Aeneas has been rowed through the Straits of Messina, avoiding the rock pinnacle that Scylla had been transformed into. From there he heads north-west until he meets a fierce northerly storm that blows him and his crew south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid breezes through what takes Virgil almost a whole book in the Aeneid, in a brief summary of the affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage. This ends with him abandoning her to fall upon the sword he had given her, and her body to be consumed on her funeral pyre.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815, is probably the standard work showing the beginnings of their romance. Unfortunately it doesn’t give any clues to its tragic outcome.

In about 1875, when Paul Cézanne was still experimenting with narrative genres, he first drew a compositional study, then painted Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage. The queen is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, who had been abandoned by Aeneas as the family fled the burning city of Troy.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it’s surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

Dido’s spectacular death is shown best in what is perhaps Henry Fuseli’s most conventional history painting, known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

After a close call with the Sirens, Aeneas reaches the land of the Cercopes, who had been transformed into apes by Jupiter because of their treachery. The ship continues to the north-west along the coast of Italy, passing Naples.

This has been shown only by those like Antonio Tempesta who engraved for illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses. Tempesta’s Jupiter Changing the Cercopians into Monkeys from around 1600 shows Jupiter at the right, accompanied as ever by his huge eagle, with the transformed monkeys.

Once past Naples, Aeneas and his crew land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. He needs her assistance to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises. The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. The two of them travel to the underworld bearing that golden bough, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity. When Apollo had invited her to wish for anything, she had pointed to a pile of sand, and asked to live as many years as there were grains, but forgot to wish for eternal youth to accompany that.

Apollo offered her eternal youth as well, but she declined and remained a virgin. After seven hundred years, with another three hundred still to go, she is well into old age, infirm, and steadily vanishing as her body wastes away until only her voice will remain. With that, the pair reach Cumae, and Aeneas sets sail.

This is depicted in one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity. Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a forward reference to Aeneas’ future visit, although that would have been seven centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle the first part of this story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, but is set at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story. Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this later scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition. True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance are Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno. The Sibyl, who doesn’t show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings. The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch, with the golden sickle used to cut that branch, in her right hand. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around a white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen, although he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps. In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it was just the first day of the month.

By the end of Book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aeneas is on the island of Sicily. Scylla has been combing Galatea’s hair, listening to her tell the tragic story of the death of her lover Acis. Ovid resumes the narration for the tale of Scylla, which doesn’t conclude until the start of the next book.

Scylla is walking naked along the beach when the figure of Glaucus suddenly breaks the surface of the water. He’s immediately enchanted by her, and tries to engage her in conversation to stop her from running away. But Scylla runs away in terror, and climbs a nearby cliff. There, she gets her breath back, and tries to work out whether he’s a god or monster with long hair and fishy scales below the waist.

Glaucus assures her that he’s a sea-god. He had once been an ordinary mortal, and fished with nets, and rod and line. One day, the fish that he had caught started to move when he had laid them out on the grass, and one by one they escaped back into the water. He couldn’t understand how that had happened, so chewed stems of the plants they had rested on. He was then transformed and swam off in the sea to visit the gods Tethys and Oceanus for removal of the last remains of his mortal form.

Scylla runs away, leaving Glaucus angry, so he makes his way to the sorceress Circe.

Bartholomeus Spranger painted his version of Glaucus and Scylla in 1580-82. Although the artist hasn’t followed Ovid’s distinctive colour scheme for his body, Glaucus is clearly pleading his case before the beautiful young woman. In the next book, Ovid will describe how Scylla was turned into a rock, and Spranger provides that link forward in the story in his background.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa makes Glaucus more of a beast, roughly mauling Scylla’s fair body and giving her good cause for her flight to the cliff.

A little later, probably in the late seventeenth century, Nicola Vaccaro is more sympathetic in his Glaucus fleeing from Scylla. Glaucus may be a bit rough, but arouses more pity. Scylla is accompanied by three Cupids as she flees not to the top of a cliff, but to the goddess Diana above.

The most interesting and unusual depiction of this story is surely JMW Turner’s from 1841, just a decade before his death.

Turner’s Glaucus and Scylla (1841) would perhaps have looked more at home among paintings made fifty or even eighty years later.

The naked Scylla is on the beach at the right, with a couple of cupids flying about. The inchoate form of Glaucus is emerging to the left of centre, holding his arms out towards Scylla. She will have none of it, though, and has already turned to run, and looks back over her shoulder towards him.

We look directly into the setting sun colouring the world a rich gold. In the right background the low coastal land rises to sheer cliffs with a temple on top. A tower atop a nearer pinnacle, or more distant lower red rocks, may be a reference to Scylla’s fate.

In the foreground are clues of the beach setting, with a crab, and several seashells. Turner has applied his paint in innovative and gestural ways, resulting in richly varied textures.

Turner had made an earlier and more traditional study in about 1810-15, but revised it almost completely by the time that he painted this in 1841. Its light appears influenced by the harbour landscapes of Claude, and its general lack of form anticipates Impressionism, perhaps even Abstract Expressionism in passages.

Rejected by the scared Scylla, Glaucus travels from Sicily to visit the sorceress Circe, whom he implores to use her dark arts to force Scylla to return his love. But Circe refuses, telling Glaucus to woo another: as she is in love with him, he could spurn Scylla and love Circe instead.

Glaucus rejects her, saying that nothing will change his love for Scylla. That annoys Circe, who cannot harm Glaucus because of her love for him, so turns her anger on Scylla instead. The sorceress prepares a magical potion from herbs, weaving her spells into it. Dressed in a deep blue robe, she then goes to a small bay where Scylla likes to bathe, and pours her potion into the water.

When Scylla wades into the water the lower half of her body is transformed into a pack of dogs. As Ulysses’ ship passes her, those dogs take some of its crew, but they allow Aeneas to pass safely. Scylla is finally transformed into a rock and becomes a famous hazard to navigation.

John William Waterhouse chose to portray the figure of Circe the sorceress in his Circe Invidiosa (1892). Despite its narrative limitations, this offers a marvellous insight into the character of Circe, as she pours her brilliant emerald green potion into the water, ready for Scylla to come and bathe.

John Melhuish Strudwick also chooses a moment early in Ovid’s story, which makes his painting of Circë and Scylla (1886) narratively rather thin. Circe, dressed in brown rather than blue, is sprinkling her potion into the water from within a small cave, as Scylla, at the left, walks down to bathe.

By far the most complete visual account is Eglon van der Neer’s Circe Punishes Glaucus by Turning Scylla into a Monster (1695). Circe takes the limelight, as she casts her potion from a flaming silver salver held in her right hand. Dripping onto that is the wax from a large candle, held in her left hand. In the water below, Scylla has already been transformed into a gorgonesque figure, with snakes for hair, and the grotesque Glaucus watches from behind. Above and to the right of Circe is a small dragon perched on a rock ledge.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) shows Charybdis the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks of Scylla at the right.

This fragment of fresco by Alessandro Allori shows Odysseus’ ship passing Charybdis, depicted as a huge head vomiting forth the rough waters of the whirlpool at the right, and the dogs’ heads of Scylla, which have captured three of Odysseus’ crew.

Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis (1794-96) is another vivid depiction of Odysseus passing the twin dangers. He stands on the fo’c’s’le of his ship, holding his shield up in defence as the oarsmen down below him struggle to propel the craft through the Straits of Messina.

In this second article about reading dancing in paintings, I move on to its most formalised expression, in ballet, which came to dominate the work of several artists in the late nineteenth century, most notably that of Edgar Degas.

His ballet paintings came to concentrate on smaller groups of dancers, focussing more on their form and movement, as in Swaying Dancer (Dancer in Green) from 1877-79. This is painted not in oils, but a combination of pastel and gouache.

Depicting movement has always been a technical challenge. At the end of the century, Franz von Stuck appears to have used flowlines in his Dancers in 1896, rather than simple motion blur.

A decade after the dancing career of La Carmencita went into decline, John Singer Sargent used his virtuoso brushstrokes to capture her motion. His inspiration was the swish of Giovanni Boldini, in the movement of the fabric rather than its form.

Exotic dancing also featured in Orientalist paintings, with their erotic associations.

Théodore Chassériau painted this sketchy portrait of two Moorish Dancers in 1849, in the style of Delacroix.

Georges Rochegrosse’s undated Palace Entertainment shows a dancer with a musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her routine involving a pair of short swords.

The early Christian church had developed moral concerns over popular performing arts including music and dancing, and by the time of Hieronymus Bosch they were included alongside gambling in those who had gone to Hell.

Edward Poynter’s 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.

Although it may seem a paradoxical subject for the slow and painstaking Divisionist approach to painting, Georges Seurat’s Le Chahut (The Can-Can) (1889-90) is a well-known celebration of a dance that became notorious in its day.

It was an infamous dance from a reinterpretation of the martyrdom of John the Baptist that swept Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, that of Salome.

The paintings Gustave Moreau made of Salome initiated this, among them being this later oil version of The Apparition from 1876-77. Those prompted Gustave Flaubert to write a short story telling this radical rewriting of the martyrdom, from which Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, and that in turn led Richard Strauss to write his opera. In 1906, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced a show in Vienna featuring the Dance of the Seven Veils that had been included in both Wilde’s play and Strauss’s opera, and many considered to be nothing short of a striptease.

Strauss’s opera arrived in New York in 1907, and inspired Robert Henri to invite a Mademoiselle Voclexca to perform the notorious Dance of the Seven Veils in his studio. He then interpreted her dance into a series of paintings, including this Salome (1909), in which John’s head has been omitted altogether.

We’ve strayed a long way from faeries and country folk.

There are few greater challenges to the figurative artist than painting figures in movement when they’re dancing. This week’s two articles about reading visual art consider the significance of rising to that challenge, and how we should read that dancing. I have already looked at paintings associated with death in the Danse Macabre, and won’t be revisiting that here.

As a rhythmic physical activity, dance has long been associated with the natural rhythm of time, particularly the hours of the day.

Nicolas Poussin’s brilliant Dance to the Music of Time (c 1634-6) shows four young people dancing, who are sometimes interpreted as being the seasons. That probably isn’t the case, as they’re most likely Poverty (male at the back, facing away), Labour (closest to Time and looking at him), Wealth (in golden skirt and sandals, also looking at Time), and Pleasure (blue and red clothes) who fixes the viewer with a knowing smile. Opposite Pleasure is a small herm of Janus, whose two faces look to the past and the future. Above them, in the heavens, Aurora (goddess of the dawn) precedes Apollo’s sun chariot, on which the large ring represents the Zodiac. Behind the chariot are the Horai, the hours of the day.

Gaetano Previati’s Dance of the Hours from 1899 shows the Horai dancing in the air around a golden ring, with the orbs of the moon in the foreground and the sun far beyond. Every fine brushstroke is rich in meaning: in the Horai they give the sensation of movement, elsewhere they form a third dimension, or give texture to the ether.

In addition to this association with the Horai, when they’re not playing their musical instruments, the Muses are often depicted as dancing.

Andrea Mantegna’s Mars and Venus, known better as Parnassus, (1496-97) refers to the classical myth of the affair between Mars and Venus, the latter being married to Vulcan, who caught them in bed together and cast a fine net around them for the other gods to come and mock their adultery. The lovers are shown standing together on a flat-topped rock arch, as the Muses dance below. To the left of Mars’ feet is Venus’ child Cupid aiming his blowpipe at Vulcan’s genitals, as he works at his forge in the cave at the left. At the right is Mercury, messenger of the gods, with his caduceus and Pegasus the winged horse. At the far left is Apollo making music for the Muses on his lyre.

More unusual is Hans Thoma’s Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies from 1886, which most probably shows the sirens dancing to their alluring voices.

Putti and their relatives such as amorini are also prone to dance, usually in the sky, presumably with the joy of love.

Thoma’s Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898) shows a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She’s surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti dancing in the sky.

Similarly, the little people in ‘faery’ paintings are adept at formation dancing.

