There are some mythological subjects which painters would do best to avoid, whilst others almost guarantee success. Medea, sorceress and jilted wife of Jason of Golden Fleece and Argonauts fame, is clearly one of the former.

For a start, there is no single authoritative account of the myths of Jason and Medea. The ancients had no problem in living with conflicting tales, as in their day so little in life could be proved in any rigorous way. But since the Age of Enlightenment we have looked at the world in the expectation of singular truths. In Medea’s case, there isn’t even any rough consensus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps inevitably, my final example comes from John William Waterhouse in is his Jason and Medea (1907). 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. Unlike Sandys, Waterhouse paints but a single toad, behaving itself quietly on the floor.

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

The next, and more successful, paintings of Medea’s story show her immediately prior to the killing of her children. I will consider those when I examine Ovid’s fuller account of the myths of Jason and Medea in my series on his Metamorphoses.

My second example of Chinese narrative painting, drawn from Cédric Laurent’s study, is, at first sight, another exquisitely beautiful handscroll painting of a landscape, with its forests, rugged hill country, and rivers.

It was painted in 1548 by Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470-1559), and at the end of the scroll his son Wen Jia (1501-1583) has written an account of the background to this painting. It is apparently a copy of an original by Zhao Bosu (c 1123-1182, not to be confused with his brother Zhao Boju). The owner of this original, a friend of Wen’s, was concerned because a local official wanted to present that handscroll to the son of the powerful Grand Secretary, to curry influence. Wen therefore made this copy, which was presumably presented by the official in lieu of the original.

This painting is based on the text of Su Shi 蘇軾 or 苏轼 (Su Tungpo, 1037-1101) in his Second (or Latter) Ode to (or on) the Red Cliff, which describes Su and his friends visiting the Red Cliff.

Viewed overall, there are no clues that this is narrative in nature. The scroll consists of a series of quite different landscape sections, which are integrated into a series of islands dissected by stretches of water. Those do not show any obvious division between scenes, either.

Late one evening in the late autumn, Su left for a walk with two friends. He realised that he had no food or wine for them, but one of his friends said that he had been fishing that night, and had caught a large fish. In this first scene, that friend is shown fishing on the river. The deciduous trees have already lost their leaves for the coming winter, and there are small groups of waders at the water’s edge.

The second scene shows Su with his two friends discussing their journey, the food and wine.

Su decided to return home and speak to his wife about the wine. She had kept a bottle for this occasion, which they collected, and the three set off on their walk. This third scene shows Su taking the bottle (shown prominently in red, in the centre of this view) from his wife.

The fourth scene shows Su and his friends using a boat to cross the river, where they started the steep ascent to the Red Cliff.

After climbing the steep path among dense vegetation, the three reached the Red Cliff, from where Su thought he could see the palace of the god of the river. By this time, he was alone, as his friends had not followed him that far. The fifth scene shows Su on a narrow path winding its way above the Red Cliff. Below, the waves are dashing against its foot.

Su and his companions then boarded their boat, and proceeded out into mid-river to view their surroundings. It was almost midnight, and everything was silent. A crane flew above them and emitted a loud cry before heading off to the west. The sixth scene shows the group being taken out to the middle of the river, and the crane flying far above them (to the upper right).

They returned home, and Su Shi slept. He had a vivid dream that night about their walk to the Red Cliff. The seventh scene shows him asleep in his house, with a distant reminder of the Red Cliff.

The following morning, Su Shi got up, went to his door, and looked out at the landscape. This final scene in the handscroll shows him stood at the door of his house (lower right).

Laurent identifies four slightly different copies of this painting, which presumably each derive from Zhao Bosu’s original.

The basic form of narrative uses a series of frames, similar to those used in ‘comics’.

However, there are some important differences here. Most obvious is the fact that the same location, such as Su Shi’s house, is not shown consistently between frames. Compare scenes 3, 7, and 8, which apparently all show the same house, and the building appears quite different, as do its surroundings.

Scene 7 has a background which has most probably been altered deliberately, to refer to the Red Cliff, but scenes 3 and 8 should appear identical. It is only by reference to Su Shi’s original text that that is apparent: visually there are no clues that they are the same place.

Another important link to the verbal narrative is the passage of time. Scenes 2 to 7 are set at night, by the light of the moon, but there is no indication that they are. Scene 8 does feature a filled red circle, bearing text, which may be the rising sun, but otherwise there is no indication as to the time of day.

In effect, Wen Zhengming, and presumably Zhao Bosu in the original, have told the story primarily in the figures, setting them into frames which reflect limited aspects of the story, but which assemble into a handscroll resembling a single synchronous landscape. This is quite different from normal Western frame-based narrative, as seen in ‘comics’.

References

Wikipedia on Wen Zhengming, in French.

Laurent, Cédric (2017) Voyages Immobiles dans la prose ancienne, la peinture narrative sous la dynastie Ming (1368-1644), Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 978 2 251 44520 5. (In French, with copious original Chinese.)

Edvard Munch appeared pleased with his first series The Frieze of Life. Not only was it exhibited in Berlin in 1895, but it was shown again in Oslo later that year, and in Paris in 1897. He then left it for two years before adding works to detail transitions between its two major themes of love and death.

Munch assembled his mature version, titled Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, and exhibited it in Berlin in 1902. It then consisted of twenty-two paintings, arranged in four sections, which I detail in this and the following articles in this series.

The first of the four sections is titled Seeds of Love, and contains a sequence of six paintings which were arranged on the left wall of the room.

1. Evening Star (The Voice, 1893)

The Boston version of Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (1893), included in the 1895 version of the Frieze, was here titled Evening Star. It shows Munch’s lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ at the edge of the Borre Woods, to the north of Åsgårdstrand. Munch still preferred this over his second version of this painting (below), now in Oslo, which is cropped more closely and has additional boats on the fjord.

Both versions feature a brilliant golden-yellow pillar of reflected moonlight on the fjord, but it is the Boston version in which it forms a distinctive ‘i‘ which reappears in other paintings. This work initiates the sequence in which Munch gives his personal account of the process of falling in love.

2. Red and White (1894)

Although Munch had painted this in 1894, he did not include it in his Frieze until the second, 1902, version. It shows two women: at the left, dressed in white and looking out into the fjord at Åsgårdstrand, and in the centre, dressed in red and looking directly at the viewer. At the right, in what is now shown as the depths of a pine wood, there is evidence of a third figure, which has been painted out.

This motif is an introduction to the more complex composition of Sphinx (Woman in Three Stages), which appears later in the Frieze. Here it establishes the first two stages of woman: the ideal and innocent, and the mature and passionate. The woman in white is similar to the figure in The Voice, above, making this a link between initial innocence and later passion. These develop his narrative, and provide a reference mark to lead into the troubles of love.

3. Eye in Eye (c 1894)

Munch had already used Eye in Eye (1894) to show a further step in the development of the relationship between a man and a woman. In the original version shown prior to about 1906, this work was probably more gloomy in its colours and tones. After 1906, Munch is believed to have overpainted the hair of the woman and the tree to add the bright highlights seen in its current state.

4. Dance (Dance on the Beach/Shore) (c 1900)

Dance on the Beach or Dance on the Shore (c 1900) was among the paintings made by Munch to enlarge and enhance his original Frieze to its 1902 form. It shows a dance taking place on the shore of a fjord, viewed from the shore, through the pines, much as in The Voice. This appears to be a simple, happy occasion featuring five different women, the colour of their dresses linking back to Red and White above, and forward to The Dance of Life in the next section of the Frieze.

Later, in his panel Desire (1906-07) from the Reinhardt Frieze, Munch re-arranged the figures in a lighter and brighter setting, under the constant ‘i‘ of the moon and its reflection.

5. Kiss (c 1893)

The Kiss (1897), a later version of the painting also shown in his 1895 Frieze, is a close-cropped image in which the lovers dominate the canvas and fuse into a single form. This was derived from the earlier variant (below), painted by Munch during the winter of 1891-2 when he was at Nice, on the French Mediterranean coast.

The later cropped motif became a recurrent image in Munch’s prints, such as The Kiss below.

6. Love (Madonna, 1894)

The final painting in this opening section was Munch’s Madonna (1894). This provided the transition to the next section with its conflicting (and shocking) themes of saint, whore, and abandoned lover. His use of red as the colour for the halo is consistent with its interpretation of passion and earthy eroticism. In more conventional Christian religious art, these themes would normally have been reserved for depictions of Mary Magdalene.

This led to the next section’s theme Flowering and Passing of Love.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

By 1868, when Millet was in his mid-fifties, his social realism had been toned down, but he still showed himself capable of the unexpected, such as his pastel painting of Dandelions (1867-68). He had also received his most valuable commission, for a series of paintings of the four seasons.

With the rise of Impressionism over the final years of his life, Millet painted some extraordinary works exploring transient and unusual effects of light. His career was inevitably interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War: Millet moved with his wife and large family back to the area of his birth, near Gréville, for much of 1870-71.

One of his commissioned series, Spring (1868-73) is less about the blossom on the trees, or the mysterious figure in the distance, and more about its startling light: not just the double rainbow shown at the upper left, but the fleeting sunshine which floods the central part of the view. From the crops and seasonal flowers in the foreground to the inky black shower-clouds in the sky, this is a perfect summary of Spring in the countryside. It is now a countryside devoid of Millet’s toiling peasants.

Some of his depictions of life in the country were becoming worryingly sentimental too. La becquée (c 1870) is an ingenious and amusing painting, but a far cry from his previous work. A mother sits on a tiny stool, feeding three young daughters from a bowl which she cradles on her knee. As the food is offered to the middle girl on a wooden spoon, the child opens her mouth like a young chick in a bird’s nest.

Millet includes some other references to the theme: in the background a chicken walks towards the group, and two others are seen in the yard behind. On the ground close to the mother, a small wicker basket lies overturned on the ground, its contents suggestive of the eggs in a bird’s nest.

The family is obviously still part of the rural poor, but the social message is now buried in its gentle humour and sentimentality.

A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville (1871) is more in keeping with his message: caught in the (dawn?) twilight on her way to/from work, a grubby and exhausted young milkmaid is carrying a tatty old earthenware milkpot on her shoulder. Behind her the sky shows wonderfully fleeting light effects.

During these later years in his life, Millet’s health started to deteriorate. This did not stop him from painting, though.

Millet had also painted occasional landscapes, particularly of the coastline near his home village. The Cliffs of Gréville (1871) is a fine pastel depiction which surprises by its unusual scaling and distance effects. At first sight, the more distant clifftop seems quite far away, but the man recumbent on the skyline establishes that it is in fact quite close to the viewer. The white foam of the waves down below is shown very gesturally.

In The Gust of Wind (1871-73), Millet explores another transient effect, that of a severe storm. Its lone and distant figure is being blown almost double, as he is nearly struck by a large branch torn from the tree to the left. Indeed, that tree itself is being uprooted, and its leaves pepper the storm sky at dawn.

Calling the Cows Home (c 1872) is another depiction of fleeting effects of light in the countryside. Its lone figure of the herdsman has receded into the distance, though, and it is pictorial rather than bearing any social message. I am not sure how complete this painting is either: the cow in the foreground is clearly seen in its original drawn outline. Although Millet left some of his drawings in this style, this is claimed to have been painted in oils, which would imply that he did not finish painting that cow.

