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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The previous article looked at paintings of three classical myths which extolled the principle of hospitality to strangers by warning people of the dire consequences of failing to respect it: Atlas was turned to stone, people were drowned in a flood, and others turned into frogs. There are also many examples of hospitality given in the Old and New Testaments, although these start to reflect changing values which perhaps anticipated more modern codes.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Abraham’s Oak (1905) shows an ancient oak tree that died as recently as 1996. Tradition holds this to mark the place where three angels appeared to Abraham, or Abraham pitched his tent. The location is just southwest of Mamre, near Hebron, and its story runs that Abraham washed the feet of three strangers who appeared there, and showed them hospitality. They revealed themselves to be angels, and informed Abraham that his wife would become pregnant and bear him a son.

Perhaps the most revealing stories are those in the teachings of Jesus Christ, concerning Israelites whose origins were in Samaria, the Samaritans, who by that time had become shunned by the Jews, hardly in accordance with the ancient code of hospitality.

In Maximilien Luce’s Good Samaritan (1896), for example, the artist combines a brilliantly colourful dusk landscape with a classical narrative painting, showing the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament, in which a Samaritan gives aid to a traveller who has been robbed and beaten up on the roadside. Jesus uses this to explain who your ‘neighbour’ is, a key point in the obligation of hospitality.

Less known is the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, told in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 4-26, in which Christ arrived at a well in Samaria, tired and thirsty after his journey. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus asked her to give him a drink. That surprised her, as at that time most Jews wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan like her. They then became involved in conversation, in which Jesus preached to her, and revealed himself as the Messiah.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1894) depicts this using fine brushstrokes to build colour and form, and in places those strokes have become organised in the way that Vincent van Gogh’s rather coarser strokes did.

More startling still is Odilon Redon’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (The White Flower Bouquet) from about 1895. In this unique interpretation, Christ appears to be holding a bouquet of white flowers for the woman. There are other adornments, such as the elaborate floral object between the two, and a bright blue object high above Christ’s head. Both the figures have their eyes closed.

The brilliant Polish artist Jacek Malczewski cast himself in the title role of his Christ and the Samaritan Woman from 1911.

Hospitality to strangers has been a recurrent theme in the lives of many different saints.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted a particularly apposite scene in his Saint Thomas of Villanueva (Villanova) Dividing his Clothes among Beggar Boys from about 1667. This shows a story from the childhood of Saint Thomas of Villanueva de los Infantes (1488-1555), claiming that when he was a child, he often came home naked, having given all his clothing to poorer children. Thomas became a friar of the order of Saint Augustine, and was famed for his care of the poor when he later became the Archbishop of Valencia.

Thomas is the boy in the clean white shirt to the right of centre, who has just given his jacket to the boy to the left, who is dressed in dirty rags. It looks like Thomas is preparing to part with his trousers too.

Early paintings of hospitals also stress their original role in hospitality.

The sick have traditionally been cared for by their families. But for those without families, particularly anyone away from home, there have long been charitable institutions and others prepared to offer hospitality. They could have been slaves in the Roman empire, soldiers in mediaeval Baghdad, those returning from the Crusades in Europe, or refugees crossing mountainous areas through passes.

Few early hospitals provided much in the way of medical care, which was generally expensive and in any case ineffective. Most were little more than large inns, and any care staff were usually members of religious orders. A few took in cases of transmissible diseases which had become proscribed locally, conditions such as leprosy, and plague, in an attempt to confine the disease and prevent spread. The richer you were, though, the greater the chance and desire of being nursed at home.

Jacopo Pontormo’s fresco showing an Episode from Life in Hospital from 1514 shows nuns from a religious order caring for other women, perhaps the sick from their own convent.

The rise of social realism and Naturalism during the nineteenth century provides insights into contemporary society, and its attitudes to strangers and those outcast from society.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners from 1887 shows the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for some hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

Naturalists like Jean-Eugène Buland took on challenging motifs with challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin. And we don’t doubt that she accepted it.

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.

Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 it was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from their polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king generously handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

Robinet Testard shows a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It’s at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, the fourteenth letter in his Heroines.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill in his Sisyphean task, the Danaïds haven’t been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, and completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, now hanging in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), now decorating the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, yet again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

As lawyers rose to prominence in life during the nineteenth century, two artists in particular targeted them with their scathing satire: Honoré Daumier and Jean-Louis Forain.

For the satirical eye of Honoré Daumier, Three Lawyers (1855-57) meeting was the gathering of an elite who were out to help themselves, rather than the unfortunate people they purported to represent. Their heads tipped back and clutching thick bundles of papers, Daumier had less respect of them than they had for themselves.

In his undated Two Lawyers Conversing, you can be sure that they’re up to no good, except for themselves.

Jean-Louis Forain was a successful painter, caricaturist and political satirist in the late nineteenth century, who had long admired Daumier’s work. When Forain turned his attention to justice and the law after about 1902, he went beyond Daumier’s biting images of lawyers by entering the courtroom itself.

Forain’s The Court from about 1902-03 is one of the first of his series of courtroom views, and most neutral in its approach. In the foreground, a lawyer discusses the case with a woman, who is bent forward to hear his whispering. In the distance the court appears detached, perhaps disinterested, the judges sat behind large piles of papers, under a large painting of the crucifixion. The artist sold this work to Edgar Degas.

By the time that Forain painted this Trial Scene from 1904, his satire had come to the surface. The court here is so completely disinterested in the case before it that its judge is incapable of remaining awake, and the jurors at the left are hardly attentive either.

A young woman stands out in Forain’s Scene at the Tribunal (1906), as a lawyer turns and scowls disapprovingly at her.

Two women are shown in his Scene of the Tribunal from 1910, a lawyer talking to them as the court appears oblivious to their presence.

Legal Assistance (c 1900-12) shows an ordinary family man, cradling his young child in his arms as he presents a paper to a barrister or judge (wearing his short cylindrical hat). This painting was bought by Henri Rouart, an industrialist who was a good patron of the arts, as well as a fine amateur painter himself.

Sadly only available in this monochrome image, Forain’s undated painting of Recess of the Court is his most scathing. The judge leans back, fast asleep, as chaos takes hold in the court. Laywers are talking among themselves, and furniture is being moved around. Where is justice?

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that a growing interest in contemporary courts, and well-publicised trials, made them more popular in paintings. As few people ever see the inside of a courtroom, one of the first tasks of artists was to reveal what they looked like.

Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin’s painting of The Old Bailey, Known Also as the Central Criminal Court from 1808, here seen in an aquatint, is a good topographic view of this most famous English court. The presiding judge sits under a Damoclean sword of justice at the left, and the twelve men of the jury are to the right of centre. At the far right stands the accused, in front of whom is a large collection of witnesses ready to testify.

That was, and remains, an exceptional court. More typical of the type of court that ordinary citizens might encounter is Adolph Tidemand’s Scene before a Magistrate in the Country (before 1858), seen here in a lithograph. Set somewhere in rural Norway, the bench of magistrates sits at the right in more cramped and modest surroundings. Its justice may have been rougher, but the experience was far less daunting, and less overwhelmed by lawyers.

Ferdinand Brütt’s Before the Judges from 1903 shows the end of an era in the courtroom, as an official lights the candles in its chandelier, and its three judges sit hearing the case being put to them.

Depictions of courts of law aren’t common, and fall into five main groups: those showing cases and events from legend and history, modern documentary records of trials, others purely fictional, some satirical accounts, and a few general views without narrative. This article covers the first three, leaving satire and general views to come tomorrow.

The first is an account of a corrupt judge in the Achaemenid Empire around 525 BCE, and the extreme penalty he paid.

The story given by Herodotus about the corruption of Sisamnes, known as the Judgement of Cambyses, is today obscure. However, in 1489 it formed the basis for two paintings by Gerard David now viewed as forming a diptych. Sisamnes was a notoriously corrupt judge under the rule of King Cambyses II of Persia, and accepted a bribe in return for delivering an unjust verdict.

In the left panel, Sisamnes is being arrested by the king and his men, as the judge sits in his official chair. Hand gestures indicate the bribery that had been at the root of Sisamnes’ crime.

King Cambyses sentences Sisamnes to be flayed alive, as shown in the foreground of the right panel. In the upper right, David uses multiplex narrative to show the judge’s skin then covering the official chair, as a reminder to all who sit in judgement of the fate that awaits them should they ever become corrupt or unfair.

David’s gruesome pair of paintings were a pointed reminder to the authorities in Bruges of the importance of an independent judiciary, and the penalty for any judge who was tempted by bribery or any other form of influence, cautions with contemporary value even now.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne before the Areopagus from 1861 harks back to a classical legend of an unusual court case in Athens. Phryne had been a highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) in ancient Greece, who was brought to trial for the serious crime of impiety. When it seemed inevitable that she would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly.

Gérôme shows a whole textbook of responses to surprise among the members of the court, although Phryne herself is covering not her body, but her eyes; each of the men in the court, of course, is looking straight at her. At the time that Gérôme painted this, France was well into its Second Empire, when Napoleon III had removed the gag from the French press, and was moving from his early authoritarian regime towards the more liberal. The legend of Phryne was a convenient vehicle for Gérôme to express his political opinion, and her nakedness suggests her role is that of Truth.

The other much better-known story of judgement is that of King Solomon, told in the Old Testament, and in a succession of marvellous paintings since the Renaissance. Two women each claimed to be the mother of the same healthy baby, alleging that the other was the mother of a dead child. Solomon’s wise judgement was to threaten to cut the living baby in two, which elicited the correct protective response from the real mother of that child.

Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting of 1649 uses a classical composition, the two disputing women and their actions preventing it from becoming too symmetrical. Timed slightly before the raising of the sword, the master of painted narrative depicts the body language with great clarity. Solomon’s hands indicate his role as the arbiter, in showing a fair balance between the two sides.

The true mother, on the left, holds her left hand up to tell the soldier to stop following the King’s instructions and spare the infant. Her right hand is extended towards the false mother, indicating that she has asked for the baby to go to her rather than die. The false mother points accusingly at the child, her expression full of hatred. Hands are also raised in the group at the right, perhaps indicating their reactions to Solomon’s judgement.

Coverage of prominent court cases came to dominate reporting in the press throughout Europe and North America. Several cases became so popular that they moved artists to depict them, and one, the Dreyfus Affair in France, had lasting influence on that nation’s history.

