Whatever the historical basis for the myths of the Trojan War, one of the great challenges is discovering how those myths changed between about 1200 BCE (when Troy most possibly fell) and the appearance of the first coherent accounts several hundred years later. This article looks at the evolution of one of the most horrific events now part of these myths, the murder of the Trojan royal child Astyanax.

The current story

Hector, crown prince of Troy, was killed in battle with Achilles long before the fall of Troy. His father King Priam, wife Andromache, and young son, named Scamandrius but known to all as Astyanax, all survived until the city was sacked following the entry of the Greeks inside the Trojan Horse.

One Greek warrior, Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, was responsible for killing both Priam and Astyanax during the sacking. The king had taken refuge with his son Polites at the altar of Zeus. Neoptolemus first killed Polites, for which Priam rebuked him by throwing a spear at his shield. Neoptolemus then dragged Priam to the altar, where he killed him with his sword.

The death of Astyanax may have been more deliberate, as a policy to eliminate any potential royal succession after the deaths of Priam and Hector, or as a sacrifice to grant the Greek fleet favourable winds for its return. Neoptolemus seized the infant Astyanax from his mother’s arms, and threw him from the top of the walls of Troy, or perhaps from one of its high towers.

Following that, Andromache was taken as a concubine by Neoptolemus, and was nearly murdered by his wife Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen (before she eloped to Troy with Paris, and ‘launched a thousand ships’).

Verbal sources

Although many have the impression that the killing of Astyanax is described by Homer in his Iliad, like a lot of Trojan myth, the story actually appears in conflicting forms in other sources.

One of the oldest is in the fragments which make up the Little Iliad, which is believed to date from about 660 BCE:
Then the bright son of bold Achilles led the wife of Hector to the hollow ships; but her son he snatched from the bosom of his rich-haired nurse and seized him by the foot and cast him from a tower. So when he had fallen bloody death and hard fate seized on Astyanax.

Another version is attributed to Arctinus of Miletus in about 776 BCE, and a fragment in Iliou Persis, The Sack of Ilium:
Neoptolemus kills Priam who had fled to the altar of Zeus Herceius; […] The Greeks, after burning the city, sacrifice Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles: Odysseus murders Astyanax; Neoptolemus takes Andromache as his prize, and the remaining spoils are divided.

There is then a long gap before this brief mention in Euripides’s play The Trojan Women from 415 BCE:
Unhappy wives of Troy, behold,
They bear the dead Astyanax,
Our prince, whom bitter Greeks this hour
Have hurled to death from Ilion’s tower.

But fuller accounts did not appear for over a millenium after Troy’s supposed fall. For example, this is Ovid’s version in Metamorphoses Book 13, in around 8 CE:
Both Troy and Priam fell,
and Priam’s wretched wife lost all she had,
until at last she lost her human form.
Her savage barkings frightened foreign lands,
where the long Hellespont is narrowed down.
Great Troy was burning: while the fire still raged,
Jove’s altar drank old Priam’s scanty blood.
The priestess of Apollo then, alas!
Was dragged by her long hair, while up towards heaven
she lifted supplicating hands in vain.
The Trojan matrons, clinging while they could
to burning temples and ancestral gods,
victorious Greeks drag off as welcome spoil.
Astyanax was hurled down from the very tower
from which he often had looked forth and seen
his father, by his mother pointed out,
when Hector fought for honor and his country’s weal.

The paintings

The record of the Trojan War in visual arts also has a long gap of over half a millenium following the possible fall of the city.

A spectacular relief found at Mykonos, dating from about 675-650 BCE, is one of the earliest records, and includes a scene of the wooden horse and the Greek soldiers within. This grizzly scene of a child being murdered with the sword of one of the Greeks, and being held by its Trojan mother, could be a generic representation, but could equally refer to a specific killing, such as that of Astyanax. Notably it does not show the child being dropped from the walls.

Although it is not easy to make out the details on this Boeotian black-figure tripod-pyxis from Tanagra, it appears to show a Greek warrior swinging the body of a child from his right arm, using it as a weapon to beat a Trojan, who is laid back over an altar. It dates from about 560-550 BCE.

If the Greek warrior is Neoptolemus, the child Astyanax, and the Trojan King Priam, this would indicate a new story which has not been passed down in the verbal accounts, in which both the Trojans were murdered together in this horrific manner.

That is the same story, and a visually very similar image, shown much more clearly in this slightly later Attic black-figure amphora from Vulci, from about 520-510 BCE.

Only slightly later, in about 510 BCE, this Attic black-figure amphora has removed Astyanax, but left Neoptolemus to murder Priam, who is shown next to Priam’s wife Hecuba, who survived and was taken captive.

Although I do not have a date or source for this reproduction of a vase painting, it shows an intermediate version of the story, in which Neoptolemus is about to drop Astyanax over the walls, in front of King Priam.

The classical record therefore shows that, in visual arts, the earliest account suggests Astyanax may have died by the sword, but a hundred years later the child was used to bludgeon his grandfather to death, and later still the murders became separate, with Astyanax being dropped from the walls, and Priam being killed on the altar.

The myths of Troy became popular subjects of painters from the Renaissance on, although the deaths of Astyanax and Priam do not seem to have been depicted much, if at all, prior to the nineteenth century.

This painting by Gillis van Valckenborch of The Sack of Troy from around 1600 is typical of the many very atmospheric works showing this event on a grand scale.

This engraving is unfortunately undated, but shows the developed story of a Greek warrior, here allegedly Odysseus rather than Neoptolemus as the warrior. I think that this was probably engraved in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

The late nineteenth century then saw a cluster of major paintings depicting detailed stories of the fall of Troy.

Edouard-Théophile Blanchard won the Prix de Rome in 1868 with his painting of The Death of Astyanax, and its unconventional depiction of Neoptolemus as a North African. According to myth, Neoptolemus’ father Achilles was the king of Thessaly, in central Greece.

Andromache pleads on her knees with the warrior to spare her son, her left hand vainly trying to prevent him from being slung from the wall. Two men cower in fear in the background. Two of Troy’s famous towers are shown, but there is no smoke or other evidence of a sacking in progress, neither is there any sign of King Priam.

Georges Rochegrosse enjoyed great success at the Salon in 1883 with Andromache, a huge and gruesome painting nearly nine metres high.

Andromache is at the centre, being restrained by four Greeks prior to her adbuction by Neoptolemus. Her left arm points further up the steps, to a Greek warrior in black armour holding the infant Astyanax, as he takes him up to the top (where another Greek is shown in silhouette) to murder him. There is death and desolation around the foot of the steps: a small pile of severed heads, a jumble of living and dead, and the debris of the sacking of Troy.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre won the Prix de Rome in 1861 with his The Death of Priam; Georges Rochegrosse was later one of his students. A thoroughly conventional, and very Spartan, Neoptolemus is just about to swing his sword at the prostrate figure of King Priam, who is lying on the floor by the altar to Zeus. Priam looks up at his killer, knowing that he has only seconds to live.

Behind Neoptolemus is another body, presumably that of Priam’s son Polites. To the right, in the darkness behind, Queen Hecuba tries to comfort other Trojans. At the left, a young Trojan is trying to sneak away, back into the burning city, with smoke twisting its way into the dark sky.

I cannot find any subsequent paintings showing these terrible stories, but there is one very moving painting which brings them to a close.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Captive Andromache (c 1886) shows Hector’s widow, and Astyanax’s mother, swathed in black, queueing for water among other Trojan prisoners. She appears lost in thought.

The development of the story of Astyanax

The evidence above suggests that, prior to 500 BCE, there was no single or coherent account of the death of Astyanax. Those producing verbal accounts and visual artists gave a range of different stories, and attributed the murder to either Neoptolemus or Odysseus.

Over the next few centuries, the story became fixed to that told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, and propagated ever since. Although narrative painters in the late eighteenth century may have changed one story – that of Salome – they remained faithful to the late classical account of the death of Astyanax.

However, the evidence above is consistent with the story of Astyanax having been fabricated after about 700 BCE. It may well be completely mythical.

References

Wikipedia.

Woodford, Susan (2003) Images of Myths in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 78809 0.
Evelyn-White, HG (trans) (1914) Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica at Project Gutenberg.
Euripides, Murray, G (trans) (1905) The Trojan Women at Wikisource.
Ovid, More, Brookes (trans) (1922) Metamorphoses at Perseus.

In the autumn of 1919, Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided their time between the bustle of Berlin and their garden of Eden by the lake and the mountains.

Corinth combined his new enthusiasm for painting floral arrangements with a gentle portrait of his eleven year-old daughter in Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine (1920). The flowers shown are dominated by amaryllis, arums, and lilacs. The composition probably reflects Wilhelmine’s shyness at that age.

During the final six years of his life, he must have painted more than sixty views around the family chalet in Bavaria, of which I can only show a small selection. Like many others, Landscape at the Walchensee with Larch (1920) was painted from an observation point on a hill across from the Corinths’ chalet. Bizarrely, this painting was classified as being ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis in 1937.

The local terrain produces some deceptive appearances, but many of Corinth’s late landscapes have marked tilting in their horizontals, and Walchensee by Moonlight (1920) even shows the same leftward lean in its verticals. This had been prominent in the earliest of his paintings in 1912, following his stroke. Here it probably reflects his shift of emphasis from form to areas of colour, particularly the impasto reflections of the moon on the lake’s still surface.

In 1921, Corinth was awarded an honorary doctorate and made a professor of arts by the University of Königsberg.

Walchensee, Landscape with Cow (c 1921) is another view painted from his ‘pulpit’ vantage point across from the chalet.

Throughout his career, Corinth had made very loose watercolour sketches, usually as preparatory studies for oil paintings. Now, he started to paint watercolour landscapes, such as his Walchensee, Evening Air (1921), which captures the colours of dusk.

Pink Clouds, Walchensee (1921) is another watercolour showing the rich colours of land and sky as the sun sets.

In 1922, his work led the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a total of thirty of his paintings exhibited there.

Red Christ (1922) is the last, most striking and original of all his many scenes of the crucifixion. Although very modern in its approach and facture, he chose a traditional wood panel as its support, in keeping with much older religious works. The red of Christ’s blood – spurting from the wound made by a spear, and oozing from his other cuts – is exaggerated by the red of the clouds and the sun’s rays.

Easter at Walchensee was painted from the family’s chalet in 1922, as the winter snow was melting on the tops of the hills.

Corinth also painted some indoor watercolours. His Flower Vase on a Table (1922) has patches of pure, high-chroma colour for the flowers and the armchair at the right, and few indications of form.

During this period of frenetic painting, Corinth appeared at first to flourish in the sunshine and fresh air. His Self-portrait in a Straw Hat from 1923 shows him looking in quite rude health.

Susanna and the Elders (1923) revisits the Old Testament story from the book of Daniel, which had brought him success in 1890. The two versions which he painted then had followed tradition, and shown the naked Susanna being spied on by two elders, who then tried to blackmail her, almost causing her death. Here he shows the three figures talking, as the blackmailers put their proposition to Susanna.

Back in his ‘pulpit’ above the lake, Tree at Walchensee (1923) has the most rectilinear form of all his views of Walchensee, set by the horizontal snowline and the trunk of the tree.

Walchensee in Winter (1923) is another evocative snowscape.

Chrysanthemums II (1923) is my favourite of his late floral works, as the texture of the paint matches the fine petals perfectly.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

So far, my explorations of hypertext and Storyspace have been confined to non-fiction. Having recently started a series looking at the best paintings of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I thought this might be a good opportunity to set some of the finest narrative from the classics into hypertext.