The Shepherd (1872-74), drawn in Conté crayon, is another puzzle. It would appear to be a preparatory drawing for Millet’s Shepherd Tending His Flock which has been claimed to date from around 1862, a decade earlier.

In the last couple of years of his life, Millet painted two exceptional works which look back at his career, and forward to the end of the century.

Millet’s Haystacks: Autumn (c 1874) contains a retrospective of many of his best paintings. The harvest has been gathered, and three huge haystacks dominate the canvas; they are painted in the distinctive style of all his haystacks. At the foot of one of them, a shepherd leans on his staff, resting from his labours as his flock gleans among the stubble.

The field opens to the plain around Barbizon, the open countryside where so many of Millet’s paintings had been made. Above, the sky is full of swirling birds, lit white against the purple-grey cloud of a building shower.

Quite unlike any of his previous paintings, Bird’s-Nesters (1874) shows country people clubbing small birds to bring them to the ground, where a couple are bent so low against the ground that they are almost resting on it, scrabbling to pick the stunned birds up and take them away as food. The man jumping up at the right is holding a burning hay brand to attract the birds to the clubs.

The light of the brand, birds, and branches of trees result in a unique broken effect, as if this were taking place in the middle of a violent electrical storm. This painting is breathtakingly innovative, and an intense visual experience like nothing I have seen in other nineteenth century art.

Millet died at Barbizon in early 1875, shortly after he and his wife had at long last been married in a church.

References

Wikipedia.
L’Atelier de Jean-François Millet, a private museum.

Sensier’s biography of Millet in English, and in French.

Lepoittevin, Lucien, and Lacambre, Geneviève (eds) (2002) Jean-François Millet, Au-delà de l’Angelus, Éditions de Monza. ISBN 978 2 908 07193 1. (In French.)

With the disposal of Athamas, Ino, and their children, the house of Cadmus, founder-king of Thebes, is finished. Ovid rounds it off with a short but touching myth which sees an end to Cadmus’ dynasty.

It is worth noting that, although Ovid names Cadmus’ wife as Harmonia, in other sources she is Hermione, and is frequently referred to as that during and after the Renaissance.

The Story

Cadmus and his faithful wife Harmonia leave the city of Thebes, which he had founded. They travel until they eventually reach Illyria on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea (roughly the former Yugoslavia), where they talk about earlier times. Cadmus wonders whether the fearsome dragon which he had killed in order to found the city had in fact been sacred. He calls on the gods to avenge its death, if that had been the case:
“Was that a sacred dragon that my spear
impaled, when on the way from Sidon’s gates
I planted in the earth those dragon-teeth,
unthought-of seed? If haply ’tis the Gods,
(whose rage unerring, gives me to revenge)
I only pray that I may lengthen out,
as any serpent.” Even as he spoke,
he saw and felt himself increase in length.
His body coiled into a serpent’s form;
bright scales enveloped his indurate skin,
and azure macules in speckled pride,
enriched his glowing folds; and as he fell
supinely on his breast, his legs were joined,
and gradually tapered as a serpent’s tail.

Just before his upper body and head are transformed into the snake, and still with tears streaming down his cheeks, he embraces his wife one last time. As his transformation completes, and Harmonia finds herself wrapped in his coils, she calls on the gods to transform her too. And they do.

To the amazement of those around, the two snakes slither off into a nearby wood. Having been good people, they are neither venomous nor do they bite. So ends the house of Cadmus.

The Paintings

Perhaps uniquely among the many substantial myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there appears to be just one painting in the history of Western art which tells this story, despite its very visual nature. However, several drawings and prints have been made of it, and I start with a fine item of Faenza maiolica.

Virgiliotto Calamelli’s ceramic telling of Cadmus and Harmonia from around 1560 is a brilliant depiction of Ovid’s story. He chooses a later moment, in which Cadmus’ transformation is complete, and Harmonia’s has reached her abdomen.

I’m not sure where Crispijn van de Passe the Elder sourced his engraving of Cadmus and Harmonia Changed into Snakes (1602-07), but it is essentially the same as Calamelli’s plate. The town on the left is a bit more extensive, and the gods have been added in the clouds above, but even the intertwined coils of snake are a perfect match.

For over two centuries, the story vanished without trace from the visual arts, before it was revived and revisualised by Evelyn De Morgan.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadmus and Harmonia was painted in 1877, after she had returned from a visit to Italy. What inspired her to paint this unique work is obscure, but it was exhibited with the following quotation from an English translation of Metamorphoses:
With lambent tongue he kissed her patient face,
Crept in her bosom as his dwelling place
Entwined her neck, and shared the loved embrace.

De Morgan was certainly very familiar with classical myths, which were a frequent source for her paintings. She was influenced by Edward Burne-Jones, taught by her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and at the Slade by Sir Edward Poynter: all three had extensive knowledge of classical myths, and Poynter’s was deep to the point of being quite esoteric.

It has been suggested that Harmonia is here reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus, a painting which De Morgan knew well, as she had copied it when she was a student. She certainly doesn’t seem to have been influenced by any earlier image of the story, but her Harmonia is certainly not the older woman that Ovid describes.

Evelyn De Morgan’s painting may be one of a kind, but does the job perfectly.

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.

The first six paintings in Edvard Munch’s Frieze: Cycle of Moments from Life, exhibited in Berlin in 1902, covered the Seeds of Love, and ended with Madonna (1894). That provided the transition to the next section with its conflicting themes of saint, whore, and abandoned lover.

In these next six paintings, Munch continues his botanical metaphor with the Flowering and Passing of Love.

7. After the Fall (Ashes) (1894)

A woman stands, her white dress unbuttoned down the front to reveal scarlet underclothing. She looks directly at the viewer, her hands in her long locks of hair, which stream in serpentine curves like Medusa’s. In front of her, a man faces away, his face buried in his chest, and his hand clasping his head, shunning the woman behind. The scene is set in a dense and dark wood.

Munch wrote an autobiographical note in his diary, which relates this painting to an adulterous relationship, in which he felt stifling despair after making love in the evening. He uses his established colour-coding to indicate the change in the woman and their relationship, from the white innocence of initial love, to the scarlet of lust and the carnal. In the title, the artist draws the inevitable parallel with the Fall of Man.

8. Vampire (1893)

This is one of Munch’s most consistent and persistent motifs in his series, which was included in his first series of Love paintings in 1893. Although it exists in several versions, his composition remains unchanged throughout them all. The lovers are now embracing, but not in a conventional way. She holds him and bends her head down, as if to bury her teeth in the back of his neck, like a vampire. This is a kiss with a menace, one which will allow her to feed off him.

The femme fatale had become very popular in the arts in the late nineteenth century, particularly with the revision of the story of Salome and John the Baptist expressed by Gustave Moreau and popularised by Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé. Today the concept may seem misogynistic, but at the time it was more complex and in some respects empowered women.

The version of this painting now in Gothenburg, Sweden, was probably that shown in the Frieze. The contemporary version shown above is almost identical, but my personal favourite (shown below) was painted just a year or two later.

9. Saint Hans Night (The Dance of Life) (1899-1900)

This was another of the paintings made by Munch to enlarge and enhance his original Frieze to its 1902 form. It shows the artist dancing with his lover ‘Mrs Heiberg’ (Millie Thaulow), who is depicted as a mature and passionate woman in red. However, Munch’s figure is stiff and his head disengaged. In the background, the moon and its reflection form an ‘i‘ which echoes that in The Voice.

To the right is a man engaged more passionately with his partner; this is thought to represent the writer Gunnar Heiberg. One woman, who lacks a partner, is shown twice, at the left and right edges: she is Tulla Larsen, Munch’s later lover. At the left, she reaches out towards the flower of love, which will not let itself be taken. At the right, her hands are clasped in front of her in acceptance of her rejection.

This multiplex narrative therefore shows Munch’s two failed relationships: with Millie Thaulow, who rejected him, and with Tulla Larsen, whom he rejected. It thus brings this series of images to a point of crisis.

10. Jealousy (1895)

Munch takes us on to Jealousy (1895). Eve, standing in the background with her scarlet dress open to reveal her body, is reaching up to pick an apple for Adam. The satanic face at the right looks directly at the viewer, his jealousy made obvious.

This painting formed part of an artistic dialogue between the writer Stanislaw Przbyszewski, model for the face at the right, and Munch, who was having an affair with Przbyszewski’s Norwegian wife at the time. Przbyszewski responded by writing a jealous painter into committing suicide, in his novel Overboard (1896).

Munch reversed this image in lithographs which he made in 1896, and later adjusted his composition – a process similar to that used by the Norwegian landscape painter Nikolai Astrup to develop his paintings. In 1907, he made a second painting of Jealousy, shown below, in which the reversal is apparent.

11. Sphinx (Woman in Three Stages) (1893-95)

One of the key paintings in the Frieze for understanding Munch’s symbolic use of colour and pose, this was originally exhibited with a subtitle quoted from a play by Gunnar Heiberg (seen in The Dance of Life, above), The Balcony:
All others are one – you are a thousand.

In the play, a woman has three lovers, and manifests herself to each with a different personality. Munch’s original title Sphinx refers less to the mythical monster than to its connotations as a femme fatale, and the artist also referred the women to the Norns, Nordic versions of the Fates.

Here Munch shows three women: a young idealised romantic on an undulating bay (white dress), a naked femme fatale (red hair), and a shadowy matron (black dress). At the right, a man stands, his face cast down in dejection. It is a series within the outer series, a frieze in its own right.

12. Melancholy (1895)

The outcome is melancholy in solitude. The man is sat up, his chin buried in the heel of his hand, morose. Behind the coastline undulates about an arc which ends in a sliver of flat land marking the horizon. He is on his own. Three figures in the distance walk along a wooden pier to board their boat. Above there are undulating banks of grey cloud which sweep across the sky.

Munch’s figure was based on a friend, an aspiring author, who had had an intense and ultimately tragic affair with the wife of Christian Krohg, Munch’s teacher and mentor.

This completes the second section in the Frieze, and provides the link to the next, titled Life Anxiety.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

Seventeenth century Europe was ravaged by war. Between 1618 and 1648, much of what is now Germany suffered the Thirty Years’ War, with widespread famines, epidemic disease, and the fighting itself. This spilled over to the Netherlands and Belgium, and beyond. Warfare at that time used weapons which individually had limited killing power, but wherever there was war, largely mercenary armies stripped the whole area of food and supplies, laying waste to large tracts of countryside, and bringing infectious diseases which then killed many of the local population.

In the midst of that, some of the old Masters managed to flourish, among them Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), arguably the greatest narrative painter in Western art, and an accomplished international diplomat.

Rubens was no stranger to the consequences of religious persecution, conflict, and war. His Protestant parents had fled Antwerp for Cologne before his birth, he returned to Antwerp with his widowed mother in 1589 to be raised as a Catholic, and from 1600 he travelled throughout Europe, including Italy, Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries.