Frederick Sargent’s painting of The Tichborne Trial (1873-1899) shows one of the most prominent cases in England. In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to a title and family riches, was presumed to have died in a shipwreck. The following year, an Australian butcher came forward with the claim that he was that heir, which was tested in a civil court case, heard between 1871-72.

The outcome of that rejected the claim, and the Australian butcher then underwent criminal prosecution for perjury, in one of the longest criminal cases heard in an English court, during 188 days between 1872-73. Sargent’s painting shows that case in progress, with the accused sitting just below the centre and looking straight ahead of him. Standing to the right of him is his barrister, Edward Kenealy, with ‘mutton chop’ whiskers.

The Australian butcher was convicted, sentenced to fourteen years in prison, and eventually died destitute in 1898. His barrister’s career was also finished, and he was subsequently disbarred. He went on to be elected as a Member of Parliament for his own political party in 1875, but died shortly after losing that seat in 1880.

Courts in some jurisdictions have long been reticent about allowing parties, judges, or juries to be drawn, painted or photographed. Although American practice has long allowed artists as reporters, in 1925 Britain made it illegal to draw inside a courtroom during a trial. The thirst for images for publication has since been satisfied by artists who work entirely from memory.

Arnold Mesches’ Courtroom sketch of the US Navy’s court of inquiry about USS Pueblo’s capture by North Korea from 1969 is perhaps more of an illustrative record of a court in session, sketched from a square and conventional position. But other artists and cases are quite different.

Robert Clark Templeton’s Drawing for CBS Evening News of Bobby G. Seale and others (1971) shows the head and shoulders of the accused, who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and was here on trial in New Haven, CT, for the murder of Alex Rackley. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and the case was declared a mistrial.

Another fine example of courtroom art is Elizabeth Williams’ portrait of Faisal Shahzad, The “Times Square Bomber” Sentencing, Manhattan Federal Court: October 5, 2010 (2010). Shahzad had pleaded guilty to five counts of federal terrorism-related crimes committed when he planted a car bomb in Times Square, New York, on 5 May 2010, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

There have also been a few paintings of fictional trials.

Abraham Solomon’s wonderful pair of paintings is set immediately outside a court. In the first, the father and family of the accused are seen Waiting for the Verdict (1859) at the end of a trial. The court appears in cameo up to the right, in that strange state of suspended animation as it awaits the decision.

Solomon’s pendant shows the elation when the verdict of Not Guilty (1859) is returned. The man, now freed from the dock, is embraced by his wife, who is kneeling in supplication, as their young child reaches out to touch father’s face. His father, eyes damp with tears of relief, is thanking their barrister earnestly.

In place of the view of the distant court, which is being symbolically dismissed as the barrister closes a door at the right edge, the left side of the painting now leads out to the warm light of the early dusk in the outside world, indicating freedom.

The melodrama of legal process is shown in William Frederick Yeames’ ‘problem picture’ Defendant and Counsel from 1895. An affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat sits with a popular newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak. As we’re told that she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of apotheoses. Following a couple of even more liberal interpretations, this article moves on to the second and third items in this list:

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

Girodet’s painting of the Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes was probably completed in 1802, and is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by the bogus Scottish poet Ossian. It’s unclear how those French war heroes became involved with Ossian, but an extraordinary mixture of myths and legends from contrasting cultures.

In Vasily Vereshchagin’s bleak Apotheosis of War (1871), ravens/crows perch on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town.

A few Christian religious paintings came close to being apotheoses.

Alexandre Cabanel’s The Death of Moses (1850) tackles one of the vaguer episodes in the life of this Old Testament prophet. When he was 120 years old, according to the book of Numbers, Moses assembled the tribes of Israel on the banks of the River Jordan, reminded them of the laws under which they must live, sang a song of praise, blessed the people, and passed his authority to Joshua. He then ascended Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, and died. Cabanel shows this as an apotheosis, with God the Father (upper left) welcoming Moses (centre right) with open arms.

Being transformed into a celestial body in catasterisation was an honour accorded those mortals who couldn’t aspire to deity, among them the giant Orion. He arrived at Chios, where he became drunk, and raped Merope, the daughter of Oenopion. As punishment for that, Oenopion blinded Orion and cast him from his land. Orion then went to Lemnos, where Hephaistos took pity on him, and lent him his servant Kedalion to sit astride his shoulders and act as his guide. An oracle advised Orion to proceed east into the rays of the rising sun, so that those rays would restore his sight. So cured, Orion then went to Crete to hunt.

There are differing accounts of Orion’s death. Some involve his love affair with Eos, which was opposed (possibly out of jealousy) by Artemis. In these, Artemis ended up killing Orion with her arrows. Other versions claim he was killed by a giant scorpion. In death, Artemis asked that Zeus catasterised him, together with the scorpion, to form the constellation Scorpio. Once there, Orion pursues the daughters known as the Pleiades, which form a prominent open star cluster nearby.

Poussin’s Landscape with Orion, or Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun was painted late in his career, in 1658, at a time when the artist’s hands were suffering a tremor that was starting to disrupt his ability to paint. It is among his finest allegorical landscapes, and one of the most intensely studied works of his career.

Set in one of Poussin’s wonderful idealised landscapes, near the coast, the giant Orion is striding purposefully towards the rising sun. He carries a huge hunting bow, and a quiver taller than a man. Standing on his shoulders is Kedalion, servant to Hephaistos, who is acting as his guide. Above and beyond Orion is a strange formation of backlit cloud, generally interpreted as being storm-cloud. Atop that is the standing figure of Artemis, with her distinctive crescent moon coronet, and an owl perched on her left shoulder. She leans nonchalantly against the cloud, her head propped against her right hand. In the far distance is the sea, with a prominent lighthouse.

There have been few other attempts to tell any part of the story of Orion on canvas. In 1685, Daniel Seiter ( –1705) painted this view of Diana by the Corpse of Orion, following in the brushstrokes of his teacher Johann Carl Loth. This shows Diana (Artemis), with her distinctive crescent moon, looking regretfully at the dead Orion, after she had killed him with her arrows.

Sidney Hall’s etching of Orion, a hand-coloured plate in a set of celestial cards from 1825, is an ingenious lesson in observational astronomy.

The Pleiades were originally the seven daughters of the titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione. When Atlas was made to carry the heavens on his shoulders, Orion started to pursue the Pleiades, so Zeus transformed them first into doves, then into stars. Their name is given to a star cluster, which appears to be chased across the night sky by the constellation of Orion.

Elihu Vedder’s painting of The Pleiades (1885) was made in association with his first illustration for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, representing Khayyam’s horoscope. Each of the sisters is connected by a thread to their corresponding star, perhaps representing the process of catasterisation.

There are a great many paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, of which I show here just a tiny sample.

Francesco Botticini’s spectacular example painted in about 1475-76 places unusual emphasis on Paradise, with its triple tiers of figures rising to those of the Virgin Mary kneeling in front of Christ at its summit.

Tintoretto painted several versions of The Assumption of The Virgin, this one for the Cappella di Santa Maria Assunta, in the Gesuiti, Venice. It’s thought that Tintoretto had promised to paint this in the style of Veronese.

Poussin’s Assumption of the Virgin from about 1650 is plainer and more orthodox.

Gaetano Previati’s Divisionist rendering of the Assumption from about 1901-03 shows a group of winged angels raising Mary’s body to Heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Medea finally consigned to oblivion and Theseus united with his father, King Aegeus of Athens, Ovid’s Metamorphoses rushes on to a little-known group of myths explaining the origins of Minos and the fearsome Myrmidons who were later to fight for Achilles in the war against Troy.

The delight of King Aegeus in meeting his son at last proved short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there. When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, Aeacus its king refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.

King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague that had almost destroyed the people of Aegina. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably also named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague sent against the people of the island. Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like one of the many outbreaks of the plague that have struck Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.

Aeacus saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being transformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh. They hailed Aeacus as king, and immediately went on to labour hard on the land and to become the fearsome band of warriors known as Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex).

Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, from where Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them with him to the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.

The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.

That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, showing Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.

If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he, together with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.

Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.

Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.

Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a thoroughly radical vision.

Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.

Camels have continued to feature in paintings showing more recent times, from events at the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon was in Egypt.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867. The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire.

Dromedaries were introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century to carry people and loads through its arid regions. They came to prominence in the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition of 1860 to cross the continent of Australia from south (Melbourne) to north in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Nicholas Chevalier painted this Memorandum of the Start of the Exploring Expedition to mark the occasion in 1860. The team left Royal Park, Melbourne on the afternoon of 20 August 1860 with nineteen men and about twenty tonnes of equipment and stores. Included were more than twenty-four camels, horses and wagons. Only one of the team survived to complete the crossing, and seven died, including both Burke and Wills.

David Roberts’ painting of the Isle of Graia, Gulf of Akabah (1839), shown here as a lithograph, is unusual for showing camels on the beach. We’re used to seeing dogs, horses, donkeys, even cows and sheep, but the ‘ship of the desert’ isn’t a common sight on the beach. The coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba (or Gulf of Eilat) is on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, and before urbanisation, development, and the advent of tourists, had a wild desert beauty, as shown here.

As artists visited North Africa more during the latter half of the nineteenth century, paintings of camels in their natural habitat became more common.

Marià Fortuny’s Camels Reposing, Tangiers (1865) is a watercolour sketch made over a heavily-worked and now visible graphite drawing, showing a group of camels resting near the city of Tangier, not far from Tétouan, in northern Morocco.

Alberto Pasini’s painting of The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is a superbly wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain, including a couple of elephants at the right.

When Ivan Aivazovsky visited Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia in 1868, his superb painting of this cosmopolitan city shows camels on its bustling streets.

Even in 1900-18, when Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani painted this Tatar Camel Driver, they would still have been a common sight in parts of Tbilisi visited by traders from the south, and the artist was clearly familiar with the animal. Tatar traders moved their goods on Bactrian camels as far as Crimea and other parts of southern Ukraine.

Eugen Bracht’s paintings of the Middle East avoid the crowded and bustling towns, preferring the barren desert where just a handful of people travel with their camels In the Arabian Desert (1882).