Given the number of myths in Metamorphoses and the length of the original Latin text, it’s going to take me a couple of years at least to complete my series of articles. So why not run a Storyspace project in parallel?

This first article looks at a fundamental issue: the textual content should be provided in both the original Latin and English translation, in parallel hypertext. Before I can even start building my document, I need to work out a good way of implementing that using Storyspace.

Ovid wrote in verse, and when that is rendered into accessible English each line of Latin does not map directly to a line of English. Because I am more interested in the stories which he tells, I’d rather break his text up into writing spaces of several lines, at least. Book 1 is in any case slightly more than 775 lines of Latin, so trying to produce a line-by-line comparison seems foolhardy.

One logical design approach is to divide the Latin into sections of 5-50 lines according to their content and narrative structure, and set those alongside their English translation. The Latin will then be divided into a series of writing spaces in a container, the English likewise in another container, then the reader can browse a web of writing spaces which draw their text from those into composites.

I also need to give the reader some flexibility: a few might wish to read the text in Latin alone, most will probably just want the English, and many will want both together. Giving the reader that choice means that I can’t use simple text inclusion, but I need to make that conditional.

If the composite writing spaces exposed to the reader are formed like
^include("/lat/1-4")^
^include("/eng/1-4")^
then there’s no choice.

Instead, I need to use
^if($ShowLatin("/me"))^ ^include("/lat/1-4")^ ^endif^
^if($ShowEnglish("/me"))^ ^include("/eng/1-4")^ ^endif^
which uses attributes stored in the me writing space to determine whether to show the Latin and English versions.

Provided that the reader is using Storyspace and understands how to alter key attributes, I could leave it to them to turn $ShowLatin and $ShowEnglish on or off as they wish. But if they are using Storyspace Reader, or don’t want to mess with attribute settings, that is no help. So I also need to provide a couple of ‘buttons’ which they can use to control which versions are shown.

Initially, I create a couple of Prototypes for the two different languages, which differ only in the colours of their writing space tiles: English is blue with dark blue text, Latin green with dark red text. I then create my first writing spaces to contain the respective texts, and drop those into containers named eng and lat.

Because I need to refer to those writing spaces and their containers a lot, I am keeping their names short and systematic: within each container, the writing spaces containing the text are named according to the line numbers of the Latin verse, such as 5-9. This will make it much easier to copy and paste the code to conditionally include text from them.

The me writing space then needs two key user attributes, $ShowLatin and $ShowEnglish, which will each be true when text in that language is to be shown.

The writing spaces to be used as control buttons need to have their own local versions of those attributes, code to run OnVisit, and code to run as a Rule.

The OnVisit code for the Show English writing space then reads
$ShowEnglish = !$ShowEnglish; $ShowEnglish("/me") = $ShowEnglish

When the reader selects that writing space, it toggles the value of $ShowEnglish in that writing space, and in the me writing space. That enables it to function as a toggle switch.

The Rule for the Show English writing space then reads
if($ShowEnglish) {$Color="bright blue"; $Name="Hide English"} else {$Color="warm gray dark"; $Name="Show English"}
which sets the tile colour to blue and its title to Hide English when $ShowEnglish is true, or to grey with the title Show English when it is false.

Thus, when $ShowEnglish is true, the English version of Metamorphoses will be displayed in text writing spaces, the English toggle will be shown as Hide English (the action from clicking the button again), and it will be coloured blue.

The Show Latin switch is set up similarly, but using the $ShowLatin attributes.

One final issue is the matter of giving line numbers for the Latin original, which the reader will need to cite the text. I have placed these inline in the Latin text, shrinking the numbers in size to make them less obtrusive. There are other options, of course; I thought about storing them in user attributes of the latin prototype, but that adds unnecessary complexity.

I hope that you will find this an elegant and practical solution. Here is my hypertext document, readable using Storyspace, Storyspace Reader, or Tinderbox: ovidmetamorphosesbook1

The Latin and English texts used here are taken from Perseus at Tufts, a superb resource for anyone wanting to access classical texts.

During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture.

Although Corinth was clearly relishing this intensity, his Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee (1924) illustrates his race against the effects of age.

The Trojan Horse (1924) is Corinth’s last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks in order to gain access to the city of Troy, so they could destroy it. The city is seen in the background, with its lofty towers and impregnable walls. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid are already concealed inside the horse, and those around the horse are probably Trojans, sent out from the city to check it out.

Although there are suggestions as to an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Corinth also painted for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) (1924) must have been completed at great speed before the family consumed his model.

The Jochberg at Walchensee (1924) shows this 1567 metre high mountain, which divides the Walchensee from the Kochelsee.

Walchensee, Vegetable Garden (1924) was painted away from his normal vantage point, to include the colours and textures of this vegetable patch.

Walchensee (1924) is a watercolour sketch reportedly painted on vellum.

Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress (1924) does not, I think, refer directly to the famous Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who had been painted by both John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase back in 1890, as she had died in 1910. I suspect that her name had remained associated with Spanish dancers, though.

Charlotte Corinth, or Berend-Corinth, had continued painting in the early twentieth century, and joined the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of her husband’s paintings. She died in 1967, so I am sadly unable to show any of her paintings.

Probably suspecting that he was reaching the end of his artistic career, Corinth painted members of his family more often at this time. In Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat (1924) the shy daughter is starting to show some of her mother’s vivacity.

Thomas in Armour (1925) shows Corinth’s older child, who was then 21, wearing the suit of armour which had appeared in several of Corinth’s paintings over the years, a visual record of the launch of his son into adult life.

Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man.

In keeping with his earlier contemporary interpretations of the scenes of the Passion, Pilate (left) is shown as an older man in a white coat, and the soldier (right) wears a suit of armour. Corinth completed this in four days.

This painting was bought for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1929, but in 1937 was condemned by the Nazi party as being ‘degenerate art’. Thankfully it escaped destruction when it was bought by the art museum in Basel in 1939.

The Beautiful Woman Imperia was one of the last paintings that Corinth completed in the late spring of 1925, and the last of his fleshly works. It is based on Balzac’s Cent Contes Drolatiques (1832-37), an anthology of tales. This shows the courtesan Imperia, naked in front of a priest, in surroundings which suggest the contemporary decadent cabarets, or a much older ‘perfumed room’.

Corinth’s Last Self-Portrait, painted just two months before his death in 1925, is unusual in showing him with his reflection in a mirror. He is now balding rapidly, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes are bloodshot and tired. In the summer he travelled to the Netherlands to view Old Masters, including Rembrandt and Frans Hals, there. He developed pneumonia, and died at Zandvoort on 17 July, four days before his sixty-eighth birthday.

He had painted more than a thousand works in oil, and hundreds of watercolours. He also made more than a thousand prints, an area of his work which I have not even touched on. Ironically, it was the rise of the Nazi party from 1933 which prevented him from achieving the international recognition which his work deserved.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

At the end of the last myth concerning the flood, Apollo killed Python, the monster, with his bow and arrows. Ovid uses this, and his lines about the Pythian Games, to lead into the next myth, which centres on Apollo and Daphne.

The Story

Of the gods whose love affairs Ovid describes, Apollo seems the least successful. After his achievement in killing Python, he takes the mickey out of Cupid over his use of the bow and arrow, calling him a mischievous boy, and claiming that only a real man (like him) should try to use them. Cupid responds in kind, claiming that his bow will vanquish even Apollo. He then flies to the top of Mount Parnassus, and looses two arrows: a golden one aimed at Apollo, to inflame him with love for Daphne, the other a special lead-tipped arrow, which turns her off any amorous advances.

The stage is set for the first of Ovid’s many tales of attempted rape or seduction. Apollo is completely smitten with Daphne, a naiad or water-nymph, but Daphne wants nothing to do with him. Even before she was struck by Cupid’s lead arrow, she had resolved to remain a virgin, rejecting every suitor, and events only strengthen her resolution.

His heart on fire for her, and his mind wondering dangerously towards raw lust, Apollo starts to chase Daphne through the countryside. As he runs he breathlessly tries to persuade her to stop and give in to his desires, but she keeps running just out of his reach. Eventually the pair tire:
Her strength spent, pale and faint, with pleading eyes
she gazed upon her father’s waves and prayed,
“Help me my father, if thy flowing streams
have virtue! Cover me, O mother Earth!
Destroy the beauty that has injured me,
or change the body that destroys my life.”
Before her prayer was ended, torpor seized
on all her body, and a thin bark closed
around her gentle bosom, and her hair
became as moving leaves; her arms were changed
to waving branches, and her active feet
as clinging roots were fastened to the ground —
her face was hidden with encircling leaves. —
Phoebus admired and loved the graceful tree,
(For still, though changed, her slender form remained)
and with his right hand lingering on the trunk
he felt her bosom throbbing in the bark.
He clung to trunk and branch as though to twine.
His form with hers, and fondly kissed the wood
that shrank from every kiss.

Daphne, whose name is Greek for laurel, had been transformed into a laurel, and escaped the clutches of Apollo. This is the story of how the laurel came to be made; given Apollo’s continuing love for Daphne, it is also the story of how it was he that decreed that crowns of laurel should be awarded to victors of games, and the like.

The Paintings

Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne (c 1470-80) is one of the earliest, and remains one of the most famous, depictions of this myth. Apollo’s pursuit has ended, he has reached his quarry and is embracing her, as she changes into a laurel. Already her arms have become exuberant bushes, and her feet are rapidly rooting into the ground.

The other famous painting of this myth is Tiepolo’s Apollo and Daphne (c 1744-45), which brings in Cupid, who is somewhat immodestly sheltering from his victim Apollo beneath Daphne’s billowing robe. In front of them, his back to the viewer, is Daphne’s father, the river god Ladon, who carries his oar as an attribute. Daphne’s transformation is at a much earlier stage, the fingers of her right hand sprouting leaves, but it is obvious what is just about to happen. It’s also noteworthy that Apollo wears a crown of laurels, rather than oak leaves.

What surprises me, though, is the number of artists who have apparently painted very different scenes.

In the last year of Nicolas Poussin’s life, the master of narrative painting made this, currently titled Apollo in Love with Daphne (1664). Its key actors are all at its edges: Apollo sits at the left looking across the painting, with Cupid just in front of him, about to loose an arrow at Daphne, who sits with her bearded father at the far right. Mercury is behind Apollo, at the left edge, apparently about to steal one of his arrows. Two women lounge in the prominent oak tree at the left, and there is no reference to Daphne’s imminent pursuit or transformation.

Quite a few painters chose to depict Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, without making any visual reference to her fate, which seems to me to have missed the point of the myth entirely.

Neither is it clear what the great JMW Turner intended in his Story of Apollo and Daphne, which was exhibited in 1837. In the foreground, the tiny figures of a greyhound coursing a hare quote Ovid’s metaphor. Behind them are Apollo and Daphne, apparently strolling gently together, with Cupid to the rear. Much of the painting is an elaborate fantasy landscape which apparently is supposed to represent Tempe (which is in fact a narrow ravine, not an open valley like the vale of Larissa).

Ruskin – in whose eyes ‘modern painters’ were primarily landscape rather than narrative artists – went to great lengths to interpret this as illustrating “the union of the rivers and the earth; and of the perpetual help and delight granted by the streams, in their dew, to the earth’s foliage.” Yet Turner showed the painting with a quotation from Dryden’s translation of Ovid.