In 1629, he returned from a period in Madrid, where he had worked with Diego Velázquez, spent a little time back in his workshop in Antwerp, then travelled to London, where he stayed until April 1630. A relatively peaceful country during the war on the continent of Europe, England’s stable period during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign had ended with her death in 1603; two years later Guy Fawkes and conspirators had tried to blow up the House of Parliament, and the Civil War broke out in 1642.

Rubens was now in his early fifties, internationally successful, and able to choose his own motifs rather more. He had developed his own sophisticated visual language of narrative over three decades of painting stories. Acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain, he was trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England. Among his tools was one of his greatest narrative paintings, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars or Peace and War, which he painted when in England and left as a gift to its king.

Rubens’ painting, now in the National Gallery in London, is crowded with over a dozen figures drawn from classical myths. Until you have identified them and understood their roles and meaning, its story remains elusive.

Its central figures are those of Ceres, here in the role of Pax (the personification of peace), and Minerva, behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto, with sundry Bacchantes, a Satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.

Ceres and Minerva are at the heart of the painting. Rubens shows Ceres expressing milk from her left breast, which arcs into the mouth of her son Plutus, the god of wealth, who is grasping her left arm.

The figures of Ceres and Plutus are almost identical to those of Venus and Cupid in Rubens’ earlier Venus, Mars and Cupid (c 1633), which introduces ambiguity to her figure. However, in this painting Cupid is shown with wings, and his traditional bow and arrows. In Peace and War, the infant is clearly not Cupid as he has neither wings nor bow and arrows: he is Plutus there.

Being the goddess of agriculture, grain crops (hence cereal), and maternal relationships, Ceres stands for values which are strongly associated with the benefits of peace – bread rather than starvation, fertility rather than barrenness and pestilence. Her son Plutus represents the growth of wealth during times of peace.

Although the figure immediately behind Ceres might be mistaken for a man (hence Mars, perhaps), her staff and helmet are characteristic of Minerva, the goddess with a curious mixed portfolio of wisdom, industry, and war (a hangover from her part-Etruscan origins). Immediately above her is a winged putto carrying a caduceus, a short staff with wings at the top and entwined snakes, normally an attributed of Mercury, but also associated with commerce. (The rod of Asculepius has no wings, and but a single snake.) That putto leans forward to place a laurel wreath, the crown of the victor and a symbol of peace, on Ceres’ head.

Minerva is pushing away the bearded figure of Mars, the god of war, who also wears his characteristic black armour. Rubens painted Mars not infrequently, and was very flexible over his age and appearance, which vary according to context. With Venus and Cupid above, he is a young, clean-shaven man.

In Venus and Mars (1632-35) he appears more like an ageing general than a warrior, and Venus is past the beauty of her youth too. Perhaps they had succumbed too often to the temptations of Bacchus, seen brandishing an empty glass behind.

At the far right of Peace and War is Alecto, the Fury responsible for dealing with the moral offences of humans, usually by driving them mad. Rubens refrains from giving her snakes in her hair, but lays emphasis on madness – the madness of war.

On the opposite (left) side of the painting is a Bacchante holding her tambourine (tympanum) aloft, and another bearing earthly riches at her left side. A Satyr crouches low over a leopard, and proffers a cornucopia filled with fruit to the figures at the right.

This group is associated with Bacchus. Although he is not himself present, his chariot is normally drawn by leopards (or similar big cats), and he is accompanied by Bacchantes. This is shown well in Lovis Corinth’s marvellous painting of Ariadne on Naxos (1913) below.

Bacchus’ age and appearance are remarkably variable. In Ruben’s later Bacchus (1638-40), he is old and grotesquely obese, but still accompanied by his big cats.

This painting was completed not long before Rubens’ death from the consequences of gout, and may be the artist’s personal reflection on the result of sustained familiarity with Bacchus.

On the other side of the cornucopia from the Satyr is a small group of children, and a winged putto or Cupid, led by Hymen, who bears his characteristic torch. The god of marriage has led the products of marriage to the fruit of peace and plenty. These figures were painted from the children of one of King Charles’ diplomats, Sir Balthasar Gerbier, who was both an artist and Rubens’ host while he was in England.

Rubens’ story is clear: push war and its associated madness away, and you will enjoy peace, prosperity, and a thriving, well-nourished population.

King Charles made peace with France and Spain, but could not get on with his own parliament; he therefore ruled England without a parliament for the “eleven years’ tyranny”. Collapse of power was inevitable after that: he faced Scottish and Irish rebellions, then in 1642 found himself in a civil war. He was executed on 30 January 1649.

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1630, where he painted a second masterpiece on the subject of peace and war, which I will examine in the next article.

In the previous article, I looked at Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577–1640) masterpiece Peace and War (1629-30) which he gave to King Charles I of England at the end of his diplomatic mission in London. Rubens returned to his busy workshop in Antwerp, and for the remaining decade of his life devoted himself to painting some of his greatest and most personal works.

His personal life changed greatly too: when he returned to Antwerp, he married the sixteen year-old Hélène Fourment, having lost his first wife four years earlier. In 1635, he bought a country estate near Antwerp, the Steen, which was to be his base until his death, and the subject of several of his finest landscape paintings over those years.

With Europe nearing the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Rubens was only too delighted to be commissioned to paint one of his final narrative masterpieces for Ferdinand de’ Medici, then the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Tuscany had been largely uninvolved in the war, and this time Rubens had no diplomatic mission to accomplish. He could afford to be frank in his story, and we are fortunate in having the artist’s own description of the painting as a reference.

The central figures in The Consequences of War (1637-38) are Venus and Mars. The god of war is advancing forcefully having just rushed from the temple of Janus, moving from left to right, with his sword bloodied and held low. His head is turned back to look at Venus, whose left arm is caught around his right, and who is clearly trying unsuccessfully to restrain him. Standing against the right thigh of Venus is a winged Cupid, the child of Mars and Venus.

Drawing Mars forward is Alecto, her hair now looking more like that of a Fury but with few snakes visible, who bears a torch in her right hand. Monsters near her personify Pestilence and Famine, the inseparable partners of war at that time. On the ground below Alecto is a woman with her back towards the viewer: she is Harmony, whose lute has been broken in the discord brought by war.

Nearby, also on the ground, is a mother with her child in her arms, symbolising the effect of war on families and their rearing. At the lower right corner is an architect clutching his instruments, indicating how fine buildings are thrown into ruin by war. Under the right foot of Mars is a book, showing how war tramples over the arts.

On the ground to the left of Cupid is a bundle of arrows or darts: these are not Cupid’s arrows of desire, but when bundled up would form the symbol of Concord; thus war breaks Concord. To their left is the caduceus and an olive branch, attributes of Peace, also cast aside.

The woman at the left in a black gown is the personification of Europe, whose globe (symbolising the Christian world) is carried by a putto behind her. Having endured the ravages of war for so long, her clothing is torn and she has been robbed of her jewels.

Venus and Mars are, in myth, well-known lovers. Venus is failing to restrain Mars from charging off to war, and in doing so, he is breaking their bond of love. This element of the composition had evolved over a long period, coming originally from Titian, and referring to another of Venus’ lovers, Adonis.

Titian’s Venus and Adonis from 1554 shows Venus trying, again in vain, to prevent Adonis from going off to hunt, where he was to be killed by a wild boar. This was a favourite motif of Titian’s: no less than seven versions have been attributed to him from the period between 1553 and about 1560.

Rubens’ early painting of Venus and Adonis from about 1610, now in Düsseldorf, adopts a similar compositional approach, with Adonis facing the viewer and about to move to the right, but Rubens turns Venus’ body to face the viewer more.

His much later Venus and Adonis from about 1635, now in the Met in New York, reverses the image (as if it had been made, say, from a print), and turns Adonis so that his back is towards the viewer. He is now about to move beyond the picture plane, away from the viewer. For The Consequences of War, Rubens keeps Venus in a similar position, but turns Mars to move straight along to the right – a more forceful and unconstrained action.

The figure of Europe has an even more contemporary reference, to a nearly-indentical woman in the centre of Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents (c 1638). She too is in distress, although here she is not a personification in the way that she is in The Consequences of War.

Perhaps the most telling comparison is with Rubens’ The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), made when he was young, and the finest painter in Flanders. The Treaty of Antwerp had been signed in 1609, and the city was flourishing in the Twelve Years’ Truce which ensued.

Painted for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers, Mars dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath (either of oak or laurel) on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord.

Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, with the experience that his work as a diplomat had brought, Rubens had expressed a completely different view of war. His Peace and War (1629-30) and The Consequences of War (1637-38) should hang in the office of every head of state, from the White House, to the Kremlin Senate, to 10 Downing Street, and the Ryongsong Residence in North Korea. Lest anyone ever forgets.

The third and final example of narrative painting on a Chinese handscroll is, I think, the most beautiful. It is attributed to Qiu Ying 仇英 (1494–1552) during the Ming dynasty, although there is some doubt as to whether this particular handscroll was painted by him. It is one of three copies: this is in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, which has a second copy dated just a few years later. There is also a fine copy in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The artist bases his narrative on a famous fu or poetic ode of the same name, written by Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179-117 BCE) for the Han dynasty emperor Wudi. At that time, Shanglin Park was the rich hunting ground near the then capital, situated in northern central China.

The story of the poem is itself something of a legend. Sima presented himself before the emperor, and submitted that he wished to compose a grand fu in honour of the emperor’s excursions and hunting. Sima was provided with a supply of brushes and bamboo (on which to write, as this predates the invention of paper). So the poet produced his major work, which is thought to have originally been named Fu on the Excursions and Hunts of the Son of Heaven 天子遊獵賦.

The emperor was so pleased with Sima’s fu that he immediately appointed him to his court.

Overall, the painting is in blue-green style with a great deal of fine brushwork, and this copy is in excellent condition.

1. The Three Nobles in Discussion

The ode starts with a discussion between the Duke Wushi and two nobles, which leads into an introduction to the Emperor’s Shanglin Park. This opening scene in the painting shows the three seated together in a fine house set among rugged mountains. Below the cloud fills the valleys, but breaks sufficiently to reveal a town in the upper right.

2. The Waters and the Abundant Life Within Them

Sima next lays out the bounds of Shanglin Park, and embarks on a long and lyrical description of the area, starting with the waters and their abundant marine life. This is shown in the second scene of the painting, where there are fish in the turbulent river, and waterbirds flying over it.

3. The Mountains, Animals, Palace, and Pavilions

The ode continues with detailed descriptions of the mountains and gorges, many wild animals, different types of horse, the emperor’s palace and various pavilions which lie within the park. This third scene is an exquisitely detailed landscape encompassing the varied terrain and other items which Sima lists in his poem. In the distance, beyond the pavilions, cloud hangs low in the valleys, and only rocky peaks project through.

4. The Imperial Carriage and Cortège

Having taken over 250 lines to describe the park, Sima starts to detail its use by the emperor and his court. As autumn turns to the start of winter, the emperor travels from his palace to go hunting. He is in his carriage, which is decorated with carved ivory and drawn by six jade dragons. With it goes his great cortège, led by his nobles, and bringing his retinue.