Bracht’s slightly later view From the Sinai Desert (1884) shows more groups on the move in the relentless heat. The ship of the desert indeed, but never argue with a half-ton camel, even if it’s an entry in a beauty pageant.

Camels are very large ungulates adapted to life in the desert, famous for their ability to survive for long periods without eating or drinking, their unpleasant smell, and a notoriously bad temper. I like Wikipedia’s sense of humour when it refers to their domestication, as few companion species could be less domesticated, but that’s supposed to have happened at least three thousand years ago.

Since then camels have been a mainstay of many major trade routes, with the single-hump dromedary best-known in Europe from its distribution across northern Africa and well into the Middle East. The Bactrian camel with its two humps has a more exotic range across central Asia, as far west as Georgia. There’s even an annual beauty pageant of camels in the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival held in Saudi Arabia.

Camels have been known to European artists since ancient times, and feature in several well-established narratives.

Piero di Cosimo’s account of Vulcan and Aeolus from about 1490 is one of the earliest in modern Western painting. From the left the figures are a river god, Vulcan forging a horseshoe, a figure (possibly Aeolus, keeper of the winds) riding a horse, a man curled asleep in a foetal position, a couple and their infant son, and four carpenters erecting the frame of a building. Among the animals are a giraffe and a black camel. It’s thought this shows early humans developing crafts at the start of civilisation.

They also feature in the centre panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, painted in about 1500. This shows a rolling deer park with lakes, overrun by a dense mass of naked men and women, animals and bizarre objects.

The middle distance is dominated by a central circular pond, in which there are groups of people. Around them is a procession of people riding horses, camels, and other mammals, in an anticlockwise direction around the central pond. To the left and right are more groups of people interacting, apparently in playful ways, with bizarre objects, such as the tail of a massive lobster.

Camels have occasionally featured in the cavalcade of animals being charmed by Orpheus.

Aelbert Cuyp’s Orpheus with Animals in a Landscape from about 1640 is one of at least two different paintings he made of the story. Here he has included a wide range of both domestic and exotic animals and birds, including a dromedary, a distant elephant, an ostrich, herons and wildfowl, although Orpheus is seen playing a violin rather than a lyre.

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

Camels also appear in paintings of Old Testament stories from the book of Genesis.

This page from the Vienna Genesis from about 525 CE tells the story of Rebecca and Eliezer, from Genesis chapter 24. In his quest for a wife for his son Isaac, Abraham sent his servant Eliezer back to their homeland of Mesopotamia to look for one. Eliezer reached the city of Nahor, where he stopped to water his camels and rest from his long journey. He pulled up at a well outside the city, where a young woman, Rebecca, had just drawn water. She offered him her water, and he recognised her as the chosen bride for Isaac, so presented her with the betrothal gifts he had brought with him.

This exquisitely painted miniature uses multiplex narrative. In the background is a symbolic representation of Nahor. Rebecca is shown at the left, having walked out of the city with her pitcher on her shoulder, along a colonnade. In front of her is a pagan water nymph, presumably the spirit of that well. Rebecca is shown a second time, and at similar size, giving Eliezer her pitcher to slake his thirst. His train of relatively tiny camels is also taking water.

Benjamin West painted Isaac’s Servant Tying the Bracelet on Rebecca’s Arm in 1775. This shows Eliezer giving her two golden bracelets and a nose ring, tokens that she showed her family, and marked her as Isaac’s intended wife. The camel at the left doesn’t seem as impressed, though.

Alexandre Cabanel painted an earlier moment in his Rebecca and Eliezer from 1883, showing the camels drinking the water provided by Rebecca.

Camels have also appeared as atmospheric extras in other Biblical narratives.

Eugène Delacroix’s magnificent painting of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris is drawn from the Book of Genesis, where Jacob is trying to assuage Esau’s anger by taking him flocks and gifts. He meets a stranger, an angel, who gets into a bitter quarrel with him, which is only ended when the stranger touches Jacob on the tendon of his thigh and renders him helpless. That’s the moment depicted here, as the angel’s right hand reaches under Jacob’s left thigh. To the right are flocks of sheep with Jacob’s shepherds driving them on a mixture of horses and camels.

They also appear in some accounts of the Nativity of Christ, either accompanying the Magi when they pay their respects to the infant and Holy Family, or later during the flight to Egypt.

Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, Italy, contain an elaborate depiction of The Adoration of the Magi from about 1305. The infant Christ rests on the Virgin Mary’s knee; she was originally clad in her signature ultramarine blue, but that has worn away with the years. Mary is accompanied by Joseph and an angel, and the Holy Family is within a wooden shed. The three ‘wise men’ pay their respects and present their gifts, here accompanied by camels and at least two attendants. The comet that attracted their attention is shown as a fireball crossing the sky.

Tomorrow’s sequel moves to show camels in more recent times.

Ovid tells one final story about the downfall of Medea after she has married King Aegeus in Athens, linking back to the saga of Jason, and forward to his next thread telling the story of Theseus. As this brief bridge only hints at the early life of Theseus, I here provide a more detailed account of his origins.

Aegeus had been childless, but following the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, the King of Troezen got him drunk and packed him off to bed with his daughter Aethra. She had been instructed in a dream to leave Aegeus asleep, and to go to a nearby island, where she was also impregnated by the god Poseidon. Theseus, who was presumed to have been conceived that night, was thus considered to have double paternity, by god and man, a common qualification for mythical heroes.

Aegeus returned to Athens, after burying his sword and sandals under a massive rock. He told Aethra that when his son grew up, she should tell him to move the rock as a test. If he succeeded, then he should take the sandals and sword as evidence of his paternity.

When Theseus was old enough, his mother Aethra showed him the rock, and gave him Aegeus’ instructions. Theseus moved the rock, found the sandals and sword, then undertook an epic journey overland to his father in Athens.

One of the earliest depictions is Laurent de La Hyre’s Theseus And His Mother Aethra (1635-36). This shows the young Theseus lifting a heavy pillar to reveal a pair of shoes and a sword.

In one of his rare collaborative paintings, Nicolas Poussin worked with Jean Lemaire to show the same scene, of Theseus Recovering his Father’s Sword, in about 1638. This shows a marked contrast between the two actors: Theseus, destined to be a great hero, looks rough and brutish, while his mother Aethra wouldn’t look out of place modelling for the Madonna.

Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s more sketchy painting of Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms from 1768 adds a river god for good measure, and has Aethra giving Theseus his marching orders to go find his father.

In Antonio Balestra’s Theseus Discovering his Father’s Sword (c 1725) Theseus looks less enthusiastic to follow his mother’s directions.

Ovid’s story starts with the arrival in the court of King Aegeus of Theseus, who hasn’t yet been recognised by his father. Medea then tries to trick Aegeus to administer poisonous aconite to Theseus before his recognition, in a bid to keep Aegeus to herself. She prepares the poison in a cup which the king then offers to the young Theseus. At the last minute, just as his son is about to drink the aconite, Aegeus recognises that the sword borne by Theseus is his, knocks the cup away, and saves his son’s life.

In 1832, the theme chosen for the prestigious Prix de Rome contest was the moment that Aegeus recognised Theseus, immediately before the latter could swallow any of Medea’s poison. Two of the contenders for that great prize remain accessible today.

In Antoine-Placide Gibert’s Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), the three main actors are arranged almost linearly across the canvas. Just left of centre, Theseus stands, his head in profile, with the fateful cup in his left hand, and his father’s sword in his right. The king is just right of centre, looking Theseus in the eye, and appearing animated if not alarmed. At the far right is Medea, her face like thunder, sensing her plot to kill Theseus is about to fall apart.

It was Hippolyte Flandrin’s Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832) that won the Prix de Rome, with its more neoclassical look influenced by Jacques-Louis David. Flandrin establishes the scene as Athens, with a view of the Acropolis in the background. His timing is different from Gibert: this painting shows the moment immediately after Aegeus has recognised his son, and the cup of aconite lies spilt on the table. Theseus stands in the middle of the canvas conspicuously naked, his father’s sword held rather limply in his right hand. Aegeus stands to the left of centre, talking to his son quite emotionally. But of all the characters shown in this painting, it is Medea who is the most fascinating. Stood at the far left, she appears to be on her way out. She is po-faced, and looks as if she has come not from Greece, but from central Asia, perhaps.

Medea flees, never to be heard of again, leaving Aegeus to give thanks to the gods. Ovid then introduces Theseus with a short resumé of some of his accomplishments, including his killing of the Minotaur and of Procrustes, to be recounted later.

The myths of Theseus were at one time as popular as those of Heracles or even Aeneas or Jason. In about 1340-41, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about them in his epic poem Teseida, or The Theseid. This in turn inspired The Knight’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) painted these three scenes from Boccaccio’s epic on the front of a cassone, the visual equivalent of Ovid’s catalogue of the adventures of Theseus.

There are some mythological subjects that artists would do best to avoid, while others almost guarantee success. Medea, sorceress and jilted wife of Jason of Golden Fleece fame, is clearly one of the former. For a start, there’s no single authoritative account of the myths of Jason and Medea. The ancients had no problem in living with conflicting tales, as in their day so little in life could be proved in any rigorous way. But since the Age of Enlightenment we have looked at the world in the expectation of singular truths. In Medea’s case, there isn’t even a rough consensus.

One broad outline might be that Jason travelled to Colchis, where he underwent a series of trials imposed by King Aeëtes, culminating in Jason’s victory over the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. These were accomplished with the help of Medea, the King’s daughter, in return for Jason’s promise of marriage.

During their voyage home, Medea and Jason married, and she then bore him two sons. Ten years later, Jason divorced Medea in favour of the King of Corinth’s daughter Glauce. Divorce was too much for Medea to bear, so she sent Glauce a poisoned wedding dress to kill her and her father horribly. She then murdered her two children, fled to Athens, and had a child by King Aegeus.

The most consistent insight that we have into Medea is of the depth and complexity of her role and character, particularly in comparison with Jason, a simple pop-up action hero whose endless stream of testosterone made thought largely unnecessary. Yet Medea’s fascinating combination of conflicting roles – princess, sorceress, seductress, wife, mother, and vengeful filicide – have only brought trouble to the succession of painters who have tried to portray her.

From the Renaissance on, paintings of the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts have been frequent and popular. It fell to the obscure Dutch artist Paulus Bor to tackle The Disillusioned Medea (The Enchantress) in about 1640. Believed to have formed a pair with his painting of Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple, Bor comes closest to capturing Medea’s intriguing psychology.