Richard Dadd’s Come unto These Yellow Sands (1842) refers to William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, rather than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was exhibited with the descriptive quotation:
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands,
Curt’sied when you have, and kissed
(The wild waves whist).
Foot it featly here and there,
And sweet sprites the burden bear.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Death and the Maiden from 1872 is most probably based on Schubert’s song of the same title, expressing the inevitability of death, almost in terms of vanitas, that had last been popular during the Dutch Golden Age. This linked with the recent war, when so many young French and Prussian people had died, and with contemporary scourges such as tuberculosis resulting in so many deaths of young people. The maidens are seen dancing together, and picking wild flowers, as the personification of death is apparently asleep on the grass at the lower left, his black cloak wrapped around him and his hand resting on the shaft of his scythe.

This leads us to country and folk dancing, which in northern Europe has long been associated with traditional mid-summer feasts.

One of Jules Breton’s major paintings from the 1870s is The Festival of Saint-Jean, shown in the Salon of 1875; I’ve been unable to locate a suitable image of that finished painting, but this study for it, The Feast of Saint John (1875) may give you an idea of its magnificence.

Anders Zorn’s major painting of 1897 was Midsummer Dance, capturing the festivities in his home town in Sweden, with women and men dancing outdoors in their uniform country dress.

The title of Teodor Axentowicz’s painting of folk dancing, Oberek Folk Dance in Front of a House, appears confusing. Although it names this dance as the Oberek, the second most popular Polish folk dance after the polka, the first word Kołomyjka makes it clear that this is what’s now known as kolomyika (Ukrainian: кoлoмийкa). That’s a combination of a fast and vigorous folk dance with music and rhymed verse. It originated in the Hutsul town of Kolomyia in Ukraine, but has also become popular in north-eastern Slovenia and parts of Poland.

Hans Thoma’s eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Tomorrow I’ll start with the most formalised expression of dancing, at the ballet.

As Ovid nears the end of Book 13 of his Metamorphoses, Aeneas and his companions are in transit across the Mediterranean, heading towards Italy and destiny. He rushes them through a rapid succession of adventures before bringing them to Sicily for the closing stories in this book.

Ovid summarises much of Virgil’s Aeneid in just a few lines, taking Aeneas from Crete through Ithaca, Samos, Dodona, and Phaeacia, to land on Sicily, where Scylla and Charybdis threaten the safety of mariners. Scylla is combing the hair of Galatea, as the latter laments her tragic love-life. Wiping tears from her eyes, Galatea then tells us her story.

When he was only sixteen, Galatea had fallen in love with Acis, the son of the river nymph Symaethis, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The Cyclops did his best to smarten himself up for her, while remaining deeply and murderously jealous of Acis.

Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye, as told in a separate story in Homer’s Odyssey. This inevitably upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there playing his reed pipes. Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach.

Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, he grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was buried by the side of a mountain hurled by the Cyclops. The blood of Acis was turned into a stream that gushed forth from a reed growing in a cleft in the rock, with him as its river-god.

Claude’s wonderful Coastal Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657) is first and foremost a coastal landscape, but also tells Ovid’s story faithfully. Polyphemus is seen at the right, watching Acis and Galatea in their makeshift shelter down at the water’s edge, with Cupid sat beside them. Additional Nereids are tucked away in the trees at the left.

Nicolas Bertin’s Acis and Galatea from around 1700 also follows Ovid’s detail. At its centre, the two lovers are behind a rock pinnacle, with three cupids sealing their love. Polyphemus is already in a rage at the upper right, although he hasn’t yet armed himself with the huge boulder. Below the couple Bertin provides a link into Ovid’s greater narrative, with Scylla and Charybdis, and possibly the goddess Venus with her son Cupid by her breast.

Johann Heinrich Tischbein prefers a plainer account in his Acis and Galatea from 1758. Galatea is almost naked in the arms of Acis, as Polyphemus peers at them, a voyeur behind a tree trunk. There are now no cupids or other distractions.

Alexandre Charles Guillemot’s The Love of Acis and Galatea (1827) doesn’t pursue the theme of Polyphemus’ voyeurism, but returns to a more conventional composition of the Cyclops sitting on a distant hill. He also sows potential confusion: Polyphemus is holding his reed pipes, although they are harder to see, and the pipes on Acis’ back are extras that are perhaps a little too obvious.

Later in the nineteenth century, emphasis switched from the jealousy of Polyphemus at the sight of the couple together, to Tischbein’s theme of voyeurism.

Gustave Moreau’s first Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked, alone in the countryside with her eyes closed, as the Cyclops plays sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be more appropriate for a sea-nymph. Acis is nowhere to be seen.

Moreau’s second Galatea from near the end of his career in 1896 is dark, and shows Galatea and Polyphemus hemmed in within a deep canyon. Around her aren’t flowers but the seaweeds and corals more appropriate for a sea-nymph.

One of the masterpieces of Symbolism, Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops from about 1914 follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of voyeurism. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis absent.

Curiously, none of the above paintings shows the moment of climax, or peripeteia, in which Polyphemus murders Acis.

Only Pompeo Batoni’s Acis and Galatea from 1761 shows the Cyclops, his reed pipes at his feet, hurling the boulder at Acis, so making clear the couple’s tragic fate.

Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently, professional painters have been cautious to stay within the bounds of what has been deemed decent for their time and society. One way to push those boundaries is to depict classical times.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of Ariadne on Naxos from 1913 shows a group of figures from classical myth on a symbolic, if not token, island. At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in ecstasy on Theseus’ left thigh, as shown in the detail below. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right. They are from the later part of this myth, after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island. Bacchus then turned up and the couple married.

Bacchic festivities or Bacchanals are another opportunity for a bit of physical ecstasy.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth painted this Bacchanal, with several of its participants staring heavenward with open mouths, clearly in physical ecstasy.

The ecstasy of love and sex was a trickier theme left for the brave or foolish, like Jacques-Louis David in 1809, when Napoleon was approaching the height of his power. David then chose to paint a legend that tells of the love of the poet Sappho 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 his great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus 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.

David’s Sappho and Phaon was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and an ecstatic gaze on Sappho’s face, resembling those of Corinth’s Bacchantes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was more coy in his pen and ink painting of Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber from 1857, taken from the seamy side of Arthurian legend. While Lancelot is brandishing his sheathed sword at knights on the other side of the door, Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen, already seems to be transported in ecstasy, to the consternation of her chambermaids behind. At least she conforms to Victorian standards of decency in being fully clothed, and doesn’t even expose her feet.

My remaining examples are taken from the transition of the story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom at the whim of Herodias, to the femme fatale of Salome in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Following Gustave Moreau’s startling paintings that changed the original post-Biblical story in The Apparition (c 1876), Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, published in 1893.

Richard Strauss saw Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera of the same name premiered in Dresden at the end of 1905. The following year, as an even more immediate inspiration for Franz von Stuck, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, featuring a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, and sparking the wave of ‘Salomania’ that swept Europe.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) is one of several similar versions. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery, naked to the waist and in ecstasy. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist.

Gustav Klimt had already conflated this novel Salome with Judith, who had killed the enemy general Holofernes.

Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience, and he returned to using gold leaf in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. In his Judith I from 1901 he emphasises her neck with a broad gold choker studded with gems, and echoed in a golden belt at the foot of this painting. Her glazed eyes are almost closed and her mouth open in overt ecstasy.

In 1909, Klimt followed that with greater ambiguity in what could be Judith II or Salome (1909). Below her is the severed head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist, in a disturbing link between erotic ecstasy and death.

Now debased by hyperbole and its association with drugs, ecstasy was intended to denote a trance-like state normally attained in two contrasting contexts: religion, and physical pleasure. This week I show how artists have depicted this intense emotional experience, starting today with paintings of Christian religious ecstasy.

This is a state most widely attributed to followers of Jesus Christ, particularly Mary Magdalene, and in paintings appears in the Renaissance when facial expression and body language became acceptable in art. Mary Magdalene is the subject of a tangle of legends, most of them the result of conflation, and many of them bizarre or outlandish. Paintings of her in religious ecstasy appear to have arisen from her penitence and mourning.

Elisabetta Sirani’s Penitent Magdalene is a powerful painting in which Mary’s eyes are closed in an understated ecstasy, despite the vision of Christ crucified on the left.

In Artemisia Gentileschi’s portrait of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy from 1613-20, her mouth and eyes are closed and her head thrown back as she directs her unseeing gaze to heaven.

The story of the conversion of Saul into Saint Paul does at least have a textual basis in the Acts of the Apostles, but the received account proved a difficult compositional problem in visual art.

Domenico Morelli’s Conversion of Saint Paul from 1876 tries a novel solution, and is perhaps the most successful. Accepting the contradictory demands, he puts Paul in a brilliant light, showing its origin in the heavens, but has him face away from it. Now blinded by that light, Paul looks with unseeing eyes of revelatory ecstasy towards the viewer, his right arm and hand outstretched.

The life of Saint Cecilia is almost unknown, and she isn’t reputed to have undergone any notable ecstasy. However, that didn’t stop the event from being celebrated in paint.

Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, painted between 1513-14, is one of his masterpieces, and probably secured the popularity of Saint Cecilia as the patron saint of music and musicians. Beside her are, from the left, Saints Paul, John the Evangelist (patron saint of the church for which this painting was destined), Augustine, who holds a crosier, and Mary Magdalene. Signs of her ecstasy are limited.

Andrés de la Concha’s later painting of Saint Cecilia from 1570-1610 shows her in more obvious ecstasy, and playing a substantial pipe organ, with angelic instrumentalists in the clouds above.

After Mary Magdalene, the best-known Christian religious figure who has been painted in ecstasy is Joan of Arc.

Léon-François Bénouville’s Joan of Arc Hearing Voices, probably from around 1850, is a composite of different episodes from her visions and life: Joan is clearly older than thirteen, and isn’t in her father’s garden, but apparently spinning while tending his sheep. In the distance, a town is burning, referring either to the war being waged by the English, or one of the actions in which Joan became involved. Instead of her eyes being closed, they’re wide open, and her arms tensed against her lower leg.

It’s Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s undated portrait of Joan of Arc that captures her in fullest ecstasy, with a rainbow behind her.

When the French Naturalist Luc-Olivier Merson was in Italy, he concentrated on religious and historical paintings, some of which are almost phantasmagoric in content. The Vision from 1872 combines an altered image of the Crucifixion with that of a nun in an apparent ecstasy, and an angelic musical trio. It’s strongly suggestive of the much later paintings of Surrealists, particularly those of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).

Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his son Ascanius. For a Roman reader, Aeneas needs no introduction; like so many classical heroes, he’s the product of a union between a god and a mortal. His case is unusual, as it wasn’t Jupiter to blame, and Aeneas’ father was the mortal Anchises, now being carried on the shoulders of his son, and his mother was the goddess Venus.

Venus and Anchises, painted by William Blake Richmond between 1889-90, shows this legend. Jupiter challenged Cupid to shoot an arrow at his mother, causing her to fall in love with Anchises when she met him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. Aeneas was the result of that union, and the legend is the explanation for Venus watching over the safety of Aeneas during his prolonged journey from Troy.

There have been many fine paintings of Aeneas fleeing the sacked city with his family.

Unusually, one of Adam Elsheimer’s paintings of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy was made in gouache. Of all these depictions, this seems to be the only one based on a reconstruction with models, as the method of carrying is not only feasible, but practical. Note how Aeneas is grasping a robe acting as his father’s seat, and Anchises has interlocked his fingers on his son’s forehead.

That doesn’t, though, appear to have been a study for Elsheimer’s finished work The Burning of Troy (c 1600-01) painted in oil on copper. The pair, with young Ascanius and his mother to the right, are seen in the left foreground. Elsheimer’s backdrop of the burning city includes the Trojan Horse, to the left of the upper centre, and hints with subtlety at the vast tragedy taking place.

Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy from about 1635 shows the family group in close-up. From the left are Creusa, Aeneas’ wife who dies before she can leave the city, Aeneas, Anchises, and a very young Ascanius. This is the start of their flight, as Aeneas and Creusa are persuading Anchises to let Aeneas carry him to safety.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is already falling slightly behind, and looks particularly distressed.

Oddly, Ovid doesn’t mention Creusa’s fate in the Metamorphoses, although a Roman reader would have been well aware of the detail in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is left behind. By the time the hero reaches the city gates with his father and son, his wife is nowhere to be seen. Aeneas re-enters the burning city to look for her, but her ghost tells him that his destiny is to reach Hesperia, where he will become a king and marry a princess.

Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius then sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to reach Delos, site of a temple to Apollo, whose priest and ruler of the island is Anius. He shows them the temple and city, and the two trees that the goddess Latona had held onto when she gave birth to the twin deities Apollo and Diana.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving of Aeneus Meets Anius (c 1639), for an illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might appear generic, but is actually carefully composed. Aeneas stands upright, his spear almost vertical, in its centre. To the right his father Anchises embraces his old friend Anius, and to the left is the young Ascanius. In the right background is the city, with its imposing temple at the edge.

This singular painting is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos from 1672. This was the first of half a dozen works that Claude painted in the final decade of his life, based primarily on Virgil’s account in the Aeneid. Its meticulous details are supported by a coastal landscape of great beauty.

The twin trees at its centre, an olive and palm according to myth, are those that Latona held when she gave birth to Apollo and Diana, and now provide shade for a shepherd and his flock of sheep.

The king and priest Anius is at the left of the group, wearing priestly white, and pointing out the twin trees to his guests. To his right is Anchises in blue, then Aeneas holding his spear, and his young son Ascanius, with a suitably shorter spear in his right hand.

Claude’s fine details tell further stories too.

The relief at the top of the temple, immediately below a couple of casual onlookers, tells the story of Latona’s twins killing the giant Tityus, who had tried to rape their mother. Tityus is seen at the right of the relief, fallen down and wounded by the arrows of Diana (centre) and Apollo (left). Similarly to the Titan Prometheus, Tityus was sentenced to spend his time in the Underworld with two vultures feeding on his liver, which regenerated each night.

Anius then entertains his guests to a feast in their honour. Anchises asks what happened to Anius’ four daughters and one son. Anius replies that he is now almost childless, with his son far away on the island of Andros, and his daughters taken from him by Agamemnon. Bacchus had given his girls the remarkable gift that whatever they touched was transformed into food, wine, and oil. Because of that, the Greeks departing from their conquest of Troy abducted them to feed their army. When the daughters begged Bacchus to release them, the god turned them into white doves of Venus, Aeneas’s mother.

Anius and his guests continue to tell tales before retiring to sleep for the night. In the morning Aeneas goes to the oracle of Phoebus, who cryptically tells him to seek his ancient mother, and head for ancestral shores. They then exchange gifts, including a decorated krater (wine bowl) telling another story. The image on the krater shows the death of Orion’s daughters in Thebes. Their funeral procession took the bodies to the great square, for their cremation on pyres. From their ashes rose twins known as the Coroni.

After that, Aeneas and his companions sail on to Crete.

Facial expressions are a rich source of information about our emotions, state of mind, and when we are in pain. While heroes always grin and bear it, and sometimes the most unlikely person appears remarkably stoical, the grimace of pain is an important feature in some narrative paintings. In some this has become so uniform as to become a stereotype.

In Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes from about 1598-9, he tells most of this story in facial expressions alone. Judith’s combines anxiety with repulsion, revealing her ambivalence in killing her victim, while the expression of her aged maid is even stronger in its grim determination. Holofernes’ face is grimaced in shocked agony, just as death is freezing it in place, and his arms show a futile effort to press himself up from his bed. The artist is believed to have used a Roman courtesan, Fillide Melandroni, as the model, and to have recalled what he had seen earlier at the public execution of Beatrice Cenci.

Jacob Jordaens’ Prometheus Bound from about 1640, features an almost identical expression on the face of Prometheus as an eagle feeds from his liver.

Later rottenpockets in Dante’s Inferno contain thieves, those who gave fraudulent counsel, those who sowed discord, and falsifiers and imposters of various kinds. In Joseph Anton Koch’s fresco in the Casa Massimo, Rome, thieves are attacked repeatedly by snakes and grimace in their agony.

This expression continued well into nineteenth century history painting, in Jules-Élie Delaunay’s Ixion Plunged into Hades from 1876. This shows Ixion writhing in agony in the Underworld, as he is bound to a wheel by snakes, his expression still conforming to Caravaggio’s Holofernes.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus the centaur is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, and the centaur’s face has the same open mouth grimace of pain, now a full three centuries since Caravaggio.

Some still found scope for more studied and original expressions of pain.

Rembrandt’s early painting of The Operation, from his late teens in 1624-25, shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head. This is most likely to have been the lancing of a boil or removal of a tumour from the scalp or pinna of the ear. In the absence of any form of anaesthesia, this visibly resulted in considerable pain for the long-suffering patient, whose eyes and mouth are closed, and his arms are tensed with fists clenched.

Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows physical punishment in a contemporary school. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, as he is already wiping tears from his eyes. A girl in the middle of the canvas is grimacing in sympathy.

I finish with two animal curiosities.

A Courtesan Pulling the Ear of a Cat, Allegory of the Sense of Touch was painted in Jan van Bijlert’s workshop around 1625-70, and is clearly composed on the theme of touch. A florid courtesan plays with her cat, pulling its ear, resulting in its grimace of pain and anger.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1878, August Friedrich Schenk’s Anguish, painted in 1876-78, shows a ewe lamenting the death of her lamb in the snow, as a thoroughly menacing murder of crows assembles around the defiant mother. Although the ewe’s face isn’t contorted, her open mouth and visible breath cries pain and anguish.

The world still looks to Paris for the height of fashion in clothing, a phenomenon already well-established by the late nineteenth century. This of course included hats, and in this second article on the reading of hats in paintings, I show a selection of works illustrating fashionable headwear of that period. These are the works of just five painters who seem, in one way or another, to have specialised in fashionable women’s headwear: Georges Clairin, Jean Béraud, Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, Henri Gervex and Edgar Degas.

Georges Clairin’s undated Elegant Couple at the Coast comes not from the Rococo, but as indicated by the painterly style of the slippery rocks, was most probably painted in the early years of the twentieth century. It’s a study of one of the few disadvantages of hats, particularly extensive fashionable adornments, in their behaviour in wind. The very pink young galante woman is a textbook example of how to make a figure look windswept, although her partner seems mysteriously to be unaffected by the breeze.

The English word for specialists in fashionable hats for women, milliner, comes from that for an inhabitant of Milan, one of the former centres of the hat trade in Europe. Milliners and their shops were associated with the height of fashion, and drew the attention of Edgar Degas among others.

Degas looked carefully at one of the delights of the middle and upper class modern woman, the selection of hats in The Millinery Shop (1879/86). Here he also experiments with unusual views and cropping, as he examines the tricky process of assessing and choosing a hat.

Around this fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées, Jean Béraud carefully balances painterly background foliage and sky, and the atmospheric detail of distant carriages. His Milliner on the Pont des Arts from 1879-82 (below) shows the same model drawing admiring looks on a windy day by the River Seine.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot’s At the Milliner (1901) contrasts with those of Degas in its relatively fine detail, and his use of mirror play to show the milliner herself, at the right. His swirling hats, and the huge ginger cat, are marvellous.

Millinery was one of the staples of fashion houses like that of Paquin, whose success was characteristic of the late nineteenth century, and shown in Henri Gervex’s Five Hours at Paquin’s from 1906.

The purpose of these expensive hand-made hats was for show, when the lady was seen in appropriate surroundings. Jeanniot’s painting of the patrons of one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris shows all the hats out on parade in the fine weather in the inner garden of the Paris Ritz.

Others captured the role of hats to those heading downward through society.

In Béraud’s The Letter (1908) the man looks rough and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. In front of each of them is a glass of absinthe, notorious for its association with alcoholism. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to drink.

Although I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on hats seen in Europe on the head of Europeans, the nineteenth century was also a time when hats from overseas were becoming more frequent sights.

Georges Clairin’s paintings of Ouled Naïl women provide glimpses of those from this nomadic group from the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Exotic they certainly are, with elaborate headwear, richly decorated clothing, and no doubt over their identity.

Of all the artists of this period, it was Clairin who appears to have been most fascinated by hats.

His extraordinary Bust of a Woman in Profile (1899) is perhaps a sea-nymph, wearing the most bizarre headgear that appears to have grown from coral. It has peculiar pedicles which sweep over her hair, and excrescences resembling the bodies of fabulous birds, making it the ultimate hat of them all.

It wasn’t that long ago that it was most unusual to go out without wearing a hat. Although they’ve made something of a comeback in recent decades, in much of the world they’re still far from popular unless it’s unusually cold. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show a selection where reading the hats can be useful. However, I avoid two other types of headgear that commonly appear in art, as they’ve been covered elsewhere: helmets and halos.

People have put hats on their head since long before recorded history. Some distinctive forms of hat have unusual histories, and puzzling representations in art. Among the many quirks in the amazing paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are figures in or wearing funnels.

Their origin goes back to the Jewish diaspora of the Middle Ages, when Ashkenazi Jews (in particular) migrated to northern Europe, from about 800 CE. Predominantly Christian powers sought to make visible signs to distinguish Jews, and to a lesser extent Muslims, from local Christians, and for many centuries the migrants were persecuted, confined to Jewish ghettos, and generally kept in isolation as much as possible.

One common discriminatory technique employed in much of northern Europe was to require Jews to wear distinctive hats. This played on religious requirements for Jews to cover their heads, and the fact that most people wore hats when outdoors. The patterns of Jewish hat most often recorded are pointed or conical, and some have highly distinctive ‘bobbles’ at the top.

This detail from the centre panel of Bosch’s Haywain Triptych from about 1510-16 shows some unusual headgear probably derived from the appearance of the Jewish hat.

They’re also to be seen in more recent historically accurate depictions of the Middle Ages, as shown by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in the right of his wonderful large history painting of Valdemar Atterdag Holding Visby to Ransom, 1361 (1882). There’s a rich range of military helmets, and one obvious conical hat being worn by a Jew, seen in the detail below.

In time, conical hats remained visible signs of discrimination. Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 shows the range of hats worn by children, and at the far right a dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.

As with all forms of clothing and personal decoration, hats have long been objects of fashion, used by individuals to distinguish and adorn, and feed their personal vanity. One of the best examples of this is in Bartholomäus Strobel’s long panoramic view of the Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist at Herod’s Banquet from about 1630-33.

Gathered in this grand banquet are many ranks of nobility wearing contemporary dress with an astonishing range of headgear, from armoured helmets to feathery confections. At the far right, the executioner stands by John’s headless corpse, a large pool of bright blood on the ground where its head once lay. A young woman (who might be Salome) looks up to heaven, her hands clasped in prayer, while an older woman (presumably Herodias) chats with the executioner.

During the English Civil War of 1642-51, hats assumed an even greater importance, to distinguish the two sides, so-called Cavaliers and Roundheads.

William Frederick Yeames’ And when did you last see your Father? indicates this in the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and children, who are clearly Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title, for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father, an act that’s bringing anguish to his sisters and mother.

Not to be outdone by their subjects, Kings and their bishops had to have their own hats in the form of crowns and mitres.

Probably the most famous depiction of any major coronation is that of Raphael and his workshop in this fresco of the Coronation of Charlemagne from 1514-15, with its serried ranks of mitres and just the one crown to rule them all. The rows of bishops here wear what is the exact opposite of the monks’ bare tonsured heads.

It didn’t take long for the church and other organisations to express rank and superiority in subtle variations of hat.

Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Cardinal from 1510-11 pays particular attention to the surface textures of the fabrics. Three quite distinct fabrics are shown in the cardinal’s choir dress: the soft matte surface of the biretta on his head, the subtly patterned sheen of his mozzatta (cape), and the luxuriant folds of his white rochet (vestment). In that scarlet biretta is great power.

Some well-known characters in paintings are instantly recognisable by their hat, in this case the Florentine poet Dante, shown below with Virgil as they are being ferried in the Inferno.

In 1822, the young Eugène Delacroix painted this Barque of Dante, one of his finest narrative works, showing Dante and Virgil crossing a stormy river Acheron in Charon’s small boat. Dante is inevitably wearing his signature red chaperon. This had evolved before 1200 as a hooded short cape, and developed into variants that remained popular until becoming unfashionable in about 1500. For his part, Virgil wears a laurel wreath honouring an epic poet of his stature.

Some of these ancient hats have been perpetuated in formal dress, such as that worn by academics for ceremonial.

In Jean Béraud’s undated The Thesis of Madeleine Brès or The Doctoral Jury he shows us one of the early woman doctoral students defending her thesis before the academic jury, who are wearing what might now appear to be fancy dress hats. At the time this was a major landmark in the improvements in women’s rights, and the archaic headwear serves to emphasise that change.