The fourth scene shows just that: to the left of centre, the emperor’s chariot has just been drawn by six white horses through a narrow gorge. As the cortège reaches a small plain, it opens out, showing the members of the court paying their respects to their emperor. Behind a long series of mounted escorts follow, bearing banners.

5. Carriages Come and Go

The imperial procession then snakes its way through winding mountain passes, as shown in the fifth scene of the painting.

6. The Beating of the Drum

The procession arrives at another small plain area, and a drum is beaten to signal to the hunting party to disperse. This sixth scene shows the massive drum being beaten just below the centre, and at the left the hunters cantering off. The emperor’s carriage and main body are still making their way through the narrow pass, at the upper right.

7. Hunting Everywhere

The hunters have now dispersed across the whole landscape, where they pursue all manner of different game, including big cats, foxes, and bears. Qiu’s depiction in the seventh scene is not quite as ambitious in terms of big game, although just below the centre a group of archers are in hot pursuit of a fox-like animal in its white winter coat. Further in the distance, and slightly to the left, four men carry what looks like a large deer attached to a pole.

8. Recovery and Return to the Longtai Belvedere

With the hunt drawn to a close, the hunters gather near the emperor’s grand marble belvedere. A large orchestra plays music to accompany his nobles in dancing. The emperor becomes lost in his thoughts about the future, and how he will eventually die and return to be interred in his park. He orders his staff to open the granaries and stores to ensure that the poor are properly fed.

The eighth scene in the painting shows the marble belvedere standing proud above a layer of low cloud. On it are the emperor and his concubines. Towards the right, the nobles dance.

9. Promenade of the Six ‘Classics’

The emperor gets into his carriage, and it is driven off on a tour of the six ‘classic’ locations across the park. After further eulogy, the poet rounds off the work by returning to the three nobles in discussion. The final scene in the painting shows the emperor’s carriage and cortège passing along the edge of a river or estuary. There are ships at anchor, and areas of padi cultivation at the water’s edge. In the distance are more pavilions and houses, surrounded by a blanket of low fog.

The story in Sima’s ode is not so strongly narrative as the two previous paintings which I have shown in this series, and more of a topographic description followed by an account of a day’s hunting. Qiu has shown this as a series of separate frames which have been blended to appear as a continuous landscape.

Because of the simplicity of its story, the handscroll would probably still make sense in the absence of Sima’s poem. But I suspect that a co-ordinated reading and viewing of the painting would be a remarkable and almost cinematic experience.

Laurent’s new book is a revelation. By bringing together these, and more, handscroll paintings with the texts on which they are based, he shows clearly how Chinese painting was – at least on occasion – fluently narrative. I hope that more studies will appear in the future.

Reference

Laurent, Cédric (2017) Voyages Immobiles dans la prose ancienne, la peinture narrative sous la dynastie Ming (1368-1644), Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 978 2 251 44520 5. (In French, with copious original Chinese.)

If you’ve visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, or any other rich collection including the works of both Jules Breton and Jean-François Millet, you might feel hard-pressed to be able to distinguish between them. In the last few weeks, I have posted series of articles covering both of their careers, and shown most of their best paintings. This article compares and contrasts their work, to help us (me included) be clearer as to which is which. It’s also a good excuse to show again a selection of those superb paintings.

Millet was the older of the two, by thirteen years, and started his career with figurative and narrative work. They both achieved their early successes in the 1850s, with paintings of poor country people working in the landscape: in Millet’s case around Barbizon, and in Breton’s at Courrières in north-eastern France.

It was in the middle of the 1850s that they converged on a common theme, that of the poor gleaning the remains left after the harvest, which perhaps shows most clearly their different approaches and styles.

Breton’s The Gleaners (1854) is the first of his major ensemble paintings, featuring his meticulous realism. It is richly populated using figures which he had worked up in studies over the previous years, each showing great detail in their dress, carefully composed in a scene which never really existed except in the artist’s mind. Light and colours are bright, and the whole finished to Salon standards.

Three years later, Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) focuses our attention on just three women who are bent over gleaning in the foreground. If you’re looking for the rest of the crowd, they are in the background busy working on the next section of wheat. Although I have no doubt that Millet worked those figures up from sketches and composed them carefully, his low-chroma and low-detail style is more in keeping with the ‘primitive’ and authentic.

Although Breton painted plenty of full-length single-figure portraits of the rural poor, many of his major works feature most of the population of his home village of Courrières, such as The Burning Haystack (1856). This speaks little about the conditions of the people, but a great deal on their superb team effort to douse a fire in a haystack. The viewer feels almost lost in the minute details recorded here.

Breton’s last great ensemble painting, The Pardon of Kergoat in Quéménéven in 1891 (1891), seems determined to outdo all those before, with its vast numbers of pilgrims vanishing into the woodland behind. Each of the figures in the foreground has been diligently worked up in great detail, bearing wonderful facial features, dress, and deportment. Away from the finish of the foreground, Breton’s brush has become rather looser, but in comparison with many works from a decade earlier his facture has changed remarkably little.

Millet kept to much smaller groups, here the half dozen farm labourers of The Potato Harvest (1855). He provides us with enough detail to know what is going on, but simplifies for the sake of clarity, and in keeping with the theme. No face is shown clearly: these are the anonymous poor who you’ll find in every field. But you can see each potato in the basket, and the stones and debris in the soil.

This quest for the bare essentials in the motif reaches its peak in Millet’s L’Angélus (The Angelus), completed around 1857-59. So much of it is vague and implicit in the failing twilight that its two figures are little more than silhouettes, and their barrow readily misinterpreted as a pram containing an infant. What Millet shows us most clearly, though, is the bowed and praying figure of the woman, their small basket of potatoes, and that pitifully poor soil. You don’t have to be a farmer to recognise what they are praying for.

In the middle of his career, Breton started to paint smaller groups labouring in the fields too. The Weeders (1868) is a fine example, with its startlingly beautiful twilight, and the merest sliver of a moon. The figures of the five women are simplified by the light, but he still paints every last fold and crease in their clothing: his image remains very explicit, leaving little to the viewer’s imagination.

Compare Millet’s The Sower: this is the original 1850 version, and has since been recognised as his first real masterpiece. It is as roughly-hewn as its figure, which again is predominantly implicit, and sparse in detail. Its influence over later artists such as Vincent van Gogh is hardly surprising.

Breton’s single figure paintings are fine portraits, here of a Young Woman Spinning (1872) on the Brittany coast. His brushwork is a bit looser here, becoming quite sketchy in the background. But the woman is shown in perfect detail down to the chipped and dirty toenails on her bare feet.

A decade earlier, Millet had painted a Young Girl Watching her Sheep (c 1860-62), which provides a good comparison. We can see that she is engaged in some quite complex knitting, but her hair, face, and clothing are simplified to show only what we need to see.

Song of the Lark (1884) is one of Breton’s finest single-figure paintings, and is about as close as he got to concentrating on the essentials in an image. Her face is shown using a more painterly style, but remains thoroughly recognisable. Every crease is shown in her blouse, and her toenails are battered, grubby, and bruised. Breton has taken advantage of the dawn light to simplify her sickle, though.

Breton was by no means confined to his ensembles and full-figure paintings of the rural poor, but Millet’s work is far more diverse, and in parts highly innovative.

Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) (c 1864-65) is drawn straight from classical mythology, an allegory of harvest time which both artists had painted so extensively.

Then there are a few of Millet’s paintings which seem to have been almost experimental, in which he departs from the norms of the day and produces something starkly original, like his very late Bird’s-Nesters (1874).

I think that it is invidious to claim either was a greater or more important artist: they are just different. Vincent van Gogh had great respect for, and was influenced by, both of them. What better judgement could anyone want?

Munch had concluded the second section of his Frieze of Life, Flowering and Passing of Love, with Melancholy (1894-96), showing the melancholy resulting from failed love. In its third section he moves on to consider Life Anxiety.

13. Anxiety (1894)

The first of the five paintings in this section presents a composite summary, originally known as Insane Mood then Red Clouds at the time that this version of the Frieze was exhibited.

It uses the same setting and colour as The Scream, which ends this section, but is populated with the crowd from Evening on Karl Johan below. In this context it does more than that, in providing the individual elements which are teased out and developed by the other paintings in this section.

14. Evening on Karl Johan (1892)

First, Evening on Karl Johan shows the crowd from Anxiety in an autobiographical scene. During Munch’s affair with ‘Mrs Heiberg’, he had arranged to meet her on Karl Johans Gate, the long, straight main street in the centre of Oslo. As he waited for her, his anxiety grew, exacerbated by crowds of people walking towards him.

Munch’s later depiction of this greatly foreshortens the perspective of this section of the street from the Royal Palace towards the Storting (parliament building), a distance of around 300 metres. This packs the pedestrians together and, coupled with their nightmarish faces, enhances its troubling feeling of anxiety.

15. Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900)

Red Virginia Creeper develops the red theme from Anxiety. One of the paintings which Munch made after his first version of the Frieze to augment it for this second version, it contrasts with Evening on Karl Johan by its relatively open and undistorted view. The building shown is Kiøsterud in Åsgårdstrand, which Munch also included in his slightly later Girls on the Bridge (c 1902).

This painting develops the theme of anxiety, with the creeper staining the walls of the building blood red, and enclosing it in its deadly embrace. In the foreground, almost oblivious of the building behind, is the anxious face of a man with a drooping moustache and pointed beard, staring at the viewer. The model for that face was most probably the author Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who also featured in Jealousy.

16. Golgotha (1900)

Golgotha is another late addition to the second version of the Frieze, painted when Munch was convalescing in the Kornhaug Sanatorium during the winter of 1899-1900. It uses Christian iconography, of the crucified Christ and the crowd of spectators, to develop the themes of crowds and persecution. It is usually suggested that Munch saw himself as the object of that persecution, something borne out by its hostile critical reception.

There are several recognisable faces in the front row of the crowd. From the left, these are Christian Krohg (Munch’s teacher), [a bailiff], Gunnar Heiberg, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, the young Munch (in profile), and Karen Bjølstad (Munch’s aunt, who raised the family).

17. The Scream (1893)

This section closes with The Scream, showing the isolated figure of Munch before the distant city of Oslo, its fjord with ships at anchor, and the surrounding hills. As the artist’s notes explain:
I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. I felt a breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and leant against the railing, deathly tired, looking out across flaming clouds that hung like – blood and a sword over the deep blue fjord and town. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.

The other famous version of The Scream from 1910 differs only slightly from that above: the two figures at the left edge are now definitely walking away, into the picture plane, and the screaming face in the foreground no longer has any eyes as such, but only blank spaces for the sockets.

This later work was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004, and finally recovered in 2006.

With this infinite scream passing through nature, the Frieze passes to its fourth and final section, Death.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

As he nears the end of Book 4 of Metamorphoses, Ovid has completed his account of the myths of the Theban cycle, with the transformation of Cadmus and Harmonia into snakes. His switch to start telling stories about Perseus is abrupt, referring in passing to Perseus’ mother, Danae, and his well-known conception by Jupiter in a ‘shower of gold’.