John William Waterhouse’s Apollo and Daphne (1908) is at least back on story. Apollo, holding his lyre with his left hand, has just reached Daphne, who looks justifiably alarmed. However, instead of following tradition and showing her transforming into a laurel, she is being encased within one, which is not exactly a metamorphosis. Some have claimed that Waterhouse used Bernini’s marvellous marble statue of the couple as his source, but Bernini showed transformation, not encasement.

Inevitably Waterhouse was assiduous in showing not only the distinctive leaves of the laurel, but its flowers too: this is confirmed by comparison with Köhler and Müller’s botanical illustration above.

So I think that I’ll choose Pollaiuolo and Tiepolo, for capturing the moment of transformation so brilliantly, and crown them with laurels.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

It is a century since the death of John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), one of the last major artists to paint mainly in Pre-Raphaelite style. In this and the next article, I consider his career and a selection of his paintings.

Waterhouse – who, like Turner, is known by the initials of his first names – was born to an artistic family then living in Rome, just at the dawn of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was quickly nicknamed Nino, an abbreviation for Giovannino or ‘little John’, which he used for the rest of his life; strangely he is not known by this now.

Soon after his baptism in April 1849, the family fled from the French siege of Rome, and lived in the Alban Hills, near Frascati. When he was five years old, the family returned to live in Kensington, London, but within two years his mother died of tuberculosis. In the late 1860s, he started drawing in the British Museum, and progressed quickly to watercolour and oil painting.

Waterhouse was accepted as a student in sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in January 1871, at the age of twenty-two, although he seems to have attended little instruction there, and gradually drifted into painting. He first exhibited in 1872, when three of his paintings were accepted by the Society of British Artists, and he continued to exhibit with them until 1875. In 1873, he started exhibiting at the Dudley Gallery, which was popular with those associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

His first success at the Royal Academy was Sleep and His Half Brother Death, which was exhibited in 1874, and received favourable reviews. This shows the Greek personification of sleep, Hypnos, and Thanatos, the personification of death. Although a painting with a mythical theme, it appears to have been influenced by the Aesthetic Movement, which was becoming popular with the decline of Pre-Raphaelite principles.

Waterhouse then became visibly influenced by the classical subjects of Alma-Tadema, and in 1877 returned to Rome for a period probably lasting a few months. The following year he was earning enough to buy the leasehold of a studio at Primrose Hill in London, where he worked until 1900.

His aesthetic tendencies are shown well in two paintings titled Dolce Far Niente, or ‘doing sweet nothing’, which he made in consecutive years. However, he continued to paint more classical themes over this period too.

Consulting the Oracle (1884) shows seven girls, sitting in a semi-circle around a priestess at her shrine, awaiting her pronouncement with rising emotion. She puts her ear to the embalmed head which is the oracle itself, so that she can hear its words and interpret them to the girls.

This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, where it was sold to Sir Henry Tate, who presented it in his bequest which founded the Tate Gallery. It was also pictured in the Illustrated London News at the time.

From 1882, Waterhouse is believed to have visited Venice on several occasions, where he painted watercolour scenes which are little-known today, and the following year he married Esther Kenworthy, who had modest success in her floral painting.

In the mid 1880s, Waterhouse started to experiment with looser handling, inspired by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage. This first became evident in The Magic Circle (1886), and became progressively more frequent and more noticeable in later work.

The Lady of Shalott (1888) is the first of his three paintings based on Tennyson’s very popular poem. Condemned to sit weaving and never look directly at the outside world for fear of death, this shows the climax, in which the Lady has abandoned her weaving and castle. She finds a boat on which she writes her name, then floats downriver towards Camelot and the knight Lancelot, dying in the process.

Waterhouse exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1888, where it was bought by Sir Henry Tate, despite some rather negative reviews. The following year he painted his first version of another theme which was to become recurrent, that of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

By the late 1880s, Waterhouse’s work was becoming sought-after. Dealers such as Agnew’s were prepared to pay substantial sums, and Waterhouse clearly achieved financial security as a result.

His main work submitted to the Royal Academy for exhibition in 1891 was Ulysses and the Sirens, which is one of his finest narrative paintings. Taken from Homer’s Odyssey, it shows the Sirens trying to lure Odysseus and his crew to their deaths. Odysseus has had himself lashed to the mast so that he is unable to to command the vessel, and his crew have plugged their ears with beeswax and wrapped cloth around their heads to ensure that they cannot hear the Sirens’ alluring song.

This painting was bought, on the advice of Herkomer, for the public collection of the National Gallery of Victoria at Melbourne, Australia.

Astonishingly, he also exhibited a second major mythical painting, Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, at the newly-opened New Gallery in London that year. The story here is drawn from the Odyssey, in which Circe is offering Odysseus her enchanted cup containing wine laced with magical potion. As with others in his crew, Odysseus is transformed into a pig. The ingenious use of a mirror to show Odysseus ensures that Circe’s invitation is extended to the viewer too, who cannot escape her alluring gaze.

This painting sold quickly to Charles Lee, a wealthy cotton mill owner from Oldham in Lancashire.

In 1895, Waterhouse was finally elected a full Academician.

Waterhouse turned to another story made popular in the work of Tennyson, this time drawn from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Mariana in the South is the abandoned fiancée in her ‘moated grange’, who waits in permanent darkness, yearning in front of a large mirror. The study above shows how the artist has moved close to paintings of the Lady of Shalott, and below places Mariana in a pose derived from Millais.

References

Wikipedia.

Trippi P (2002) J. W. Waterhouse, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4518 0.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) was one of the last major artists to paint mainly in Pre-Raphaelite style. This article concludes my short account of his career and paintings, to commemorate his death a century ago today.

His painting of Ariadne (1898) shows a strong influence from the Aesthetic Movement, and the likes of Leighton’s Flaming June (1895). Its underlying narrative is drawn from Ovid’s Heroides, in which Ariadne has just been abandoned by Theseus, whose ship is seen sailing away into the distance. The two leopards most probably appear in their role as attributes of Dionysus/Bacchus, providing a visual cue to the resolution of the narrative, as Ariadne will soon be joined by the god of wine.

Although Waterhouse seems not to have taken any private pupils, he was actively involved in teaching at the Royal Academy Schools during the period 1887-1902, and from 1892-1913 taught at the highly successful Saint John’s Wood Art School on the periphery of London, which also enjoyed the support of Alma-Tadema. In 1900, Waterhouse finally moved out of his studio at Primrose Hill, to a villa in Saint John’s Wood, where the Waterhouses also lived.

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900) celebrates honesty in art, which was dear to Waterhouse throughout his career. It shows two young women discovering the severed head and lyre of the master musician and poet Orpheus, who had been torn apart by Maenads (Bacchantes) when he refused to engage in their worship and ceremonies. Waterhouse may well have seen Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus (1865), which had become popular with Symbolists of mainland Europe. A decade later, Waterhouse re-used its setting for another aesthetic work, The Charmer (1911).

Echo and Narcissus (1903) is one of Waterhouse’s finest narrative paintings, which is both surprisingly painterly and ingenious in telling two interlinked stories. Echo was originally a loquacious singing nymph, but was cursed by Zeus’ wife Hera to only be able to repeat the last words spoken. She then falls in love with Narcissus, who rejects her. Instead, when he pauses to drink from a spring, he falls in love with his own reflection.

Narcissus has long been a favourite subject for painters, but the challenges posed by Echo’s story are usually avoided – painting auditory subjects is very challenging. Waterhouse manages to combine the stories more successfully than anyone else.

Waterhouse had a particular affection for stories involving beautiful women enchanting brave warriors, as he had shown in Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus (1891). This is his Jason and Medea (1907), showing the popular story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. When Jason reached Colchis, he underwent a series of trials imposed by King Aeëtes, culminating in Jason’s victory over the dragon which guarded the Golden Fleece. These were accomplished with the help of Medea, the King’s daughter, in return for a promise of marriage.

Medea is depicted as a sorceress, preparing perhaps the potion which Jason is to later give to the dragon. Jason appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge. A year later, Waterhouse painted Apollo and Daphne (1908), which shows the climax of Ovid’s myth of the transformation of Daphne into the laurel.

By now, Waterhouse’s paintings were rapidly falling out of fashion. He resorted to painting portraits, something that he had hardly ever attempted before.

Just before the First World War broke out, Waterhouse painted his one and only religious work, The Annunciation (1914), which marked the final phase in his career. He turned now from classical myths to the Middle Ages.

By the time that he visited Camelot and the Lady of Shalott for the last time, Waterhouse was ill with cancer. However, “I am Half Sick of Shadows” said the Lady of Shalott (1915) is another great narrative painting which adheres closely to Tennyson’s story. The Lady sits looking wistfully into the (interior) distance, in front of her loom, on which she is weaving images.

What appears to be a window behind her is actually a very large circular mirror, reflecting the view of the outside which must be behind the viewer. This cleverly brings the viewer into her world, without showing the viewer in the mirror. She is surrounded by additional objects which provide abundant cues to what she is doing. In the (reflected) distance the river is shown running down to the large castellated palace of Camelot.

What is essentially a static scene turns out to be an examination of the reality of images, and of their reflections – a fitting subject for a great painter at the end of his career.

By the time that he completed Tristan and Isolde (1916), Waterhouse was becoming gravely ill. He returns to the theme of the enchantress and the warrior one last time. Tristan has travelled to Ireland to bring King Mark’s bride Iseult back for their wedding. On the return journey, they drink a potion which makes them fall hopelessly in love with one another, setting up the well-known love triangle.

John William Waterhouse died at home on 10 February 1917, at the age of 68.

Germany had just resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to stop allied shipping reaching Europe. The war was not going at all well for any of the nations involved, and the US was poised to enter it later in the year. Waterhouse’s death passed almost unnoticed, even by The Times newspaper. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that his paintings became more popular again.

References

Wikipedia.

Trippi P (2002) J. W. Waterhouse, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 4518 0.

Making a highly successful career for yourself as a woman artist in the Renaissance was an extraordinary if not unique feat. It is one of the many accomplishments of Sophonisba Anguissola (c 1532-1625), who also managed to survive the ravages of infectious disease, and died in her early nineties.

Even more unusually, she was not born into an artistic family, but into minor nobility, in Cremona, Lombardy, Italy. The oldest of Amilcare Anguissola’s seven children, the family claimed ancestry going back to ancient Carthage. Amilcare and his wife Bianca educated and encouraged their daughters to develop their abilities, which resulted in four of their six girls becoming painters, but it was only Sophonisba who persisted long enough to make a career of her art.

When she was fourteen, Sophonisba went to study in Bernardino Campi’s workshop, then to Bernardino Gatti’s. She probably completed her training in about 1553, but by then was already painting some outstanding works in oils.

One of her earliest surviving paintings is also one of her most remarkable and ingenious, her Self-portrait with Bernardino Campi, painted in 1550 when she was just eighteen. This double portrait is fascinating in her depiction of two left hands on the portrait which Campi is shown working on: one reaches up to meet his right hand, which holds a brush, and the other holds her own brushes.

Only five years later she transformed Renaissance portraiture with her superb The Chess Game (1555), showing her sisters playing chess, with their mother (probably) making an appearance at the right edge. Her sisters, Lucia, Minerva and Europa Anguissola, are shown dressed in their finest, but the informality of their poses and expressions is striking, and innovative in portraits at that time.

Anguissola’s attention to detail in clothing and on the table is also notable, and perhaps more characteristic of the Northern Renaissance. Her other portraits are just as finely detailed.