Finally, hats aren’t always good signs, but can signify the sinister and worse. Although most of us associate the silk top hat with elegant opulence, in its day it gained some dark associations.

Jean-Louis Forain’s Dancer and Admirer Behind the Scenes from 1903 whispers its disturbing message of the association between the top hat and white tie, and under-age prostitution that was rife at the time among dancers of the Paris ballet. It’s not just the hat, but the context in which it’s worn.

Given the great many paintings commissioned as altarpieces, it’s perhaps surprising that relatively few others depicted Christian altars. When you might expect them to, for example in Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the sacrament of Eucharist, they often avoid it. In this second article showing examples of altars in paintings, I start with one of Raphael’s magnificent frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican Palace.

Traditionally, the first of his series is the Disputa, or Disputation of Holy Sacrament, completed in the period 1509-10. This doesn’t represent what we know as a dispute, but a theological discussion on this aspect of the Christian faith. Its apex contains the Holy Trinity of God the Father (top), Jesus Christ flanked by the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, with the white dove of the Holy Spirit below. The tier with Christ at its centre represents the elect, a group of the most revered saints, and figures from the Old Testament including Adam, David, Abraham, Moses and possibly Joshua.

The lower tier is earthly, centred on an altar and simple monstrance containing the Holy Sacrament. Seated beside that are the Roman Fathers of the Church, including Gregory, Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose. In the flanks are many other figures who were important to the church at the time. Notable among these is Dante, seen in profile mid-right, with a laurel wreath on his head and red robes.

Altars also feature in several paintings of Joan of Arc (c 1412-1431), patron saint of France and heroine of the French nation.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand. To the right is an altar, on which her left hand is resting. At its back is a triptych altarpiece.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance, from 1863, shows Joan kneeling at an altar, where she stares up and into the future, while pressing her lips to her sword. This is one of the few paintings of Joan showing her wearing jewellery.

Altars were central to many coronations and similar acts of dedication.

Friedrich Kaulbach painted his romantic vision of the Coronation of Charlemagne in the nineteenth century. As Pope Leo III raises the imperial crown to place it on Charles’ head, his biographer Einhard records the event in words, at the lower right, and the emperor’s family watch on. Behind the pages and bishops to the right is an ornate altar with a large crucifix.

Edmund Blair Leighton exhibited The Dedication in 1908. A knight and his lady are kneeling before the altar of a country church seeking a blessing on the knight’s sword, presumably before battle. His squire stands outside, tending the knight’s charger.

One of the strangest events depicted at an altar must be Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s most controversial painting, of St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation (1891).

It shows Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) prostrate before an altar, and completely naked, with two nuns and two monks behind her. At present, this painting is so dark that it is hard to see its details. The overlightened image below makes it more clear how shocking this must have appeared at the time.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil was probably painted towards the end of the nineteenth century, or possibly in the early twentieth. Taken from the well-known story in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Lisabetta is here kneeling before her pot of basil at an altar, with a crucifix behind.

Of the many wonderful paintings that Harriet Backer made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church from 1909.

Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) giving them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the distant altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar, where there’s a painting of the Last Supper. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

Most religions centre their ceremonies and worship around a raised horizontal surface, a stone slab, table or platform referred to as an altar. In some pre-Christian religions altars are used for libations, the pouring out of liquid as an offering, and sacrifice. Most Christian churches use them for a collection of symbolic objects such as candles and crucifixes, and the vessels used to celebrate the Eucharist. They can be a modest alcove in a home, or the focus of a grand cathedral. In this and tomorrow’s sequel I offer some examples that are significant in the reading of paintings.

Alfred-Henri Bramtot’s painting of The Death of Demosthenes from 1879 shows the suicide by poisoning of this Greek statesman and orator. His limp body is supported from falling in front of an altar to the god Neptune. At the left edge is the characteristic altar tripod, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it. He charged his pen with poison, and used that to administer it to himself.

This surviving version of Angelica Kauffmann’s Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe in front of an altar to the goddess Diana, with Acontius behind. He holds his ingeniously inscribed apple high above her, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to drop it in front of her. Instead of the altar flame burning at the top of a tripod, it’s here shown in a carved stone slab, at the left. Behind the statue of Diana are two of her priestesses.

In the seventeenth century, Domenicus van Wijnen explored the theme of witchcraft in The Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight, set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with ‘the dark arts’, and takes place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs. Clustered in front of the altar at the right is a soldier in armour, who is looking in a mirror at the image of another, and a woman who is kneeling and holding a snake in her right hand. The surface of the altar has been prepared with bread and wine, and there is a small chimera by it.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Many artists associated with German Romantic and Symbolist movements painted groups of worshippers within ancient trees, often under similar titles to Arnold Böcklin’s Sacred Grove, from 1882. The nine figures here are shrouded in white habits indicating their religious association. On top of a stone altar is a bright flame, at which three of them are bent low and kneeling in obeisance.

Charles William Mitchell’s best-known painting is that of Hypatia, completed and exhibited in 1885. It shows a naked woman, her long tresses clasped to her right breast, leaning back against a carved stone altar, on which there is a crucifix and a bowl, on an altar cloth. She holds her left arm up, her hand open and gesturing towards a mosaic on the wall behind her, and looks anxious.

On either side of the altar are burning candles, long on tall floor-standing candlesticks. The flame of that at the left is being blown towards the altar, implying that a door to the left, in the direction of the woman’s gaze, is open.

The walls are decorated with mosaics; although the images of them shown are only fragmentary, they appear to be of religious motifs. That behind the woman shows a right foot that could be from an image of Christ crucified. A curtained door leads to a room behind the altar. Scattered on the floor are a white robe (presumably removed from the woman), a candlestick holder, and other debris.

A Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Hypatia was a pagan philosopher who headed the Neoplatonic school there. Known for her dignity and virtue, she became embroiled in a bitter feud between Orestes, Roman governor of Alexandria, and Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, over local Jewish dancing exhibitions. A fanatical Christian mob kidnapped Hypatia, took her to a Christian church, where she was stripped, tortured to death, and her body mutilated and burned.

Although Mitchell may well have been aware of the historical origin of this story, he was probably most influenced by Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, published in 1853. In that version, Hypatia is on the verge of being converted to Christianity when she is attacked by the Christian mob. She is then dragged to a Christian church, stripped naked by the mob, and torn apart under a large image of Christ. Modern criticism of the novel stresses its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

As Ovid reaches the end of Book Twelve of his Metamorphoses, Nestor is still telling stories to the feast in honour of Achilles’ victory over Cycnus in the Trojan War. He has just completed the long and colourful story of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodame.

Tlepolemus, the son of Hercules (Heracles), is offended that Nestor hasn’t mentioned his father in his stories, to which Nestor points out his hatred for Hercules. Nestor says that he’s the only survivor of twelve sons of Neleus, Hercules having destroyed all the others. Nestor then goes on to tell of the strange death of his brother Periclymenus, who had been given the power of shape-shifting by Neptune. After Periclymenus had torn the face of Hercules and had flown away as an eagle, Hercules’ arrow severed the sinews of his wings. When he fell to earth, the arrow was driven into his neck, killing him.

Ovid then jumps to the closing months of the Trojan War, writing that Neptune’s hatred of Achilles has not gone away. Seeing the Greeks are about to conquer the city, Neptune speaks with Apollo, seeking a way to kill Achilles at last. As Neptune cannot face him in combat, Apollo agrees to use his skills as an archer to bring about the warrior’s death.

Apollo goes down to the walls of Troy, where he finds Paris (Alexander), whose abduction of Helen had started the war, shooting arrows almost at random. The god reveals himself and offers to help him make his shots more effective by aiming them at Achilles. Apollo assists Paris and his arrow, to ensure that it reaches its target; Achilles falls, mortally wounded, as a result.

Of those who have painted this, it was Peter Paul Rubens who has told the story most vividly, in a series on Achilles that he completed between 1630-35, towards the end of his own career and life. This painting of The Death of Achilles is an oil sketch on a smaller panel.

Achilles, an arrow piercing straight through his right foot, is shown in the centre foreground, overtly moribund. But Rubens doesn’t place Achilles in battle, as does Ovid: he has been standing at a small altar to the goddess Diana, with her strong association with archery. At the door to the left, Paris is still holding the bow that loosed the arrow, and behind him is Apollo aiding and abetting in the killing.

Rubens’ finished painting of The Death of Achilles adheres faithfully to that sketch. Achilles’ face is deathly white, and this brings to life the supporting detail, particularly the lioness attacking a horse at the lower edge of the canvas, symbolising Paris’s attack on Achilles.

Much later, Alexander Rothaug’s undated Death of Achilles is true to the original accounts, with the arrow passing through the Achilles tendon. Paris, still clutching his bow above, looks mortified, and Apollo stands behind him.

Henry Fuseli’s Thetis Lamenting the Death of Achilles (1780) is less straightforward to read. In the foreground, Achilles’ body lies like a fallen statue on his shield, his great spear by his left side. There is no sign of any wound, arrow, or injury. At the water’s edge, his mother Thetis is waving her arms in lament for her dead son. Another deity is flying past in the distance, and is seen white against the dark and funereal sea and sky.

Ovid is quite vague as to how Achilles died, other than telling us it was from an arrow shot by Paris. Since that account in his Metamorphoses, a new myth has flourished, giving a more familiar explanation. When Achilles was a young child, his mother Thetis immersed him in the water of the river Styx, to make him invulnerable. However, she had to hold him by part of his body, the left heel, which was therefore left as his only weakness, hence his Achilles Heel. This was first recorded in the poetry of Statius, in the first century CE.

Rubens included this oil sketch in his Achilles series, showing Thetis Dipping the Infant Achilles into the River Styx (1630-35). This is taking place in the foreground, while in the middle distance Charon is seen ferrying the dead across the River Styx into the Underworld. Rubens complies with Statius’ story in making Achilles’ left heel the one left vulnerable.

Nearly thirty years after Rubens’ death, Jan-Erasmus Quellinus painted his version of Thetis Dips Achilles in a Vase with Water from the Styx (1668). It’s set not on the bank of the River Styx, but at a temple, where Achilles undergoes a baptismal procedure in a a huge pot, at the lower left. Thetis appears to be holding the infant, who is almost completely immersed, by his left foot, again in compliance with Statius. Quellinus has engaged in a little intentional Christianisation of this myth, which may also have made it seem more familiar to those who saw it.

Antoine Borel’s more traditional account of Thetis Immerses Her Son Achilles in Water of the River Styx was painted at least a hundred years later, in the late eighteenth century, and again has Thetis hold Achilles by his left foot.

Unusually for Rubens, though, his paintings of the death of Achilles show the arrow transfixing his right foot, not the left. That was a necessity by virtue of its composition, although Rubens could just as easily have reversed his drawing to achieve consistency with this detail.

With Achilles on his funeral pyre, Ovid closes the book as King Agamemnon calls his warriors to meet, to decide who should be awarded Achilles’ shield and arms, in the opening of book thirteen.

In addition to their use for concealment and revelation in paintings, curtains serve other purposes, often as a visual device, or in their everyday roles. They have been widely used through history to provide privacy and separation for sleeping, classically in the four-poster bed.

The right wing of Hieronymus Bosch’s reconstructed Wayfarer triptych shows a frail and emaciated man in bed, being tended to by an angel, with a devil poised above him, and the figure of death coming in through the door. The scene is a barrel-vaulted bedroom which goes deep, and is furnished with a large bed with a canopy and side-curtains. At the foot of the bed is a large chest containing money and valuables. In the foreground, the bedroom ends in a pillar at each side, with a low wall joining them.

The figure of death is shown as a skull on a near-skeletal body and limbs, holding a long silver arrow in its right hand. That arrow points towards the man in bed. Peering over the canopy above the bed is a small devil who holds a lantern on a rod. More devils are seen under the chest, one holding up a document with a red seal on it. Another devil is looking over the frontmost low wall, by the garments laid on it.

Galswintha (540-568 CE), or Galeswintha, was the daughter of the Visigoth king of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and sister of Brunhilda, Queen of Austrasia (Belgium across to Germany). She married King Chilperic I, the Merovingian ruler of Neustria (northern France), in 567. However, marriage didn’t suit Chilperic’s mistress Fredegund, who arranged for Galswintha to be strangled so she could marry the king. That murder caused her sister Brunhilda to make war for forty years against Chilperic, and his murder in 584, possibly by Fredegund.

