: blind man’s buff (or bluff). This involves putting a blindfold on the ‘victim’, who is then required to ‘tag’ one of the sighted players. It was recorded in ancient Greece, and more recently is known from much of Asia, including Japan, throughout Europe, and the Americas.

The game also rejoices under many fascinating names: in ancient Greece it was known as copper mosquito, in Bangladesh as blind fly, in Germany as blind cow, and in France as Colin-Maillard, after a tenth century warrior.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Blind-Man’s Buff (1750-52) shows a red-faced young woman wearing the blindfold, being teased by her young man, and a child using a simple fishing rod. Her torso is tightly constricted by a tubular corset which gives her what appears to be an anatomically impossible figure, and if she’s not very careful, she will fall down the stone steps in front of her.

Francisco Goya shows a more usual form of Blind Man’s Buff (1788), in which the sighted players hold hands and form a ring around the blindfolded ‘victim’. Although this should provide them with more safety, this group has chosen to play on the bank of a river.

Konstantin Makovsky’s Игра в жмурки (Blind Man’s Buff) (c 1895) shows another variant being played indoors.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, following the publication of his illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Walter Crane was becoming more involved in teaching. He lectured at the Manchester School of Art, and for a short period was principal at the Royal College of Art in London. He also travelled, and in 1900 paid a successful visit to Budapest in Hungary to promote a retrospective exhibition of his work.

His watercolour portrait of the beautiful woman knight Britomart from 1900 was probably a sequel to his Spenser project, as she is one of the major figures in that epic, and an allegory of virtue. She is shown on a very English beach, with the chalk cliffs of the south coast behind her, staring wistfully into the distance, her chin propped on the heel of her right hand. She wears full armour, mixed with more feminine clothing. Her left arm rests on her shield, there’s an enchanted lance beside her, and her helmet on a dune behind her.

In the same year, Death, the Reaper may have drawn inspiration from faerie paintings of the previous century, in particular those of Richard Dadd, in the tiny humans cavorting among the wild flowers. Crane invokes one of the most exaggerated moon illusions I’ve seen, to add more atmosphere.

A Masque for the Four Seasons, painted in oils between 1905-09, is one of Crane’s most overtly Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and possibly his last major work in oils. Drawing on his memories of Botticelli’s Primavera, it uses a similar frieze of figures before a dense woodland background, and copious displays of seasonal wild flowers. The four Grace-like women wear loose classical robes, and are colour-coded. From the left they represent Spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Gaps in the trees provide two cameo glimpses of appropriately seasonal agriculture, with Spring ploughing on the left, and the grain harvest in the centre. At the right is Father Time playing the pipes, his hourglass beside him. This coincided with Evelyn De Morgan’s similar frieze The Cadence of Autumn, shown below, also from 1905.

Crane appears to have travelled more widely in the early twentieth century, as far as Colombo in modern Sri Lanka, where he painted this gouache Under the Palms at the Galle Face, Ceylon on 17 February 1907.

Original artwork for illustration can become more difficult to classify, as shown in this watercolour and ink drawing for The Mirror, one of Crane’s illustrations for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales from 1909.

Although Crane’s Race of Hero Spirits Pass from 1909 may have been in preparation for an illustration to accompany Charles Kingsley’s poem The World’s Age (1849), it was painted in tempera on canvas, suggesting it may have been intended as a standalone easel painting. This was accompanied by the quotation:
“Still the race of Hero-spirits
Pass the lamp from hand to hand;
Age from age the Words inherits –
‘Wife, and Child, and Fatherland.'”

The fourth modern Olympic Games had been held in London the previous year (1908), and may have been his inspiration.

The Judgment of Paris, painted in 1909 in watercolour, returns to the Pre-Raphaelite frieze. Although competent, it lacks the flair and innovation of his earlier depictions of myth.

On 27 February 1910, Crane was on his travels again, this time in North Africa, where he painted this watercolour of Porte de France, Tunis.

I also have two interesting undated paintings I suspect may have come from Crane’s later years.

Painted in a combination of transparent watercolour and gouache, A Diver is an unusual and challenging motif.

His more illustrative watercolour of Nyads and Dryads melds its Dryads in with their trees, puts the ‘Nyads’ or Naiads (water nymphs) in the water, and has a river god watching from the reeds in the distance.

Late in 1914, after the start of the First World War, his wife Frances became unwell and went on a ‘rest cure’ in Kent. She then suffered an episode of acute mental illness and killed herself. Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915, at the age of 69. Although his paintings had already lost their popularity, as a children’s illustrator his accomplishments live on.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

Dante and Virgil are ferried across the River Styx to land at the entrance to the city of Dis, the lower depths of Hell (circles 6-9), but its gate is slammed shut on Virgil when he tries to secure their admission. He reassures Dante that he has been here once before, but Dante is staring at the top of the gate where the three Furies have appeared, wreathed in snakes.

Virgil names them to Dante: Megaera on the left, Alecto to the right, and Tisiphone between them. Megaera represents evil deeds, Tisiphone evil words, and Alecto evil thought. They are another crossover drawn from classical mythology into Dante’s Christian Hell.

The Furies call on Medusa to turn Dante to stone with the sight of her face, and Virgil makes Dante turn to look away from them, and close his eyes tightly.

A strong wind then blows across the marsh of the Styx towards them, as a mass of ghosts there part to make way for an angel who walks across the water towards the walls of Dis. Virgil gets Dante to bow in deference to the angel as he passes them by and opens the gate of Dis for them with his rod. The angel chides those inside for their resistance and immediately returns the way he came.

Virgil then leads Dante through the open gate onto a plain, its ground made uneven by the many tombs set in its surface. The stones on top of them are open, revealing flames within, and letting out cries of pain. Virgil explains that these contain heretics and their followers, and that their lids will only be closed with the Final Judgement. By heresy, Dante here means that these sinners denied the immortality of the soul.

Virgil points out the tomb of the Epicureans, then Dante is startled by the appearance of the head and upper body of Farinata degli Uberto in another.

Farinata was the leader of the Ghibellines of Florence, a family grouping that had been fighting against the Guelphs, including Dante himself. The Florentine then asks Dante who his ancestors were, and reveals that he had opposed Dante’s family. With Farinata are the last Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Cardinal Octavian, Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, who had been a powerful supporter of the Ghibellines prior to his death in 1273.