Ovid makes this even more stark by launching into his stories of Perseus in medias res (in the middle of the action). Instead of giving us the background of why Perseus set off to behead Medusa, or telling us that part of the story first, we find Perseus flying over North Africa with Medusa’s severed head tucked safely in his rucsac (kibisis).

The Story

As Perseus flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still drips from Medusa’s head and falls onto that sand, where it transforms into snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of Atlas, the giant. Perseus introduces himself to Atlas, including his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses the request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then (averting his own face) points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain:
He said no more, but turning his own face,
he showed upon his left Medusa’s head,
abhorrent features. — Atlas, huge and vast,
becomes a mountain — His great beard and hair
are forests, and his shoulders and his hands
mountainous ridges, and his head the top
of a high peak; — his bones are changed to rocks.
Augmented on all sides, enormous height
attains his growth; for so ordained it, ye,
O mighty Gods! who now the heavens’ expanse
unnumbered stars, on him command to rest.

With dawn about to break, Perseus gets himself together and flies away on his winged sandals, which had been given by Mercury for his mission to kill Medusa. He flies over Ethiopia, then ruled by Cepheus, where he sees the beautiful Andromeda shackled to a rock. He immediately falls in love with her, and descends to chat her up.

Andromeda tells him a bit about herself, and is just about to explain the full story of how she came to be chained to a rock, when a huge monster rises up from the sea and heads towards the woman, to devour her. With her parents stood helplessly by, Perseus offers to save her, in return for her hand in marriage; as they have no option, her parents consent, as the monster closes in on them.

Perseus takes to the air again and sinks the curved blade of his sword into the monster’s shoulder. The monster rears up, dives down, then reappears, for Perseus to wound it further. His winged sandals are now soaked with spray and blood, and struggling to keep him airborne. He therefore lands on a small rock, from where he finishes the monster off.

Andromeda is released, and Perseus first washes his hands, then carefully places the head of Medusa in a bed of seaweed, which is transformed into coral as a result:
The hero washes his victorious hands
in water newly taken from the sea:
but lest the sand upon the shore might harm
the viper-covered head, he first prepared
a bed of springy leaves, on which he threw
weeds of the sea, produced beneath the waves.
On them he laid Medusa’s awful face,
daughter of Phorcys; — and the living weeds,
fresh taken from the boundless deep, imbibed
the monster’s poison in their spongy pith:
they hardened at the touch, and felt in branch
and leaf unwonted stiffness. Sea-Nymphs, too,
attempted to perform that prodigy
on numerous other weeds, with like result:
so pleased at their success, they raised new seeds,
from plants wide-scattered on the salt expanse.
Even from that day the coral has retained
such wondrous nature, that exposed to air
it hardens. — Thus, a plant beneath the waves
becomes a stone when taken from the sea.

Perseus makes offerings to the gods, and prepares for his wedding with his newly-won bride.

The Paintings

The myths of Perseus, particularly those of Perseus and Andromeda, have been very extensively depicted in paintings. I have previously surveyed many of them, and given an account of the particularly detailed series by Edward Burne-Jones. Very few have shown Atlas turned into a mountain.

The seventh in Edward Burne-Jones’ series of paintings about Perseus, his Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) shows the aftermath of Atlas’ failure to offer hospitality: he has been turned to stone by the residual power of Medusa’s face, and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Ethiopia.

It is a modern misunderstanding that Atlas, standing in the barren mountains named after him, bears the world: he bears the heavens, shown here using representations of the named constellations.

In contrast, the rescue of Andromeda is far more popular, particularly as she has been almost universally interpreted as chained naked to the rock.

This Roman wall painting from the ruins of Pompeii, dated to about 50-75 CE, adopts the approach typical of many later artists, showing a close-up of the couple. Andromeda is still chained to the rock by her left wrist, and is partially clad, nakedness being reserved for the hero and half-god Perseus. He has Medusa’s head tucked behind him, the face shown for ease of recognition, wears his winged sandals, and carries a straight sword in his left hand. There is no sign of any sea monster, though.

Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda (1553-59) improves on that by showing the height of the action, remaining largely faithful to Ovid’s details. All three actors are present, with Andromeda still shackled and Perseus attacking Cetus, the sea monster, from the air using a sword with a curved blade.

Paolo Veronese’s Perseus Rescuing Andromeda followed soon afterwards, in 1576-78. His composition is similar to Titian’s, and equally faithful to the text, but his additional attention to the details of Perseus and Cetus bring this to life, making it one of the finest depictions of this scene.

One snag with these is that none contains any clues as to the eventual resolution of the story. Three centuries later, Edward Burne-Jones used a long series of watercolour studies and finished oil paintings to cover the whole story.

The eighth of those paintings, The Rock of Doom (1884-5), shows Perseus arriving, and just about to start his negotiations to secure Andromeda’s hand in marriage. Medusa’s head is safely stowed in the kibisis on his left arm. Andromeda is naked, looking coy and afraid with her face downcast.

In the ninth painting, The Doom Fulfilled (1888), Perseus is swathed in Cetus’ coils (with their almost calligraphic form), brandishing his sword and ready to slaughter the monster and bring its terror to an end.

Rubens’ Perseus and Andromeda (c 1622) shows a later moment in which the action is just past, but the outcome more obvious. Andromeda is at the left, now unchained but still almost naked. Perseus is in the process of claiming her hand as his reward, for which he is being crowned with laurels, as the victor. He wears his winged sandals, and holds the polished shield which still reflects Medusa’s face and snake hair.

One of several putti (essential for the forthcoming marriage) holds Hades’ helmet of invisibility, and much of the right of the painting is taken up by Pegasus, which derive from a different version of the myth. At the lower edge is the dead Cetus, its fearsome mouth wide open.

Two remarkable paintings have told the story using multiplex narrative.

This Roman painting from Boscotrecase, near the coast at Pompeii, dates from soon after 11 BCE, and puts the story into a larger landscape, much in the way that later landscape painters such as Poussin were to do.

Andromeda is shown in the centre, on a small pedestal cut into the rock. Below it and to the left is the gaping mouth of Cetus, as Perseus flies down from the left to rescue Andromeda, kill the sea-monster, and later marry Andromeda in reward, as shown in the upper right.

Piero di Cosimo shows even more events within his large Andromeda Freed by Perseus (c 1510-15). Centred on the great bulk of Cetus, Perseus stands on its back and is about to hack at its neck with his curved sword. At the upper right, Perseus is shown a few moments earlier, as he was flying past in his winged sandals. To the left of Cetus, Andromeda is still secured to the rock by red fabric bindings (not chains), and is bare only to her waist.

In the foreground in front of Cetus are Andromeda’s parents stricken in grief. Near them is a group of courtiers with ornate head-dress. But in the right foreground the wedding party is already in full swing, complete with musicians and dancers.

Ovid’s telling of this story is one of his most carefully-structured narratives; it is rich in action, with all the ingredients necessary for the many superb narrative paintings which have been made. As a result, it’s an excellent read, with excellent art.

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.

The final section in Munch’s 1902 version of the Frieze of Life was almost entirely new from his earlier exhibition. He led into it with his famous painting of The Scream, and it is with that infinite scream still passing through nature that the artist takes us to Death.

18. By the Deathbed (Death Battle, Fever) (1893)

By the Deathbed (1895) is Munch’s painting from memory of his sister Sophie resting in her deathbed in 1877, when she was 15 and the artist was not quite 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis, an unfortunately common event at the time. Munch explained that, when painting from memory like this, he depicted only what he could remember, and was careful to avoid trying to add details which he no longer saw. This explains the relative simplicity of this and other paintings in this section.

Sophie is seen from her head, looking along her length to her feet, her figure compressed into almost nothing by extreme foreshortening. Her deathbed resembles the next step, in which her body will be laid out in a coffin prior to burial. More than half the painting is filled by the rest of the family, father with his hands clasped in intense prayer. At the right is the mother, who had died of tuberculosis herself nearly nine years earlier.

It is likely that a pastel version of this painting, dating from 1893, was that actually exhibited in the Frieze. That has a similar composition, with the addition of demon-like masks hovering on the back wall of the room.

19. Death in the Sickroom (Death Room) (1893)

Death in the Sickroom shows another remembered scene from the end of Sophie’s life, which appears to have been earlier in her final illness, when she was still able to sit out in the high-backed wicker chair shown at the right. Nearest to the viewer, in the centre, is Munch’s sister Laura, and behind her is his other sister, Inger, who Munch quite often used as a model, particularly in this position.

Munch himself stands behind Inger, with his face turned towards the dying Sophie in her chair. Munch’s father stands behind Sophie, his hands again clasped in prayer, and the woman tending to Sophie is the aunt, Karen Bjølstad, who brought the children up after their mother had died.

The seeming absence of Sophie and distance from her siblings emphasises the loneliness and isolation of death.

20. Hearse on the Potsdamer Platz (Death) (1902)

Probably the least-known painting in the Frieze, there are two versions of Hearse on the Potsdamer Platz (above and below), both painted in 1902, either of which could have been exhibited in the series. They both appear to depict similar events, the presence of a horse-drawn hearse in this famous square in the heart of Berlin. They are unusual here in showing an outdoor scene using high-chroma colours.

Amid those bright hues is the hearse, covered in a black pall, and drawn by a single black horse. This is the external culmination of the private process of death in the deathbed.

21. Metabolism (Life and Death) (1898-99)

Metabolism had been the key vignette at the end of the first frieze, and here in the second it is a ghostly reminder of the life before. A young man and woman have met in a dark wood, beyond which are glimpses of a ‘golden city’. At the time of its exhibition in the Frieze, there was an exuberant plant in the foreground between the two figures, in which there was a human foetus; this was overpainted after 1903.

22. Dead Mother and Child (The Girl and Death) (1897-99)

Dead Mother and Child can only be Munch’s later painting, made to augment the Frieze for its second version of 1902, showing his own mother in her deathbed in December 1868, when the artist was just 5 years old. She too died of tuberculosis, shortly after the birth of Munch’s sister Inger, her third daughter.

In a room more resembling a wide, empty stage, Munch shows asynchronous and later forms of Inger, who would have been a baby at the time but here assumes her characteristic pose, their aunt Karin, Munch’s father, and Munch himself, as a young man. Sat at the head of the bed is the artist’s brother, Andreas. The young girl at the front is reminiscent of the foreground figure in Anxiety, which links the image to The Scream.

Munch had earlier painted The Dead Mother (1893), which was inspired by Max Klinger’s print The Dead Mother (1889), and the death of his own mother. Outside, the world is bright, sunlit, and green. Inside it is pale blue, and the mother’s skin has assumed the slightly cyanotic pallor of death. Behind her head is a fern leaf.

This painting had been exhibited in Berlin in 1893, twenty-five years after his mother’s death. Perhaps Munch felt that is was a little too personal to include in the Frieze of Life.

So Dead Mother and Child brought the series to a close, at least in its 1902 version. For subsequent exhibitions, Munch rearranged the paintings, and he showed strong preferences for others of his works, such as one of the many variants of The Sick Child which he had painted.

But it is telling that on many later occasions, such as his seventy-fifth birthday in 1938, Munch was usually seen in front of one or more of the paintings in (or related to) his Frieze of Life.