In addition to painting her family, she also completed a series of self-portraits in her early career, including this Self-portrait from 1554, when she was twenty-two. The contrast with the fine dress and relaxed informality of her family portraits is interesting, and may reflect her almost austere devotion to her art.

A couple of years later, Self-portrait at the Easel (1556) shows her working on an exquisite devotional painting which may have been of the Virgin and Child, showing the deep relationship between a mother and her infant, and another painting within a painting. The artist sustains her austere devotion.

This small undated Self-portrait on a tondo is no more relaxed.

Her Portrait of the Artist’s Family of 1557-58 maintains her style of informality in poses, although its composition is more typical of the day. This shows her younger sister Minerva, father Amilcare, and young brother Asdrubale, with a fantasy landscape of classical ruins and the rising towers of distant castles, receding to a dramatic mountain.

In 1554, she stayed in Rome, where she met Michelangelo and several other artists. Michelangelo seems to have mentored her for a while. She became an established portraitist, and in 1559 was invited by King Philip II of Spain to teach painting to his wife, the young Queen Elisabeth of Valois. Anguissola painted many important portraits when she was in Philip’s court, and prospered as a result.

This fine Portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese from about 1560 has been attributed to Anguissola. The prince, who later became Duke of Parma and Piacenza, lived from 1545-1592, and this portrait conforms to more standard practice.

Anguissola’s Portrait of Anna of Austria of 1573 was one of her more important commissions. Anna (1549-1580) was the fourth wife of her uncle, King Philip II of Spain, and the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. She married the king in 1570 following the death of Queen Elisabeth of Valois, who had been Anguissola’s pupil. Among Anna’s other portrait painters was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, later famous for his unique ‘vegetable’ portraits.

Although Anguissola herself had married a noble in 1571, she continued to paint professionally, and the couple moved to Paternò, near Catania on the east coast of Sicily. Her first husband died eight years later, and in 1584 she married again, moving to Genoa.

This unusual Portrait of Julius Caesar Aged 14 from about 1586 shows, according to its inscription, the famous Roman emperor, who lived from 100-44 BCE, when he was assassinated in Rome. Anguissola has approached it as another of her informal portraits, rather than as a history painting.

Anguissola’s religious paintings broke new ground in the intimacy with which she shows family scenes, as in The Holy Family with Saints Anne and John the Baptist (1592). I apologise for the slightly unfocussed image, which is the best that I have been able to locate.

She taught and provided advice to other painters throughout her later career, and in 1624 was visited by the young Anthony van Dyck. Her sight was failing by that time, but she was still able to give good advice to van Dyck which remained important through his career.

Finally, Anguissola moved to Palermo, where she died at the age of 92 or 93 in 1625. She had no children, but left a generation of artists who had benefitted from her innovation and influence. Among those directly inspired by her example and work was Lavinia Fontana. Over two centuries later, Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer pursued her painting career bearing Anguissola’s name.

Reference

Wikipedia.

There were many history painters in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century, of whom Gustave Moreau and Jean-Léon Gérôme were but two of the more prolific, famous, and contrasting. Moreau had two close friends who were highly-rated history painters, whose early deaths affected him deeply: Théodore Chassériau, and Élie Delaunay. This article looks at some of the latter’s history paintings.

Jules-Élie Delaunay (1828-1891) was born in Nantes, France, whose Art Museum now holds the largest collection of his work. Educated at an elite local school, his talents were spotted by Joachim Sotta, a local artist, who taught him initially. In 1846 Delaunay was introduced to Hippolyte Flandrin, who had been Ingres’ favourite student, and two years later enrolled in his workshop at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He first competed for the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1852, but was unsuccessful. He tried again over successive years, but it was not until 1856 that he was awarded the prize jointly with Félix Auguste Clément. He then moved to the French Academy in Rome in January 1857, travelling in northern Italy during the following summer. While he was in Rome, Delaunay met and befriended Degas, Bonnat, and Moreau.

Caesar and His Fortune, also known as Caesar in the Boat was his unsuccessful entry for the Prix de Rome in 1855.

This shows an episode from the civil war fought between Julius Caesar and Pompey in 49 BCE. When Caesar had famously crossed the Rubicon and driven Pompey from Italy, he then tried to cross the straits of Brindisi in disguise as a slave, in his pursuit of Pompey, who had fled to Greece. However, Caesar’s boat was caught in a storm, and forced to turn back, as shown here.

Caesar stands, looking quite unlike a slave, in the small boat, as its oarsmen struggle to make headway in the mounting sea. He then made the famous remark, quoted by Plutarch (Lives, volume 2): Fear not, you are carrying Caesar and his fortune.

Delaunay returned to Paris after travelling in 1860-61, after which he started to make studies for The Plague of Rome (below). The following year he visited London. He was then commissioned to paint murals in the foyer of the Paris Opera, and Chapel of the Virgin in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris.

The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on an episode reported in The Golden Legend, a mediaeval compilation by Jacques de Voragine, in which plague was raging in Rome. A pair of angels were claimed to have appeared, one good, the other bad. The good angel then gave the commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried the commands out. At the right edge of the canvas, the white statue appropriately shows Aesculapius or Asclepius, the god of medicine.

It is thought that Delaunay based this painting on a fresco in the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, which shows the plague in Rome in 1476. It was quickly popularised following exhibition of the painting in the Salon du Palais de l’Industrie in Paris, in the print below, and Delaunay’s painting was bought by Napoleon III for the public collection.

The Death of Nessus (1870) is perhaps the best of Delaunay’s history paintings, discussed here. Sadly I cannot show it here, but it is to be seen via this link.

Delaunay’s full-length portrait of Diana (1872) shows the Roman maiden goddess of the hunt, moon, and nature in her full glory (this image being much darker than the painting itself).

David Triumphant (1874) tells the well-known Old Testament story of David and Goliath, moments after the young and slight hero David has felled the Philistine giant Goliath, who had been troubling the Israelites under King Saul. The rather androgynous, almost elfin, figure of David holds aloft the slingshot which he used to topple Goliath, and carries over his left shoulder the huge sword, still bloodied, with which he then beheaded him.

This painting attracted considerable attention when it was exhibited in the Salon of 1874.

Ixion Plunged into Hades (1876) shows Ixion writhing in agony in the Underworld, as he is bound to a wheel by snakes.

Ixion was the son of the King of the Lapiths in Thessaly. He had murdered his father-in-law Deioneus by pushing him into a bed of burning coals and wood, which resulted in Ixion going mad. Zeus showed pity on him, and brought him to Olympus, where he promptly lusted after Hera, Zeus’s wife.

When Zeus found out, Ixion was expelled from Olympus, and Zeus instructed Hermes to bind Ixion to a winged fiery wheel and send it spinning across the heavens. The snakes were added to his punishment in later versions of this myth.

Ophelia (1882) shows the tragic heroine from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, who has been a favourite subject for painting, particularly during the nineteenth century.

In 1883, he travelled to Normandy, Jersey, and Switzerland, and started to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Sappho Embracing her Lyre (date not known) shows the classical Greek poet Sappho, holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover. She is seen at the top of the Leucadian cliff, where she is traditionally said to have killed herself after falling in love with a ferryman. Delaunay painted at least two different works featuring Sappho, who was also a recurrent theme in Moreau’s paintings.

Delaunay also painted major religious works, and during the 1870s was a successful portraitist.

In 1889, he was appointed director of one of the three official workshops of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, bringing him a major commitment to teaching his students there. He won the grand prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His health then started to deteriorate, and on 5 September 1891, he died in Paris. As one of his close friends, Gustave Moreau was an executor of his will.

With almost three thousand of his works (mainly drawings), the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Nantes holds the largest collection of Delaunay’s work. Although these have now been digitised, access to them is still very limited.

Reference

Wikipedia.
Musée de Beaux-Arts de Nantes (English, also available in French).

If I had to put a single name forward as the first Impressionist, it would have to be Charles-François Daubigny, who was born two centuries ago, on 15 February 1817, in Paris. To celebrate his bicentenary – the first bicentenary of any of the French Impressionists – I offer a brief review of his career and a small selection of his wonderful landscape paintings, in this article and its sequel.

His father was also a landscape painter. Daubigny seems to have been a sickly child, and to promote his health was sent for several years to stay in the village of Valmondois, to the north of Paris, on the river Oise, in the care of a nurse/nanny. To set his age in context, he was a schoolboy of 13 when the oldest of the mainstream Impressionists, Pissarro, was born, and had started work at the age of 15 when Édouard Manet was born.

By 1834, Daubigny was helping to restore paintings in the Louvre, although he still enjoyed returning to the countryside on the banks of the Oise. The following year, he started as a student in the studio of Pierre-Asthasie-Théodore Sentiès. In 1836, he had earned enough money to pay for himself to travel to Rome and southern Italy, with a colleague from the studio. On his return the following year, he entered the Prix de Rome, but was unsuccessful.

Daubigny continued to develop his paintings, and in 1838 had his first landscape accepted by the Salon. This was followed by two landscapes in 1840, when he had started in Paul Delaroche’s studio. Unfortunately there was a misunderstanding over the rules of the Prix de Rome in 1841, and his submission was eliminated; he abandoned further attempts.

He continued to exhibit at the Salon through the 1840s, and married at the end of 1842. The following year he started painting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, which was the focal point for the Barbizon School at the time. At some stage during the 1840s, he met and befriended Camille Corot – a friendship which was to last until Corot’s death in 1875.

With the liberalisation of the Salon under the Republic in 1848, Daubigny exhibited six paintings, and won a second class medal.

The Harvest (1851) and View from the Banks of the Seine at Bezons (1851) were great successes at the Salon in 1852, and were bought by the Nation, although they were also criticised for their sketch-like finish. Daubigny’s use of colour in this painting heralded the changes that came with the main Impressionist movement.

Daubigny painted with Corot in Switzerland, and in The Hamlet of Optevoz (c 1852).

The Pond at Gylieu (1853) was his great success of the Salon of 1853: it won a gold medal, and was purchased by Emperor Napoleon III. I think that it is one of his greatest masterpieces, and one of the finest realist landscapes of the century. The detail below may help convince you.

In the mid 1850s, he started to paint extensively on the coast of Normandy and Brittany. He returned to Optevoz to paint Sluice in the Optevoz Valley (1854), which won him a third class medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855; this painting was also purchased by the State.

Banks of the Seine (1855) marked the start of a long campaign painting the banks of rivers in northern France. To facilitate that, in 1857 he launched a specially-built studio boat, anticipating Monet’s later use of a similar floating studio.

He also turned to fruit trees in blossom in the spring, and his first major painting of them, Spring (1857), was acclaimed for its originality. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1859 – the year that Monet ‘discovered’ his work, and Pissarro first exhibited in the Salon. In 1860 and 1861, Daubigny visited Gustave Courbet, in his home town of Ornans.

This rather later painting of blossom, Spring Landscape (1862), was made in the same year that Daubigny moved into a new purpose-built house and studio in Auvers-sur-Oise. This marked the beginning of the artists’ colony there, where Vincent van Gogh was later to spend his final two months of painting.

On the Oise (1863) is a fine example of the paintings that Daubigny made of riverbanks at this time, and shows the influence that they had on the mainstream Impressionists over the following decades. In 1863 he entertained Berthe Morisot and her family, and he continued to have social contact and to encourage her painting.

Reference

Ambrosini, Lynne et al. (2016) Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet, van Gogh, National Galleries of Scotland. ISBN 978 1 906270 86 5.