With Dante thinking on what he had heard, Virgil leads him into a gorge, in which they descend deeper into Hell.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still remain in use. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29.

Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612) was an Italian Mannerist painter and print-maker who was born in Florence and painted some magnificent frescoes in the palaces of the richest families there.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was an American painter who worked much of his career in Europe. Trained in Paris, he was a highly successful portraitist in Paris then London. One of the most gifted and prolific painters of the nineteenth century, his work is rich in bravura brushstrokes and highly individualistic. In his later career, he painted large murals on the East Coast of America, including Orestes Pursued by the Furies in Boston, MA, which he started in 1922, and completed in 1925, just prior to his death. Over its 100 square feet of canvas, it shows a young and naked Orestes cowering under the attacks of the Furies, as he tries to run from them.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In yesterday’s article, I looked at how William Blake’s late painted etching of The Ancient of Days isn’t what it seems, and tells a story unique to Blake’s personal mythology. This article looks an earlier work that until relatively recently was misidentified as a painting of Hecate.

According to Blake’s mythology, Enitharmon is partner, twin, and inspiration to Los, and mother of Orc. She is spiritual beauty, and her image here was most probably modelled on the artist’s wife Catherine. In The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (c 1795), she establishes her Woman’s World, with a false religion of chastity and vengeance, which is Blake’s view of the 1800 year history of the ‘official’ Christian church.

As the moon to the sun of Los, she is accompanied by symbols of night, such as the owl and bat. She also plays the role of Eve, which may explain the head of a snake peering out towards her. The donkey eating thistles underlines Blake’s rejection of the ‘official’ church, and the two figures behind Enitharmon face in and bow their heads in guilt. The book on which Enitharmon’s left hand rests is Urizen’s ‘Book of brass’, in which his repressive laws are laid down.

If you didn’t know Blake’s mythology, identifying her as Hecate seems reasonable.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s drawing of a classical sculpture of Hecate, Greek Goddess of the Crossroads was engraved for his illustrated account of classical mythology published in 1880. This is her most conventional representation: fully triple-bodied, holding a key at the left, and torches to the left and right, with a symbol of the moon on her forehead.

Hecate has also been depicted more like Eve with a serpent, as seen in Francesco de’ Rossi’s fresco of her from 1543-45. He hints at her triple body with the heads on which she is standing, and she wears a coronet of the moon, her association with night, hence with the owl in Blake’s painting.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau flies his owls in support of a personification of the mythical Night (1883), as do others painting similar motifs. But the owl is also famously associated with Minerva.

Hendrik Goltzius shows a classical and fairly complete set of her attributes in his Minerva (as the Personification of Wisdom) from 1611: the owl, her distinctive helmet, here decorated with olive leaves, a spear, books, and great beauty.

Blake’s mythology has an elaborate and sometimes opaque genealogy. Los and his emanation Enitharmon have children, the first of whom is Orc. As Los is spiritual revolution, so Orc is revolution in the material world. Orc hates his father Los in an Oedipus complex of love for his mother Enitharmon. As shown in Los and Orc (c 1792–3) above, Los is driven to bind Orc to a rock on the top of Mount Atlas, using the chain of jealousy. Orc’s limbs then become rooted in the rock, pinning him there. This cannot prevent Orc’s imagination from raging, though, and permeating everything.

One of the fundamental concepts in Blake’s mythology is that of pairings: there are many elements with both male and female counterparts, the latter being termed emanations. These might take the generation of Eve from Adam as their prototype. Nowhere does Blake envisage a pantheon of gods, but stretches the Jewish and Christian concepts of a single God, going far beyond the Christian Trinity. These include expressions of God associated with particular eras, such as the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and those of particular interpretations that Blake deprecates.

William Blake wasn’t the only artist in Britain at the time who painted new stories. Henry Fuseli did too.

Fuseli’s painting of Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma (1783) shows a narrative that the artist had invented for this painting. It appears to be one of a series, although only one other work has been identified as part of that, and that is only known from a print of 1782. He also preceded this series with a single painting of Ezzelin and Meduna (1779), referring to another unique narrative, which doesn’t appear to have any associated works.

Fuseli provides the viewer with a rich array of ‘Gothic’ narrative elements to form their own account of the story. There are visions of faces in the distance on the left, chains leading to an unseen figure apparently manacled into a bed at the right, Percival swinging a sword above his head, to strike the cloaked figure of Urma in the left foreground, and a beautiful young woman, presumably Belisane, embraced by Percival’s left arm, kneeling on the floor.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

One of the golden rules in narrative painting is to tell stories that the viewer is already familiar with, because of the limitations imposed by still images. By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, artists were breaking that rule in what became a new sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’, with open-ended narrative encouraging the viewer to construct their own stories. William Blake was a precursor to that in some of his paintings, and this weekend I look at two examples that try to tell stories we’re unfamiliar with.

At first sight, Blake’s painted etching The Ancient of Days from about 1821 might represent the Christian God seen as master craftsman, forming the world out of the darkness below heaven. That would be an innovative but hardly revolutionary interpretation of the opening of the book of Genesis.

That wasn’t Blake’s intention, though. This represents Urizen, one of many figures from his own mythology, and documented only in the artist’s writings. There, Urizen symbolises reason, his name most probably a semi-conscious pun on your reason. This painting shows Urizen the architect, creating the world using his compasses. He goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, but his desire for dominion brings about his downfall into a state of Satan.

Representations of God as architect aren’t common, but Blake’s would be by no means unique.

This frontispiece to a Bible Moralisée from around 1220-30 shows the Christian God as architect, using his compasses during the creation of the world. The compasses continue in various modern symbols, including those that feature in freemasonry, and in its references to the Supreme Being as the Great Architect of the Universe.

Urizen typically appears with long and streaming white hair and beard, as in Blake’s plates throughout his First Book of Urizen from 1796.

But Urizen isn’t the only figure from Blake’s mythology who has long white hair and beard: above is Elohim Creating Adam from 1795, for example.

In Blake’s God Judging Adam also from about 1795, both figures sport long, flowing white hair and beards, which appear to be markers not so much of their ages or identities, but of the ancient nature of events.

Long white hair and beards are of course a long-established tradition in visual art: here is a contemporary example of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, in Henry Fuseli’s Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85). Fuseli was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and a great influence on Blake.