She sits, her face flushed, resting her head on the heel of her right hand. In her left, she holds a wand made from bamboo or rattan, a reference to her sorcery. Her wand is poised ready for use as soon as she has worked out what to do next. Behind her is a small altar to Diana, the goddess of contradiction (the hunt and nature, chastity and childbirth) and the irrational (the moon and nature).

Paired with the story of Acontius and Cydippe, Bor can only be referring to Ovid’s fictional letter from Medea to Jason, letter twelve in his Heroides. Jason has told Medea of their divorce, but she hasn’t yet murdered their children. Medea gives a potted summary of their relationship, her crucial role in Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, and how she had turned her loyalties to him and betrayed her own family. Ovid ends it with portentous lines about Medea following her wrath, and of great forces acting on her soul.

There is another tragedy here too: although almost all of Ovid’s known works have survived to the present, one which hasn’t is his Medea, where his account of her role might have redressed the balance with accounts of Jason’s deeds.

After Bor’s painting, there is a gap of almost two centuries before the next substantial attempt to depict Medea at this troubled time.

JMW Turner’s Vision of Medea (1828) is the first in a series of more modern attempts to tell Medea’s story, and one of Turner’s few uses (perhaps his only use) of multiplex narrative. Turner had stayed in Rome with Sir Charles Eastlake during the autumn and winter of 1828, where he painted his View of Orvieto, Regulus, and this work, together with several other paintings whose identity is less certain.

He exhibited them there to the outrage of critics and the puzzlement of the public. Turner didn’t show this painting at the Royal Academy until 1831, where it was considered to be a wonderful “combination of colour”, but generally incomprehensible.

In the middle of the canvas, Medea is stood in the midst of her incantation to force Jason’s return. In the foreground are the materials she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Next was Gustave Moreau, in his Jason (1865), which bizarrely excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, a standard tool of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s future rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that isn’t borne out by the only clues that Moreau provides, in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Translated from their Latin, these read: Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing. And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil.

These imply we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, while Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was lost amid his surfeit of symbols.

A few years later, Frederick Sandys tried his Medea (1866-68), now possibly his best-known painting. He shows Medea at work preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a pair of toads copulating, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo. Despite this fine depiction and Medea’s intense stare, this painting was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1868.

While Sandys was still smarting from that blow, Anselm Feuerbach was painting Medea (1870) as a mother of two, watching as Jason and his Argonauts push their boat back into the surf to go in quest of the Golden Fleece. She is shown as an archetypal mother, a Madonna and infant plus one, not even looking at the departing boat. She is no sorceress, and the merest suggestion that she could ever kill those children in vengeance seems absurd.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Medea (1886) is visually rich but narratively thin. She has been abandoned by Jason, and now stares wistfully as she walks along the polished stone floor of her palace holding a vial of potion in her right hand: might this be the substance with which she impregnated the wedding dress she sent Glauce?

My final example comes from John William Waterhouse in his Jason and Medea (1907). Medea is depicted as a sorceress, perhaps preparing the potion Jason is to later give to the dragon. He appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge. Unlike Sandys, Waterhouse paints but a single toad, behaving itself quietly on the floor.

Each of these paintings has captured some of the many facets of Medea and her complex story. None comes close to the nuances of the verbal accounts, and in their efforts to approach this subject, painters have taken risks that haven’t paid off, at least at the time. Sandys was done an injustice when his painting was rejected by the Royal Academy, and that and Bor’s appear now to be her most successful portraits.

Two of Ovid’s fictional letters from heroines have become so obscure that their paintings have all but disappeared. To discover them we have to look in the collections of the Vatican, and in a provincial museum near to Nelson’s dockyard on the south coast of England. These are for the eleventh letter from Canace to Macareus, and the thirteenth from Laodamia to Protesilaus.

Canace

We start in the amazing collections of the Vatican. Known best for its most famous works like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museums also hold some more mysterious works. Among them is a series of full-length portraits in fresco found in a Classical Roman villa at Tor Marancia, now famous for its more contemporary wall-paintings.

In another stroke of luck, their unknown artist has kindly identified the women depicted as Pasiphae, Scylla, Myrrha, Phaedra, and Canace. Although these differ from the women featured in Ovid’s Heroides, the series shares the idea of gathering together women with singular stories to tell. For a long time, these frescoes were on display in the same room containing the better-known Aldobrandini Wedding, a superb and equally puzzling frieze from a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome.

Here is Canace, about whom we know very little, except what Ovid tells us in Heroides, as another tragic case of incest.

Incest is among the most ancient of human taboos. Given that we only relatively recently came to understand why incest is genetically catastrophic, this pervasive ban on mating with close relatives is biologically important, but of puzzling origin. How did our dim and distant ancestors recognise the consequences of genetics that weren’t discovered for so many millennia, and ban incestuous relationships? Although probably most common in remote and isolated communities, incest has been most prominent among ruling families, who have repeatedly tried to cheat genetics in a bid to keep power within their family, only to rediscover why the taboo developed in the first place.

Ovid’s Canace cuts a tragic figure. She was the daughter of Aeolus, he of the winds and a king in his own right. She fell in love with her own brother, Macareus, and one of her other brothers was just as unfortunate, being Sisyphus, whose deceitfulness led to him being sentenced to pushing a huge boulder uphill in the underworld, in the prototype Sisyphean task.

Not only did Canace and Macareus have an incestuous relationship, but she fell pregnant as a result. Aeolus found out about the concealed birth, and had her baby abandoned among wild animals. He also sent his daughter a sword so she could fall on it.

This moment is shown in Jean Pichore’s miniature for an illustrated edition of the Heroides from about 1510.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Canace is written shortly before she fell on her father’s sword and ended her life. The letter doesn’t even attempt to argue her case for clemency, and serves as her suicide note.

There are also alternative endings to her story. In one, she simply commits suicide as instructed; in the other, Macareus pleads clemency with Aeolus, who reluctantly agrees. But as Macareus reaches his sister, it’s already too late, so he kills himself with the same sword.

Jean Pichore illustrates this vividly, possibly employing multiplex narrative in the foreground.

Laodamia

The story of Laodamia is also tragic, but in a different sense. The daughter of Acastus and Astydameia, she had only just married Protosilaus, a king of Thessaly in Greece, when he had to leave to join the force of a thousand ships sailing to the war against Troy.

Protosilaus had been a suitor of Helen, and brought with him a force of forty ships. Despite the prophecy that the first Greek to land would be the first to die, when the fleet finally arrived in front of the city, Protosilaus was the first to land. He promptly killed four Trojans, perhaps hoping in vain that they might count in his stead, but was then killed by Hector.

Ovid artfully writes Laodamia’s letter before the landing, when she has heard that the Greek fleet is held at Aulis, awaiting better winds. It’s a letter that could have been written by any military partner during the long and awful pause between their partner’s departure and the joining of war. It has some delightful twists, as you’d expect of Ovid: at one point, Laodamia explains to the Trojans that her husband is no warrior, and makes love much more vigorously than he makes war.

The letter also makes clear the fateful prophecy about the first Greek ashore, filling it with that impending doom, and Laodamia makes clear her views on Helen’s morality. The gods looked favourably on Laodamia, at least. As she had been married so briefly, Protosilaus was given three hours with his wife before he was finally taken down to the underworld. This didn’t ease her grief, though, and she sobbed on his tomb.

It is this moment that George William Joy shows in his painting of her from 1878, which appears to be the only such depiction. It isn’t tucked away in the collections of the Vatican, but somehow has found its way into Portsmouth City Museum, just a few minutes down the road from the Royal Navy dockyard in Portsmouth, England, and a curious location for the work of an Irish painter who worked mainly in London. But Joy died at Purbrook, just to the north of Portsmouth over the chalk whaleback of Portsdown Hill.

The story of Laodamia reaches its conclusion with her making a full-size bronze statue of her late husband, which she worshipped and embraced. Caught by a servant kissing the statue one morning, it was put on a pyre and burned. That was the final straw for Laodamia, who threw herself on the pyre and joined her husband at last.

By 1880, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was well-established as one of the leading artists of the day. Although he had painted some spectacular panoramas and some scenes from popular classical narratives, many of his paintings were more typical of the Aesthetic movement, lacking the intricate narratives of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s earlier works. Poynter was also taking leading roles in art education, and was by this time principal of the predecessor to the Royal College of Art in London.

A Visit to Aesculapius (1880) is an unusual motif. Although this image makes it appear to be a nocturne, this is probably darkening from aged varnish and dirt: contemporary prints (below) suggest it’s actually set in normally-lit daytime. Aesculapius, the ancient Greek god of medicine and the healing arts, sits at the left, contemplating the left foot of Venus with a thorn in it. She’s attended by doves, with the three Graces as her handmaidens.

Poynter arrays the Graces in classical manner, with one turning her back to the viewer, and reaching her right arm out to the figure of Hygieia, daughter of Aesculapius and the goddess of health and sanitation, who is drawing water from the fountain at the right. Shown at the lower edge of the painting is the staff of Aesculapius, around which a snake is entwined. That isn’t to be confused with the caduceus of Hermes (Trismegistus), which has two snakes intertwined.

Psyche in the Temple of Love (1882) returns to the theme of the contemplative woman, here in the context of a simple classical story. Cupid has fallen in love with Psyche, and takes her to the Temple of Love, where he visits her each night, but never in daylight. Here Psyche is whiling away the daytime, holding a sprig out to attract a butterfly, her attribute. However, Psyche’s enemy Venus is not far away, as implied by the doves in the temple behind her.

Diadumenè (1883) is one of several paintings that Poynter made of the Esquiline Venus statue in Rome, which had only been discovered in 1874. He first saw the statue in about 1881, here ‘restoring’ its form into the figure of a beautiful young woman who is binding her hair with a strip of cloth in preparation for her bath. The title is a reference to Polyclitus’ Diadumenos, meaning ‘diadem bearer’, one of his two famous figural types, the other being Doryphoros, or ‘spear bearer’.

Light in narrative but a classical depiction of the female nude, this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. It resulted in correspondence in The Times newspaper which condemned “the indecent pictures that disgrace our exhibitions”, to which Poynter responded with a defence of such classical works. The figure’s nudity may have been enhanced by the presence of her clothing next to her, just as in Thomas Eakins’s William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77). Ten years later, Poynter painted another version in which his Venus is partially clad, although her right breast still shows proud.