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

If there is one phrase which epitomises the last year or so, it is fake news. It’s easy to get the impression that, until last year, everything which appeared in news media, the press, indeed publications of any kind, was totally factually accurate. That is, perhaps, the biggest fake news of all, as news has been notoriously riddled with errors and lies ever since people first started to communicate with one another.

In this article and the next (tomorrow), I am going to look at two famous stories of ancient Rome, which have been depicted in some magnificent paintings. But in both cases, they are based on legends which are at least questionable, and quite possibly made up: gloriously fake news, if you like.

My first is the story of the brave Roman soldier who stood and defended the city of Rome from attack by the Etruscans, fighting single-handed on the Sublicius Bridge: one Roman who personally saved the whole city, Horatius Cocles.

Horatius was an unlikely hero, as they always are. When the army of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena marched on Rome from its base at the city of Clusium, it found the Romans ill-prepared and in disarray. It quickly seized the Janiculum, a hill outside the western walls of Rome, and then headed for Rome’s weak point, the Sublicius bridge over the River Tiber, which guarded the eastern edge of the city. The Romans were lined up ready for battle there, so the larger army of Etruscans drew up their line of battle ready to attack.

By the time that the two Roman commanders had been carried away wounded, the Romans were starting to crumble. They then panicked, and headed for the bridge, where the Etruscans quickly got the better of them. It looked as if Rome was about to be seized by its enemy after only brief and feeble resistance.

This is shown well in Coldeel’s animated GIF of the battle above.

According to the legend, three Romans turned imminent defeat into success: Spurius Lartius, Titus Herminius Aquilinus, and Publius Horatius Cocles. These three formed a human barrier on the bridge, allowing the retreating Romans to pass back into the city, but blocking any progress by the Etruscans.

Following sustained attacks, Lartius and Herminius were forced to abandon their positions on the bridge, leaving its defence to Horatius alone. He instructed his fellow Romans to demolish the bridge from the Roman bank, and so prevent the enemy from using it to enter the city. While they did that, he continued to hold attacks at bay.

Francesco Pesellino’s cassone panel showing Horatius Cocles Defending the Sublician Bridge from about 1450 is a magnificent and inventive depiction, which shows Horatius mounted on a horse. As there are at least two (possibly a third) figures of Horatius on his horse, this shows multiplex narrative.

This miniature by the Master of Boccace of Munich shows Horatius Cocles Defending Rome (1542). Unfortunately it places the site of demolition on the wrong side of Horatius, between him and the enemy, which would of course have changed the story completely.

Elia Castello’s brightly coloured stucco of Horatius Cocles Defending Rome (1602), in the New Residence in Salzburg, Austria, is one of the earliest depictions which appears consistent with the Roman accounts. Even with such a narrow bridge, though, it begs the question as to how a single man could ever have fended off an entire army for the time that it took to break the bridge.

It is Charles Le Brun’s wonderful Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge (c 1642-43) which I think first captures the story faithfully and brings it to life.

Horatius is seen putting up his spirited fight on a stone pier on the side of the bridge opposite the city, as Romans are hastily removing a wooden bridge behind him. Above and behind Horatius, Minerva, goddess of battle, grasping her characteristic staff, holds a laurel wreath over Horatius’ head. In the foreground, the god of the River Tiber lounges on the bank, pouring water from his large flagon (which never becomes empty). It can only be a matter of minutes before the bridge is adequately broken, and Horatius jumps into the Tiber below.

Once the bridge behind him had been demolished, with several significant wounds and still wearing his armour, Horatius Cocles knew it was time to get out. He jumped into the River Tiber and swam to the Roman shore, where he was welcomed as a great hero, and rewarded with the land that he was able to plough around in a day, which became the estate of the Horatius family. The Etruscans still laid siege to Rome, but on this occasion, around 509 BCE, did not occupy and sack it.

This plate from Urbino in Italy also uses multiplex narrative to tell its story of Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge. The hero is again mounted on horseback, and its multiple images of Horatius in the Tiber seem to recognise the problems of trying to wear armour when in the water.

I have been unable to trace the original painting or drawing made by Giulio Romano (–1546) from which Diana Scultori (1547–1612) made her engraving of Horatius Cocles (c 1590). She too uses multiplex narrative, showing Horatius both on the bridge and in the Tiber. Unfortunately she also positioned the breach in the bridge between the Roman and Etruscan forces, rather than between the Roman forces – or more specifically Horatius Cocles – and the Roman shore.

This pair of paintings by an unknown follower of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, above and below, used to be in Cleveland, OH, but were sold more recently. That above has been given the title of Horatius Cocles Defending Rome Against the Etruscans and below is The Wounded Horatius Cocles Swimming the Tiber. The Sublicius bridge is made to look quite flimsy and ad hoc, and when Horatius Cocles takes to the water in his armour, he floats even higher than if he had been wearing a lifejacket.

Ever since this legend was told in the histories of early Rome, Horatius Cocles has been used as an example of the virtues of self-sacrifice; in the words of Thomas Macaulay in his Lays of Ancient Rome:
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

Even the Romans who told the story of Horatius Cocles seem to have considered it more of a legend than accurate history. There are good arguments that it was a very successful attempt to hide the shockingly poor performance of the Roman army in a tale which held self-sacrifice ‘for the benefit of the state’ as a great moral virtue. It’s also a clever explanation for the family estates.

Tomorrow I will look at another famous story concerning the Horatius family, from a much earlier age.

References

Wikipedia.

Wiseman, TP (2004) The Myths of Rome, University of Exeter Press. ISBN 978 0 85989 704 4.

Publius Horatius Cocles, the lone defender of the bridge, came from one of the great families that made up the original Romans: the Horatiuses, or in Latin Horatii. By far the most famous of the Horatii, in both Roman history and in art, are the triplets who are claimed to have saved Rome in another battle, this time fought between just six men.

In legend, Rome was founded by Romulus, but had a long history before that, going right back to Aeneas and the other survivors of Troy who escaped with him. At the end of Virgil’s Aeneid – the epic story of their wanderings around the Mediterranean – Aeneas is in Italy in the vicinity of what became Rome, destined to bring about the founding of a great city. This is often interpreted as the founding by his son, Ascanius, of Alba Longa, rather than Rome itself, the later Romulus and Remus being descendants of Aeneas.

Later, in the early history of Rome, its (also legendary) king Tullus Hostilius fought a war with Alba Longa, eventually resulting in the latter’s destruction. The battle of the Horatii is a legend within that legendary war.

Rather than set their armies against one another and lose many valuable citizens, Tullus and the king of Alba Longa made a gentlemen’s agreement to fight by proxy: each side would put up a set of triplets, who would then fight one another to the death. Whoever survived would then secure victory for their side.

The Albans fielded their renowned warrior triplets from the Curiatius family, the Curiatii; the Romans their Horatii, ancestors of Horatius Cocles.

The two sides then massed on a battlefield about five miles out from Rome on the Appian Way, and the six men fought in front of them. Given the high stakes, their fighting was fierce, and the Curiatii became quite seriously wounded at the cost of the lives of two of the Horatii. The remaining Roman, Publius Horatius, realised that he was badly outnumbered, and sought to separate the three Curiatii to increase his chances: he ran across the battlefield until the Curiatii were well split up.

He then turned and tackled the least wounded of the Curiatii, killing him. He was next able to turn to the second, and killed him too. This left only the most badly-wounded of the Curiatii, who was easily killed off. Publius Horatius was the victor, as was Rome, forcing Alba Longa to submit to the rule of Rome.

Fulchran-Jean Harriet’s Combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii was the winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1798. It shows a late stage in the battle, as Publius Horatius is killing the Curiatii one by one, starting with the least-wounded of the three. One of his brothers doesn’t appear to be quite dead yet, either.

Giuseppe Cesari’s huge fresco Combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii (1612-13) shows the last Curiatius and Horatius (to the right) in the final phases of combat, as the Roman is about to deliver the coup de grace. Publius Horatius’ sister is shown at the left, by the bodies of the two dead Curiatii.

As was traditional, Publius Horatius then stripped the three corpses, and returned to Rome. He was greeted there by his sister Camilla, who had been engaged to one of the Curiatii, and immediately broke down and wept for the fate of her fiancé. Her surviving brother, declaring that no one should mourn the fallen enemies of Rome, killed her on the spot.

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s Horatius Slays his Sister (1750-54) makes the brother appear thoroughly accusative, even though his sister is already dead. To the right of Horatius, the three bundles of clothes removed from the dead Curiatii are being paraded in public.

Francesco de Mura’s Horatius Slaying His Sister after the Defeat of the Curiatii (c 1760) shows the shock and fear generated by this murder, but omits the clothing which was said to have been the trigger for Camilla’s grief.

Victor Maximilien Potain’s Horatius Killing his Sister was the winner of the Prix de Rome in 1785. Publius Horatius is vociferously condemning his dead sister’s actions, and at the left is a display of the clothes he removed from the Curiatii, as victor.

Camilla’s murder was of course a crime, even in times of war, and Publius Horatius was condemned to die as a consequence. However, he appealed to an assembly of the people, which commuted his sentence. The family was required to atone for the crime by making sacrifice to the gods, which became a tradition.

By far the most famous, and most important, painting of the Horatii is bloodless, and shows a scene which does not appear in verbal accounts: it is, of course, Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784-85).

An image of the original, much larger painting which David made in 1784-85, now in the Louvre, is at the top of this article. Here I show a superior image of the smaller copy made by the artist in 1786, now in Toledo, OH. David had won the Prix de Rome on his fourth attempt, in 1774, for a very different work.

David chooses to show the three Horatii saluting their father, and taking their swords immediately before combat. Behind the father are three women, of whom the young woman at the far right is Camilla, sister to the Horatii and betrothed to one of the Curiatii, who thus knows that she will lose someone dear to her no matter what the outcome.

David chose a decisive and dramatic instant, which was enhanced and empowered by his brilliant composition and use of body language. This was commissioned for King Louis XVI, as an allegory about loyalty to the state and the monarch, which David interpreted as a message about the nobility of patriotic sacrifice. He cunningly left the viewer to decide where that loyal patriotism should be directed. Within five years, the French Revolution was at its height.

But did any of this actually happen? Did two kings really make such a gentlemanly agreement? Once again, even the Roman accounts present them as little more than legends, and some scholars doubt whether king Tullus Hostilius even existed. The whole story may have been invented to account for the destruction of Alba Longa and the absorption of its population into that of the growing city of Rome.

Reference

Wiseman, TP (2004) The Myths of Rome, University of Exeter Press. ISBN 978 0 85989 704 4.

Many landscape paintings come with not just fixtures and fittings, the elements which are necessarily in the view, such as fields, trees, mountains, buildings, and the sky, but with mobile extras: animals and people. Although a great many landscapes have been painted without so much as a cow or person in sight, such barren and depopulated landscapes can appear quite eery.

Paul Nash used depopulated landscapes extensively, or populated them not with the creatures that you’d expect to see, but symbolic objects, which eventually led to surrealism.

Artists started populating their landscapes before they even made landscape paintings.