Characteristic of the figure of Urizen in The Ancient of Days is the unusual way in which the figure’s hair and beard stream as if in a strong wind, the figure’s nakedness, and its posture.

This can be traced most immediately to a major work by another contemporary painter who was highly influential on Blake: James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8). Barry was also Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and the similarities between King Lear’s white hair and beard here, and those of Blake’s Urizen in The Ancient of Days, are striking.

Blunt found another potential source in Pellegrino Tibaldi’s figure of Neptune (1549-51) in his fresco showing the story of Ulysses in the Palazzo Poggi. Although now relatively obscure, Blake saw fresco as being ‘true’ art, and was long an enthusiast of frescos, even if he saw few. A contemporary popular book of prints of frescos included an engraving of Tibaldi’s Neptune, so this image would have been accessible to both Blake and Barry.

It’s likely that Tibaldi’s Neptune was itself a reference to Michelangelo’s earlier frescos in the Sistine Chapel: the detail above showing God creating the sun and moon, and even more important that below showing the creation of Adam (c 1511).

Blake knew both of these sections of the Sistine Chapel frescos well, having engraved them previously. They also link to Blake’s own Elohim Creating Adam above.

Blake’s Urizen the architect, seen creating the world using his compasses, is distinct from both God and Elohim in his nakedness. In Blake’s written narrative, the distinction between Urizen and Elohim becomes more blurred, when the former goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, until his desire for dominion brings about his downfall.

It may be tempting to assume that, just because Blake’s paintings appear so original and different, they originate entirely from his own mind. However, Blake was just as likely to borrow from and refer to other visual art as any other master.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

Dice have been thrown and rolled by people throughout recorded history. Early dice were often irregular, made of bone or stone and used primarily for gambling. Although they don’t appear to have played any significant role in mythology, their role in the events of the Crucifixion is well recorded in the New Testament Gospels.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 depicts the biblical account of guards gambling with dice, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

The Christian Church has generally taken a dim view of gambling, and shunned dice. Several artists have expressed this in paint, but none so forcefully as Hieronymus Bosch.

For Bosch and his patrons, gambling was definitely one of the cardinal sins. It appears in the garden of Hell in the right panel of his magnificent Garden of Earthly Delights from about 1495-1505. In this damning conclusion, figures are mutilated and tormented in a nightmare landscape dominated by non-human creatures and alarming objects, where gambling takes the foreground.

In the foreground, a huge blue bird, wearing a cauldron on its head and swallowing a whole human, presides over the scene. Two main groups of victims here are clustered around objects associated with gaming and gambling, and those for making music, then associated with the work of the devil, and immoral activities such as dancing. Playing cards are scattered on the ground beneath an overturned gaming table, and dice are balanced precariously on an index finger and on the head of a naked woman. From among that cluster of figures, a pair of dark blue non-human arms holds high a backgammon board with three dice.

Not all cultures have been as damning, though.

Albert Anker turns to classical times to put his spin on gambling games in his Knucklebone Players (1864). Three youths are here playing a game of greater skill, but still frequently the basis of gambling. The distinguished men in the background are hardly the sort to frequent a gambling den, surely?

Nevertheless, playing with dice continued as a cardinal sign of sin.

Alcohol, and that other vice tobacco, are cited in David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50). In common with other paintings of card-playing and gambling in this period, it’s set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men are completely absorbed in gambling large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

William Hogarth’s successor Thomas Rowlandson painted his Gaming Table in watercolour in 1801. Players here are putting their stakes on dice, which are about to be revealed by the man at the far right of the table, who seems to have been raking the money in.

Although Gustave Courbet’s portrait of the operatic singer Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable (1857) shows the last scene in Act 1 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1831), its message is clear. In this scene, Gueymard’s character Robert gambles away his entire estate on dice; in the opera this is marked by the aria L’or est une chimère: ‘gold is but an illusion’.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less convinced. In his watercolour of Hesterna Rosa from 1865, he shows a moment from the contemporary play Philip van Artevelde, written by Henry Taylor in 1834. Van Artevelde was a Flemish patriot who lived between about 1340-1382, and led the Ghent rebellion in 1381, only to be crushed to death in battle the following year. In Taylor’s play, van Artevelde has a relationship with a woman of lower class; in this scene, his lover has paused to reflect on her life while he plays dice with a friend. The painting’s title means yesterday’s rose, and draws on the theme of the fallen woman, so popular with Rossetti.

Murillo’s Young Boys Playing Dice of about 1675 adopts a different theme, of gambling among the poor and vulnerable. Two scruffy urchins from the streets of Seville are throwing dice for the small piles of change which are probably their entire fortunes. A third stands over them, chewing at a bread roll while his dog looks up longingly at the food.

Passing on from the circle of gluttons, Virgil leads Dante past the great foe of Plutus, a wolf-like creature who is chided by Virgil, and so they descend to the next circle, densely populated by avaricious misers and prodigal spendthrifts.

Plutus most probably refers here to a composite of the god of wealth, thus the root of the evil in these souls in this fourth circle of Hell, and Pluto, one of the gods of the classical underworld. Either of those roles justifies Dante’s description of him as the great enemy of mankind.

As opposites, the two groups of spirits are locked against one another, each rolling great boulders around in opposition. When their rocks crash together, they turn about and push in the other direction, and so on for eternity. Among those whose sin is avarice are many clerics, including cardinals and popes.

Virgil explains the role of Fortune in all this, that neither group of sinners can ever be satisfied with the riches that she has. Thus both the avaricious and the spendthrifts curse the angelic Fortune for their own sins.

Dante is led by Virgil past a dark spring to the swamp of the River Styx, so entering the fifth circle of Hell, where other souls covered in mud are attacking one another, punching and kicking as hard as they can. These are the sinners who were overcome with anger. Also in the swamp are their opposites, the mournful and miserable, whose breath bubbles up through the muddy waters.

The two reach the foot of a high tower, on top of which two flames are lit to signal to another tower in the far distance. This brings them a ferry, this time rowed by a man who Virgil calls Phlegyas, who is to carry the pair across the Stygian waters in his boat.

Phlegyas is a character drawn from classical legend and myth, including Virgil’s Aeneid. After Apollo raped his daughter Coronis, Phlegyas flew into a fit of rage and burned the temple of Apollo at Delphi, so the god killed him and sent him to the underworld to undergo eternal torment.