Jean-Paul Laurens shows Galswintha lying, presumably dead, in a heavily built four-poster bed, its curtains partly drawn back. A young well-dressed woman (presumably Fredegund) views her from the foot of the bed. Fredegund is partly undressed, her right shoulder and much of her back bare, as if she too is just getting ready for bed. Just outside the room, on the other side of a drawn curtain, is a man, who looks in through a gap in that curtain. He is presumably King Chilperic waiting for his mistress to join him, now that he is a widower and free to marry her.

Antoine Wiertz’s Reader of Novels from 1853 is perhaps his most curious painting. A shapely and completely naked woman lies on her back, a book held above her face, reading avidly. Her bed is in a small compartment, a large mirror hanging above her lower body and legs. Her clothing is hung on the foot of the bed, and a floral garland on the top of the mirror. Beside her on the bed are several other books, and the hand of a horned figure is reaching up to those books from below and behind a curtain.

This has all the elements of what later became the ‘problem picture’, a visual riddle which the viewer was invited to solve by building a narrative which fitted the various clues. It could just be dismissing the reading of novels by women as a morally dangerous activity, but it seems too elaborate for that. I wonder if the woman is part of a ‘live peep show’, and passing the time by reading, perhaps, or just a prostitute in her booth in a brothel, although the bed is too small to accommodate a partner. Whatever it meant, it was badly received when exhibited, and deemed pornographic.

At first sight, Moritz Stifter’s The New Dress from 1889 shows a simple scene set in the dressmaker’s. Every face is smiling here, some perhaps a little vacuously, as an affluent young woman tries on a new dress, with its incredibly small waist. Look carefully, though, at the cameo views revealed by its open curtains that are attracting the attention of two of the staff in the background. In one there’s an adult and child apparently watching what can be glimpsed through the window to the right. There is a close-packed crowd who don’t appear to be happy, and perhaps express the artist’s disapproval of events taking place in the dressmaker’s.

Occasionally, the nature and state of curtains can add to the signs shown in the rest of the painting.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy (in 1859), and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window that looks out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, at Chatham Place, London.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak is hanging, with some white lace. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery and other items. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She is dressed for the bedroom, her long red hair let down. A short drop of cheap and dirty net curtain is strung across the lower section of the window.

She looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken, and stares in quiet sadness at the viewer. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, an area that was a popular haunt for prostitutes. Her thoughts are clearly of remorse at her shameful occupation, and her only means of redemption, that of drowning herself in the river.

Around 1920, George Bellows painted more figurative and portrait works, including this Nude with Fan. This wasn’t his first nude, but is remarkable for its richly-lit embedded cameo landscape with marked aerial perspective, that may have been intended to enhance depth. That view is framed by a pair of floral curtains and a blind.

In Jacek Malczewski’s account of the Annunciation, Mary (right) is a modern young woman, whose thimble and scissors rest on a bare wooden table behind. Gabriel is in the midst of breaking the news to her, his hands held together as he speaks. The window and curtains make clear that this is twentieth century Poland, not the Holy Land two millennia ago.

Some of Jan Vermeer’s paintings feature heavy curtains in the foreground, drawn back to reveal his subject behind. Among those is his Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window (c 1658), where its railed curtain gives an air of intimacy, suggesting that the viewer is peeping past the curtain and gazing in at real and private life.

I end this collection with another trompe l’oeil, this time for a still life from the Dutch Golden Age.

At that time, painters such as Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts made their speciality the production of trompe l’oeil still lifes. A popular theme was the wall-mounted letter-rack, shown in his Board Partition with Letter Rack and Music Book (1668), with its carefully positioned curtain.

Curtains, drapes of fabric suspended from rails or lines, have been around a long time, but have only recently become popular for providing an internal screen for windows. Although they have other purposes in paintings, they’re primarily used to conceal or to reveal when drawn back. Unusually, they can be depicted as part of the content of a picture, or added to it as a deception, a trompe l’oeil, to fool the viewer into thinking the curtain isn’t in the picture, but is real.

It was Raphael who was probably the first painter to attempt a trompe l’oeil using curtains, in his Sistine Madonna from 1512-13.

Now recognised as one of Raphael’s greatest and most important paintings, it was donated by Pope Julius II to the Benedictine basilica of San Sisto in Piacenza. The two saints shown are Saint Sixtus II and Saint Barbara, whose relics were preserved there. The Madonna and saints are painted superbly, but it’s the rest of the image that is most fascinating. The two cherubs with tousled hair at its foot are gentle touches of humour for a congregation as they looked at this image.

But Raphael’s visual feat is the curtains. He was by now confident that his realism was sufficient to pull off a trompe l’oeil, and fool the viewer into thinking that they were looking at a painting behind real curtains, at least until they got close. Having fooled them once, they’re now more receptive to the image beyond the curtains.

Those curtains also have theological significance: they mark the separation between the physical and spiritual worlds. As they are painted and not real, though, access through them is always open. No one can come along, draw them closed, and stop the ordinary person from accessing Christ. In a world where almost everything else, apart from air, was heavily controlled, this was and remains an empowering message.

Curtains are bold moves in some other religious paintings, including Oleksandr Murashko’s breathtaking Annunciation from 1907-08. Apparently, he was first inspired to paint this when he saw a girl part light curtains to enter his house from the terrace outside, and saw a parallel with the entry of the Archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation.

Their role in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin from 1848–9 is less convincing. This contains some archaic devices, such as the gilt and lettered halos, and an oddly-proportioned angel, but shows what Rossetti envisaged might have been the pictorial reality of the Virgin Mary during her youth. She works on embroidery with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine. Those are shown realistically with an abundance of symbolic objects, but the curtains seem merely a background.

A curtain formed from an outsized handkerchief is concealing in Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea – A Deception (c 1822). This was a visual criticism of the small-minded attitude to the display of paintings of nudes at the time.

With curtains concealing what shouldn’t be seen, they provide a means for the voyeur to peep through them.

The story of Susanna (or Shoshana) and the Elders is told in the Old Testament book of Daniel, chapter 13, and centres on voyeurism, blackmail, and justice. Susanna was a beautiful married woman who was bathing in her garden one afternoon, having dismissed her servants. Two lustful elders spied on her, and as she returned to her house they stopped her, and threatened that, unless she agreed to have sex with them, they would claim that she had met her lover in the garden. Being virtuous, Susanna refused their blackmail, and was promptly arrested, charged with promiscuity, and awaited her execution.

It was only after the intervention of the young prophet Daniel that the elders’ conspiracy was revealed, Susanna was acquitted of the charge, and the elders executed instead. Lovis Corinth’s early Susanna Bathing from 1890 adopts a traditional approach, where Susanna is seen in the flesh, being spied on by a peeping elder from behind a curtain.

Pedro Américo’s Faust and Gretchen from 1875-80 uses this in the context of the seduction of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust. The shadowy figure of Mephistopheles is eavesdropping behind the curtain at the right, and white lilies, a symbol of her virginity, lie fallen on the floor.

While peeping is implicitly non-consensual and unwelcome, curtains can also be used for revelation.

One of Millais’ last paintings, before his death the following year, was Speak! Speak! (1895), which is also one of his most enigmatic. Millais’ son reported that this scene is set in ancient Rome. The young man had spent much of the night reading through the letters of his lost love. At dawn, the curtains were parted to reveal her, dressed for her bridal night, gazing upon him with sad but loving eyes. The title of the painting is therefore the words that he said to her spectre.

The mere presence of curtains denotes separation, particularly that between performers and their spectators.

Antoine Watteau adds a scarlet curtain both for colour and as the conventional separator between The Italian Comedians (1720) and their audience.

Ludwig Knaus shows the scene Behind the Curtain of a small itinerant circus in 1880. Performers were often colourful in both their costume and character, with many incongruities, such as the clown seen in the centre feeding a baby, and looking straight at the viewer. Their curtain is also rough and ready.

Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’s Fable from 1939 refers to Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825), who wrote the first biography of George Washington shortly after the latter’s death. This contains several apocryphal stories, including the legend of the cherry tree, which didn’t appear until its fifth edition.

According to this, when Washington was six, he was given custody of a hatchet, which he used to cut through the bark of a superb young English cherry tree. When this was discovered the next day, Washington’s father asked the boy if he knew who had killed the cherry tree, to which George Washington admitted his guilt, saying that he couldn’t tell a lie. His father was overjoyed at his son’s honesty. Sadly, the story is generally considered to be a fabrication.

Wood’s ingenious treatment places Parson Weems at the right, holding open a stage curtain, as if narrating the story to the viewer.

Borne on the fair winds brought by the near-sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, the thousand Greek ships sail for the shores of Troy. The Trojans had already become aware that they were on their way, and were ready guarding its shores. Protesilaus, the first of the Greek forces to land, is quickly killed by Hector.

Achilles then flies off in his chariot, in pursuit of Hector or Cycnus to redress the balance for the invading force. Finding Cycnus, Achilles drives his chariot at him and implants his spear in Cycnus’ shield, but that makes little impression. Cycnus responds by throwing his lance at Achilles, but he too fails to make any impact. After a second attempt, Achilles is still thwarted, and becomes angry with his enemy.

To test his weapon, Achilles throws his spear at Menoetes, pierces his armour, and kills him instantly. He tries the same combination of spear and throwing arm against Cycnus’ shoulder, but the projectile just bounces off. For a moment, Achilles thinks he may have drawn blood, but realises it’s that of Menoetes, not Cycnus.

Achilles grows even angrier, so draws his sword and attacks Cycnus at close quarters, but that only blunts the sword. As Cycnus is forced to step back from Achilles’ assaults, he backs up against a large rock. Achilles throws his opponent to the ground and strangles him with the thongs of his own helmet. As Cycnus dies, he’s transformed into a white swan. Following that, there’s a pause in the fighting while Achilles sacrifices to Pallas Athene, and the Greeks feast his victory over Cycnus. During that, Nestor tells the story of Caeneus of Thessaly, who survived a thousand wounds in battle, but had been born a woman.

Caenis, as she was previously, had been the prettiest girl in Thessaly, although she remained unmarried. When walking on the beach one day, Neptune raped her, but offered to fulfil her request. She asked to be turned into a man, and Neptune not only granted that wish, but made Caeneus the warrior proof against all wounds inflicted by spear or sword.

Johann Ulrich Krauss tells a fragment of the story of Caenis and Neptune (before 1690), although he doesn’t make any allusion to the transformation to Caeneus. As is usual, the flying Cupid indicates entirely inappropriately the rape of Caenis, and Neptune’s horses are held ready for his return.

Virgil Solis’ Caenis and Neptune from about 1560, moves the story on to the rape itself. Neptune puts his arms around Caenis, who doesn’t reciprocate. The god’s trident has been dropped to the ground, and his horses are prancing in the waves. In the distance is a walled city, possibly a reference to Troy, although this rape took place in Thessaly, Greece, on the opposite shore of the Aegean Sea.

After that story, Nestor tells of the battle between the Lapiths and Centaurs, at which he claims to have been present. This is one of a pair of primaeval battles said to have established world order: that between the Titans and the Gods ended the heavenly Titanomachy, and that between the Lapiths and Centaurs ended the earthly Centauromachy.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried Hippodame off by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked.

Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Nestor details a succession of grisly accounts of Lapiths and Centaurs killed. Gryneus the centaur ripped up the altar and crushed two Lapiths with its weight, only to have his eyballs gouged out by a Lapith using the prongs of some antlers. Not content with using the objects around them as weapons, they started using their own lances and swords.

When the centaur Petraeus was trying to uproot a whole oak tree, Pirithous, the groom, pinned the centaur to the tree-trunk with his lance. Nestor also tells of the success of Caeneus, formerly Caenis, in killing five centaurs. The centaur Latreus taunted Caeneus, so the latter wounded the centaur with his spear. Latreus thrust his lance in Caeneus’ face, but was unable to hurt him, so he tried with his sword, which broke against the invulnerable Caeneus, leaving him to finish the centaur off with thrusts of his own sword.