Of all the modern festivals, that of Saint Valentine today, 14 February, is the most pagan of all. Branded with a saint’s name, we know next to nothing about the saint, and in 1969 his name was removed from the General Roman Calendar, which determines the saints who are generally celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church.

In any case, if you are fortunate enough to have received a card today from your ‘Valentine’, it won’t bear any image associated with Saint Valentine, but will almost certainly show at least one rather obese baby bearing a bow and arrow: the ever-popular Cupid, and modern representation of a thoroughly pagan god known to the Greeks as Eros, to the Etruscans as Turnu son of Turan, and to the Romans as Cupid. This article looks at where today’s Cupid came from.

Eros is, amazingly, one of the most senior of the Greek pantheon, according to one of the oldest literary sources, Hesiod. He was created fourth, after Chaos, Gaia (the earth), and Tartarus (Hades, the underworld).

The oldest visual art showing Eros depicts him as a winged young man, as shown on this Attic red-figure bobbin from about 470-450 BCE. The only other Greek gods generally shown with wings are the goddess of victory, Nike, and the god of death, Thanatos, although the later Etruscans seem to have been more generous in equipping other gods with wings.

This Red-Figure Plate from about 340-320 BCE shows another common image, of Eros complete with large wings placing a wreath on the cippus, or pillar, in front of him.

Nor was Eros limited to being a single figure: this Red-Figure Bell-Krater (c 330-310 BCE) from Campania, Italy, shows two Cupids attending a single woman. They appear to be dressing her. Once (or twice) again, Eros is shown as a young man.

This more detailed depiction of Eros on an Apulian red-figure Oinochoe from the same period (c 320 BCE) shows magnificent detail in the wings. Eros here holds a mace, with which he presumably knocked his victims senseless in order to get them to fall in love.

At some stage in Etruscan (pre-Roman) times, with the development of first Turnu then Cupid, the god has become a child, the son of Venus, the goddess of love. This detail from the beautiful mural from Pompeii’s Casa dell’Amore Punito (the House of the Punished Cupid) (c 30 BCE) shows Venus and the Punishment of Cupid. As the mischievous god of erotic love and lust, there are several myths in which Cupid gets into trouble, thus plenty of reasons for his mother to need to admonish or punish him.

The spectacular Mosaic of Love in Cástulo, Spain, from about 275 CE, shows half a dozen little scenes of Cupid in its semicircles. In each he appears with his bow and arrow, attributes which he appears to have acquired during Roman times. Ovid and other Roman authors frequently refer to him shooting his arrows at those who he will put in love, and sometimes using lead arrows which do the exact opposite: the myth of Apollo and Daphne is a good example.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco showing Cupid Blindfolded (1452-66) illustrates the ancient and long-lived saying the love is blind, while conforming to the Roman concept of an infant archer with spectacular wings.

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

If you thought that two Cupids were overdoing it, Titian’s The Worship of Venus (1518-19) shows a convention of winged infants. But only one, at the lower right corner, is armed with his bow and arrow, and a true Cupid. The others, who seem to be up to all sorts of mischief, are more properly amorini, (singular amorino), Cupid’s helpers. These are also termed putto (singular) and putti (plural), but however cherubic they might appear, they remain distinct from cherubim, which are sacred creatures derived from the Old Testament of the Bible, and may attend Christian saints, and others.

Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid, or Allegory of Lust, from about 1545, shows the real Cupid kissing his mother Venus in a worryingly erotic way, with a putti watching, and Father Time behind.

It was, perhaps inevitably, Caravaggio who painted the most shocking Cupid of the modern era: a homoerotic (if not pederastic) interpretation of the old saying ‘love conquers all’, or Amor Vincit Omnia (1601-2).

Caravaggio’s patron’s brother was a Cardinal, and was shocked by Caravaggio’s work and his brother’s apparent delight in it. The Cardinal commissioned Giovanni Baglione to paint a response, in his Sacred and Profane Love (The Victory of Sacred Love over Profane Love) of about 1602. This shows Caravaggio’s naked boy at the lower right, and a devil with Caravaggio’s face at the lower left corner, being dominated by the ‘true’ winged figure of Cupid, supposedly of sacred love.

Other artists tackled the same subject, ignoring the fact that, throughout Greek, Etruscan, and Roman mythology and religion, Eros/Turnu/Cupid had only ever represented erotic and physical love.

By now the meaning of Cupid in a painting was clear, and fairly universal. In Poussin’s narrative painting of Rinaldo and Armida (c 1630), the winged Cupid plays a key role in preventing Armida from murdering Rinaldo, as she originally intended, and he induces her to fall in love with him instead.

As with many other artists, Poussin sometimes showed Cupid without his wings, as here in The Empire of Flora (1631), where he does rest on a quiver.

But it remains more usual for Cupid/Eros to be shown with fine wings and his archery kit, as in Mignard’s superb Time Clipping Cupid’s Wings (1694).

A few artists did still show Cupid/Eros in his original form, as a winged young man. My favourite painting of that is Ricci’s dizzying ceiling showing The Punishment of Cupid (1706-7).

This also turns out to be an allegory of sacred and profane love. At its centre, Cupid is blindfolded, and his quiver about to empty its arrows to earth below. His mother Venus looks on from a group of goddesses below. Tearing feathers from Cupid’s wing is Anteros, who represents sacred love. The putto to the right carries a torch, an attribute of Cupid, but its flame has gone out, as profane love is also transient.

In classical mythological terms, this is a curious and contradictory painting. Anteros was Eros/Cupid’s half-brother in Greek myth, and a childhood companion. He was the god of returned (requited) love, and the complement of Eros/Cupid rather than a competitor. He was more typically depicted as a young man with the wings of a butterly, and bearing a golden club or leaden arrows.

You are probably already very familiar with one of the few statues of Anteros: Alfred Gilbert’s famous Anteros (1893) stands on top of the Shaftesbury Memorial in London’s Piccadilly Circus. More usually and incorrectly believed to show Eros, it has the distinctive butterfly wings of Anteros, and wields a bow and arrows.

Once painting became Rococo, Cupids were to be found on almost every canvas. Boucher’s workshop, for example, produced Cupid Disarmed in 1751. Gone are his large and colourful wings, leaving remants with which even a god would find hard to get airborne.

Cupid’s mischief became more overtly risqué too: Sir Joshua Reynolds shows him about to undress his mother in Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus (1788).

It took the likes of Bouguereau to ready the bubbly-haired child for his popularity in the nineteenth century. Instead of including a Cupid on every canvas, Bouguereau seems to have made him a protagonist at every opportunity, as in his A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros (c 1880).

A few artists tried to keep to the classical god: John Roddam Spencer Stanhope has no time for infants (or nudity) in his Love and the Maiden (1877).

But in the end, even Lovis Corinth adorns his Homeric Laughter (1909) with many mischievous young children, and decorates the sky behind with a chain of putti.

So the image has stuck.

Having worked out a framework for displaying parallel hypertext, my next task was to load it up with the whole of the Perseus versions of Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in both Latin and English translation.

To do this, I worked on text files containing the versions provided on Perseus. This editorial phase required me to divide those texts up into the chunks to go into each writing space, check the text and the numbering of Latin lines (there is one significant textual issue in the book which I had to reconcile), and match the division of the English translation to the Latin. There are no shortcuts here, but working methodically in BBEdit with printed versions was fairly straightforward and swift.

I then created all 38 writing spaces to accommodate the Latin text, copying and pasting the content in from BBEdit. Each writing space is named according to the range of line numbers which it contains, and the text formatted to a common standard.

One minor change which I have made is in the treatment of line numbers (Latin text only). It might have been nice to have placed them in a margin, but shrinking their size and putting them at the start and end, and at the beginning of intermediate lines, makes them accessible but inconspicuous. Your taste and preferred solution may be different.

The matching English writing spaces are named identically – made possible by keeping them in separate containers – and have no formatting or adornments beyond the text colour.

I then generated the composite writing spaces one by one, arranged them according to the sections within the book, and linked them using plain links. These were the most demanding task, made much simpler and more rhythmic by Storyspace’s wonderful Duplicate command. This was my workflow:

I selected the last-created writing space (in Edit mode), and invoked the Duplicate command in the Edit menu.

For writing spaces with a title ending in a number, Storyspace conveniently creates a new identical writing space with that number incremented, so in most cases I did not even have to edit the title of the duplicate. However, the references to the names of the included writing spaces had to be changed to bring in the content from the next Latin and English sections.

That was simply done by referring to my edited Latin text (in BBEdit), which shows the line numbers for each section. One convenience which I did not use was to give these writing spaces a prototype with smart quotes disabled. When editing the ^include commands, the plain quotes will normally be automatically converted to smart quotes, which do not work with ^include. I was content to correct these as they occurred, by replacing them with Control-Shift-” quotes, but you can disable smart quotes in the Inspector, and apply that to their prototype.

Once I was happy with the conditional include commands to bring in that writing space’s content, I switched to Read mode and checked that the code had worked.

All that remained was to drag the new writing space into the right location in the Map view, and connect its plain link up with the previous writing space in sequence.

The end result is a Storyspace/Tinderbox document which now contains the whole of Book 1 in Latin and English parallel text. You can download a copy from here: ovidmetamorphosesbook1a

As far as hypertext goes, this is only a start, of course. My next task is to add in the paintings which I have been showing in my articles here. There are many other really neat things which you can do with the text alone, though. For example, Ovid used certain rhetorical modes, such as ecphrasis, repeatedly, and used parallel structures and words in different sections of text. Writing spaces can be added to examine those, and to draw comparisons between the myths of Daphne and Io.

I will be looking at those in future articles here, as well as adding the other books of Metamorphoses.

Two hundred years ago today, Charles-François Daubigny was born in Paris. My previous article traced his career up to 1863, and showed a small selection of his paintings. This article concludes that account.

In 1865, Daubigny visited London, where he had lunch with Whistler. Back in France, he continued painting his superb and highly innovative river landscapes in the Île de France, the countryside around Paris, which he knew from his childhood.

Working on the bank or in his floating studio, paintings such as his Boats on the Oise (1865) were generally well-received, although there were still critics who complained about his lack of Salon finish.

Les péniches (Barges) (1865) is another of these now well-known works, which were so influential on the mainstream Impressionists, who were just starting their careers.

Orchard (1865-69) is a fine example of his pioneering paintings of fruit trees in blossom, long before Japonisme became popular in Europe. Daubigny met Monet near Honfleur by 1866.

In 1866, Daubigny was elected to the jury for the Paris Salon. He was there able to defend the submitted paintings of Impressionists, including Pissarro, Renoir, and Cézanne. The following year he signed Bazille’s petition to hold a second Salon de Refusés, and in 1868 was able to persuade the jury to accept paintings from seven of the mainstream Impressionists. However, in 1870 he resigned from the jury when it decided to reject a painting by Monet.

It was in 1868 that the term impression seems to have been first applied to Daubigny’s landscapes, when Odilon Redon referred to Daubigny as “the painter of a moment, of an impression”, although it was not until later that Monet applied the term to one of his own paintings, Impression: Sunrise (1873), shown at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874.

The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 drove Daubigny to flee to Britain with his family. While there, Daubigny introduced Monet and Pissarro (who had also fled to London at the time) to Paul Durand-Ruel, who was Daubigny’s dealer and had just opened a gallery in London. Daubigny co-arranged in London an exhibition of paintings which included some of Monet’s. These relationships with Durand-Ruel were to prove decisive in Monet’s and Pissarro’s careers.

In 1871, Daubigny exhibited nine paintings at the International Exhibition in London. After that and the end of the Paris Commune, he and his family returned to France, where he resumed painting from his floating studio.