As Phlegyas rows Dante and Virgil across rough water, the spirit of Filippo Argenti, an arrogant Florentine who is hated by Dante, rises out of the water and tries to capsize their boat.

Dante tells him to be off, and Virgil assists in pushing him back into the river. They see Argenti’s ghost cast among those fighting on the shore, where he is torn apart by them, to Dante’s delight.

Their boat then approaches the moated city of Dis, in the depths of Hell (circles six to nine), where Phlegyas lands them. Virgil goes forward to secure their admission, but the gate to the city is slammed shut on him.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Gates as a means of access through the walls of fortified cities have ancient origins, but it wasn’t until the Etruscans and the Romans that they acquired their own deity, notably in the Roman god Janus with his two faces. His association with gates, and the start and end of war, gave rise to an interesting tradition in classical Rome: the gates at each end of an open enclosure associated with the god were kept open in times of war, and closed when the city and empire was at peace. Opening the gates of the temple of Janus was therefore a mark of starting a war.

In Rubens’ Temple of Janus from 1634, those gates, here imagined to be those of a temple, are being opened to let a warrior through to battle. Above that doorway is a statue of Janus with his two faces.

In Biblical narratives, the prominent account involving gates, other than those of heaven or hell, occurs at the start of the Passion of Jesus, in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, since celebrated by Palm Sunday. This has been depicted in two significant works in the late nineteenth century.

Gustave Doré painted several versions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem including this preparatory sketch, in preparation for his final huge version exhibited at the Salon in 1876, measuring 6 by 10 metres.

In 1897 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted his account of The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. According to all four gospels, Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, and as he proceeded towards Jerusalem, crowds laid their clothes on the ground to welcome his triumphal entry into the city. Aside from being one of the major events in the Passion to be shown in paintings, for Gérôme this may have had another reading. Just a few years earlier, his paintings were being welcomed by throngs at the Salon, and commanded huge sums when sold. A short time later, his work was largely ignored, and he may have seen himself as being prepared for crucifixion in public.

The gate of hell is featured in two of the major Christian literary works of the early modern period: Dante’s Divine Comedy (c 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

At the start of Dante’s Inferno, the ghost of Virgil leads the author to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above it is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

It’s also William Blake who depicts Satan at the gates of hell in his paintings to accompany the second book of Milton’s epic.

Two versions, that from the Thomas set above, and below that from the Butts set, show Satan at the gate of hell, on his way out and heading for heaven.

Although the phrase pearly gates, derived from a description of the gate to heaven in the book of Revelation, has been in common use, few if any paintings have depicted them literally. However, in paintings of secular life they can have symbolic significance.

James Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she was a governess, perhaps. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if the floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Regency scene of The Elopement from 1893, shows a woman leaving home to run away with her lover, the oarsman in the boat. She closes the gate on her old life as she looks back and reflects, before boarding the boat in which she will start the journey of her new life.

In the nineteenth century many painters paid the bills by illustrating books, often those intended for children. Two in particular are now known as illustrators, overlooking their fine art: Gustave Doré and Walter Crane. In this series of three articles I look at the work and career of the latter, who was one of the leading children’s illustrators who shaped how children’s books would look well into the twentieth century.

Crane was also an accomplished and recognised painter, an enthusiastic fan of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, a close friend of William Morris, a key member of the Arts and Crafts movement, and an overt and active Socialist.

He started his training as an apprentice to the wood-engraver William James Linton, between 1859 and 1862. In 1863 Edmund Evans employed him to illustrate ‘toy books’ for children, and he continued to create book illustrations until well after 1900. In the later years, he extended his repertoire to include special editions of the Faerie Queene, a volume of Arthurian legends, and a book about the New Forest.

His career in painting had started slightly earlier, though, when his first work was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1862, and he continued to paint independently of his illustrations.

Crane was one of the first artists to base a painting on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem The Lady of Shalott, published in 1833 and 1842. This tells part of the Arthurian legends, that of Elaine of Astolat, as given in an Italian novella from the 1200s.

The Lady of Shalott lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She’s subject to a mysterious curse confining her to weaving images on her loom, and must not look directly at the outside world. One day, while she sits and weaves, she catches sight of the knight Lancelot. She stops weaving and looks out of her window directly towards Camelot, invoking the curse. She abandons her castle, finds a boat on which she writes her name, then floats downriver to Camelot, dying before she arrives. Lancelot sees her body, and the poem ends:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Crane’s Lady of Shalott from 1862 shows her white in death, laid out in her boat, tresses and flowing sleeve draped over its gunwhales into the still water at the river’s edge. This is set in an ancient wood, in dramatic twilight, presumably dusk. This painting was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, and must have influenced JW Waterhouse’s much better-known version just over 25 years later (below).

The following year he chose a story from the Old Testament. According to various sources in the Bible, Boaz was a wealthy landowner in Bethlehem who noticed Ruth, a widow in such difficult financial circumstances that she came to glean grain from his fields. Boaz invited her to eat with him and his workers, and started deliberately leaving grain for her to glean. Because they were distantly related, Ruth then asked Boaz to exercise right of kinship and marry her. They had children, and David was their great-grandson.

Crane’s painting, which is in oils despite resembling a watercolour illustration, shows the couple at the end of lunch, during Ruth’s gleaning. Their dress is an odd composite of the Biblical and Arthurian. She is looking down at her hands, as if contemplating grain held in her left palm. He has turned and looks towards her. In the background Boaz’s workers continue the harvest, and saddled horses are idle, a castellated house set in the crag behind them.

Two years later he was one of the first artists to depict John Keats’ ballad of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, written in 1819, and later revised slightly. It gives a simple story of love and death, including the verses:
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

The ‘belle dame’ of the title is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, and the knight, clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand. This appears to have inspired later paintings by Arthur Hughes and Frank Dicksee.

There’s some dispute over whether this triptych from about 1870 shows The Danaïdes, or Europe, Asia, Africa, or maybe both. The fifty daughters of Danaus were forced to marry the sons of their uncle Aegyptus, but their father told them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. All but one followed his instructions, for which they were condemned to eternally carry water in leaking vessels. Alternatively, the woman on the left could be African, that on the right Asian, and the woman in the middle European.