The centaurs then united to try to overwhelm Caeneus by crushing him under their combined weight. Just as they thought they had succeeded, Caeneus was transformed into a bird and flew out from underneath them. With that the survivors dispersed, the Lapiths having won the day.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings, and remains one of its best-structured and complete accounts. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted this brilliant oil sketch of The Rape of Hippodame (c 1637-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

That became the finished painting, The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38), which remains faithful to Rubens’ sketch and its composition. Facial expressions, particularly that of the Lapith at the left bearing a sword, are particularly powerful.

Luca Giordano’s later painting of the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs from 1688 lacks the narrative structure of Piero di Cosimo’s, and covers later action than Rubens’. As a result, its story has become a little lost in the mêlée of battle.

Sebastiano Ricci’s The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 has similar problems, although it does use multiplex narrative to help. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and to the right there are scenes of abduction at the wedding feast.

Francesco Solimena’s Battle between Lapiths and Centaurs (1735-40) puts multiple abductions in the foreground, with pitched battles taking place behind.

There’s a moral, of course: never invite centaurs to your wedding feast, as they’ll go way beyond smashing the crockery.

In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of lightning in paintings, I showed examples drawn from mythical and religious narratives. Today I start with a symbolic use, then consider the depiction of lightning in landscape art.

Just as in spoken language, images of thunderstorms and lightning may have symbolic or allegorical meaning. For Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by a Lightning Stroke (1842) formed an allegory of his wife’s death. Although painted at the dawn of photography, Vorobiev couldn’t have had the benefit of images of lightning with brief exposure times, and his accurate representation can only have come from observation.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

Francisque Millet was a seventeenth-century Flemish landscape artist who followed in Poussin’s manner, but painted views less idealised and closer to topographical reality. His Mountain Landscape with Lightning from about 1675 shows a violent but localised storm far away from his native Low Countries, and closer to the Alps, which he may well have crossed when he travelled to Italy.

Eugène Delacroix painted this dramatic watercolour of a Horse Frightened by Lightning in 1825-29. The heavy clouds have made it almost as dark as night, and the contortion of his rearing stallion enhances the effect.

For realist painters of the middle and late nineteenth century, awe and impact were to be achieved by less romantic and more objective accounts.

Dry prairies can catch alight when struck by lightning, as in this scene painted by Charles Deas in his Prairie on Fire from 1847. A bolt of lightning at the far right tells us how the prairie came to be aflame. From this low viewpoint, the fire itself is unimpressive, but is close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight.

Perhaps the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is indoors, where you can stand and marvel at the sight outdoors.

In painting six from Louis Janmot’s Poem of the Soul, Fatherly Roof, his subject’s family are at home during a thunderstorm, shown by the flashes of lightning at the window. Grandmother reads a psalm to calm the spirit, while the mother and another young woman sit and sew. Father (a self-portrait at the age of thirty) looks on with concern. An even older woman, perhaps the great-grandmother, sits in the shadows near the window.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Ovid ended Book Eleven of his Metamorphoses with some unrelated myths, he returns to the story of the war against Troy in the opening of Book Twelve. King Priam, father of Aesacus and King of Troy, is then linked with his other son Paris, whose abduction of Helen triggered the Greeks to launch ‘a thousand ships’ to start their war against Troy.

The Greek fleet gathered at Aulis in Boeotia, where they made sacrifices to Jupiter in preparation for their departure. Just as the Greeks were preparing a sacrifice they saw an omen, when a snake slithered up a plane tree and seized a nest of nine birds. This was interpreted by Calchas as portending their success against Troy, but only after nine years of war. With that the snake was turned into stone.

Despite their sacrifice, the sea remained stormy and prevented the fleet from sailing. Some claimed this was because Neptune had helped build the walls of Troy (as Ovid had told earlier), but Calchas said that it would require the sacrifice of a virgin to satisfy Diana, whom Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, had offended. Agamemnon had to set aside his love for his daughter Iphigenia, and in his role as king, give her as a sacrifice to propitiate Diana.

Ovid is meticulous in leaving open whether the princess was really killed, or a deer acted as her proxy, so accommodating the many variants of this story with their conflicting outcomes.

Among the earliest post-classical depictions is Domenichino’s fresco in Viterbo, Italy, of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia from about 1609. The princess kneels, her wrists bound together, as an axe is about to be swung at her neck. Onlookers at the left are distraught, as Agamemnon at the right watches impassively. But in the distance, Diana is leading a deer towards the altar, ready to make the substitution.

Charles de La Fosse’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1680), now hanging in the Versailles palace, uses a powerful triangular composition to arrange the figures, with Diana at the top, telling Agamemnon to spare the young woman, to his evident surprise. His large sacrificial knife, dropped from Agamemnon’s right hand, rests by Iphigenia’s right foot. At the lower right, one of the Greek warriors, possibly Achilles, is still resigned to her sacrifice, but the warrior standing above is already smiling with relief.

Many other artists painted this story in the meantime, but the next outstanding work is Tiepolo’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia almost a century later, in 1770. Iphigenia sits, almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon, looks up to the heavens, with the knife held in his right hand. In a direct line with that hand comes Diana in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with the substitute deer. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrificial victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.

My next choice is an unusual painting by Jacques-Louis David, who develops the story using other sources, and packs his figures close together to great effect, in The Anger of Achilles from 1819. Iphigenia had already been promised by her father as a bride to Achilles, and the announcement of her impending sacrifice throws Achilles into the first of his many rages.

Achilles, at the left, reaches for his sword in an uncomfortable manoeuvre with his right arm. A rather masculine and tearful woman just to the right of him is Queen Clytemnestra, Iphigenia’s mother, and her right hand rests on Iphigenia’s shoulder. Iphigenia is dressed as a bride, and looks wistful, staring into the distance, her face empty of outward emotion. At the right, Agamemnon appears emotionless, but indicates firmly to Achilles for him to restrain his emotions.

Over a century later, more modern artists continued to paint this story. Louis Billotey, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1907 but is now forgotten, painted his version of Iphigenia in 1935. Clytemnestra looks distant at the left as she leads her daughter towards the sacrificial altar beside her. Diana, marked only by her bow and hunting dog, stands at the right, as the deer runs past.

No matter how it ends, the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice is a glimpse back into a dark and distant past, at humans whose commitment to savage rituals overrode their humanity to one another.

With Diana’s wrath assuaged, the winds and sea abate, and the Greek fleet sets sail for Troy.

In this second article looking at examples of the use of posters in paintings, and how their contents can be relevant, I move on to the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century. By this time large-format colour printing was churning out unprecedented numbers of posters that were being stuck onto walls in public places. These promoted events and products, and the advertising industry was starting to flourish. Posters included in paintings had largely been associated with poverty.

In France, 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. Buland uses two small posters as decorations, one pinned to the white tablecloth at the left, the other attached to the wooden door at the right.

Those artists like Jean Béraud who were recording street scenes of Paris in the Belle Époque often featured posters.

Béraud’s view of A Windy Day on the Pont des Arts from 1880-1 contains several fascinating details, such as the man carrying his fishing rod among the stream of top-hatted gentlemen. Posters at the right advertise the Fête de Sèvres, held annually in that town each June, but this clearly isn’t a pleasant summer’s day.

Working from his customised studio carriage, Béraud developed a particular affection for the street kiosks that had sprung up on so many corners, and were covered with posters. Parisian Street Scene, claimed to date from about 1885, is one example, on the Boulevard des Italiens from the corner of the Rue Laffitte.

Béraud’s Carriages on the Boulevard des Italiens shows the same kiosk in the golden light of a winter’s afternoon. However, this view is purported to have been painted in 1890, five years after the Parisian Street Scene above. It isn’t credible that the posters illuminated in the kiosk have remained identical over that period.

Just as in London a few years before, posters continue to feature in the background of paintings of those living on the streets. Fernand Pelez’ Homeless from 1883 was exhibited at the Salon in Paris that year, where those viewing it only needed to walk round the corner from the Palais des Champs-Élysées (where it was held) to see scenes like this for real. Posters again refer ironically to festivals, and deliver information about traffic management in Paris.

Jean-François Raffaëlli’s Guests Waiting for the Wedding, from before 1884, are stood outside a wedding room that has, like them, seen better days. Behind them are official notices concerning dogs, an appeal for military reservists, and other local matters.

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 black indicating recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for 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. At the left edge are two posters apparently promoting local events, to which these foreigners presumably aren’t invited.

By the early twentieth century posters had grown into large hoardings shown in Paul Hoeniger’s view of Berlin’s Spittelmarkt from 1912. With the advent of motor vehicles came the visual excesses of the advertising industry that still wants to own everything we see today.

No one knows when people started attaching big sheets of paper to walls as posters, but it wasn’t until large-format colour printing became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century that the modern poster became commonplace. Within a couple of decades walls in many public places became covered with announcements, particularly those promoting events and products, and the advertising industry developed. In this week’s two articles about the reading of paintings, I show examples of the use of posters in paintings, and how their contents can be relevant.

One of the earliest examples of a poster contributing to the reading of a painting is one of Richard Dadd’s watercolour series of the Passions, in Want, the Malingerer dated 26 November 1856. From a hill overlooking the River Medway at Chatham, where Dadd was born and brought up, he shows a small family of destitutes. The father, his face hidden behind a poster seeking a “good Christian home to a poor forlorn outcast”, appears to be a military veteran, has a couple of crutches, and bare feet. The mother, her face aged beyond her years, is slumped in her tattered clothing, her right hand stretched out, its wrinkled palm seeking charity. Behind them is their son, and beyond the father their dog holds a tin begging bowl in its mouth.

A couple of years later, in the third of Augustus Leopold Egg’s series Past and Present telling the story of the breakup of a family as the result of the mother’s extra-marital relationship, she is seen homeless, sat among the debris under the arches of one of London’s bridges. She stares wide-eyed and fearful at a star in the sky, cradling a young baby to her, under her thin cloak. Behind her, on the side of the arch, are old posters, one with the word VICTIMS prominent, another advertising excursions to Paris.

Posters have further significance in the intricate details of Ford Madox Brown’s visual essay on Work from 1863.

This crowded street scene is set in Heath Street, Hampstead, one of London’s ‘leafy’ suburbs at the time, into which Brown has crammed references to many aspects of contemporary Victorian society, including an election campaign.

At its centre is a gang of navvies, the term originating from the word navigators, usually Irish labourers, who had dug the canals during the previous century. They’re engaged in digging up a road to lay a sewer as part of the campaign to improve the hygiene of Victorian London. Inspired by the moralising series painted by William Hogarth, Brown is effectively giving a meticulously detailed account of the breadth and depth of contemporary society, using multiple interwoven narratives in this single image.

At the left is a file of people making their way down the pavement. To the rear, heading uphill, is a porter carrying a green case on his head. Next down are two well-dressed women carrying parasols. The woman behind is carrying religious tracts, one of which has floated in front of the navvies, while the woman in front of her represents ‘genteel glamour’. In front is a barefoot flower-seller who lives in a flophouse in Flower and Dean Street in Whitechapel. She is on her way to scrape a living from the wicker basket full of freshly picked wild flowers.

Posters on the wall at the extreme left advocate voting for Bobus, and warn of a man wanted for robbery. Bobus is a character in the writings of Thomas Carlyle who uses ill-gotten gains from his business to sell himself as a politician, one of many links from this painting to contemporary thought.

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.

This association between posters in the streets and destitution remained strong, but posters also appeared in other roles.

In Giovanni Battista Quadrone’s witty Every Opportunity is Good (1878), we’re given a detailed look at the painter’s paraphernalia, including several paint bladders on the low table behind the easel, and one on the floor. On the wall at the right, behind the young couple, is a poster showing the anatomy of human muscles, a reassurance that this artist works from an understanding of science.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, young wife of the painter Lawrence, was quick to achieve recognition in her work. Her first painting to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris was in 1873, and that same year she started to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. The Tea Party is undated but recorded as being her seventh painting, and shows the artist’s step-daughter Laurense, playing with her dolls. Behind her are some of the girl’s own drawings, and a poster with a story told in a series of drawings as a storyboard or comic.

With Peleus and Thetis safely married and the birth of their son Achilles, Ovid brings Book Eleven of his Metamorphoses to a close with a series of less-known myths that have also been rarely depicted.