Outward Bound (1886) shows two young boys playing in a small rock cave at the coast. They have a bamboo fishing rod with them, and have made a small boat, which appears to be floating out through the rock arch at the left towards the open sea. Although the phrase outward bound is now more usually associated with the movement started in around 1941 by Kurt Hahn, and Baden-Powell’s scouting movement wasn’t founded until 1910, there were contemporary advocates who promoted getting the poor out of cities to a healthier life in the country and at the coast.

Corner of the Marketplace (1887) might have been painted by Poynter’s close contemporary Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, but for its joyous celebration of motherhood. Apparently it shows a maker of wreaths and floral displays at work, while the baby plays with a flower. However, the mother sat on a marble bench has a more pensive and wistful stare.

The Corner of the Villa (1889) may have been painted as a pendant to the previous work. Its ornate classical setting is almost overpowering in fine detail, threatening to outdo both Alma-Tadema and Gérôme. The family here is more patrician, and feeding pigeons from a bowl of seed. One of the birds is bathing and splashing in the drinking fountain at the left, and ripe apples are scattered on the marble floor.

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890) is another of Poynter’s spectacles that might have been worthy of Gérôme. Inspired by the growing collections of antiquities from Egypt and the Middle East that had been gathering in the British Museum and elsewhere, it presents a simple orientalist narrative of the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon. Poynter again fills the painting with extraordinary detail, which spills over into its heavy, ornate frame. Orientalism was becoming the new classicism.

In a Garden (1891) treats a sub-tropical garden to a similar level of detail, as a small figure sits reading in the shade of a large fan.

In 1894, Poynter became Director of London’s National Gallery, and remains the last practising artist to have run this major collection. During his period as Director, which lasted a decade, he oversaw the opening of the Tate Gallery.

The Ionian Dance: Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos, Matura virgo et fingitur artubus (1895) quotes the ‘Roman’ Odes of Horace, and describes the ‘corruption’ of a young woman who learns the ‘lascivious’ movements of this particular dance. The Latin text may be translated as it pleases the mature virgin to be taught the movements of the Ionian Dance, and shapes her limbs. However, artubus may be a double entendre, as it can also refer to the sexual organs.

Poynter’s painting shows a shapely young woman, wearing nothing but a diaphanous dress, dancing vigorously in front of an audience of eight other women, who seem critically engaged in her performance. This appears decidedly Aesthetic, as well as more than a little risqué.

In 1896, Poynter was elected President of the Royal Academy at a time of difficulty: its long-standing President, Frederic, Lord Leighton, had died unexpectedly in January, and his successor, John Everett Millais, died in August. Poynter was knighted in 1896, and made a Baronet in 1902.

Helena and Hermia (1901) shows two of the young lovers from William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Helena is an aristocrat from the court of Theseus, who was betrothed to Demetrius, to whom she remains devoted. Hermia is an Athenian who is caught in a romantic accident, in that she loves Lysander, but Demetrius loves her. Hermia is named after the Greek god of exchange and dreams, one of the central themes of the play.

Although caught in complex relationships, Helena and Hermia are good friends, and it’s their friendship that Poynter depicts, a popular theme for paintings in the nineteenth century. There is perhaps a little more symbolism buried in this work, though: a ball of red thread lies partly unwound on the ground at the lower right, possibly representing difficulties in the course of love.

At first sight, Cave of the Storm Nymphs (1903) might appear to be another excuse for three superb female nudes, but there is more complex narrative behind this scene. Its literary reference may be to the Naiads of Homer’s Odyssey, book 13, who live in a sea cave, updated to encompass more contemporary references to Wreckers, who lured ships onto the rocks in order to steal their precious cargos, sirens without the socially unacceptable habit of cannibalism.

Here the three Storm Nymphs are seen amid their rich takings, the more distant of them perched on a rock and holding a shell-based lyre, and a wrecked galleon breaking up in the huge sea beyond. The painting is rich in the beauty of the nymphs, the savage waves, and the evoked sounds and sensations associated with each.

Asterié (1904) returns to a thoroughly classical narrative, taken from Horace’s Odes, books 3 and 7. Asterié is a Greek wife, left behind in Athens while her husband is away in the service of the state. She is being stalked by the god Zeus, who lurks in human form down in the street below. She looks down at him, pondering what to do: whether to succumb to his desires, or to retain her virtue? Clutching a carnation (also adorning her hair), a symbol of marital fidelity, she looks to be standing by her absent husband, but the question is left open for the viewer to speculate.

This painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904, but remaining unsold, was sent to New Zealand for the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch, where it was finally sold.

Lesbia and Her Sparrow (1907) might these days be easily misread from its title. In fact, Lesbia was the literary pseudonym used by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the Roman poet, for his lover, who’s traditionally thought to have been another man’s wife. She came to dominate nearly a quarter of Catullus’ surviving poems, and appears in several contemporary paintings: Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted her at least twice, and several of those paintings show her with her devoted pet sparrow. For Poynter, it appears to be another Aesthetic work invoking the sparrow’s song, and the taste of grapes.

Poynter appears to have largely retired by the start of the First World War, and died shortly after its end. He was so greatly respected that he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds had been. He had been a prolific, highly successful, and influential artist. His work includes classical narratives as sophisticated as Frederic, Lord Leighton’s, spectacles as good as the best of Gérôme, and some of the best paintings to emerge from the Aesthetic movement. Yet he has no catalogue raisonné, no monograph on his paintings, nor have his works been exhibited together since 1920, apart from a small exhibition in Brighton College’s Burstow Gallery in 1995.

References

Wikipedia.
Ten Lectures on Art (1880), by Sir Edward Poynter, at archive.org: an Aesthetic manifesto.

In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the horse in narrative, I showed examples from classical myths and legends, culminating in that of Saint George and the dragon. This leads to the role of the horse in chivalry, with its origins in the crusades.

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).

Walter Crane is one of the earlier artists to depict a late fifteenth century poem revived in a ballad from 1819 by John Keats. The Belle Dame Sans Merci is shown riding side-saddle on the knight’s horse, flowers in her long, flowing tresses, as the knight, clad in armour and heraldic overgarments, holds her hand.

The same year that Keats wrote his ballad, Lord Byron wrote his poetic account of the legendary Mazeppa, who was bound naked to a wild horse and set loose as punishment for his affair with a Polish Countess.

Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa and the Wolves from 1826 shows the young victim during his wild ride that took him to the point of death before he was rescued.

Mykola Samokish’s watercolour of a Ukrainian Cossack on a Horse, or Haidamak on a Horse from 1899 shows a haidamaka, a Ukrainian insurgent who took part in uprisings against the ruling Polish Empire that governed west Ukraine in the eighteenth century. They were immortalised in an epic poem in 1841 by the father of Ukrainian literature Taras Shevchenko.

Horses are a longstanding feature of circuses, and individual showmen and women around the world.

Georges Seurat’s The Circus from 1891 is one of the masterpieces of Divisionism, and may depict a scene in the Cirque Fernando of Montmartre in Paris. Its internal contradiction is the artist’s choice of a painstakingly slow and mechanical method of painting, for a motif that is full of spontaneous movement and action.

In the millennia before the arrival of steam engines, horses were the fastest means of travel, and inevitably were used in racing.

In February 1817, Théodore Géricault witnessed the Roman Carnival, with its traditional horse race. Among the studies that he made of that event is Race of the Barberi Horses (1817), intended for a later large studio painting that he never started. This was a longstanding tradition of the Roman Carnival, where these horses were gathered in the Piazza del Popolo, then raced without riders to gallop down the Corso to be recaptured at the finish. The Barberi are a hardy North African breed popular among the Berbers, and are still bred today although this race has long since ceased.

More orderly horseraces have been popular events.

Géricault’s The Epsom Derby from 1821 follows the convention of the day in showing galloping racehorses flying through the air, legs in full extension, without contact with the ground beneath them. It wasn’t until early photographic studies demonstrated that this never occurred in real life that artists reluctantly changed their images.

The Derby Stakes is a flat-race that has been run on Epsom Downs, to the south of London, since 1780. At this time it was run on a Thursday in late May or early June, despite the unseasonal weather seen here. It was accompanied by a large fair, the subject of a later painting by William Powell Frith in 1858. I suspect that Géricault’s version was a significant influence on the later equestrian paintings of Edgar Degas.

The New World of the Americas grew their own stories about feats achieved by horses and their riders.

Grant Wood’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) was inspired by Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride (1860), telling of the American patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818) and his midnight ride on 18 April 1775, to alert colonial militia of the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is shown using a bird’s eye view giving it an air of unreality.

My last two paintings are even more unreal.

Long before Courbet’s well-known allegorical painting of his studio, Horace Vernet painted his as being just as crowded, rich in stories, and puzzling. In the centre, two young men fight one another with swords by a white horse, which is tethered to the wall. Immediately in front of the white horse is a pair of boxers, and another young man sits on the back of a chair to watch the fencing, holding a rifle against the left side of his body.

In the left background a couple of pupils are actually engaged in painting at easels, but the most prominent easel in the room is completely ignored by those present. Another painter is at work at the far left, apparently talking with three young men who are watching, and accompanied by a drummer. Another small group of young men is engaged in discussion against the wall to the left.

Henry Fuseli’s breakthrough painting of his career, The Nightmare from 1781 was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy, and remains the work by which he is best known. It shows a daemonic incubus squatting on the torso of a young woman, who is laid out as if in a deep sleep in bed, her head thrown back, and her arms above her head. Lurking in the darkness to the left is the head of a black horse, whose eyes appear unseeing. The incubus stares directly at the viewer in a manner which arouses discomfort.

Since its domestication somewhere on the steppe of Ukraine and south-western Russia around five millennia ago, humans have been dependent on the horse as a means of transport and drawing wheeled vehicles of many kinds. By the late eighteenth century the work they’re capable of was used as the basis for the measurement of power, in the horsepower, that became most popular when they were being replaced first by steam engines, and then the noisy and smelly motor vehicles of the twentieth century.

These two articles look at horses of conventional design; those with wings have been covered here, and the story of the unicorn in this article.

