I dwell too much on the art of Europe. In 1918, there were many exciting artists working in North America, and many significant landscape paintings were created there. So in this concluding survey of paintings of that year, I will look at a few from the New World first.

Marsden Hartley had lived and worked in Berlin until 1915, then returned to the US, where he resumed landscape painting, travelling extensively within the continent. He visited New Mexico from June 1918, where he repeatedly painted the landscapes of Arroyo Hondo, here in pastel. Hartley claimed that this area was “the only place in America where true color exists, excepting the short autumnal season in New England.”

Rio Grande River is another pastel from Hartley’s New Mexico campaign.

Charles Demuth demonstrated his maturing Precisionist style, with its Cubist relations, in this watercolour of Red Chimneys.

Robert Henri had been the driving force behind the Ashcan School, and at this time was a popular teacher at the Art Students League in New York. He was turning away from his previous city motifs, and his pastel of The Reader in the Forest is an example of his direction.

At the end of the First World War, Claude Monet concentrated his effort on series of water lilies in his garden at Giverny, and of weeping willow trees, which he dedicated to the memory of all the French personnel who had died in that war. Weeping Willow is one example of the latter works.

Théo van Rysselberghe’s colours became as strong as those of the Fauves. In Almond Trees in Blossom (Morning) the more delicate pinks of the flowers pale in comparison with his full reds and blues – even down to the blue horse pulling a plough.

The great Swedish wildlife painter Bruno Liljefors had also became decidedly post-Impressionist, as seen in this Autumn Landscape with Fox.

Tragically, in his last few months of life, the radical young Egon Schiele painted few landscapes. This close-up of a mountain stream, Brook, is one of those.

There were two landscape painters whose works have particularly lasting value, in terms of their impact on subsequent art: the highly individual Pierre Bonnard, and the dying Ferdinand Hodler.

Bonnard continued to paint at a furious rate. The Terrace is an example of his many expansive views with intervening trees.

House by the Path on the Cliff must have been painted among the sandy cliffs and dunes of northern France, rather than on the Mediterranean coast which he loved so much. Although a hazy day, with quite a big sea running according to the waves, the roofs are brilliant red, even back to the church in the distance.

Landscape of Haute-Savoie shows the western foothills of the Alps, and must have been painted while Bonnard was staying in Uriage.

Bonnard had first developed aerial views when painting street views in Paris early in his career. These grew to include the window frame and sometime substantial parts of its surrounds, as seen in his Window in Uriage.

But my favourite landscape paintings from 1918 are the last series of sublime views which Ferdinand Hodler made from his home on Lake Geneva. He had been progressively eliminating detail so that these images stated just the elements of water, earth, air, and the fire of the rising sun, in their natural rhythm.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc by Morning Light is one of the more complex paintings of this series, with bands representing the lake shore, four different zones of the surface of the lake, the lowlands of the opposite bank, the mountain chains, and two zones of colour in the dawn sky. The lower section of the sky and the foreground shore echo in colour, and contrast in their pale lemon-orange with the blues of the other bands.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light has a much simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the dawn sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light is also simpler in its structure, with the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Given the end of the horrific war and the even higher death toll brought by the influenza pandemic, that is the image with which I end this review of the paintings of 1918.

Armida, abandoned by Rinaldo so he could return to the siege of Jerusalem, has joined the massed army of the King of Egypt. One of his leaders, Adrastus, has promised to rip Rinaldo’s heart out, and present his head to Armida, to satisfy her lust for vengeance.

Rinaldo, Charles and Ubaldo return in their magic ship, and land on Judea’s shore. Waiting nearby is an old man guarding a new suit of armour for Rinaldo, which has been specially forged and crafted to protect him. The shield bears figures demonstrating its heroic roots, and Rinaldo is presented with the predestined sword which had been owned by Sven, the late Prince of Denmark.

The three are then whisked through the night sky in the old man’s chariot to rejoin the crusaders in their camp near Jerusalem.

At the start of Canto eighteen, Rinaldo and Godfrey of Bouillon are re-united: the knight says that he is ready to redeem himself, and Godfrey throws his arms around him. The leader then explains to Rinaldo the problem that they have with the enchanted wood, which is stopping them from felling trees to replace their siege engines and towers to resume their assault on the city.