During the 1870s, Daubigny painted an experimental series of twenty-five moonlit landscapes, among them Banks of the Oise (date not known), which explored the chromatic effects of light.

Le Tonnelier (The Cooper) (1872) shows the increasing looseness in Daubigny’s skies.

Although undated, this painting of a Farm at Kerity, Brittany continued the transition to the Impressionist palette.

Daubigny’s undated October is an unusual and very effective portrayal of stubble-burning on a grey and windy autumn day.

Few of Daubigny’s paintings show the city of Paris, but this undated cityscape of Pont Marie is of a thoroughly urban riverbank.

By the time of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, when Daubigny was 57, his landscapes had become very painterly indeed. The Coming Storm; Early Spring (1874) is a good example.

Daubigny was an innovator in his depiction of what was later a popular motif for the mainstream Impressionists: fields of flowers, particularly poppies. He painted Fields in the Month of June in 1874, which compares with Monet and de Nittis in 1881, and Vincent van Gogh in 1890. When van Gogh was working for Goupil in 1874, he compiled a list of his favourite artists, which included Daubigny. And it was in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village which still contained Daubigny’s former house and studio, that van Gogh spent the last two months of his life, in 1890.

Far from becoming staid or repetitive, the final years of Daubigny’s career and life saw him pressing on to explore the transient effects of light. Landscape with a Sunlit Stream (c 1877) retains a lot of detail, but in its light and colour is gloriously Impressionist. I think that this is another of Daubigny’s great masterpieces.

Moonrise at Auvers (1877-78) is the culmination of his experimental nocturnes, another masterpiece in its own right, and the last painting which he completed.

Daubigny’s health had started to deteriorate in 1875, the year that his great friend Corot died. By this time, he was suffering from gout, asthma, and chronic bronchitis. These worsened each year, and constrained his painting. He was still able to work in his floating studio during the summer of 1877, but had to cancel plans to do so when it was colder. He died in Paris on 19 February 1878, having just attained the age of 61.

His work was not quickly forgotten, and its influence on the mainstream Impressionists and Vincent van Gogh was acknowledged. However, as the mainstream Impressionists became first better accepted and then very popular later in the century, Daubigny’s work faded into the pre-Impressionist past. When the history of Impressionism was repeatedly revised and re-shaped during the twentieth century, Daubigny and his innovative paintings were forgotten.

It is time to remember him not just as a major landscape painter, but as the first of the Impressionists.

Reference

Ambrosini, Lynne et al. (2016) Inspiring Impressionism: Daubigny, Monet, van Gogh, National Galleries of Scotland. ISBN 978 1 906270 86 5.

John Singer Sargent was a precocious and gifted painter, but those talents were realised with the teaching of Carolus-Duran, whose art is almost unknown. Charles Auguste Émile Durand, who called himself Carolus-Duran, died a century ago. This article and the next look at his career and a small selection of his paintings, in commemoration of that anniversary.

Carolus-Duran was born in Lille, in the extreme north-east of France on the border with Belgium, in 1837. He was initially taught by a local sculptor, before being taught to paint by François Souchon, who had been a pupil of Jacques Louis David. He moved to Paris in 1853, where he copied in the Louvre, assumed the name Carolus-Duran, and started to make friends with other artists including Henri Fantin-Latour. In 1858, he was introduced to Whistler.

In 1861, he entered a painting entitled Visiting the Convalescent for the Wicar Prize. The latter was a recent institution in memory of the Lille painter Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762-1834). Sadly, Carolus-Duran later cut up his original canvas which won the prize, but kept a fragment which is now in the Musée d’Orsay, and painted this variant, The Sleeping Man (1861), which is in Lille. Both show clear influence of Gustave Courbet’s realism.

Although not as prestigious as the Prix de Rome, the prize was sufficiently valuable to enable Carolus-Duran to study in Rome and beyond, which he did in 1862.

For much of the nineteenth century, there were French troops occupying or stationed in Rome; until the Franco-Prussian War started in 1870, they were mainly there to ‘protect’ the Papal States, and when Italy became independent in 1861, its capital remained in Florence. Against this turbulent background, Carolus-Duran painted his disturbing work The Assassinated Man, or Remembrance of the Roman Campaign (1865).

In 1866, he moved from Rome to Spain, where he became influenced by Vélazquez. He then returned to Paris, where in 1869 he married Pauline Croizette, a painter in pastels and of miniatures.

The Kiss (1868) is a touching double-portrait of Carolus-Duran kissing his fiancée Pauline, and perhaps one of the most touching paintings of any couple.

In the year of their marriage, Carolus-Duran visited a small village near Boulogne, on the Channel coast, and painted the beach there. The Beach at Audresselles (1869) (above) and Low Tide at Audresselles (1869) (below) are two of these paintings, in which he may have been experimenting with plein air techniques. He does not appear to have painted any later landscapes.

In 1870, Carolus-Duran started to concentrate on painting portraits. His Portrait of Hector Hanoteau (1870) shows this landscape painter, who lived from 1823-1890, and was a friend of Gustave Courbet.

Merrymakers (1870) is a superb and quite intimate family portrait, which I think ranks among his best works. Sadly, the joy seen here was short-lived. That same year, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Carolus-Duran remained in Paris, fighting in the same battle in which the young history painter Henri Regnault was killed.

Carolus-Duran’s oil sketch of Henri Regnault Dead on the Battlefield (1871) was painted the following year. After the war, he stayed with his family in Brussels, and in 1872, following their return to Paris, he opened his first proper studio. Among his early pupils there was the young John Singer Sargent.

His fine Equestrian portrait of Mademoiselle Croizette in 1873 is an excellent example of his early portraits; bearing the same surname as his wife, I suspect that this is her sister.

The Artist’s Daughter, Marie-Anne (1874) is a delightful portrait of his daughter and her small dog. I am sorry that the image is of low quality, but it is the only copy which I could find. Marie-Anne married the young playwright Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) in 1889, although they divorced fifteen years later.

Reference

Wikipedia.

By the mid 1870s, Carolus-Duran had established himself as a portrait painter in Paris, and in 1874-75 had his first solo show at the Cercle des Mirlitons.

Carolus-Duran was the right painter, in the right city, at the right time to paint a succession of rich and upwardly mobile women. Among his early stars was his Portrait of Mademoiselle de Lancey (1876), which he exhibited in the Salon the following year, where she became known as ‘the lady with the red cushion’. Most of those who attended that Salon knew only too well who she was: one of the great courtesans of the Belle Epoque.

She was born Julia Tahl, in Baltimore, MD, in 1851. When she arrived in Paris, she quickly arranged to attend soirées, and led a wild life, with a succession of rich lovers. The scarlets and crimsons and her direct wide-eyed gaze at the viewer left little to the imagination, and the critics were merciless with Carolus-Duran. But a little notoriety, and such a wonderful painting, were not a bad thing at all for the artist.

Portrait of Madame Henry Fouquier (1876) is a much more conventional painting of the wife of Henry Fouqier, a journalist who lived from 1838-1901.

Portrait of a Red-Haired Woman (1876) is quite a different type of portrait, probably painted of a close friend. From the date it is possible that this may have been of Victorine Meurent (1844-1927), who modelled for Édouard Manet and others, and was a painter in her own right.

In 1876, Carolus-Duran visited Russia.

Portrait of Mrs Harry Vane Milbank (1877) shows Alice Sidonie Van den Bergh, a woman with a very unusual background. Born in Brussels, she first married the Marquis Edward Charles de Belleroche, who was living in Britain. When he died in 1867, the family moved to Paris, where in 1871 she married Harry Vane Milbank (1848-1892), a former officer in the Royal Horse Guards who had no money. Her son (by de Belleroche) was Count Albert de Belleroche, who is sometimes known as the French John Singer Sargent, although today he has almost been forgotten.

It is sometimes said that Carolus-Duran only painted portraits after about 1870, but that is not accurate. He was commissioned to paint this startling ceiling decoration for the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris, which shows The Glorification of Maria de’ Medici (1878). She had been the second wife of King Henry IV of France, and lived from 1575-1642. A noted patron of the arts, the Palais du Luxembourg had been built and furnished for her, with Rubens as her court painter, and his famous cycle of paintings there one of his greatest commissions.

John Singer Sargent’s famous Portrait of Carolus-Duran (1879) is not only his personal tribute to his teacher, but when it was shown at the Salon proved the foundation of Sargent’s own career as a portraitist.

Portrait of Édouard Manet of about 1880 is probably the most famous and finest portrait of Manet in his later years; he died in 1883.

Portrait of Queen Maria Pia of Portugal (1880) shows Dona Maria Pia of Savoy (1847-1911), who was the wife of King Luis I of Portugal. Along with the rest of the Portuguese royal family, she left for exile in 1910, and died in Italy the following year.

Vision (1883) appears to be a fairy-fantasy scene, perhaps used as a vehicle for his figurative painting.

In 1890, he was a founder-member of the second Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and was elected its president in 1900.

Obsession (1898) is another unusual work, which shows a woman in contemporary dress collapsed in grief at the foot of the Crucifixion. In the sky behind is a cloud containing indistinct figures.

Portrait of Mrs. William Astor (1890) shows Caroline Webster ‘Lina’ Schermerhorn (1830–1908), who married the businessman William Backhouse Astor, Jr., (1829-1892). She apparently reigned over New York and Newport society, being known simply as “the Mrs Astor”.

Danae (c 1900) is a beautifully simple painting of a favourite story from Greek mythology, of Danaë and the Golden Shower. The mother of Perseus, she was impregnated by Zeus who ‘appeared’ in the form of a shower of gold, which made her pregnant. Her father wanted male heirs, but wanted to keep his daughter childless, so he confined her to a tomb-like bronze chamber in his palace. With a skylight as its only source of light and air, when Zeus lusted after her, his only means of doing so was to descend on her in the form of golden rain. This is seen falling from the upper edge of the painting.

I do not have a date for Carolus-Duran’s painting of Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth. The daughter of Zeus and Hera, her attributes include a wine cup, the eagle, ivy, and the fountain of youth. The artist shows her almost wing-walking on a huge eagle, while pouring wine into a cup held in her left hand.

In 1904, Carolus-Duran was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and appointed Director of the Académie de France in Rome, a post which he held until 1913.

He died in Paris on 17 February 1917. His most famous pupil had been John Singer Sargent, but among his others were Theodore Robinson, Maximilien Luce, James Carroll Beckwith, and Paul Helleu. He was a fine artist, and an even greater teacher, whose pupils have certainly left their mark.

Reference

Wikipedia.

There can’t be many artists who died before they reached the age of forty, but still have a whole room in the Louvre dedicated to their work, and a couple of paintings in the Musée d’Orsay too. Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) does, and his other great legacy was his influence on Gustave Moreau and others. In fact, as I’ll show here, several of Moreau’s motifs and themes followed his mentor Chassériau.

Chassériau was born to a French adventurer in what is now the Dominican Republic, when it was first a French then a Spanish colony. His family moved to Paris when he was a young infant, and his precocious skill at drawing was soon recognised. He started as a pupil in the studio of JAD Ingres in 1830, when he was only eleven years old. Ingres was struck by his talent, and rated him as his truest follower.

But in 1834, Ingres was appointed as the Director of the French Academy in Rome, leaving Chassériau to fall under the influence of Ingres’ rival Eugène Delacroix. Within two years, in 1836, Chassériau had his first work exhibited at the Salon, where he was promptly awarded a third-class medal. Chassériau travelled to Rome in 1840 to try to heal the rift with Ingres, to no avail.