In Greek and Roman myth, the sun is drawn across the heavens by Phoebus’ chariot, with four horses, usually named Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon, in harness.

They are shown in Gustave Moreau’s Chariot of Apollo, or Phoebus Apollo from about 1880, in a prelude to the myth of Phaethon, who lost control of it and set the world on fire when his adventure went wrong.

While several deities are drawn in their chariots by unusual creatures, Pluto opts for a pair of suitably black horses.

Walter Crane’s account of The Fate of Persephone (1878) shows her at the moment of her abduction, still holding her posy. Pluto has pulled up in his chariot, and is gripping her right arm, ready to make off with her into the dark cavern to the right, taking the couple down to Hades.

Chariots of mortals were conventionally drawn by a pair of horses. Franz von Matsch’s The Triumph of Achilles (1892) shows Achilles in his chariot driving at speed around the walls of Troy, towing the naked body of Hector and followed by celebrating Greeks.

Troy was also the site of the greatest deception using a horse, although in this case it was a huge wooden model containing a team of Greek commandos who were to open the city up for the rest of their army to enter.

Tiepolo’s Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (1773) is one of his series showing the construction and entry of the horse into the city. He follows accounts that refer to Troy’s women and children hauling the structure using lines, and some reporting that it was ostensibly an apology for the theft of the Palladium.

Subsequently, the term Trojan Horse has entered the languages of Europe, although that isn’t the case for the Roman hero Marcus Curtius, whose leap saved the city of Rome.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leap of Marcus Curtius (c 1850-1855) depicts the brief legend of this hero of classical Rome. Following an earthquake (now dated to 362 BCE), a great bottomless chasm opened up in the middle of the Forum. Attempts to fill it were unsuccessful, so an augur was consulted, who responded that the gods demanded the most precious possession of the state. Marcus Curtius was a young soldier who proclaimed that arms and the courage of Romans were the state’s most precious possessions. In a moment of supreme self-sacrifice, he then rode into the pit in his finest armour, astride his charger, the moment shown here. As he and his horse fell into its abyss, the chasm closed over him, and the city was saved.

Horses feature in many other legends from around the world. Among the more curious is that of Lady Godiva, who is claimed to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry, England, in protest at her husband’s swingeing taxes.

Jules Lefebvre’s first painting of Lady Godiva from 1891 shows her passing over deserted narrow cobbled streets, covering her breasts and appearing in some distress. Her horse is being led by a maid, and flying alongside are three white doves. She appears almost saintly in her mission, as if undergoing a form of psychological martyrdom.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses from 1892 is one of a series of paintings he made fusing the horses drawing Poseidon’s chariot with near-breaking waves, popularly known in English as white horses.

Another widespread legend is that of Saint George, a knightly Christian who slayed a dragon to save a princess. He is claimed by several countries across Europe as far as Georgia, and is patron saint of England.

Around 1553-55, Tintoretto retold his story in his small masterpiece of Saint George and the Dragon. The saint, the dragon and the Princess have escaped the confines of his earlier votive painting of this motif, and here run free in a rich green coastal landscape of the artist’s invention. George is locked in battle with the dragon and the Princess flees from the scene in terror. The dragon’s last victim still lies on the grass, his blue clothing in tatters. Above them and the massive walls of a distant fortress is the figure of God, in a brilliant mandorla in the heavens.

That leads us to tomorrow’s sequel, which starts with horses in chivalry.

Up to this point in his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s account of the sorceress Medea has told of her better achievements, in enabling Jason to win the Golden Fleece, and to rejuvenate his father Aeson. Such powers are readily abused, though, and those stories are followed by a brief account of her downfall.

Medea pretends that she and Jason have fallen out, and flees to Pelias’ court in Colchis; Pelias is Aeson’s half-brother, thus Jason’s uncle. She tells that court how she rejuvenated Aeson, prompting Pelias’s three daughters (the Peliades) to ask her to do the same for their father. To ensure their commitment to her trap, Medea first demonstrates her rejuvenation procedure on a sheep, whose throat she cuts before plunging it into a large bronze kettle and turning it into a lamb.

The daughters are hooked, and plead with Medea to do the same to their father. She sets out to gather her magic herbs and other ingredients for her potion. As she starts preparing that, Medea urges the Peliades to drain the blood from their father to prepare his body for treatment, by cutting his throat and other major blood vessels.

The daughters cannot bear to watch one another, but attack their father while he is still in bed. He tries to prop himself up and ask them what they are doing, but is cut short as Medea plunges his body into the boiling cauldron containing water, not the magic potion.

Georges Moreau de Tours’ The Murder of Pelias by His Daughters (1878) is one of the few paintings to show the Peliades committing this horrendous act. The old man is resting uncomfortably on a couch, behind which his name is inscribed in Greek. Medea shrinks into the shadows behind, her face half-covered, as the young women set about Pelias with their daggers. The daughter at the back appears to be offering Medea a knife so that she can join in, but she sits impassively in front of her boiling cauldron.

Knowing she had deceived the Peliades in her plan to get them to murder their father, Medea flees in her chariot drawn by winged dragons. Ovid takes her on a whirlwind tour of fifteen locations where mythical transformations had occurred, finally reaching the city of Corinth. This ends with brief mention of Medea’s subsequent history, and her abandonment by her husband Jason. She uses sorcery to take revenge on his new bride, and murders her two young sons as revenge against Jason, their father. She finally flees to Athens, where she marries King Aegeus.

Richard Dadd’s watercolour of Jason and Medea, or The Flight of Medea with Jason – Chief of the Argonauts, shows Medea fleeing on foot with Jason, rather than in her sky chariot, in accord with other accounts of this myth. Iolcus is shown in the distance, and Medea’s maid is watching to see if they are being pursued.

Eugène Delacroix’s first version, titled simply Medea (1838) and now in Lille, captures the scene well. The mother looks anxiously into the distance, to see if she is being followed, or there are any witnesses about. The boys seem to know what is about to happen: one is crying as Medea’s arm is holding him by his neck, and the other is hiding under her skirts.

Delacroix made at least two later copies, including Medea about to Kill her Children (1862) which is half the size, and now in the Louvre.

Henri Klagmann’s Medea (1868) shows the boys playing at mother’s feet, as Medea, grasping the handle of her knife with her left hand, wrestles with her conscience.

JMW Turner tries to bring together many of the elements in this tragedy in his ingenious Vision of Medea (1828), which he painted when staying in Rome with Sir Charles Eastlake during the autumn and winter of 1828.

Jason has abandoned Medea for his new bride Glauce (or Creusa), and Medea is now in the midst of an incantation to force his return. In the foreground are the materials which she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in her chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Turner didn’t show this painting at the Royal Academy until 1831, where it was considered to be a wonderful “combination of colour”, but generally incomprehensible.

In his day, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was one of the most eminent and influential British artists, but like so many in the later years of the nineteenth century, his work was soon reviled with the arrival of modernism. Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites and John Singer Sargent, Poynter remains unrehabilitated and largely unknown, despite holding the posts of Slade Professor at University College, London (1871-75), Principal of the National Art Training School (1875-81), Director of the National Gallery (1894-1904), and President of the Royal Academy (1896-1918).

Poynter first met Frederic, Lord Leighton, when he was only 17, and was immediately inspired to become a painter. Following only a year’s study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1855, he went to Paris, where he studied with Charles Gleyre, alongside James Whistler. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861.

Orpheus and Eurydice (1862) is a straightforward narrative painting showing Orpheus leading his dead wife out of the underworld. Eurydice died tragically on their wedding day when she was bitten by a snake; Orpheus convinced the gods to allow him to enter the underworld to bring her back from the dead. His success in persuading them was dependent on his exceptional skills on the lyre that he carries. They’re striding past snakes and along a dizzying path on the mountainside, following the warning that at no time must Orpheus look back at Eurydice.

A Day Dream from the following year appears to anticipate later Aesthetic painting with its emphasis on the other senses. The woman of its title is clearly day-dreaming, and has the forlorn look of deep, wistful thought as she stares into the distance. On her lap, carefully pointed at by her left hand, is a volume of poetry, and her right hand is absentmindedly playing the keys of a piano. This was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863.

The Siren (c 1864) also has Aesthetic overtones in the lyre being played by this siren.

Poynter’s first grand spectacle was Israel in Egypt from 1867, a finely detailed panorama depicting the Israelites during their time in bondage in Egypt. Although the popular press appreciated his archaeological basis, archaeologists of the day pointed out how he conflated elements from several different temples, including those at Thebes, Edfu, and Philae, together with the Great Pyramid at Giza, and the limestone cliffs of Thebes.

Catapulta from the following year is a less grandiose depiction of the back end of a Roman siege catapult.

In his Andromeda from 1869, Poynter gives a faithful account of the fate of Andromeda, who was chained to a rock to await the arrival of Cetus, the sea monster. This is a fine figure study, if weak in narrative.

In 1869, Poynter completed a mosaic of Saint George and the Dragon in the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster, the home of the Houses of Parliament, in London.

Poynter’s Portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840-1920), painted in about 1870 when she was thirty, is a delicate and demure portrait of the artist’s sister-in-law. She had married the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones a decade earlier. A painter and engraver herself, she was to become one of the last survivors of that era, alongside Marie Spartali Stillman.

The Peacock Fan: Portrait of Elizabeth Courtauld (1871) is an exquisite and unusual watercolour portrait of one of the members of this family of patrons of the arts, now famous for the Courtauld Institute and its Gallery in London. The profusion of peacock feathers may well be another marker of Aestheticism.

That year, Poynter was appointed the first Slade Professor at University College, London, a post he held until 1875.

Paul and Apollos (1872) was a trial of fresco on plaster made by Poynter before tackling full-scale fresco painting in the Church of Saint Stephen in South Dulwich, London. This is based on a New Testament quotation from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 3:5-9, and shows two early Christians, Paul, who had been a Jew, and Apollos, a Greek, with the quotation “I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”

In 1875, Poynter was appointed principal of the National Art Training School, in South Kensington, London; that was renamed the Royal College of Art about twenty years later. The following year he was elected a full member of the Royal Academy.

Funchal, Morning Sun (1877) is Poynter’s startlingly detailed watercolour landscape of Funchal on the island of Madeira, probably painted from the verandah of Poynter’s hotel, Hotel Reids Santa Clara. He had been troubled by illness from childhood, and often stayed in Madeira during the winter.