Crane married in 1871, and the couple travelled in Europe for the next two years. They visited Florence where they must have seen some of Botticelli’s paintings.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c 1486) is one of the world’s most famous paintings, and shows the goddess Venus, when she was born from the waters as an adult, arriving at the shore.

Crane bases his Renaissance of Venus (1877) on Botticelli’s painting, and links her rebirth back to the Renaissance. She is stood at the edge of a placid sea, the water just above her ankles. Three attendant graces are also getting out of the water in the middle distance, but appear to have been bathing. A train of white doves flies down and behind Venus, to start landing on the shore at the right. In the distance are the remains of a classical building at the water’s edge, and what appears to be a section of Mediterranean coastline. Further out at sea, a sailing boat passes by. Crane painted this in tempera, just as Botticelli did.

In classical Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is the queen of the underworld. She acquired that role when Hades, god of the underworld, was overcome with love and lust from one of Cupid’s arrows, and had seen Persephone picking flowers with friends. Hades then abducted her to be his queen.

Crane’s Fate of Persephone from 1878 shows her at the moment of abduction. She had been picking spring flowers in the meadow with the three other women shown at the left. Hades brought his chariot, complete with its pair of black horses symbolising the underworld, and is seen gripping Persephone’s right arm, ready to move her into the chariot and make off.

It’s remarkable that, although their body language is emphatic and clear, each of the five figures has a completely neutral facial expression. This helps its appearance as a frieze, an effect enhanced by Crane’s use of oil and tempera. The horses appear in complete contrast, champing at their bits and poised to set off at a gallop.

The following year he’s believed to have painted this elaborate setting of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, seated in the gardens at Naworth Castle, Cumbria, with a companion, standing holding a book. However, it was later signed clumsily by “E Burne Jones”, possibly in an attempt to pass it off as a more valuable work.

This couple had married in 1864, and were ardent supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and friends of Crane since they were both students, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Howard was an accomplished painter who had trained at Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, and later became a trustee of the National Gallery in London.

Edward FitzGerald’s translation of a selection from the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was published in 1859, was popularised from 1861, and appreciated by several of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Walter Crane’s painting from 1882 was accompanied by the following quotation from FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat:

Would that some winged angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Ah love! could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

A male winged angel is on bended knee before the figure of Time, who holds his scroll recording the destiny of all mankind. The angel’s hands are intertwined with those of Time: both right hands grasp the quill used to record destiny, both left hands are at the other end of the scroll. The angel looks up pleading at Time, but Time looks down at him with a frowning scowl. In front of the dais on which the angel kneels and Time sits is an hour glass. The whole is set inside a circular building revealing the stars through its roof, like a planetarium.

Endymion was a classical Greek mythological character, an Aeolian shepherd. Although accounts differ, some tell that Selene, Titan goddess of the moon and in Roman terminology, Diana, fell in love with Endymion, when she found him asleep one day. Selene asked Zeus to grant him eternal youth, resulting in him remaining in eternal sleep. In spite of his somnolence, she still managed to have fifty daughters by him. In Crane’s beautiful pastoral watercolour of Diana and Endymion from 1883, he is fast asleep in a meadow. Diana is in her hunting role with her dogs, bow and arrows. Endymion’s flock of sheep is in the distance.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

After hearing Francesca’s story in the Second Circle of Hell, for those guilty of the sin of lust, Dante weeps for her and faints. When he comes to, he realises that he has already descended to the Third Circle, where it’s pouring with rain, with snow and huge hailstones falling down in sheets. This soaks the ground, turning it into stinking mud.

He sees Cerberus, the fearsome three-headed canine monster that guards this circle, also soaked by the unceasing rain.

Agostino Carracci’s portrait of Pluto from 1592 shows Cerberus alongside his master, and the god holding the key to his kingdom.

Its heads bare their fangs at Dante, but his guide Virgil scoops up three handfuls of mud and throws them into the mouths of Cerberus to assuage its hunger.

Dante and Virgil walk on the flat plain among the prostrate forms of the gluttons. One of them sits up and accosts Dante, reminding him that they knew one another. He is Ciacco (a nickname, literally ‘Hoggio’), who tells Dante of his suffering there, and the names of five other Florentines of noble rank who are to be found in the lower circles of Hell.

Ciacco then falls flat on his face in the stinking mud to await the Final Judgement.

As Virgil leads Dante down to the next circle, they talk of what will happen when the Apocalypse comes, until they reach the dreaded figure of Plutus.

Cerberus is a good example of the redeployment of pre-Christian mythology into Christian beliefs: it was originally the guardian of the Underworld, as depicted by Carracci, and prevented those within from escaping back to the earthly world. It even features in the twelve labours of Hercules, in which he captured Cerberus. With Virgil’s explicit involvement, Dante here incorporates it into his Christian concepts of the afterlife.

The artists

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was a highly original and individualistic Italian painter now best known for his portraits consisting of assemblies of fruit, vegetables and other objects to form human images. He also painted more conventional works which are largely forgotten today, and was court painter to the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague. You can see some of his portraits in this article.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) was one of the Carracci trio, the others being his brother Annibale and cousin Ludovico, who were largely responsible for the reputation of the School of Bologna in Italy. After working as an engraver, he painted a series of major frescos showing the story of Jason and Medea, and the early history of Rome.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still in use. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29.

Philippe Semeria is a young contemporary artist who is an enthusiast for comics and is an aspiring illustrator.

Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Lovis Corinth wasn’t the only artist to have his own suit of armour. Rembrandt apparently bought at least one, while Jean-Léon Gérôme seems to have kept a suit hanging in his studio.

The End of the Pose (1886) is the first of Gérôme’s series of unusual compound paintings, which are at once self-portraits of him as a sculptor, studies in the relationship between a model and their sculpted double, and further forays into issues of what is seen, visual revelation, and truth.

Here, while Gérôme cleans up, his model is seen covering up her sculpted double with sheets, as she remains naked. Hanging against the wall behind is a complete suit of armour, and there is a single red rose on the wooden platform on which the model and statue stand.

Armour has occasionally been purely symbolic, most famously in the collaborative painting of Touch by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens in their series The Five Senses from 1618.

Touch extends beyond its title to encompass other tactile sensory modalities. Heat is associated with a brazier, fine touch with brushes nearby. Much of the panel is devoted to a collection of armour, weapons, and their manufacture by gunsmiths and armourers. The many suits on display, seen in the detail below, appear to be equipment that isolates rather than stimulates the sense of touch.