Rinaldo accepts Godfrey’s challenge and, with the encouragement of Peter the Hermit, he sets off alone for the wood. When he enters it, all is still and calm. He seeks a place to cross the river, and a bridge of gold appears, sees him across, then vanishes again. In front of him, the trunk of an oak splits open to give birth to a fully-grown nymph, who resembles Armida.

Rinaldo ignores the overtures of the nymph, draws his sword, and goes to cut down some myrtle. The nymph intervenes, and transforms into a monster with many arms bearing swords. Then there is lightning and thunder, and heavy rain, but Rinaldo persists and cuts through a black walnut tree. This suddenly dispels the enchantment, and the wood returns to normal.

Rinaldo returns to the camp and tells of his success. Crusaders and their expert engineers swarm out to the woods to fell trees and build new siege machines. In no time, they build three great towers to place against the city’s walls, replacing those which had been burnt to the ground by Clorinda before her death.

In Jerusalem, there is frantic work to repair and reinforce the city’s walls, build their own towers, and make inflammable weapons using sulphur and bitumen.

Some French crusaders then spot a messenger pigeon, which is attacked by a hawk. The pigeon lands on Godfrey, who discovers the message it is carrying. This is from the Egyptian forces who are approaching, and expect to arrive at Jerusalem in four or five days. Godfrey knows how little time he has left to capture the city, and calls on his commanders to prepare to assault the city walls.

In their meeting, Raymond nominates his polyglot valet Vafrine to be a spy on the approaching army from Egypt. The valet agrees, and promises to bring back full details of their forces and disposition.

The day before their intended assault they spend in prayer, confession, and celebrating Mass. The crusaders then move their siege towers to a well-armed gate, to mislead the enemy. Overnight they shift them again to where they intend to use them, catching the defenders of the city by surprise.

Soon after dawn, with their host of smaller engines brought into play, the crusaders start their massed assault. The air is filled with arrows tipped with poison, then stones hurled from the walls. The knights and soldiers approach under cover, and Rinaldo has a high ladder placed against the wall so that he can lead many others also scaling its heights.

The crusaders swarm up using ladders and the three towers, taking casualties from missiles and heavy objects dropped upon them. Then balls of fire start to rain upon them, as if from hell. As the soldiers try to control fires burning in their wooden towers, the wind suddenly changes and blows the flames back at those defending the walls. This sets alight woollen materials which they had been using as protection, and the defenders are scorched away.

Ismen takes two of his neophytes out to try to cast spells, but a stone flung from one of the towers kills all three in a single shot.

As Soliman takes to leading the defence, the Archangel Michael appears to Godfrey, and reveals a whole army of angels who are in his support. This inspires Godfrey to challenge Soliman. Rinaldo makes a way for his leader to plant a holy Cross on the top of the city’s wall, bringing cheers from the crusaders, who push onward and upward. Tancred too storms over the wall, raising his banner of the Cross in victory over Argante’s men.

Finally, the nearby gate is opened, and the whole crusader army enters Jerusalem. The wrath of their victory is immediate, and the city’s streets are soon awash with blood and piled with corpses.

Canto nineteen opens within the conquered city, where only Argante the Circassian fights on. He is met by Tancred, and the two agree to conclude their previous combat outside the city, alone. Argante has no shield, and stands higher by his head against his opponent. They swing their swords at one another, inflicting wounds, but fighting on. Taunting one another, they grapple and wrestle so forcefully that they both fall to the ground.

Argante is the slower to get up, and they continue slashing through their armour into flesh. But Argante is now bleeding badly from his arm, and Tancred offers to call a halt. The Circassian responds by wounding Tancred viciously in the shoulder and ribs. Argante then falls to the ground, opening up his wounds. Still he won’t give up, and Tancred has to drive his blade into Argante’s skull to finish him off.

Tancred may be the victor, but he is himself quite badly wounded, and has to struggle to walk. He sits down, trembling, and as night falls he lapses into unconsciousness.

While Argante and Tancred have been engaged in their duel to the death, slaughter has continued in the captured city of Jerusalem. Rinaldo will only kill those who remain armed. Many of the citizens are packed into the shelter of the Temple of Solomon, whose doors are quickly battered in, leading to mass murder of the occupants.

Aladine and Soliman find their way to the Tower of David, where they barricade themselves in, armed with a steel mace. When Count Raymond of Toulouse tries to break into them, he is knocked senseless and dragged in as a hostage. Rinaldo is just about to enter when Godfrey sounds the retreat for the night, leaving the storming of the tower for the following morning.