Susanna at her Bath, or Susanna and the Elders, from 1839, is among his most important early paintings. It shows a scene from the story in the Old Testament of this pious woman who was watched when she was bathing in her garden, by two voyeuristic elders. They tried to blackmail her into committing adultery with them, threatening to report that she had met a young man with whom she was having an adulterous relationship.

Susanna stood fast, and was tried and sentenced to death. The young Daniel intervened, showed that it was the elders who had lied, as result of which it was they who were executed, and virtue triumphed.

Chassériau shows the most popular scene, which here combines a delicate figure study of Susannah, with a condemnatory interpretation of the voyeurs behind.

His watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) seems to have been his first painting of the motif which was to become an obsession in Moreau’s paintings. Here the Greek poet clutches her lyre, with her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the Leucadian Cliff.

Andromeda Chained to the Rock by the Nereids (1840) is an unusual depiction of a popular narrative scene, from the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. When Cetus, a sea monster, is devastating his kingdom, Andromeda’s father is advised to sacrifice her to appease Cetus. She is then chained to a rock by the Nereids to await her fate, as shown.

Cetus is just arriving at the left edge (which appears to have been cropped badly, I am afraid). Also cropped from the left edge is Andromeda’s saviour, Perseus, who has recently killed Medusa the Gorgon. Andromeda’s face shows her abject terror, as the Nereids make haste to secure her before Cetus reaches them.

In complete contrast to most of Moreau’s history paintings, Chassériau has followed the classical rules of Alberti in constructing his narrative, using facial expression and body language eloquently.

When he was in Italy in 1840, trying to reconcile with Ingres, Chassériau visited the ruins of Pompeii. The buried Roman town there had been extensively excavated since its rediscovery in 1738.

Taken from another well-known and often-painted Old Testament story, The Toilet of Esther (1841) is less strongly narrative. It shows Esther, an orphan daughter of a Benjamite who had been living in exile in Persia. After becoming a member of King Ahasuerus’s harem, Esther dressed in her finest in order to successfully persuade the king to spare the life of her former guardian, and to execute his anti-Semitic grand vizier.

In 1846, Chassériau travelled to Algeria for the first of several visits. He seems to have spent much of his time in and around the city of Constantine, in the north-east of the country, making copious sketches and drawings. On his return, he then worked those up into finished oil paintings which are among some of the finest of the ‘oriental’ works of the day.

In 1844, Chassériau was commissioned to paint murals for the grand staircase of the Cour Des Comptes, which he completed in 1848. A monumental work, it was badly damaged when the building was set ablaze during the Paris Commune in May 1871 – an act of destruction which distressed Moreau. Recovered fragments of this are now preserved in the Louvre.

In 1849, Chassériau painted another version of Sappho about to throw herself from the Leucadian cliff. I apologise for its poor image quality.

Woman and Little Girl of Constantine with a Gazelle (1849) is a very painterly work derived from Chassériau’s visits to Algeria, apparently based on his sketches of scenes in the city of Constantine there.

This part of Algeria had been seized by France in 1837, so when Chassériau visited, it was an integral part of France. Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine (1851) shows a mother and, presumably, her mother with an infant in an ingenious rocking cradle. Constantine is now the third largest city in Algeria, and has long had a substantial Jewish population.

The Tepidarium (1853) was inspired by Chassériau’s visit to Pompeii, and shows a carefully composed group of women in the warm room prior to their proceeding to a hot or cold bath. It is traditionally understood to have been the most richly-decorated of the spaces in classical Roman baths. This painting was acclaimed when it was shown at the Salon.

During his brief career, Chassériau also painted several scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, particularly of the tragedy of Macbeth.

In 1854, Chassériau returned to his north African theme with his vivacious painting of a Battle of Arab Horsemen Around a Standard. This shows the influence of Delacroix, and despite its wonderful painterly style, contains numerous details, such as the brandishing of a severed head, by one of the horsemen at the rear, mid-right.

In the early 1850s, Chassériau was commissioned to paint murals in the Paris churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, which he completed by 1855. Descent from the Cross (1855) is his vast mural for the latter, showing one of the most popular of the scenes from the Crucifixion, also known as the Deposition. Chassériau tackled this in a very conventional and traditional manner, using a composition which dated back to Rogier van der Weyden in about 1435.

These huge works and his already deteriorating health combined to weaken him during the winter of 1855-56.

He still managed to paint this powerful and intimate version of Susanna and the Elders (1856), though, before his health finally collapsed in 1856. He died that October at the age of only 37. I can see why Moreau held him in such respect, and why Ingres is alleged to have called him ‘the Napoleon of painting’.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After Apollo’s attempt to rape Daphne, who metamorphosed into the laurel, Ovid tells us no less than three myths with four metamorphoses, ingeniously embedded into a single story. Ovid leads us into this by establishing that, just as Daphne was the daughter of the river god Peneus, so Io was the daughter of the river god Inachus.

The outermost story consists of Jupiter’s rape of Io, who he then transforms into a white cow for safe keeping. This leads to the embedded story of Mercury murdering Argus, whose hundred eyes are then used to transform the peacock. Within that story, Mercury tells Argus the story of Pan’s attempt to rape Syrinx. Finally, Io is transformed back to human form, and leads us onto Ovid’s next myth (mercifully covered in the next article in this series).

The Story

Jupiter meets Io when she is out walking, and taking a fancy to her, offers to lead her safely through the hazards of the forest – a pretext for leading her there to rape her. Io flees from him, but Jupiter brings her to a halt:
For while he spoke she fled,
and swiftly left behind the pasture fields
of Lerna, and Lyrcea’s arbours, where
the trees are planted thickly. But the God
called forth a heavy shadow which involved
the wide extended earth, and stopped her flight
and ravished in that cloud her chastity.

Juno, watching from the heavens, suspects that her husband is up to no good again, so she descends to earth and dispels the clouds which he had used to stop Io’s flight and conceal his rape of her. Jupiter, knowing that his wife is on his trail, quickly transforms Io into a white cow. Juno is immediately suspicious, and asks to be given the cow.

Trapped, Jupiter has no option but to make a gift of Io, the cow, to his wife, who then entrusts the cow to the care of the ever-watchful Argus:
Juno regardful of Jove’s cunning art,
lest he might change her to her human form,
gave the unhappy heifer to the charge
of Argus, Aristorides, whose head
was circled with a hundred glowing eyes;
of which but two did slumber in their turn
whilst all the others kept on watch and guard.

Io’s life as a cow comes as a shock, and is miserable for her. She manages to communicate her name to her father by scratching it out with a hoof, but Argus then removes her to a mountain to graze. Jupiter takes pity on Io, and devises a way of getting her back, by killing Argus. He therefore calls Mercury to murder Argus.

Mercury’s first task is to lull Argus to sleep. He tries playing his reed (‘Pan’) pipes, but then resorts to telling Argus the story of Pan and Syrinx, another myth like that of Apollo and Daphne, in which Pan lusts after the beautiful Naiad Syrinx. Part way through this story, Mercury has already put Argus to sleep, but Ovid completes the story of Pan and Syrinx for the benefit of the reader.

When Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx has almost succeeded, Syrinx implores her sisters to transform her. Just as Daphne before, when Pan reaches her, she has been changed into reeds:
but she despised the prayers of Pan, and fled
through pathless wilds until she had arrived
the placid Ladon’s sandy stream, whose waves
prevented her escape. There she implored
her sister Nymphs to change her form: and Pan,
believing he had caught her, held instead
some marsh reeds for the body of the Nymph;
and while he sighed the moving winds began
to utter plaintive music in the reeds,
so sweet and voice like that poor Pan exclaimed;
“Forever this discovery shall remain
a sweet communion binding thee to me.”—
and this explains why reeds of different length,
when joined together by cementing wax,
derive the name of Syrinx from the maid.

Returning to the story of Mercury and Argus, once his victim is sound asleep, Mercury beheads him and throws his head from a cliff, ending his watch over Io the cow:
Such words the bright god Mercury would say;
but now perceiving Argus’ eyes were dimmed
in languorous doze, he hushed his voice and touched
the drooping eyelids with his magic wand,
compelling slumber. Then without delay
he struck the sleeper with his crescent sword,
where neck and head unite, and hurled his head,
blood dripping, down the rocks and rugged cliff.
Low lies Argus: dark is the light of all
his hundred eyes, his many orbed lights
extinguished in the universal gloom
that night surrounds; but Saturn’s daughter spread
their glister on the feathers of her bird,
emblazoning its tail with starry gems.

This brings us to the third transformation, that of the hundred eyes of the dead Argus into the eyes on the feathers of Juno’s peacocks.

Juno expresses her anger at Io the cow, eventually driving her as far as the river Nile in Egypt. Jupiter and Juno then make peace, and the king of the gods promises his wife that Io will trouble her no more, as Io is transformed back into human form:
And now imperial Juno, pacified,
permitted Io to resume her form,—
at once the hair fell from her snowy sides;
the horns absorbed, her dilate orbs decreased;
the opening of her jaws contracted; hands
appeared and shoulders; and each transformed hoof
became five nails. And every mark or form
that gave the semblance of a heifer changed,
except her fair white skin; and the glad Nymph
was raised erect and stood upon her feet.
But long the very thought of speech, that she
might bellow as a heifer, filled her mind
with terror, till the words so long forgot
for some sufficient cause were tried once more.

This provides Ovid with the lead-in to the next myth, which I will cover in my next article:
and since that time, the linen wearing throng
of Egypt have adored her as a God;
for they believe the seed of Jove prevailed;
and when her time was due she bore to him
a son called Epaphus; who also dwells
in temples with his mother in that land.

The Paintings

These three inter-related myths have inevitably proved too complex to capture in a single painting, but have provided a rich series of images from many different artists.

Correggio took on the challenge of depicting Jupiter raping Io, and came up with a subtle approach in his Jupiter and Io (1520-40). This departs from Ovid’s account, in that Jupiter has actually become part of the clouds which he used to cloak his adultery, and re-interprets the rape as a seduction.

John Hoppner’s much later Jupiter and Io (1785) takes a similar approach, but does not really innovate from the original.

Less well-known but in many ways the most remarkable depiction of Ovid’s complex stories, Bartolomeo di Giovanni’s panel The Myth of Io (c 1490) is believed to have had a companion which told the first part of the story using a similar multiplex narrative technique.

This wonderful surviving panel tells the second part, after Io has been transformed into a cow, although he shows her as being light brown. At the left, Jupiter (in the clouds) directs Mercury (carrying his caduceus) to free Io the cow from the watchful eyes of Argus (shown with a red cloak). Mercury takes a flock up the hill to Argus, where he sits with Argus and puts him to sleep. Once asleep (centre), Mercury beheads Argus, and gives Juno his head to place its eyes on her peacocks (bottom centre).

Io the cow is then driven by three naked Furies to the River Nile, at the right, where Io is returned to human form and flees under the sight of Jupiter and Juno making peace with one another.

The most popular scene in the stories is that of Mercury lulling Argus to sleep. However, hardly any painters depict Argus having the hundred eyes specified in the text. Abraham Bloemaert is an exception, in his carefully composed Mercury, Argus and Io (c 1592). Mercury is playing his flute at the left, as Argus falls asleep in front of him, his additional eyes visible over the surface of his head. In the distance at the right is Io as a white cow.

The far figure on a green hill may be another instance of multiplex narrative, as it could represent Mercury holding the head of Argus aloft after he had murdered him; unfortunately this is difficult to be certain about.