During the nineteenth century, many painters looked back at the age of knights and chivalry, which inspired German Romantics, Pre-Raphaelites, and some of the last academic artists of the century.

The crusades presented Carl Friedrich Lessing with an ideal combination of mediaeval history, romance, and chivalry. In The Return of the Crusader from 1835, he shows a lone knight in full armour dozing as his horse plods its way up a path from the coast. Although his armour is still shiny, a tattered battle pennant hangs limply from his lance. This is based on a Romantic poem by the writer Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840).

Edmund Blair Leighton’s Conquest from 1884 shows a stereotype knight in shining armour walking through an arch with its portcullis raised, a fair maiden walking behind him, as this victor enters the castle he has just conquered. The knight appears to be an idealised self-portrait.

Leighton’s The Accolade (1901) apparently shows Henry VI the Good – of Poland, not the British Henry VI – being dubbed a knight. Every link in his chain mail has been crafted individually.

Manuel García Hispaleto’s Don Quixote’s Speech of Arms and Letters (1884) shows the hero, his squire Sancho Panza behind, delivering one of his many orations after dinner, in a full suit of armour, as you would.

Eugène Delacroix visited tales of chivalry in his Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.

Plate armour continued to be worn by soldiers well into the twentieth century, and appears in some paintings of contemporary history.

Paul-Émile Boutigny’s undated Scene from the Franco-Prussian War shows soldiers from both sides of this short war in 1870-71. The soldier on the left is French, and holds a French Chassepot musketon with a long yataghan bayonet, while his colleague on the right appears to be Prussian, with his pickelhaube spiked helmet and a heavy cavalry cuirass that’s essentially modernised armour. (I’m grateful to Boris for his expert interpretation of this motif.)

François Flameng’s undated scene of Germans from the First World War shows the odd combination of archaic plate armour with modern gas masks.

Finally, as everyone knows, a knight goes to their grave in their armour.

Briton Rivière’s Requiescat from 1888 epitomises the faithful relationship between a dog and its master. As the knight’s body is laid out clad in armour, so his dog sits pining by the side of his body.

Armour, either in the form of plates of metal or chain mail with its many interlocked rings, is the primary attribute and symbol of the warrior. As such, several of the classical deities are often depicted wearing armour.

Peter Paul Rubens painted The Triumph of Victory in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars in his short suit of black armour dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

Jacob Jordaens’ finished version of an original sketch by Rubens now known as The Golden Apple of Discord (1633) shows the wedding feast of the deities where Eris (Discord) makes her gift of the golden apple to set up the Judgement of Paris, leading to the Trojan War. At the left, Athena/Minerva, wearing her plumed helmet and a suit of ornate plate armour, reaches forward for that apple.

Just to confuse, the Roman goddess of war, Bellona (Greek Enyo), is also shown in or with armour by convention.

Peter Paul Rubens’ undated Portrait of Marie de’ Medici as Bellona shows her in the midst of cannon, arms and armour, with an exuberantly decorated helmet, a sceptre and a statue of a winged woman.

Armour inevitably plays a role in some of the events reported during the war against Troy. After his close friend Patroclus had been killed while wearing the armour of Achilles, he demanded a fresh suit made by Vulcan/Hephaestus before he would return to engage in battle.

Anthony van Dyck’s Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus from about 1630-32 shows the scene when Thetis is collecting her son’s new armour from Hephaestus, at the left.

Benjamin West’s Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles from 1804 shows the Greek warrior being presented with the armour and helmet by his mother Thetis.

When Achilles is killed in battle, in accordance with warrior tradition, his armour was handed on to the next in line, who could have been either Ajax or Odysseus.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Armour also leaked through into Christian religious paintings.

Lucas Cranach the Younger sets The Conversion of Saul (1549) in mediaeval northern Europe, with Paul and his party riding knightly chargers in their armour. Paul’s horse has fallen to the ground, with Paul still in the saddle rather than prostrate on the ground. Paul holds his hands up and looks to the heavens, where the figure of Christ is seen in a break in the clouds at the top left corner.

It was the young French martyr Joan of Arc, though, who is most often depicted wearing armour.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand.

The second scene in Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s Joan of Arc Murals (1886-90) shows Joan leading the French forces against the English, who were laying siege to the French city of Orléans. There had been controversy in Joan’s trial as to whether she had used weapons against the English; Lenepveu hedges here, showing her holding a sword in her right hand, but brandishing the Dauphin’s standard to rally the French, in the role that she described of herself. She’s wearing a suit of plate armour, which she was provided with in preparation for this operation. As this would have been designed to fit a man, this was part of the case against her for ‘cross-dressing’ in men’s clothes.

Lovis Corinth is one of several major painters who acquired themselves a suit of armour. This featured in two symbolic paintings made before and after the First World War.

When war broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism. He expressed this openly in his In Defence of Weapons from 1915.

Armour Parts in the Studio is Corinth’s summary of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

In the First Circle of Hell, Dante and his guide Virgil saw the souls caught in Limbo. From there they descend to the Second Circle, where they find those guilty of the sin of lust. They pass the figure of Minos, who extracts a confession from every sinner as they begin their descent, and directs them onward to the appropriate circle for their sins.

Here the light is dim, and there is an eternal storm blowing those in this circle, ensuring they never obtain any comfort or relief from its incessant blast. The first of those described by Virgil to Dante is Semiramis, who married her father and made such incestuous relationships legal. (This is now known to be a false legend recorded by Orosius, popular in Dante’s time.)

Then they see Cleopatra, Achilles, Paris and Tristan. Dante tells the story of Francesca in most detail, and possibly for the first time in literature. She appears, blown in the wind, with her lover Paolo, but it’s Francesca who speaks to Dante.

Francesca da Rimini was the aunt of Dante’s host when he lived his later years in Ravenna. In about 1275, she married Gianciotto of the ruling family in Rimini, for political reasons. There’s strong suspicion that she had been tricked into this: her husband turned out to be disfigured and uncouth, but pre-nuptial negotiations were conducted by his handsome and eloquent brother Paolo, suggesting she was duped.

Soon after the marriage, Paolo and Francesca became lovers, apparently inspired by the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Gianciotto suspected the couple, and one day caught them together in his wife’s bedroom.