Vafrine, meanwhile, has been sizing up the Egyptian forces during the day. He has spoken freely within their camp, gleaned details of strengths and plans, even learning of the soldier who has been designated to kill Godfrey. He found Armida, and her suitors who have vowed to kill Rinaldo for her hand. There he bumps into a beautiful woman who recognises him: it is Erminia, who asks him to take her back with him.

Erminia tells Vafrine how the death of Godfrey has been planned using subterfuge. His killers will be dressed as crusaders, bearing the red cross on white to ensure that they can get close to him, with just a small sign on their helmets to distinguish them as ‘pagans’.

By dusk, Erminia and Vafrine are nearing the crusader camp, when they spot Argante’s corpse, and a little beyond it the unconscious Tancred, who at first they think is dead. When Erminia (who is in love with Tancred) recognises his faint voice, she leaps from her horse and weeps over him. Vafrine tells her that there is still time to cure his wounds and save his life, and removes Tancred’s armour.

Erminia has nothing to use as bandages to bind Tancred’s wounds, so cuts her hair off and uses that. Tancred regains consciousness, and recognises Vafrine. Others who have been searching for Tancred arrive, and start to carry him back to camp. Tancred insists on two things, though: that Argante is given a proper burial, and that he is carried into the city of Jerusalem to rest.

It is this last section which has been painted often, and by great masters.

Giovanni Antonio Guardi’s Herminia and Vafrine Find the Wounded Tancred from about 1750-55 shows the start of the sequence, just after Erminia has leapt from her horse. The corpse of Argante is in the lower left corner, Tancred’s sword still impaling its head.

Guercino’s Erminia Finding the Wounded Tancred from about 1650 shows the scene slightly later, as Erminia rushes over to minister to the ailing Tancred, still a little uncertain whether he is alive or dead. This painting was originally commissioned by the Papal Legate of Bologna, but he let the Duke and Duchess of Mantua buy it from its creator in 1652.

Much earlier in his career, Guercino had painted a few moments further into the story, in Erminia Finds the Wounded Tancred from 1618-19. Vafrine has now removed Tancred’s armour, and they are trying to work out how to bandage his wounds.

Pier Francesco Mola’s Erminia and Vafrine Tending the Wounded Tancred After the Battle with Argante from about 1650-60 shows a similar scene, with Vafrine cradling the knight’s head and upper body, and the body of Argante at the far left.

There are three great paintings which show the strange climax, in which Erminia cuts her tresses to form bandages.

Alessandro Turchi’s Erminia Finds the Wounded Tancred is thought to have been painted in about 1630. Erminia is using Tancred’s sword to cut her hair, a detail omitted from Tasso’s text. Argante’s body is behind them.

At about the same time, Nicolas Poussin was painting this first version of Tancred and Erminia (c 1631) which is now in the Hermitage. It contains the same elements, even back to Argante’s body, but in a more open composition which is dominated by Erminia and her white horse.

This slightly later version by Poussin is thought to date from about 1634, and has a more powerful close-in composition. Erminia’s arms are in a similar position, also using Tancred’s sword, but she is now kneeling at Tancred’s side. The love between Erminia and Tancred is also made clear in the pair of cupids, and the two horses are anticipating the arrival of other crusaders to carry Tancred away.

It is now night, and Vafrine has a lot to brief Godfrey about, as the crusaders prepare to complete their conquest of Jerusalem then defend it from the approaching Egyptian army.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

Over the last few weeks, I have looked at the careers and works of two great Danish realist painters in parallel: Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942) and Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933). In this final article, I’d like to draw together some conclusions about their paintings, illustrated by some of the finest work.

They shared the surname of Andersen, only changing later when they came to exhibit together. Both came from humble rural families, and together had to struggle long and hard to achieve recognition for their art. They shared political ideas, being socialist, with Ring even something of a revolutionary when a young man.

Soon after they had changed their names to enable their viewers to distinguish them, Brendekilde captured Ring’s frustrations in L A Ring by his Fallen Easel (1883). Ring was even contemplating emigrating to America.

For Ring, recognition came with The Lineman in the summer of 1884. Hardly radical or even social realist, it did though express the spirit of that time of great change in the country, and for such ordinary people, without sentimentality, or even for that matter showing the plight of many in rural areas.