Peleus, with his sheep and cattle, was forced to flee from Aegina to Trachis after he had been involved with his brother Telamon in the killing of their brother Phocus. When in Trachis, Peleus kept company with King Ceyx, son of Lucifer (the Morning Star, not the devil). The king told the story of his brother Daedalion, whose daughter Chione was raped on the same night by both Mercury and Apollo. She conceived by them, and gave birth to twins, Autolycus and Philammon. However, Chione was very beautiful, and boasted that she was fairer than the goddess Diana.

Diana decided to silence her, so shot an arrow through Chione’s tongue, causing her not only to fall dumb, but to bleed to death. Her father Daedalion tried to throw himself on Chione’s funeral pyre four times. Eventually, in his grief, he ran off and threw himself from the top of Mount Parnassus, and was turned into a hawk by Apollo.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s set of engravings to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses include a particularly fine account of Chione (c 1639), with rich multiplex narrative. At the left, in the foreground, the vengeful Diana has just loosed an arrow, still in flight, at Chione on the right. She is shown with her twins Autolycus and Philammon. Behind them, in the centre, Daedalion tries to throw himself on Chione’s funeral pyre, then hurls himself from the sea cliff, being transformed into a hawk.

As Ceyx was telling of Daedalion being turned into a hawk, the royal herdsman rushed in and reported that a monster wolf was killing their cattle down by the beach. Ceyx had his men prepare to go and tackle the beast, but Peleus offered to deal with this by praying to the sea-goddess who was responsible. They went down to a lighthouse tower above the beach, and saw the bodies of many mutilated cattle and the wolf covered in their blood. Peleus prayed to Psamathe, and his wife Thetis secured the solution as that goddess turned the monster wolf into marble.

Ovid’s penultimate story in this book concerns King Ceyx and his wife Halcyone (or Alcyone), and is told at length, with several lyrical passages, particularly those describing the storm and shipwreck.

Ceyx was still troubled by his brother’s transformation into a hawk, and wanted to visit an oracle. However, the road to that at Delphi was blocked by bandits, so he was forced to go by sea to the oracle at Claros in Ionia. That troubled his wife, but Ceyx pointed out that his father Aeolus ruled the winds so should ensure his safe passage.

Ceyx set out, Halcyone sobbing as he left. At first the ship’s crew had to row because of the lack of wind, but soon there was enough to stow the oars and proceed under sail. By nightfall the wind was blowing a gale, and the sails were fully reefed as they tried to weather the storm out. The waves grew larger until they came crashing down on their ship.

With water pouring in, the tenth wave (by legend always the largest) broke the vessel up, it sank, and its terrified crew drowned. Ceyx, his thoughts turning to his wife, clung to wreckage, fighting for his life. Just before he too drowned, he prayed for the waves to carry his body to the shore, so his wife could tend to it before burial. Still muttering her name, he sank into the black water and died.

Knowing nothing of this, Halcyone prepared for Ceyx’s return, and worshipped at Juno’s shrine. The goddess took pity on her, and despatched Iris to wake Sleep and break the news of Ceyx’s death to his wife. Sleep did this through his son Morpheus, who appeared to Halcyone in her sleep as the ghost of her dead husband. Halcyone woke as Morpheus went away, realised that he was only a ghost, and descended into profound grief. In the morning, she went to the shore to look for her husband’s body, which she saw slowly washing in on the tide. Ceyx and Halcyone were then transformed into kingfishers.

Herbert James Draper’s oil painting of Halcyone from 1915 shows the widow looking out to sea, watching Ceyx’s body float slowly in. He completes the story with a pair of kingfishers flying above her head, matching the kingfisher blue of her clothes.

Helen Stratton’s illustration of Ceyx and Halcyone, published in 1915, doesn’t follow Ovid’s account as closely. The sea is still rough, and spume covers the beach. Halcyone is walking past flotsam from the wreck, but the birds appear to be terns and are definitely not kingfishers, however inappropriate they might be on a beach.

A man watching kingfishers fly together tells the final story of Book Eleven, of one of the sons of Priam king of Troy, thus Hector’s brother. While Hector’s mother was Hecuba, this brother, Aesacus, was secretly born of Alexiroe. Unlike his more famous brother, Aesacus shunned Troy and populous places. He often pursued Hesperia, daughter of the river-god Cebren, but one day as she was fleeing from him, she was bitten on her foot by a venomous snake. She died immediately, and Aesacus held her limp body in his arms, blaming himself for being the cause of her death. He went straight to the top of a sea cliff and flung himself from it. Tethys took care of him as he entered the water, and transformed him into a diver (a seabird).

Although seldom painted, this myth does have the benefit of a fine engraving by Virgil Solis of Aesacus and Hesperia for sixteenth century editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the foreground, Aesacus has just caught up with the dead body of Hesperia, the offending snake still by her foot. Behind them is the sight of Aesacus throwing himself from the top of a cliff, with Tethys ready to catch him below.

The great nineteenth century narrative painter Jules-Élie Delaunay, a friend of Gustave Moreau, is probably the only painter to have depicted this story in a significant work, The Death of the Nymph Hesperia (1859). I apologise for the poor image quality, which lacks sufficient detail to determine whether the snake is still present. Hesperia lies, cold, white and dead, as Aesacus blames himself for the tragedy. At the top right corner are the overhanging cliffs from which Aesacus will shortly hurl himself.

This brings us to the end of Book Eleven.

In this second article looking at how difficult it is to depict the purpose or intent of an inanimate object, specifically here a poisonous liquid, I show some more classical history paintings before ending with modern retellings of Arthurian legend.

The jury of the Prix de Rome chose another grim subject for 1805, the suicide of the great Athenian statesman Demosthenes, who had incited the Athenians to seek independence from the Macedonian Empire. He escaped to a sanctuary on the island of Kalaureia (modern Poros), where he was discovered by the Macedonians. To avoid capture, he drank poison from a reed pen.

Felix Boisselier shows Demosthenes looking up at a statue of Poseidon, clinging onto the altar as he weakens. His pen has fallen to the ground, and his left arm is outstretched towards Archias as he approaches to arrest him.

When the jury again chose the suicide of Demosthenes as the subject in 1879, Alfred-Henri Bramtot’s successful painting shows Demosthenes’ limp body being supported from falling in front of the altar, with Archias angry and frustrated at the far right. The altar tripod is at the left edge, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it.

Without knowing this story in detail, you’d spend a long time guessing that it was the original poison pen.

Last in this succession of suicides set as subjects for the Prix de Rome is that for 1887, the suicide of Themistocles. Henri-Camille Danger recreates the moment of great drama as Themistocles, visibly aged, raises a goblet ready to drink to his death. Although the goblet is of obvious significance, there’s little to suggest that it’s about to end the life of Themistocles.

Just a couple of years before his death in 1889, Alexandre Cabanel found a tragic heroine in Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887). Known for her ruthless pursuit of power and her alleged beauty, Cleopatra spent much of her life as co-ruler of Egypt with one of her brothers, including Ptolemy XIV. A few months after the assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome, in 44 BCE, Cleopatra had returned to Egypt, where she had her brother killed by poison, making her co-ruler her son by Caesar, Caesarion. It’s likely that this painting refers to an apocryphal story that Cleopatra had candidate poisons tested out on prisoners to help her select the one to be used to kill her younger brother. The clues are here, if you know what you’re looking for.

In Arthurian legend, King Mark and Sir Tristram fell out over their love for another knight’s wife. The king then devised a way to destroy Tristram, by sending him to Ireland to bring La Beale Isode back for Mark to marry. The Queen of Ireland sent Tristram back with her daughter and her lady-in-waiting. As they were sailing back to Cornwall, Tristram and Isode drank together from a golden flask containing a potion that ensured their love for one another would never end, setting up the love triangle.

Isolda with the Love Potion (1870) is one of Frederick Sandys’ late Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic paintings, and shows as femme fatale Isolde of the legend and Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. The opera had only received its première five years earlier, although its next production didn’t occur until 1874. In the operatic version, the couple drink what they believe is a poisonous potion, which instead of killing them both, makes them fall in relentless love with one another. Sandys shows only Isolde, the cup of poison in her right hand, looking into the distance. The floral language, red roses in particular, is symbolic of love.

Herbert James Draper’s Tristan and Isolde from 1901 shows the couple on the deck of the ship as they return to Cornwall. The golden goblet is empty as he looks in desperation into her half-closed eyes. Behind them the crew are rowing through the choppy waters.

John Duncan’s ornate tempera painting of Tristan and Isolde from 1912 shows them holding a crystal glass in their hands, staring into one another’s eyes just before they drink, although by now it’s impossible to tell whether they think the potion will kill them, or make them fall in love.

Koloman Moser’s Tristan and Isolde from about 1915 shows Isolde persuading Tristan to drink the potion, as his sword rests at their feet.

In his painting of the couple from 1916, John William Waterhouse gives a faithful pictorial account of them drinking the potion from a golden chalice, while on the ship carrying them back to King Mark. Is it poison, though? Without knowing the literary reference, I doubt whether we’d ever guess.

In this week’s two articles about reading paintings, I tackle one of the greatest challenges in narrative art: how to depict the purpose or intent of an inanimate object, specifically here a poisonous liquid? In this series of examples drawn from paintings largely of classical myth and history, I’ll show the image of each before explaining its story.

The Greek hero Theseus was the estranged son of King Aegeus of Athens. As a young man, his mother dispatched him in search of his father. When Theseus arrived in his father’s court, the king didn’t recognise him. The sorceress Medea tried to keep the king to herself, so prepared a poisonous drink of aconite for the king to unwittingly give to 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) above, 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.

Without knowing the full story, you’d be fortunate to guess from either of those paintings that it revolved around a cup of poison.

Jason, another classical hero, had challenged Pelias for his throne, and was given the quest for Poseidon’s Golden Fleece to win it. This took him and his Argonauts to Colchis, where they discovered the owner of the fleece was King Aeëtes, who set Jason three tasks to achieve before he could take possession of the fleece. To ensure his success, Jason enlisted the help of the king’s daughter Medea, already a proficient sorceress, and the inevitable happened when she fell in love with Jason, thanks to the divine intervention of Hera (Juno) through Aphrodite (Venus). In return for her assistance, Jason promised to marry Medea.

John William Waterhouse’s painting of Jason and Medea (1907) shows her preparing the potion given later by Jason to the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. Medea wears a dress suggesting in its bold icons her role as a sorceress. In front of her, a flame heats ingredients for the potion, which she is adding to a chalice. Jason appears anxious, and is dressed and armed ready to go and fight the dragon.

Although identified as being The Etruscan Sorceress (1886), Elihu Vedder’s painting has all the symbolic associations of Medea. She’s holding a vial which Jason used to capture the fleece, and at her feet is an open fire which is associated with preparation of the potion for the vial.

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

The presence of Medea in her role as sorceress and the liquid’s preparation are valuable clues here.

Socrates (470/469-399 BCE) was a major Greek philosopher known still for the Socratic Method, although none of his writings have survived. At the time when Athens was trying to recover from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Socrates was openly critical of Athenian politics and society, and made prominent Athenians appear foolish. He was tried, ostensibly for corrupting the minds of the young and for being impious, found guilty, and sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock.

Plato’s Phaedo describes Socrates’ execution. Although several encouraged him to escape, he refused. After drinking the hemlock from a bowl, he was told to walk around until his legs became numb. He then lay down, and the numbness slowly ascended until it reached his heart, and caused his death.

Jacques-Louis David shows Socrates half-sitting on a bed, his right hand over the bowl of hemlock, his left gesticulating with his index finger pointing upwards. His face is expressionless. By the head of the bed, five friends are distraught at what is happening, although only one shows grief on his face. Another friend (Crito) sits by Socrates, his right hand resting on Socrates’ left thigh.

The bowl of hemlock is held out by a young man, who is turned away, averting and shielding his eyes from the bowl. At the foot of the bed, an old man (Plato, who told the story) is sat, asleep, but behind him, under an arch, another of Socrates’ friends (Apollodorus) is pressing his face to the wall in his anguish. In the far distance, a small group of patricians are seen walking away, upstairs, the lowermost holding his right hand up as if to bid Socrates farewell.