Look carefully in Antonello’s tiny vignette landscapes through the windows of Saint Jerome’s study, and you’ll see figures in a boat on a lake, another apparently on horseback, and some sheep.

When the first proper landscape paintings started to appear, it is hard to know whether they were about the landscape shown, or the figures shown within it.

Giorgione’s revolutionary painting of The Tempest from just after 1500 has long puzzled viewers. Is there some narrative involving the mother nursing her infant at the breast and the rather fashionable young soldier stood on the opposite bank of the stream, or are they just elaborate staffage? That is a question which recurs when looking at so many landscapes with figures.

There are many landscape paintings which come with stories attached. Poussin and other early landscape specialists frequently set figures from a narrative against their landscapes. So long as you recognise the characters and they match a familiar story, this works well. Valenciennes’ depiction of the story of Ulysses and Nausicaä, above, is a particularly clear and late example.

Even if you don’t recognise the characters or story, it would be perverse to assume that such a deliberate arrangement of figures would not be a narrative waiting to be discovered. But sometimes painters deliberately bury their narrative, giving us the absolute minimum of clues.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s splendid account of the fall of Icarus could easily elude the viewer: its only real clues are the shepherd stood in the middle of the painting looking up to the top left corner of the canvas, where there is nothing to be seen, and a pair of legs kicking in the water just below the stern of the ship at the right, with some feathers floating down above them.

The legs are those of Icarus, who has flown too close to the sun, the wax holding his wings together has melted, and he has plunged into the sea. The shepherd is looking in wonderment at his father, who is still flying, but off the view (in another version by Joos de Momper, both Daedalus and Icarus are shown still in flight).

There are also plenty of primarily non-narrative figurative paintings in which a landscape is a backdrop, as in Bazille’s Summer Scene, which may have been a prototype for many later Impressionist paintings of bathers. In this case, the figures dominate the landscape in composition and size, but that is not always the case.

There many paintings, including those by Caspar David Friedrich, in which the balance between figures and landscape is far more difficult to judge, and may depend on your reading of the painting as a whole. The title of the painting suggests that the landscape might be dominant here, in which case the figures are mysterious, or the reading may actually need to start from examination of the figures and their likely identities: in this case the artist and his newly-married wife on their honeymoon. The third figure is open to speculation.

Whether figures are added to a painting to alter its reading can be impossible to determine. Superficially, you could assume that the two women in Welsh dress in William Dyce’s Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting are simply there to tell the viewer that this is Welsh countryside. But they are completely out of place, and dressed for show not knitting on the hillside. I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation as to how this painting might be read.

There are also many landscape paintings in which the sheer number and complexity of the figures overwhelms the landscape in which they are depicted.

Like many of the Dutch paintings of winter scenes on frozen rivers, Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters could be more appropriately titled Skaters with Winter Landscape as its countless people form a figurescape. The same is true of many cityscapes painted in crowded parts of Paris and New York from the late nineteenth century onwards.

In spite of these difficulties, there are plenty of landscapes and their creators in which the figures work with the fixtures and fittings of nature (and man) to create a coherent whole.

In many of Constable’s landscapes, the wagons and people are very definitely a part of the view, and as characteristic of the artist as their signature.

To my great surprise, when researching this series I have been unable to discover any systematic study of the use of figures in landscape painting. Its articles will therefore proceed somewhat unsystematically, in the hope that, over time, consistent themes and coherence will emerge. I am looking forward to the journey, and hope that you will enjoy it with me.

Over the last three weeks, with the help of Cédric Laurent’s excellent new book, I have looked at three superb Chinese handscroll paintings: The Nymph of the Luo River, The Second Ode to the Red Cliff, and Shanglin Park. Each is based on a famous Chinese literary work, and each shows strongly narrative painting. Here I’d like to draw some conclusions about the way in which those handscrolls tell their stories.

The handscrolls are, as is traditional, designed to be viewed in short sections, starting from the right end of the scroll. They tell their stories in a series of separate scenes from that end of the scroll in chronological order, as the viewer works towards the left end of the scroll. Movement also occurs from right to left, and so is consistent with the passage of time as depicted.

In the sixth scene of Shanglin Park, the emperor’s entourage appears from behind and to the right of the frame, and moves to the left, where members of the hunting party gallop off to the left.

Although some scenes make visual references to previous scenes, there does not seem to be any requirement for the viewer to scroll back at any time.

Each scene is painted as a narrative frame, much in the way that ‘comics’ (manga, graphic novels, BD) are constructed. Frames are not marked by an obvious visual device, but are usually separated by background non-narrative passages, such as water or vegetation.

The most consistent marker of narrative intent is the repeated appearance in frames of visually identical figures, notably the main characters in the narrative. If you discover a handscroll painting in which visually similar figures appear repeatedly along its length, then it is reasonable to suspect that it is telling a narrative using serial frames.

Although each of the three handscrolls shows the passage of a significant period, and two (Nymph of the Luo River and Second Ode to the Red Cliff) include nighttime, their artists do not provide obvious visual signs to mark the times of day or to suggest contrasting ambient light conditions.

Most remarkably, and in contrast to modern comics and their relatives, identical locations are not represented as being visually identical.

In the Second Ode to the Red Cliff, the third (above) and last (below) scenes are set at Su Shi’s house, which appears quite different in the two frames. This avoids the handscroll becoming repetitive in its imagery, but assumes that the viewer’s knowledge of the verbal story will inform them that these are the same location.

It is also worth noting that in the frame above, the scene is set at night; that below is after dawn.

Not only do the handscrolls show multi-frame narrative like comics, but within frames figures can appear more than once.

In the third scene of Nymph of the Luo River, the nymph appears twice: once to the right, down on the surface of the river, and a second time up above the river, and between two poles. Her appearance is identical, and there is no separation of these images along the length of the scroll. This is, therefore, multiplex narrative, in which a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story. This was common in Western art until the end of the Renaissance.

A more unusual feature is the visual echoing of sometimes quite elaborate objects and passages across scenes.

The ninth scene of Nymph of the Luo River (above) shows the ‘carriage of the waves’, which takes the nymph away from Cao. It is echoed in the final scene by the appearance of the conventional carriage in which Cao travels back (below).

Another interesting feature, which is shared by some comics and their relatives, is the use of purely descriptive scenes.

The Ode on Shanglin Park contains long and lyrical descriptions of aspects of the park, which are depicted in non-narrative frames, such as this third scene.

I hope that you have enjoyed looking through these exquisitely beautiful paintings, and that these small insights into visual narrative have been worthwhile too. If you know of any other non-Western narrative art which is amenable to such presentation and analysis, please let me know.

References

The Story in Paintings: Modes of painted narrative
explains different terminology used to describe narrative modes in visual art.

Laurent, Cédric (2017) Voyages Immobiles dans la prose ancienne, la peinture narrative sous la dynastie Ming (1368-1644), Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 978 2 251 44520 5. (In French, with copious original Chinese.)

Having rescued Andromeda from the sea-monster Cetus, Perseus makes offerings to the gods, and prepares for his wedding to his newly-won bride. It is then, at his wedding feast, that Ovid has Perseus tell the story of his encounter with the Gorgon Medusa, which brings Book 4 of the Metamorphoses to a conclusion.

The Story

Once Perseus has made appropriate thanks to the gods, he takes Andromeda to their wedding feast. As the Princess, this is celebrated in grand style in her parents’ palace. When the banquet is over, Perseus asks about the kingdom, and King Cepheus, his new father-in-law, asks Perseus how he acquired Medusa’s head.

Perseus then gives a short and fairly detached account of how he beheaded Medusa. He first went to the two Graiae, the sisters who guarded Medusa, and stole the single eye which they shared between them. As they were then unable to keep watch, he travelled on to the land where Medusa lived. This was distinguished by abundant figures of animals and people who had been turned to stone by the sight of her face.

As he approached Medusa, Perseus was careful to look only indirectly, via the reflection in his polished shield, so that he did not view her face directly. He found her in a deep sleep, and working with her reflection he cut her head off:
“When she was helpless in the power of sleep
and even her serpent-hair was slumber-bound,
I struck, and took her head sheer from the neck. —
To winged Pegasus the blood gave birth,
his brother also, twins of rapid wing.”

From her blood which emerged, the winged horse Pegasus and his human brother Chrysaor were born. Perseus then gives a summary of his escape and flight around the world before discovering Andromeda in distress.

He is finally asked how Medusa came to be the only one of the three Gorgons who had snakes in her hair. Perseus replies with a summary of the story of Medusa’s rape by Neptune in the temple of Minerva, and how that goddess transformed Medusa’s hair as ‘punishment’ for her rape:
“Because, O Stranger, it is your desire
to learn what worthy is for me to tell,
hear ye the cause: Beyond all others she
was famed for beauty, and the envious hope
of many suitors. Words would fail to tell
the glory of her hair, most wonderful
of all her charms — A friend declared to me
he saw its lovely splendour. Fame declares
the Sovereign of the Sea attained her love
in chaste Minerva’s temple. While enraged
she turned her head away and held her shield
before her eyes. To punish that great crime
Minerva changed the Gorgon’s splendid hair
to serpents horrible. And now to strike
her foes with fear, she wears upon her breast
those awful vipers — creatures of her rage.

The image of Medusa shown on Minerva’s breastplate is known as her Aegis, and is one of her more obvious attributes.

The Paintings

The head of Medusa has been a popular motif for painters across the ages, although how Perseus came to remove it seems to have had more limited appeal. I cannot find any painted account of how Medusa was transformed into a Gorgon, but will start with a selection of her portraits.

The most famous of those is probably Caravaggio’s Medusa (c 1597), actually his second version, which is now in the Uffizi in Florence; the first is slightly smaller and is in a private collection. Unusually for Caravaggio, this was painted on a tondo. He follows traditional lines, with ample blood and abundant snakes, and captures the open-mouthed horror in the woman’s face.

Shortly afterwards, the young and flourishing Rubens painted his remarkable The Head of Medusa (c 1617). This most probably shows the head when Perseus had placed it on a bed of seaweed, when he had rescued Andromeda in the previous story. Rubens shows an exuberant mass of snakes, even a lizard and a scorpion, more of which appear to be forming in the blood exuding at the neck.

Also noteworthy is Carlos Schwabe’s watercolour Medusa (1895), with its feline eyes and that characteristic wide-mouthed look of horror.

The great Polish artist Jacek Malczewski made Medusa a recurrent theme in his work. Here I show his Medusa (1900), above, in which the snakes adorning her hair curl and sweep in symmetry, amid more natural locks. In his painting below, he pairs his sculptor friend with the Gorgon in this Portrait of Tadeusz Błotnicki with Medusa (1902).

Although Baldassare Peruzzi must have been very familiar with the story, his fresco in the Sala delle Prospettive of the Villa Farnesina in Rome takes a very liberal approach. Perhaps to simplify his composition and make the action more direct, Perseus does not view Medusa via her reflection in his shield, but in Perseus and Pegasus (1510-11) the hero looks straight at his victim. The white head of Pegasus, at the far right, was born from the blood spilt when Medusa was beheaded, so is later in time than the events at the left.