Reference

Wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following Ovid’s brief summary of the adventure of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Book 7 of Metamorphoses continues his account of Jason and Medea with an unusual myth about human rejuvenation. Once Jason and his Argonauts had returned to their homes, there was much celebratory feasting, but one person was unable to take part: Jason’s father Aeson, who was too old and nearing death. Jason therefore asks his new wife Medea if she can transfer some of his own youth to extend his father’s years.

Medea initially chides Jason for suggesting such an act forbidden by Hecate as the goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, but then tells him that she will go one better, and try to rejuvenate Aeson without using any of Jason’s future life.

For three nights Medea engages in rituals to seek Hecate’s help, and the goddess sends down her chariot to help her prepare for the task. The sorceress then takes that chariot in her quest for the ingredients required for her magic potion. For nine days and nights, Medea flies around gathering herbs and other arcane substances from all over the world.

She then builds two turf altars and slaughters a sheep before starting to prepare the potion. She calls for Aeson to be brought out to her, and uses a spell to put him to sleep on a bed of magic herbs before dismissing Jason and others. She purges Aeson’s body with water, sulphur, and fire, while her potion is brewing in a cauldron. Where it bubbles over the side, luxuriant plants and flowers sprout up immediately.

Medea finally cuts Aeson’s throat to let all his old blood out and replaces it with her potion. The old man is immediately transformed back to his youth, his thinning white hair replaced by a rich growth of dark locks from someone forty years younger. Bacchus, who has been watching from heaven, asks for the recipe so he can rejuvenate his own nurses.

This monochrome image is the only one available of Pellegrino Tibaldi’s fresco of Medea Rejuvenates Aeson, which he painted in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Medea, naked as became traditional in depictions of witchcraft, is shown purging Aeson’s body with water. Pellegrino relocates the event from outdoor turf altars to a more substantial indoor stone trough, around which are scattered jugs and other remnants from Medea’s sorcery. At Aeson’s feet are statues, the most prominent of which shows Hecate.

About a century later, Domenicus van Wijnen painted his Medea Rejuvenating Aeson (late seventeenth century), invoking alchemy as well as witchcraft. Medea, naked again and reclining in Hecate’s golden chariot, points her wand at the body of Aeson lying on the ground as she casts a spell. A glass sphere above her contains a small devil and shoots a trail of flame and sparks like a rocket. Medea is assisted by four putti and has what appears to be Hecate herself behind her, and a full moon is seen rising above the horizon. Scattered around the scene are objects associated with witchcraft, including a glass cauldron, a jar of brown liquid, a sacrificial knife, old books, and a burning candle.

Bartolomeo Guidobono’s Medea Rejuvenates Aeson from about 1700 is more of a puzzle to read, as Medea, dressed in an unkempt and wild manner, is here accompanied by two men. The near-lifeless and pale body of Aeson rests behind her, but a younger man, possibly the rejuvenated Aeson, is materialising under a table.

There’s a panoply of symbols associated with magic, including a snake and toad, large tomes of spells on top of which is a lizard, an open fire on a small stand, and an assortment of more normal animals including a dog, fox, and deer. The table in the background has further magic equipment, such as an orrery, and a bat is flying to the right of Medea’s head.

Corrado Giaquinto’s splendid Medea Rejuvenating Aeson from 1760 is more theatrical. Set outdoors by the arches of a large stone structure, three gods watch Medea work her spells. At the front of the trio is Diana, wearing a crescent moon as a diadem. To the right is Neptune with his spiked crown and trident, and to the left is (probably) Hecate.

Medea stands in the midst of casting a spell, her wand held over the inert body of Aeson, which rests on a bed of flowers and leaves. Behind that is a more Christian-looking altar, with candles burning at its sides. There is a cauldron heating over an open fire at the bottom right, and the body of a black sheep on a more classical altar to the left.

Sorcery and witchcraft became increasingly popular in the late eighteenth century as themes for painting and other arts, with some innovative works by Fuseli and others. Although those painters would have been well aware of this myth, the rejuvenation of Aeson doesn’t seem to have made its way onto canvas. Popular interest in ‘gothic’ stories of revivification was inspired by the publication in 1818 of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but by this time narrative painting was in crisis, and Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t seem to have been depicted in painting until the twentieth century. By then Shelley’s story had already appeared in plays and movies.

Among Ovid’s Heroines, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one who not only survives, but emerges from her crisis rather well in the end. The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her half-brother, from her mother’s extraordinary bestial relationship, was the Minotaur. Her father blamed the Greeks for the death of her full brother Androgeus, so demanded they provided the Minotaur’s annual diet of seven young men and seven young women. The Minotaur was kept concealed inside the Labyrinth, an ingenious maze designed and built by the master artificer Daedalus.

Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and decided to put an end to this attrition of young Greeks by killing the Minotaur. The only way he could gain access to it was by including himself in that year’s batch of sacrificial victims. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne fell desperately in love with him.

Ariadne came up with an ingenious plan to enable Theseus to make his way back out of the Labyrinth once he had killed the Minotaur: she provided him with a ball of thread, which he used to mark his route of entry. He could then retrace his steps along the line of thread and escape. In return for this assistance, Theseus agreed that, once he had killed the Minotaur and escaped, he would marry her.

When it was Theseus’ turn to enter the Labyrinth, Ariadne held the end of the thread, he went in, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back to her. They wasted no time, and sailed immediately from Crete, stopping off overnight on the island of Dia (Naxos), where they consummated their marriage. The following morning, Theseus and his crew set sail before Ariadne had awoken, abandoning her on the island, as she watched Theseus’ ship heading towards the horizon and Athens beyond.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Bacchus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

By the moment shown in Angelica Kauffman’s Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774), she has seen Theseus’ ship heading back to Athens, and is now swooning in the realisation that she has been jilted.

The painting that perhaps captures best Ariadne ready to write her letter to Theseus, is Paulus Bor’s Ariadne (1630-35). She looks desolated, is still undressed from bed, and clutches the thread with which she had saved his life, the thread that she thought held them together as a couple, only now there is no one at the other end.

Evelyn De Morgan envisages her alone on the beach, in her painting of Ariadne in Naxos (1877). It’s possible that Ariadne had slept there, in the large brown blanket still wrapped around her legs, but there’s now no trace of her former husband, not even a sail on the horizon.

The other painting that’s truly Ovidian is Herbert James Draper’s Ariadne (c 1905). Still half-naked, kneeling on a rock by the sea, she beats her breast in the grief of Theseus’ betrayal. This is a direct reference to Ovid’s lines in Ariadne’s hypothetical letter.

Ovid’s letter also contains some subtle allusions as to what happened next, but is written in ignorance of that. In a remarkable turn of fortune, who should turn up on the island of Dia/Naxos but the god Bacchus, who promptly marries Ariadne, and carries her off to Olympus with him. Maybe Bacchus’ lifestyle didn’t make him an ideal husband, but this was far better than the fate of Ovid’s other heroines.

Eugène Delacroix’s Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63) shows the moment of his arrival, as he helps the despondent Ariadne back up from her gloom. Behind is his chariot, here drawn by lionesses.

Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos (1725) is the ideal romantic ending, the couple staring longingly at one another as putti cavort with fruit. But look carefully at what’s going on down at the beach, in the background.

Maurice Denis’ Bacchus and Ariadne from 1907 is a radically modern treatment of the story of Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos, which could be mistaken for a recreational beach scene at a coastal resort. Buried in there are some more traditional references.

Just to the right of centre, Dionysus stands behind Ariadne, helping to hold a red and white striped cloak or sheet on her left shoulder. Ariadne’s three attendant nymphs are resting on the rocks at the left. Various bacchantes and other figures are riding black horses down in the water at the right, one of them clutching the thyrsus (staff). There is no sign of Silenius, a chariot, or big cats, and a yacht at the right edge may not have anything to do with the narrative.

My favourite painting of this scene has to be Lovis Corinth’s vivacious and complex Ariadne on Naxos (1913). He uses multiplex narrative to tell the whole story, from Theseus’ betrayal at the left, to the arrival of Bacchus at the right.

None, though, shows Ariadne’s revenge on Theseus.

Theseus had made an elaborate arrangement with his father, the king of Athens, to signal to him the outcome of his mission. When Theseus had sailed from Greece, his ship had black sails. The agreement was that he would change those sails to normal white or, more probably, tan ones in the event that he had successfully killed the Minotaur.

In his rush to abandon Ariadne, Theseus forgot to change the black sails. As the ship approached the Greek mainland, his father noticed this. Knowing that meant that they would have to continue sending young Greeks to their death on Crete, King Aegeus threw himself to his death from a cliff. Theseus was broken by grief when he realised that his carelessness had caused the suicide of his father. I wonder if Bacchus and Ariadne ever visited Theseus to remind him of how his treachery backfired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just as humans have always wanted to fly, the ability has commonly been ascribed to those elevated to the status of god or goddess. While some systems of belief have been happy to award all their deities the power of flight, it was more restricted in those of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations responsible for most of the myths painted in European art.

Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Fury of Achilles from 1737 captures Achilles, wearing his elaborate armour in the centre, as he’s being aided in the war against Troy by Athena on the left and Hephaestus on the right. Further to the right is Scamander, shown traditionally with his large jar gushing water and a wooden paddle in his right hand. Beneath them are the bodies of Trojans, and the river is starting to run red with their blood. In the more distant chariot is Hera with one of her peacocks.

More generally, though, unlimited free flight was confined to Hermes/Mercury, messenger of the gods, Cupid, and those personifying features of the sky, including the winds, heavenly bodies such as rainbows (Iris, another divine messenger), and events like night.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted The Judgement of Paris late in his long career, in 1908-10. Its three slightly soft-focus nudes are shown against a blurry background of countryside. Paris has accepted Aphrodite’s bribe, and is here awarding her the golden apple. Watching on is Hermes, complete with his winged helmet and sandals signifying his flying ability, and his distinctive caduceus.

The sixth painting in Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus series, The Death of Medusa II (1881-2), completes the story of Medusa by showing the hero fleeing from the Gorgons. The headless body of Medusa is left on the ground, and her sisters fly around searching for her assailant. Perseus wears the helmet of Hades to maintain his invisibility, and is flying away with his borrowed winged sandals, while inserting Medusa’s head in his kibisis.