Phocion was an incorruptible statesman in a Greece that had become all too corrupt. When he was wrongfully accused of treachery, he and his colleagues were sentenced to death by the mob. They were taken to prison, where they had to drink poisonous hemlock. There was sufficient to kill the colleagues, but not enough remained for Phocion, who had to arrange for a friend to pay for more hemlock so that he too could be executed.

In 1804, The Death of Phocion was the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome competition. Charles Brocas’ unsuccessful entry shown above gives Plutarch’s account clearly. At the right, Phocion’s friends are dying as they drink their goblets of hemlock. In the centre, Phocion is arranging for the payment of the executioner so that he too can be killed. Behind Phocion stands another man, pointing to the empty bowl into which the hemlock plant was to be put to make the infusion.

Joseph Denis Odevaere’s winning painting shows Phocion standing in the middle, comforting his friends as they die. At the right, the executioner is being paid for the additional supply of hemlock. As with the previous paintings, the goblets and bowls containing the poison aren’t prominent, and you have to know what you’re looking for to see all the clues to the story.

After two humorous stories poking fun at King Midas, Ovid makes a start on the central theme for much of the remainder of his Metamorphoses, retelling the myths about Troy, and how its fall led to the foundation of Rome. This begins with the foundation and fall of the first city of Troy, leading into the birth of Achilles.

Once Apollo had won his musical contest against Pan, he made his way to Laomedon’s kingdom, where he found the king struggling to build the great walls of the first city of Troy. Apollo and Neptune agreed to lend a hand, but when the walls were complete, Laomedon denied striking any bargain to repay the gods for their labour.

One of the few works showing the story of Laomedon is thought to have been painted by Joachim von Sandrart and Girolamo Troppa in the late seventeenth century. Its close-cropped figures show Laomedon Refusing Payment to Poseidon and Apollo. The youthful Apollo holds his hand out at the left, while behind him the much older Neptune leans forward next to his trident.

Neptune responded by flooding the city. In a scene reminiscent of Andromeda being offered for sacrifice to the sea-monster Cetis, Laomedon’s daughter Hesione was then chained to rocks to await her grizzly fate. When she was rescued by Hercules, Laomedon again welshed on his debt, so Hercules gave Hesione to Telamon.

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

Ovid’s story then switches to that of Telamon’s brother, Peleus, who married Thetis, one of the fifty Nereid daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus. She had been told by Proteus that her son’s deeds would be famous, and even Jupiter had left her to his grandson Peleus to marry. Thetis used to ride naked astride a dolphin to visit the remote sea cave where she slept. Peleus found her there, and tried to rape her. But she used her powers of transformation to escape his clutches, first turning into a bird, then a tree, next a tigress. Peleus pleaded with the sea gods for their help, and Proteus told him to bind her with ropes while she was still asleep. When he did that, she relented, and they were married.

According to other sources, their wedding was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion, and attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, hadn’t been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’. This set up the Judgement of Paris, and led to the Trojan War.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis from 1593 segregates the deities into a separate feast in a sacred grove on the left. There is, as yet, no sign of discord among them, nor of any golden apple. Some of the gods are still among the other guests in the foreground, including Pan (near his pipes, at the left) and Mercury, with his winged hat and caduceus at the right. They seem to be having a good time.

Joachim Wtewael’s undated painting of The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis is great fun, with its aerial band, and numerous glimpses of deities behaving badly. I think that I can also spot Eris, about to sow her apple of discord into their midst: she is in mid-air to the left of centre, the apple held out in her right hand.

Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder combined their skills to paint The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus together in about 1630. Here it’s the innumerable putti who seem to be running riot, and there’s no sign of Eris or her golden apple.

It’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

The most famous painting of this event doesn’t show the wedding at all, only the introduction of the golden apple to the feast of the gods.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. 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, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too, leading on to the Judgement of Paris.

Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa was briefly popular in paintings during the first half of the nineteenth century, but was by no means his only work to have been painted. When Byron was on his Grand Tour of Europe in 1810-11, he wrote what he described as “a Turkish Tale” of The Giaour, published in 1813.

That inspired Eugène Delacroix to paint The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan in 1826. The name Giaour is based on an offensive Turkish word for infidel, and Byron’s poem describes the revenge killing of Hassan by the Giaour for killing the latter’s lover. After their deadly combat, the Giaour is filled with remorse and retreats into a monastery. This painting was rejected by the Salon of 1827, but Delacroix went on to paint later versions.

Nearly a decade later, in 1835, Delacroix returned to Byron’s poem, and painted this version of the Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. This time he had the benefit of watching Moroccan cavalry manoeuvres, and a commission from the Comte de Mornay. The resulting composition is radically different from his earlier version, and although Mornay seems to have been pleased with the result, the critics remained unimpressed.

In May 1810, Lord Byron, then only twenty-two, swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) between Abydos and Sestos, in a recreation of the myth of Hero and Leander. Three years later, the poet used the same Abydos as the setting of his heroic poem of The Bride of Abydos (1813). This was the literary basis for four of Eugène Delacroix’s paintings.

The young and beautiful Zuleika had been promised by her old father Giaffir to an old man, but fell in love with her supposed half-brother Selim. The couple elope to a cavern by the sea, where he reveals that he’s the leader of a group of pirates who are waiting to hear his pistol shot as a signal to them. When Giaffir and his men approach, Selim fires his pistol, but is killed by Giaffir, and Zuleika dies of sorrow.

Delacroix’s Bride of Abydos from 1843-49 shows the moment of climax as Selim is preparing himself to defend against Giaffir’s attack.

Although Delacroix was probably the painter most frequently influenced by Byron’s poetic stories, he was by no means the only one. In 1816-17, Byron wrote what many consider to be an autobiographical poem, Manfred, that inspired Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in musical compositions.

This followed Byron’s ostracisation over alleged incest with his half-sister. Its hero Manfred is tortured by guilt in relation to the death of his beloved Astarte. Living in the Bernese Alps, where Byron was staying at the time, Manfred casts spells to summon seven spirits to help him forget and sublimate his guilt. As the spirits cannot control past events, he doesn’t achieve his aim, and cannot even escape by suicide. In the end, he dies.

John Martin’s watercolour of Manfred and the Alpine Witch (1837) shows Manfred conjuring a witch from a flooded cave in the mountains. Unusually light and sublime but not apocalyptic, it is perhaps one of Martin’s most beautiful works, and reminiscent of Turner’s alpine paintings.

In 1821, when Byron was living in Ravenna, Italy, with his lover Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, he composed a historical tragedy as a play in blank verse, Sardanapalus. This relies on an account in the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian, and Mitford’s History of Greece, telling of the last of the great Assyrian monarchs, who ruled a large empire from his palaces in Nineveh. However, a rebellion grew against him, and the story reaches its climax in the fifth and final act of Byron’s play.

At the time, the river Euphrates was in high flood, which had torn down part of the protective walls of the city of Nineveh. Once the river started to fall again, this left no defences against the rebels. Their leader offered to spare Sardanapalus his life if he would surrender, but he refused, asking for a cease-fire of just an hour. During that period he had a funeral pyre built under his throne. He released his last faithful officer to flee for his life, and climbed the pyre. As he did so, his favourite wife Myrrha threw a lighted torch into the pyre, and climbed up after him, where they both burned to death.

Delacroix painted two versions of this famous work: the huge original in 1827, now hanging in the Louvre, and a smaller more painterly replica in 1844, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Delacroix departs considerably from Byron’s narrative to invite us to see Sardanapalus in a different light. In this, the original version, his brushwork is tight and the huge canvas intricately detailed.

When he painted this smaller replica seventeen years later, it wasn’t intended to please the Salon, and he was far more painterly in its facture; Instead of showing Sardanapalus and Myrrha mounting the funeral pyre, Delacroix places the king on a huge divan, surrounded by the utter chaos and panic as his guards massacre wives and courtesans.

The last and greatest of Lord Byron’s works to be painted by the masters is Don Juan, an epic poem that he started writing in 1819 and left incomplete on his death in 1824. Based on traditional Spanish folk stories of the life of an incorrigible womaniser, Byron portrays his hero as a victim easily seduced by women. Despite its seventeen cantos, the attention of painters has concentrated on events in the second canto, after Don Juan’s first love affair with a married woman. As a consequence of that, Don Juan’s mother sends her errant son to travel in Europe, and that results in shipwreck, from which he is the sole survivor.

For Eugène Delacroix, the shipwreck became an obsession, linking back to the masterwork of his mentor Théodore Géricault, The Wreck of the Medusa (1818–19).

In Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan from 1840, Don Juan and his companions have run out of food, so draw lots to determine who will be sacrificed to feed the other survivors.

At some time prior to the Salon of 1847, Delacroix revisited the shipwreck in his Castaways in a Ship’s Boat (c 1840-47). The boat has shrunk in size and the number of survivors is falling steadily.

Ford Madox Brown’s watercolour of The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée from 1869-70 shows Haidée, a Greek pirate’s daughter, and her maid Zoe discovering the apparently lifeless body of the hero on a beach. Inevitably, Don Juan falls in love with Haidée, despite them having no common language. Her father takes a dislike to Don Juan, and has him put into slavery.

In this weekend’s two articles, I look at paintings of the poems of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Lord Byron, known best for his gripping tales and the epic Don Juan. Today I concentrate on the story of Mazeppa, a Cossack who became Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the seventeenth century, and tomorrow I’ll cover several other poems including Don Juan.

Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) was a figure in history who became a ‘Prince’ of the Holy Roman Empire, one of Europe’s largest landowners, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and a patron of the arts. In spite of those achievements, he’s best remembered for his youthful indiscretion with Madam Falbowska at the Polish royal court, that almost led to his early death.

Over time, fact became embroidered in its retelling into the legend of an affair with a Countess married to an older Count, who punished the young Mazeppa (who also acquired an extra ‘p’ in the process) by strapping him naked to the back of a wild horse, and setting the horse loose. That legend gained sufficient credence for it to be recorded in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731), where it seems to have caught Lord Byron’s imagination when he was seeking inspiration for a narrative poem. What emerged from his pen was further embroidery, and proved almost instantly successful with some of the great painters of the day.

Byron’s Mazeppa, published in 1819, served as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa, and had an affair with a Countess Theresa. Much of the poem details the suffering and endurance of Mazeppa during his long journey on the back of the horse. Most significantly, Byron’s account was immediately translated into French.

Théodore Géricault was probably the first artist to be inspired by that French translation, and within a few months had painted his first study.

Géricault’s initial Mazeppa is a nocturne from about 1820. The wild horse has just swum across a river at night, and is now climbing up the bank. The viewer is almost guaranteed to wince in sympathy with the young Cossack’s cold and pain.

In what must have been one of his last paintings, Géricault revisited the same scene in Mazeppa from 1823, the year before his death.

The following year, when his friend and mentor Géricault died, the young Eugène Delacroix painted Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, showing the Cossack’s mount on its last legs.

Two years later, in 1826, Horace Vernet painted Mazeppa and the Wolves, a different scene with an ingenious composition and the added danger of a pack of wolves lurking in ambush. This is one of many paintings showing a horse galloping with both fore and hind legs simultaneously in full extension, a position demonstrated later in the century by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) to be fictional.

A former signwriter, John Frederick Herring’s talent was recognised during the 1820s, and he painted portraits of racehorses. I don’t know when he saw Vernet’s painting, but in 1833 Herring made a copy that’s now in the Tate: Mazeppa Pursued by Wolves (after Horace Vernet).

Herring also painted Mazeppa Surrounded by Horses (after Horace Vernet) at about the same time; if it too was a copy of a Vernet, then the original seems to have been lost. Mazeppa’s mount has here finally reached its journey’s end, and the Cossack is undoing his bonds.

Nathaniel Currier used Herring’s second painting as the basis for his lithograph of Mazeppa Surrounded by Wild Horses in 1846. This is one of a set of four that were apparently commercially successful.

Byron’s poem ends when Mazeppa wakes up in bed, after he had been rescued from unconsciousness by a “Cossack Maid”, who then tends his wounds.

It wasn’t until 1851 that Théodore Chassériau anticipated this ending in A Young Cossack Woman Finds Mazeppa Unconscious on a Wild Horse. As in Byron’s poem, there are ravens flying overhead, waiting to feed on Mazeppa’s corpse.

Just as suddenly as paintings of Byron’s Mazeppa had appeared, so they vanished in the later nineteenth century.