Paolo had become stuck when trying to escape through a trapdoor. Francesca was unaware of that, and let her husband in, who then attacked his brother with his sword. But Francesca stepped in between them to save her lover and was killed; Gianciotto then killed his brother, and after his own death had descended further into Hell for that double murder.

Dante’s story has inspired a succession of masterly paintings.

It was William Blake’s Whirlwind of Lovers that transformed these depictions.

This story is told in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s watercolour triptych: at the left, the lovers are reading the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere. In the centre are Dante and Virgil, and at the right Paolo and Francesca are being blown in the storms of the Second Circle of Hell.

Dante faints at the tragic story that Francesca has told him, and collapses as if dead.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor whose tragically short career was a major influence over the development of Futurism. Drafted into the Italian Army during the First World War, he was thrown from his horse and trampled to death when he was only thirty-three.

Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889) was a major French painter of history in an academic style, and a precocious artist. He won the Prix de Rome in 1845, and was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1864, teaching many successful pupils including Jules Bastien-Lepage. This article summarises his career and work.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso, and this painting was highly praised when shown at the Paris Salon in 1863. This article looks at his paintings.

Giuseppe Frascheri (1809–1886) was an Italian painter in fresco and oils who has been almost completely forgotten.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) was a major French painter in Neoclassical style, best known for his history and other narrative paintings. He was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and continued much in his tradition, and in opposition to the more Romantic painting of Eugène Delacroix. His work extended from portraits to Orientalism.

Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) was an Italian painter who worked mainly in Divisionist style, but is now known for his Symbolism. He was most famous in the period 1880-1920, during which he was involved in the Venice Biennale and exhibitions in Italy and Paris.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. He had a succession of relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and William Morris’s wife Jane. The triptych shown here is the earliest of at least three paintings of his showing Paolo and Francesca, another similar triptych being from 1862.

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was a major narrative painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, born in the Netherlands but trained and working in Paris. Among his favourite literary themes were Goethe’s Faust, and the story of Paolo and Francesca. This article looks at his narrative work.

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) was a major British painter and sculptor in the middle and late nineteenth century who was associated with several artistic circles and movements including the Pre-Raphaelites, but who worked independently in more Symbolist style. This article looks at his career and paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Dante lost consciousness just before he was expecting to be ferried across the River Acheron in Charon’s boat, from Hell’s Gate to its First Circle.

Botticelli’s Map of Hell from 1480-90 shows these stages of their descent at the very top: highest are the woods through which Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area in which the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat then crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and his guide Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

Dante is woken by thunder, and realises that he’s on the edge of the abyss that is Hell. Virgil leads him down into darkness, where there is no grief or pain, and explains that the multitude there never sinned at all, but none was baptised in faith as they had lived before the Christian era. This is where Virgil’s ghost now inhabits, for despite his merit and attainments, he never revered the Christian God.

Dante asks whether any of those in Limbo, as this circle is known, have ever been blessed and been able to leave. This allows Virgil to explain the Harrowing of Hell by Christ after his crucifixion. This occurred not long after Virgil’s death: following his crucifixion, Jesus Christ descended into Hell, where he reached the First Circle, blessed and liberated from it the many Old Testament figures who had been faithful to the God of the Jews, also known as Anastasis.

The descent of Christ into Limbo and his Harrowing of Hell was a popular theme in religious painting until the end of the Renaissance, and would have been familiar to Dante’s readers. Here is a small selection of some of the finest paintings of this, from 1530 to 1600.

Virgil then introduces the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers, in an ambitious piece of self-promotion.

The group walk on to the Dome of Light, and further to a castle surrounded by seven curtain walls and a moat. When they enter that they see many ancient heroes, including Electra, Hector, Aeneas, and other figures from classical history and legend. Next Dante notices a group of philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and others. Finally, he sees other learned figures from the past, including Euclid, Ptolemy and Hippocrates.

Here Dante and Virgil bid farewell to the spirits of those great figures as they move onward to the next circle.

The artists

Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486–1551) was one of the last of the Sienese School of Painting, which contrasted with the better-known Renaissance painting of Florence. He has been aptly summarised as “a mediaeval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.”

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of Primavera (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings that were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but those weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 that were engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who specialised in floral still lifes. The painting shown above was made in collaboration with the figure painter Hans Rottenhammer, a relationship that lasted between 1595-1610. At the time of this painting, Brueghel had returned to Antwerp, and Rottenhammer was in Venice.

Pablo de Céspedes (1538–1608) was a Spanish polymath from Córdoba, who was an accomplished painter, poet and architect who worked for twenty years in Italy, largely because he fell foul of the Inquisition of Valladolid in Spain. He was also a linguist and theologian.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, that were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625) was a German figure painter who worked in Italy from 1593-1606. Later during that period, when he was in Venice, he collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder on the work shown above. He was probably responsible for the early training of Adam Elsheimer, and for introducing him to the technique of painting on a small scale using oil on copper plate.

Jacopo Tintoretto (c 1518-1594) was one of the three grand masters working in Venice in the middle and late sixteenth century, alongside the more senior figure of Titian, and Paolo Veronese. Primarily a religious painter, I have looked in detail at his major works and biography. His painting shown above was made to accompany his Crucifixion for the church of San Cassiano in Venice.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In the first of these two articles I showed paintings of Hercules (Heracles) brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, as a stereotype of the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero. That association was strong enough to make its way into some more Christian images.

In Frans Francken the Younger’s composite painting of Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice from 1633, the upper section of Paradise sets heroes including Hercules, to the left of centre with his trademark club and lion-skin, in an idealised landscape. Above them is an angelic musical ensemble serenading the figures below. This clearly was a Paradise for the artist’s patron, not the common person.

Clubs also appeared in other examples of hand-to-hand combat drawn from classical mythology.

In Peter Paul Rubens’ finished painting of The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) the figure at the upper right is just about to bring his club down on this wedding feast that turned into a pitched battle.

Sebastiano Ricci’s Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 uses multiplex narrative to tell the same story. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and a centaur in the centre foreground is swinging his club at one of the Lapiths.

Although the original story of the death of Orpheus at the hands of Bacchantes has them club him with their thyrsi, more modern interpretations are content with ordinary clubs.

Louis Bouquet’s The Death of Orpheus (1925-39) transports this scene to a beach, where the naked Bacchantes are armed with clubs, and just starting to tear the body of Orpheus with their bare hands and teeth.