The story of Pan and Syrinx has also proved quite popular. François Boucher seems to have painted it many times, and his Pan and Syrinx from 1743 is probably his finest version, even though it alludes to Syrinx’s transformation rather than showing it.

Rubens’ late oil sketch of Pan and Syrinx (c 1636) is one of the few paintings which attempts to show Syrinx undergoing metamorphosis, and he makes Pan appear thoroughly lecherous.

Perhaps the most famous painting of Mercury and Argus is that of Velázquez, made in about 1659, the year before he died. The two figures are shown in contemporary dress, with Mercury just about to raise his sword and decapitate the sleeping Argus (who has no evidence of any supernumerary eyes). Behind them is Io, not white but tan in colour.

Rubens painted several versions of Mercury about to kill Argus which are very skilful, but omit Argus’ extra eyes. His other superb painting of this story is Juno and Argus (c 1611), which shows the conclusion of the story of Mercury and Argus. Juno, wearing the red dress and coronet, is receiving eyes which have been removed from Argus’ head, and is placing them on the tail feathers of her peacocks. The headless corpse of Argus lies contorted in the foreground.

Rubens has taken the opportunity of introducing a visual joke, in which Juno’s left hand appears to be cupped under the breasts of the woman behind. This also emphasises the plentiful arcs throughout his composition.

Sadly, Ovid’s triple story with multiple metamorphoses seems to have been largely ignored by the great narrative painters of the nineteenth century. In this case, the older works are the best.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Allow me a brief gloat: The Eclectic Light Company blog has just reached its first serious milestone, that of half a million views.

The first year was, as every blogger knows, the hardest. With only 76,399 views from 29,173 visitors, there were days when I wondered whether I was just writing here for my own benefit.

Last year, more and more of you came here: 160,057 visitors in all, viewing 334,757 pages. Then last autumn, with the release of macOS Sierra, you started coming in hordes, maybe even in buses. Over the winter, the busiest day saw 3,352 views in all, and the grand total is now 500,075 views and 232,540 visitors.

I (still) don’t write articles to bump up these figures – but because I want to write about these topics and enjoy doing so, and because I hope that you will enjoy reading them, and find them useful.

Thank you for coming. I hope that I can continue to make it worth your while.

Over the last six weeks or so, I have been looking at the life of Lovis Corinth, together with images of well over a hundred of his paintings. This article and the next draw on those articles to survey his work in three genres: this article looks at his self-portraits and nudes, and the next at his history paintings.

There are two main hypotheses which I want to consider: the first is that his style changed quite dramatically with the times, and the second is that his stroke, at the end of 1911, was no ’cause’ of his change in style – it being commonly held that his work became more painterly, perhaps even more ‘abstract’, as a result of lasting problems in his arm(s) from that stroke.

Self-portraits

His earliest self-portrait is typical of his initial detailed realist style, although he did not show the meticulous detail in his hair or beard, for instance, which was more popular earlier in the nineteenth century.

By his later years in Munich, the skin of his face has become more painterly, and non-flesh surfaces such as his shirt and the landscape background, as well as the skull, have obviously visible brushstrokes. A simple self-portrait was also not enough: he posed beside a skeleton, making the comparison between his living, fleshy face, and the fleshless skull next to it.

His move from Munich – where he already had a reputation for drinking and social life – to Berlin brought him love and inspiration from his fiancée then wife Charlotte Berend, but intensified his work, social life, and drinking. His depiction of flesh has a much rougher facture, and most of the passages in this work appear to have been painted very quickly and sketchily.

These changes are even more evident in this wild and ribald double portrait with his wife, posing appropriately as Bacchantes. His chest and left arm now have stark dark brushstrokes which give the flesh a texture rather than form.

Before his stroke, and the outbreak of the First World War, he posed as the standard-bearer to a mediaeval knight, his head held high with pride for Prussia. The flesh of his face appears very rough-hewn now, particularly over surfaces which would normally be shown smooth and blended, such as the forehead. Bright patches on the suit of armour are shown with coarse daubs of white paint.

After his stroke, and just as the First World War was about to start, there has been little roughening in his facture. His face, though, looks more worried, and his previous pride appears to have been quashed.

By the end of the war, when he was 60, he had aged quite markedly, with his receding hair and gaunt cheeks. Although his face and hand are as sketchy as before, his hair and left ear have been rendered more roughly still.

When he was out in the country sun at the family’s chalet by Walchensee, he painted his clothing and the landscape extremely roughly. He looks his years, but if anything appears more healthy and relaxed than when he was confined to Berlin.

His last self-portrait shows age catching up with him, and has an even rougher facture. His forehead is now a field of daubs of different colours, applied coarsely. His hair consists of quite gestural marks seemingly made in haste.

Nudes

Even in the early years of his career, Corinth painted the flesh of his nudes quite roughly, with an abundace of visible brushstrokes, as if they were still being hewn from the paint on his palette. As with his self-portraits, their faces were more smoothly-worked, but hair was never given the appearance of individual filaments.

By the end of his time in Munich, Corinth showed flesh as if it had been sculpted in brushstrokes, and the bedclothes have been sketched in remarkably loosely.

This more formal group of nudes is generally more ‘finished’, but also has passages which are more painterly – particularly in the more peripheral figures of the clothed man with them, and the woman at the far left.

This was his first substantial nude painted in the studio after his stroke, and a return to one of Corinth’s favourite themes. Its brushmarks are considerably finer than the last two nudes prior to his stroke, but were here painted in tempera rather than oils. This is also a significantly larger canvas than most of his other nudes. This confirms that, when he wanted to at least, he was still able to apply much finer, controlled brushstrokes despite any sequelae from his stroke.

His last nude, painted shortly before his death, shows the roughest facture of all, with flesh that is textured in impasto. If this were to be the result of a physical limitation or problem, then rather than improving during the recovery from his stroke, it has steadily worsened.

The changes which took place over these nearly forty years in Corinth’s application of paint are very great indeed. Where many other painters have become stuck in their mid-career style, leading to their later work looking staid and stale, Corinth’s career shows a relentless progression from detailed realist to loose and gestural expressionist.

His emphasis has steadily transferred from form, to colour and texture. This has ensured that his later works have been every bit as innovative and original as those from earlier in his career.

In the great majority of similar cases of stroke, physical and mental effects are most marked immediately after the event, following which there is a progressive recovery. Corinth’s stroke was severe enough to render him unconscious initially, and to leave him with significantly impaired brain function for several days or more afterwards.

However, initial paralysis in his left arm and leg clearly resolved over the following weeks and months. Far from this being reflected in his paintings between 1912-1925, his facture typically became rougher and more painterly as he grew older. That is the exact opposite of the pattern which would be expected if his painting were significantly impaired as a result of his stroke.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)

Before progressing with my hypertext version of Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for Storyspace and Tinderbox, there are three issues which I’d like to visit.

Tidy tiles

Mark Anderson, probably the greatest expert on these apps outside Eastgate Systems, has kindly pointed out one small blemish in the Map view of my previous version: even when in Read mode, the body text of the bilingual writing spaces leaks into the tile and is displayed as the conditional include code. I had rather ignored that as being a bit too difficult for me to solve, but Mark recommends the simple solution of setting the attribute $MapBodyTextSize to fix this.

To make this easier, I have now made all those bilingual writing spaces use a new prototype, which has $MapBodyTextSize set to 1, which suppresses the display of body text in the writing space tile. By default it is set to 0, which displays it, or you can specify the point size of the text, e.g. 12 for 12 point text.

An alternative might be to use a custom shape for the tiles, as body text is never displayed in those.

Why not explode the text?

Mark also asked a very good question: why didn’t I use Storyspace’s superb feature to explode imported text to generate the Latin and English writing spaces automatically?

If you’re not familiar with the power of this technique, I have written a tutorial on using this to import poetry which is divided into verses. It is a powerful technique which can very quickly convert large amounts of text into writing spaces with minimal effort.

I could have edited my source texts to use a common delimiter between each section destined for a separate writing space, and placed the title on the first line of the section. In this case, although I started preparing to do this, I decided not to, because the work involved in preparing the text before importation and in editing each writing space afterwards would, if anything, have been made more time-consuming. And it was that work which took much of the time.

I had two major tasks to perform on the text before I could even think about importing it into Storyspace: one was to reconcile the line numbering with most other Latin versions of the work, the other to decide where to divide the Latin and its matching English translation. Only when I examined a recent reference copy of the Latin did I discover that the Perseus version had line numbers which differed from that, for almost half the book.

Division of the text into writing spaces was also not simple. This had to be performed at matching points in both the Latin and English versions, although the translation is not sufficiently literal to move directly from one to the other. Some of the sections then had to be tried for length in Storyspace before making final decisions. Finally, the Latin and English writing spaces had to be named to match one another, the name giving the line numbers for the Latin section.

There are times when the process of actually importing the text is the quickest, simplest, and least controversial step!

Debugging and testing

I haven’t looked at these issues before, as my use of Storyspace’s scripting has been very simple, to date. However, one valuable aid for those debugging more advanced and complex scripts, and during user testing, is my Blowhole command tool, available from the Downloads menu at the top of this article.

Storyspace and Tinderbox give access to the command line with the runCommand() command. If you install Blowhole in an accessible path, such as /usr/local/bin, you can trigger it to make a timed entry into the log of a Mac running macOS Sierra: simply use the script
runCommand("/usr/local/bin/blowhole -d 42")
for example to write a default level entry in the log containing the number 42.

Unfortunately issues prevent the writing of arbitrary strings, which would be even more useful, but you can harness this to log the time that a reader enters each writing space. Add that script to the $OnVisit attribute of the prototype of the writing spaces which you want to monitor, then in each one, edit the integer to a unique number for that writing space.

After your test reader has worked through your hypertext, you can then run Consolation, my free tool for browsing Sierra’s logs (from the Downloads page), and filter on Blowhole’s subsystem, which is co.eclecticlight.blowhole. You’ll then see accurate timings for the moment that reader opened each writing space, with the integers telling you which writing space they visited, and the sequence. If you’re developing a ‘serious’ hypertext document, this information can usefully augment your reader-testing.

Adding the paintings

My major outstanding task for the parallel hypertext version was to add the paintings which I showed in my articles here. Out of the various options for including them, I have gone for the simplest, for author and reader, which is to place each image in its own writing space, and to create text links from the relevant section of parallel text out to the painting, then back into the original writing space.

As usual, I had to be meticulous in preparing the images of the paintings. Using GraphicConverter, I checked their resolution and set it to a standard, here 72 dpi, then scaled the image so that its longer dimension is 1024 pixels. This ensures that the 21 images do not inflate the document size too severely, and readers can keep windows to a reasonable and consistent size, but still view each painting in its entirety.

I created a prototype for the writing spaces containing paintings, although at the moment this only differs in the colour of the tile, and they are all placed inside a container named Gallery. I then added the captions and relevant text, and formed text links out to them from the appropriate section of parallel text, and back again to the same point.

The only slight delay in completing this resulted from the fact that I had to browse the writing spaces in Read mode in order to select the most appropriate location for each painting, but then had to switch back to Edit mode to add the anchor text and links. That is one of the disadvantages of using included text in a writing space, as you can only inspect its contents in Read mode.

The end result, my illustrated version of the Perseus parallel Latin and English versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1, is here: ovidmetamorphosesbook1b

I hope that you enjoy reading it using Storyspace, Storyspace Reader, or Tinderbox.