Eugène Romain Thirion’s Perseus Victorious Over Medusa (1867) keeps to convention, with the hero holding Medusa’s head aloft, and facing away from him, in triumph. He shows Pegasus behind, but not Chrysaor, who is in general omitted from these paintings, and indeed from some verbal accounts.

As with the rest of the story of Perseus, it is Edward Burne-Jones who provides the most complete and explicit account, in his studies for his Perseus series.

The fourth painting in the series, The Finding of Medusa (1882), progressed no further than the unfinished bodycolour study above. It shows Perseus, wearing the helmet of Hades for invisibility, brandishing his adamantine sword, and viewing the scene in his mirror, in the Gorgons’ cave. Medusa, her hair yet to be detailed into snakes, is stood with a fearsome expression, while her two immortal sisters are scrunched together under their wings.

The fifth in the series, The Death of Medusa I (1882), was completed in bodycolour study but not in the final version in oils. Perseus has just cut Medusa’s head off, and holds it aloft with his left hand, at the far right edge of the painting. The adamantine sword is still in his right hand, and the kibisis is slung around his neck. Emerging from the severed neck, as if in collage, are Pegasus and Chrysaor, the latter shown as the associated person and without his characteristic curved golden sword. Three of the serpents from Medusa’s head have detached and fallen to the ground.

The sixth in the series, The Death of Medusa II (1881-2), completes the story of Medusa, as Perseus flees from the Gorgons. The headless body of Medusa is left on the ground, and her sisters fly around searching for her assailant. Perseus wears the helmet of Hades to maintain his invisibility, and is flying away with his winged sandals, while inserting Medusa’s head in the kibisis. This too was never realised in a final version painted in oils.

Medusa and her death at the hands of Perseus have not only proved very popular with artists, but have inspired some superb paintings, right up to modern times. The image of Medusa’s snake-filled hair has extended even greater, and is one of the great visual tropes in Western art. And I think Perseus’ story must be one of the best wedding speeches ever.

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.

I hope that you have enjoyed this series, which began by looking very briefly at Edvard Munch’s extraordinary life, career as an artist, and paintings.

As I explained, my main interest was in trying to assemble and read his Frieze of Life, predominantly paintings which he made during the 1890s, exhibited several times as a series, and among which he lived much of his life.

Many of that series are individually narrative paintings, telling parts of his life story, particularly its emotional turmoil. Although the series stops well short of the crisis which Munch underwent in 1908, and his recovery thereafter, its individual works and the series which they form must be among the most intensely autobiographic paintings by any artist.

In terms of narrative technique, within at least one painting (The Dance of Life, 1899-1900), Munch uses multiplex narrative. The whole series forms a higher-level narrative on top of those individual scenes. Works which depict deep emotional states, like The Scream, come together to compose a visual account of Munch’s life, loves, fears, and anxieties from his childhood in the late 1860s to about 1902.

Here then is a whistlestop tour, uninterrupted by my distracting commentary, of a selection from Munch’s Frieze of Life, followed by two indexes to the articles here.

The first Frieze of Life, exhibited in Berlin in 1895, is detailed in article 1. Subsequent articles show his second version, first exhibited in Berlin in 1902, which is divided into four sections.

Seeds of Love article 2

Flowering and Passing of Love article 3

Life Anxiety article 4

Death article 5

Index of Paintings, including common synonyms. These are referenced by the painting number cited in each article.

After the Fall (1895) 7 in article 3
Anxiety (1894) article 1, 13 in article 4
Ashes (1895) 7 in article 3
By the Deathbed (1893) 18 in article 5
Dance (c 1900) 4 in article 2
The Dance of Life (1899-1900) 9 in article 3
Dance on the Beach (c 1900) 4 in article 2
Dance on the Shore (c 1900) 4 in article 2
Dead Mother and (her) Child (1897-99) 22 in article 5
Death (1902) 20 in article 5
Death and Life (1893-94) article 1
Death and the Maiden (1893-94) article 1
Death Battle (1893) 18 in article 5
Death in the Sickroom (1893) 19 in article 5
Death Room (1893) 19 in article 5
Evening on Karl Johan (1892) article 1, 14 in article 4
Evening Star (1893) 1 in article 2
Eye in Eye (1894) article 1, 3 in article 2
Fever (1893) 18 in article 5
The Girl and Death (1897-99) 22 in article 5
Golgotha (1900) 16 in article 4
Hands (1893) article 1
Hearse on the Potsdamer Platz (1902) 20 in article 5
Insane Mood (1894) article 1, 13 in article 4
Jealousy (1895) article 1, 10 in article 3
The Kiss (c 1893) article 1, 5 in article 2
Life and Death (1898-99) article 1, 21 in article 5
Love (1894) 6 in article 2
Madonna (1894) article 1, 6 in article 2
Melancholy (1894-96) 12 in article 3
Metabolism (1898-99) article 1, 21 in article 5
Mysticism (1893) article 1
Red and White (1899-1900) 2 in article 2
Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900) 15 in article 4
Saint Hans Night (1899-1900) 9 in article 3
The Scream (1893) article 1, 17 in article 4
Separation (1896) article 1
Sphinx (1893-95) article 1, 11 in article 3
Starry Night (1893) article 1
Summer Night’s Dream (1893) article 1, 1 in article 2
Vampire (1893) article 1, 8 in article 3
The Voice (1893) article 1, 1 in article 2
Woman in Three Stages (1893-95) article 1, 11 in article 3

Index of People Depicted or Mentioned These are ordered by last name, and referenced by the painting number cited in each article.

Karen Bjølstad (aunt), 16 in article 4, 19 and 22 in article 5
‘Mrs Heiberg’ (alias Millie Thaulow, lover), article 1, 1 in article 2, 7 and 9 in article 3, 14 in article 4
Gunnar Heiberg, 9 and 11 in article 3, 16 in article 4
Christian Krohg (teacher), 12 in article 3, 16 in article 4
Tulla Larsen (lover), 9 in article 3
Andreas Munch (brother), 22 in article 5
Christian Munch (father), 18 and 22 in article 5
Edvard Munch (artist), 22 in article 5
Inger Munch (sister), 19 and 22 in article 5
Laura Munch (née Bjølstad, mother), 22 in article 5
Laura Munch (sister), 19 in article 5
Sophie Munch (sister), 18 and 19 in article 5
Stanislaw Przbyszewski, 10 in article 3, 15 and 16 in article 4
Millie Thaulow (alias ‘Mrs Heiberg’, lover), article 1, 1 in article 2, 7 and 9 in article 3, 14 in article 4

References

Wikipedia.
Collection at Norway’s National Gallery.
The Munch Museum, Oslo.

Wood, Mara-Helen (ed) (1992) Edvard Munch, The Frieze of Life, National Gallery Publications. ISBN 978 1 857 09015 4.

Until the widespread use of photography, and most particularly until the advent of the zoom lens, landscapes came as you saw them. A few were privileged enough to possess optical instruments like telescopes, but the great majority of people could only see what they saw. If you wanted to ‘zoom in’, you had to walk closer; if you wanted a broader view, you had to walk away and find a vantage point.

The notable exception to this was in landscape paintings, where a diligent painter could depict details which you could only discern by getting close to their painting.

Figures and similar small details could therefore be introduced into a landscape painting to lure the viewer to study its fine details, and to marvel at them: figures on the other side of a fjord, perhaps. In luring the viewer in this way, an artist could get them to look at their work intently.

We still do the same with our children: illustrated children’s books which feature a recurrent figure, like Richard Scarry‘s Goldbug series, teach us to look long and hard at images in much the same way.

Some of the best examples of this use of figures in the landscape come in the magnificent paintings of Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842), a Norwegian painter whose career was cut short when he died of typhus at the age of only 39.

Fearnley was one of the most brilliant exponents of plein air painting in oils when Corot was also painting in the Roman Campagna. His sketches made in front of the motif and subsequent finished paintings are rich in their use of figures, among them an artist, often seen sitting at an easel painting the view depicted in the painting: Fearnley’s graphical signature.

By all accounts, Fearnley himself was a portly man, who would have looked quite different to the figures which keep appearing in his paintings. It seems reasonable to conclude that this traveller, viewer, and artist was Fearnley’s artistic alter ego, a rückenfigur seen in paintings by the likes of Caspar David Friedrich.

(Note: to view a painting in this and other articles here at full size, click on an image, and click again to magnify it to full size.)

He often appears wearing a distinctive hat – sometimes a top-hat, or the red cap of Landscape with a Wanderer (1830), shown in the detail below.

A couple of times, Fearnley’s painter assumes great importance, as in The Painter and the Boy (c 1834) above. This view of the Italian coast was most probably painted en plein air over a period of a few days, the figures being added late during that process. The artist with his back to the viewer doesn’t appear bulky enough to be Fearnley, cannot be identified as any real painter, and must be presumed to be this alter ego.

If the Painter and the Boy themselves are part of the motif, Fearnley still adorns the ground with accessories. The detail below shows well over a dozen, each carefully worked during the limited time available for this painting.

We get even better insight into Fearnley’s use of figures when comparing one of his plein air sketches with its matching finished work.

During his travels in about 1837, Fearnley visited the Grindelwald Glacier, and produced this superb plein air oil sketch. In addition to the ghostly-white eagle soaring above the ice, he included more than half a dozen figures, shown in the detail below.

Prominent among the nearer group is a walker, wearing a large black hat. Even the line of people far back against the foot of the glacier has been painted in some detail, though, with the leader holding a staff, and one of them mounted on a pony or similar.

A year or so later, Fearnley painted this large finished version. The method he used to transfer from his original sketch has reversed the sides of the image, but many details have been retained. The eagle still soars, the trees are very similar, but the figures have changed completely.

On the now lush pastures in front of the massive wall of ice, Fearnley has found a flock of sheep instead of people. In the distance, with his back towards us, is the rambler, posing as shepherd but looking away from the viewer, towards the glacier, and wearing a distinctive black hat.

Old Birch Tree at Sognefjord (1839) features two small figures at is centre, and many other absorbing details such as the smoke rising from the chimney of the house on the other side of the small bay. Look closer, at its detail (below) and both figures wear hats, the one on the left being bright red.

Fearnley draws the viewer closer and closer into his paintings.

In The Duck Hunter, the figure is camouflaged to increase the challenge made of the viewer. This is heightened in another large finished work, showing The Labro Falls at Kongsberg (1837), below.

You don’t get many points for spotting the large eagle in the foreground, or the scattered fungi. Rewards increase with the birds wheeling in the sky, and the cabin in the middle distance.

To get full marks, you have to notice the tiny red cap among the shadows, to the left of centre in this detail. I think that is Fearnley’s alter ego, collecting brushwood for the fire in his cabin in the upper right.

Fearnley is by no means the only landscape painter to have used such little figures to draw the viewer into their highly detailed landscapes, and make them marvel at seeing what they could not have seen in reality. It’s a very effective trick which adds interest to a view, and enriches the dialogue between the artist and viewer. The people may be little, but their purpose is as ambitious as the grander landscape around them.

Reference

Sumner, Ann, and Smith, Greg (eds) (2012) In Front of Nature, The European Landscapes of Thomas Fearnley, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. ISBN 978 1 907804 10 6.