Some earlier paintings of Christian devils show them with clubs.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Anthony 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.

In contrast, Hercules’ lion-skin developed different associations, and involved other species.

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s romanticised view of The Siege of Paris from 1870 combines almost every symbol relevant to the city’s distress, and dresses the symbolic figure of Marianne in a lion-skin against a battle-worn flag.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animal skins had gone from the uncouth to the mildly erotic, as seen in several of John William Godward’s paintings of doing nothing, or Dolce Far Niente.

This first from 1897 returns to a classical Roman setting, and adds a brilliant green parakeet to accompany this woman on a tiger-skin, in her diaphonous dress.

Seven years later (in 1904), Godward painted his more complex version, also known as Sweet Idleness, or A Pompeian Fishpond. More modestly clad, his lone woman rests with her knees drawn up into a sleeping (near-foetal) position on another animal skin, with a peacock-feather fan in the foreground.

A couple of years after that (in 1906), Godward’s beautiful woman is stretched out on an animal skin on marble, a colour-co-ordinated garden and distant Mediterranean waterscape beyond: a far cry from the uncouth Hercules.

If you see a well-muscled man brandishing a large olive-wood club and wearing a lion-skin, you can be fairly certain he is Hercules, or Heracles if you prefer the original Greek. He’s the ultimate high-testosterone uncouth hero, who doesn’t understand why others wear fabrics, and relies on his club to settle all disputes. In this and tomorrow’s article I explore how reliably paintings meet that expectation, and who else wielded clubs and liked animal hide next to their skin.

One of the most unusual summaries of Hercules’ career is this mosaic from Llíria, Valencia, showing each of his twelve labours around its central panel. His club goes with him in every one except that in the centre, seen in the detail below.

There, in the midst of all his swashbuckling masculinity, Hercules is seen holding a distaff and spindle for spinning, and is dressed as a woman, while Queen Omphale sits on his Nemean lion-skin on her throne, clutching his club. This comes from a curious myth of role reversal and cross-dressing, in which Hercules served as a slave to the Queen of Lydia for a year as penalty for murdering Iphitus.

Bartholomeus Spranger’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1585) uses the same exchange of attributes, and plays openly with the eroticism of Omphale’s position. Note also the colour-coding of their skin.

Luigi Garzi’s Hercules and Omphale (c 1700-10) lets Hercules put his spinning gear behind him, as he entertains the court with a song and the tambourine. Omphale seems to be enjoying her new position on the lion-skin, while fondling his club in her left hand.

Byam Shaw ignores the figure of Hercules altogether, showing a triumphant and erotically-charged Omphale (1914) against a background of the twelve labours, in a remarkable reconfiguration of that ancient Roman mosaic.

Elsewhere, there are many depictions that identify the uncouth hero with his attributes.

In Hans Thoma’s Hercules Delivering Hesione (1890) Hercules stands on the beach in front of the early city of Troy, his trademark club in his right hand. A naked Telamon is busy keeping the sea monster at bay by throwing boulders at it, while Hercules is bargaining with the fair Hesione.

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered the story of Hercules Fighting with the Centaur Nessus showing the hero wearing his lion-skin, and his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background.

Noël Coypel, the father of the better-known history painter Antoine Coypel, painted Hercules Fighting Achelous in about 1667-69. This opts to show the pair during the first phase of their fight. In addition to wearing his lion-skin, Hercules wields his fearsome club.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God. He is wearing the poisoned shirt inadvertently given him by Deianeira, rather than his lion-skin, and his club rests at his feet.

Dante has been rescued from three wild beasts by the ghost of Virgil, who leads him along the only possible route, taking them to the gate of Hell. Inscribed above that gate is a forbidding series of lines leaving the traveller in no doubt that they’re going to a place of everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter, and is seen written in William Blake’s own hand below.

Virgil explains its meaning to Dante before the two enter. Dante is then struck by the terrible sounds that he hears, those of tormented sinners in Hell mixed with the noise of the first group of dead: those who have been refused entry to Hell or to Heaven, because of their cowardice in failing to choose between God and the Devil. They form a river of naked bodies drawn by a banner, their faces constantly stung by wasps and hornets, streaking them with blood and tears.

Among them is one who has been identified as Pope Celestine V, who resigned from office in 1294, and another candidate is Pontius Pilate, who refused to pass judgement on Christ.

Then Charon, an irascible old man with white hair and coal-black eyes, appears in his boat. He tells Dante to get away from the dead, as he won’t be carried across by him with those souls, and will have to arrange another crossing. Virgil intercedes to ensure that they too will be ferried across the marshy River Acheron to Hell.

Those souls destined for Hell rush to board the boat, with Charon sweeping them in using his oar to hit those who are slow. The boat then carries them across, as another load gathers on the shore ready for its return.

There is then a violent gust of wind and a red bolt of lightning, and Dante loses consciousness.

Although Dante doesn’t describe his crossing of the Acheron in Charon’s boat, this has been imagined by several painters.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted one of his finest narrative works, The Barque of Dante, showing the pair crossing a stormy river Acheron in a very small boat. He painted this quickly, over an intense period of a little over two and a half months, just in time for submission to the Salon. Dante, wearing his distinctive scarlet chaperon (hat), holds his hand up as he leans back onto the shoulder of Virgil his guide. This has been interpreted as showing how, when we encounter challenges from the modern we should look to tradition for support.

This is one of the most remarkable paintings of the Inferno, as an early experiment with colour. In the detail below, water droplets on the bodies of those surrounding the boat contain at least three different colours: their reflected highlights are pure white, the rest of the body of the droplet and its trail are the dark green of the water below, and the droplet itself has a shadow of the same pink that Delacroix uses to shade flesh. Their overall effect is of an unusually three-dimensional and realistic droplet.

The artists

José Benlliure y Gil (1855–1937) was a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia but spent much of his working life in Rome, where he became the director of the Spanish Academy there. After painting small genre works, he turned to classical narratives including the painting shown here.

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article introduces a series featuring his major works.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko (1835-1890) was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, but spent most of his career painting historical events in Russia. His painting of Charon won him a gold medal.

Paolo Vetri (1855–1937) was a precocious Italian painter who was born in Sicily. He was a pupil of the great narrative artist Domenico Morelli, and completed several major murals as well as many easel paintings.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.