Sandro Botticelli’s huge masterpiece Primavera (Spring) demonstrates this differentiation, in its retelling of the story of Zephyrus and Flora. The west wind (far right, and detail below) abducted and raped the nymph Chloris (to the left of him), who was then transformed into the goddess Flora, who is dressed and decked in flowers, representing the Spring. Only Zephyrus as a wind, and Cupid above, are shown in flight.

Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 gives a full and classical account of this myth. Orithyia is trying to push the head of her abductor away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne.

Another deity whose role in mythology depends on her ability to fly is Eris, whose spreading of discord among the goddesses was key to the origin of the war against Troy.

In Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord (1633), the facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, now at the centre of the grasping hands above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Aphrodite, her son Eros at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Hera reaches her hand out for it too.

Flying ability wasn’t evenly distributed in Norse mythology either, but was a skill best developed among valkyries.

Edward Robert Hughes’ first work showing a valkyrie from Norse mythology, Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie) from 1902, depicts a naked and unarmed woman riding a winged horse in the sky over a late Victorian city, perhaps London.

This has perpetuated into more recent myths and legends of fairies and related little creatures.

This Allegorical Scene looks like one of the more extreme faerie works from Victorian Britain, but was painted by Domenicus van Wijnen almost two centuries earlier. At the upper right, hundreds of small putti-like fairies are being ejected from below, flying in an arc over the top of the painting, and coalescing around a goddess lit brightly from behind. Below her is a river, where large numbers of naked bathers are congregated, and they too appear to rise up into the sky in another stream of flying figures.

These have been perpetuated in Christian beliefs in the form of angels, whose wings have more ancient and pre-Christian origins.

Hieronymus Bosch’s panel Ascent of the Blessed is one of the four making up his Visions of the Hereafter (c 1505-15), with particularly original and beautiful winged angels. These wings enable clear distinction to be made between humans and other human-like creatures, and the messengers of God. Being messengers, just as older gods like Eros, Thanatos, and Vanth before them, there’s a feasible rationale for them requiring their wings in order to move swiftly from heaven or the pre-Christian underworld to earth, and in their duties on earth.

There are even a few instances of divine and saintly figures being awarded the gift of flight.

William Blake’s unusual Nativity of 1799-1800 shows Joseph (left) supporting the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers, arms outstretched as if ready for crucifixion, in mid-air. On the right, Mary’s cousin Elisabeth greets the infant, with her own son, John the Baptist, on her lap.

The occasional saint has been awarded their licence to fly, as shown here in the figure of Saint Mark in Tintoretto’s early success Miracle of the Slave from 1548. Here the artist’s intention is not just about motion, but about the act of flying, and the figure’s saintliness or divinity.

It seems that humans have always wanted to fly like the birds, although it’s clear that few birds have ever wanted to walk far on two legs. As is often the case, our aspiration has been transformed into stories, among the oldest being that of Daedalus and his son Icarus. The father was artificer and master craftsman to King Minos of Crete. After creating the Labyrinth, in which the Minotaur was kept, father and son were effectively imprisoned on the island, and tried to escape by flying with wings constructed from feathers held together by wax.

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

The pair flew away successfully, but Icarus grew over-adventurous, flying too high and close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his wings together. He then plunged to his death in the Aegean Sea.

His fatal downfall is shown best in Jacob Gowy’s Fall of Icarus from 1635-7, a conclusion that should deter all but the most foolhardy from trying to fly. Later stories thus show humans flying on mythical beasts with wings, like the hippogriff in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Louis-Édouard Rioult’s Roger Rescues Angelica from 1824 shows the pair flying away after he had rescued her from the jaws of an orc, here left somewhere beneath them, as Ruggiero’s mission is successfully accomplished.

Even Cervantes’ Don Quixote, together with his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza, are duped into believing that they flew on a horse, as shown in Salvador Tusell’s illustration from about 1894, based on Gustave Doré’s fine series of prints.

As mythical flying beasts have ceased to be credible, the forces at work in human flight have grown darker.

In Goethe’s Faust it’s Mephistopheles himself who takes his victim into the air, as painted by Mikhail Vrubel in his Flight of Faust and Mephistopheles from 1896. Here Vrubel uses small and sometimes tiled patches of flat colour, outlined in black, to model the figures, similar to a style adopted by many of the artists who illustrate modern graphic novels.

If it’s not the Devil himself who does the flying, then it’s one of the many witches that serve as his acolytes.

Fritz Roeber’s Walpurgis Night Scene from ‘Faust’ from about 1910 shows this later scene, with Gretchen, Mephistopheles in red, and Faust surrounded by flying witches holding pitchforks.

Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Flight shows three witches levitating in the air while carrying a naked body, which they appear to be exorcising. Below them are a donkey and another two human figures, one shrouded in a white sheet to cover their eyes, the other lying on the ground covering their ears, a possible reference to Goya’s own deafness and tinnitus when he painted this in 1798.

The Age of Enlightenment brought a more physical and realistic approach to human flight, first using hot air balloons.

In the early eighteenth century, Europeans started experimenting with hot air balloons, and during the autumn of 1783 the Montgolfier brothers in France began to make the first human ascents using them. The British remained sceptical of the safety and merits of this French advance, and it took George Biggin’s Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon to break the ice for them, an event painted here in 1785-88 by the wonderfully named Julius Caesar Ibbetson.

One of the more famous balloon flights made from Paris is shown in Jules Didier and Jacques Guiaud’s painting of the Departure of Gambetta in the Balloon ‘Armand-Barbès’ on 7 October 1870 (c 1870), during the Franco-Prussian War.

By the time the Prussians had encircled Paris, a delegation from the French government had been sent to Tours, leaving Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, trapped in the city. He arranged to be flown from the foot of Montmartre in a balloon filled with coal-gas, escaping on 7 October 1870. His balloon, named Armand-Barbès, was one of over sixty being used to transport mail and carrier pigeons from and to Paris at the time, giving an idea as to how popular ballooning had become.

One of the few paintings of the following years showing ballooning is that of the Hungarian realist Pál Szinyei Merse, The Balloon from 1878.

Then in the summer of 1909, the Frenchman Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an aircraft across the Channel, from France to England.

H. Delaspre’s chromolithograph of The Channel Flight. Blériot, July 25th 1909 (1909) is one of the better prints produced at the time. The rest is aviation history.

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll consider divine flight.

Ovid starts the seventh book of his Metamorphoses with myths concerning Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece. Although these take up the first half of this book, he only summarises long and complex stories told more fully elsewhere. They also present a problem in consistency of theme. For the Metamorphoses to provide reasonably comprehensive coverage of all the major contemporary myths, they’re essential, but lack the transformations promised by the title.

The book drops us into the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece just as Jason has learned of the three tasks he must complete to obtain the prize. Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, considers that her father’s demands are too harsh, and is torn between desire and reason. She recognises that she has fallen in love with Jason, and is already considering wild thoughts of marriage to him.

She thus resolves to provide him with every aid that she can to assist his mission, in the hope that this will ensure their marriage and secure her future glory. Medea therefore goes to an old shrine to Hecate, where she meets Jason and teaches him how to use magic herbs to accomplish the tasks.

Several artists, notably those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have explored Medea’s role, and her relationship with Jason at this stage of the story. In John William Waterhouse’s Jason and Medea (1907), she’s depicted as a sorceress, preparing the potions Jason was about to use to accomplish his tasks. He appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge.

Frederick Sandys shows Medea (1866-68) at work, preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a toad, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo.

The following day, watched by the king, Jason succeeds in his first task of yoking a team of fire-breathing bulls, and using them to plough a field which had never been ploughed before, enabled by a herbal ointment provided by Medea.

As he is ploughing, Jason sows the teeth of a dragon, required for his second task. As with those sown by Cadmus before he founded the city of Thebes, those teeth instantly grow into an army who point their spears at Jason. Medea tells him to throw a large rock into their midst, to draw their attention so they kill one another instead of Jason.

Jason moves on to his final task, to provide him with the Golden Fleece, but first has to get past the dragon guarding it. He sprinkles another of Medea’s herbal preparations on the guardian and recites a magic spell three times to put the dragon to sleep.

The frescoes of the Palazzo Ghisilardi Fava in Bologna give a superb account through eighteen separate images. Although directed by Annibale Carracci, it’s thought that his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico also made significant contributions during the painting between about 1583-84.

This uses elaborate multiplex narrative to summarise much of Ovid’s account: at the left, two of the fire-breathing bulls are still yoked, in front of King Aeëtes. The army sprung up from the dragon’s teeth appear behind the wall, armed still with spears but no longer fighting. In the foreground, Jason has put the dragon to sleep using Medea’s magic concoction, and is unhitching the Golden Fleece while he can. At the right, two of the Argonauts offer to help Jason (shown a second time) carry the fleece away.

In Jean François de Troy’s The Capture of the Golden Fleece from 1742, Jason reaches up to take the Golden Fleece from a branch of an oak tree. The artist has interpreted this prize as a lamb of rather modest size. However, the hero’s left foot rests on the body of the dragon, whose nostrils emit steam. To the left of Jason is Medea, dressed as an eastern princess, and surrounding them are the Argonauts, whose ship is seen at the far left, preparing to set sail.

Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865) oddly excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, a standard tool of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s later rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that’s not borne out by the only clues provided by Moreau in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Cooke has deciphered their Latin as reading:
nempe tenens quod amo gremioque in Iasonis haerens
per freta longa ferar; nihil illum amplexa timebo
(Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing)
et auro heros Aesonius potitur spolioque superbus
muneris auctorem secum spolia altera portans
(And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil)

These imply we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, while Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was irretrievable amid his surfeit of symbols.

This is the sort of narrative you might have expect Rubens to have painted, and he did prepare some sketches of the motif. It was his pupil and collaborator Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607–1678), though, who produced this finished painting of Jason and the Golden Fleece in 1630, probably within Rubens’ workshop.

Once the dragon is slumbering deeply, Jason seizes the Golden Fleece, and sails with Medea and his prize to his home port of Iolcus.

Herbert James Draper shows one account of the tactics employed in The Golden Fleece from 1904: as Jason and his Argonauts are sailing away, Medea throws her brother into the sea, forcing her father to stop to recover him, so allowing the Argo to escape from the pursuit.