It was Brendekilde’s Cowed in 1887 which tackled some of those issues more openly, but even here they only surface with careful reading. His style is reminiscent of Jules Breton or Jules Bastien-Lepage, and the subject the rural poor gleaning after the harvest.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still hard at work gleaning her handful of corn; her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs; their daughter is engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is ‘in service’ as a maid in a rich household in the nearby town. She is an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it is she who is oppressed or cowed by her circumstances.

Brendekilde followed this in 1889 with his remarkable Worn Out, which surely stands alongside the best of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Ring pursued a unique project which documents skilled workers in their humble working environments, among them his future father-in-law, the ceramic designer and potter Herman Kähler in his Workshop (1890). However, these are almost documentary in their style, not a call to action.

Brendekilde’s road paintings, particularly his People by a Road from 1893, seem to have been his last social realist works. In this, a young carpenter (with references to Jesus Christ) is preaching to a family of itinerant stone-breakers.

Ring won a bronze medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle with this wonderful full-length portrait, At the French Windows. The Artist’s Wife (1897), which marked his transition to mature and thoroughly respectable painting.

The following year, Ring painted another outstanding work, In the Month of June (1899), in which his wife sits blowing dandelion ‘clocks’ in a moment of dolce far niente, as his social realism fell away altogether into the Aesthetic.

There was still narrative to be found reading Brendekilde’s paintings, such as his Wooded Path in Autumn from 1902. Here, it is more speculative and open-ended, like a ‘problem picture’ within its rich autumn landscape.

Ring’s working men remained detached and unemotive, as in Whitewashing the Old House from 1908.

Then just before the First World War, the two friends painted a common motif drawn straight from Millet’s The Sower of 1850, one of the archetypal works of social realism.

Ring’s Sower from 1910 is innovative not for its style or social content, but its photographic freeze-frame of the seeds caught in mid-air.

Four years later, Brendekilde set his sower as a small part of the countryside where he had been born, in A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church (1914). It’s almost idyllically pastoral, not social comment except for the abundant flints in the soil.

That year, Ring revisited The Lineman (1884) of exactly thirty years before in Waiting for the Train. Level Crossing by Roskilde Highway (1914). It is equally matter-of-fact and almost mundane in its lack of emotion.

Both artists seem to have retired at a similar time: Brendekilde to paint the occasional pretty but rather bland rural scene, and Ring to paint landscape views from his retirement home just outside Roskilde.

Ring’s superb View of Roskilde from Sankt Jørgensbjerg from 1916 has a fine rhythmic texture which extends deep to the skyline, and is a tribute to his skill and technique.

Brendekilde’s delightful garden tale in Afternoon Work (1918) shows the whimsical battle between a dedicated gardener and the mole steadily burrowing under his vegetable patch.

I suppose most of us are the same. The fire of our youth turns to the cozier warmth of later life.

The stories told each day in Boccaccio’s Decameron follow a theme appointed by the ‘ruler’ of that day, as they decree when they are crowned with laurels at the end of the previous day’s storytelling. The theme chosen by the queen of the fifth day, Fiammetta, was the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness.

The eighth such story concerns the misfortunes of Nastagio degli Onesti, as told by Filomena. This appears to have been instantly successful, and by the early sixteenth century had been painted by both Botticelli and Ghirlandaio.

Nastagio degli Onesti was a young man from an old and noble family in Ravenna, who inherited a huge fortune, then fell in love with the daughter of a more noble family. His love for her was not returned, though, and she was persistently cruel towards him. This caused the young Nastagio so much grief that he even contemplated suicide.

He continued to try to win her over, and in the course of that expended much of his inheritance. Friends and relatives feared for him and his future, and tried to persuade him to leave the city for a while. He was very reluctant, but finally travelled to Classe, which is just three miles away, in May when the weather was fine.

Once there, he wandered off into the local pine woods, thinking as he always did about his cruel love. As he walked in the wood, he heard the screams of a woman in distress. He then caught sight of her running naked towards him. In hot pursuit was a pair of large mastiff dogs, and behind them was a mounted knight brandishing a sword and threatening to kill her.

Nastagio took up a tree branch in her defence, but the knight told him by name to keep out, and let him and his dogs give the sinful woman what she deserved. Nastagio challenged the knight, who dismounted and introduced himself as Guido degli Anastagi. He then explained that he had fallen deeply in love with this woman many years ago, but she too had rejected him cruelly. As a result, Guido had killed himself, and was condemned to eternal punishment for that sin.

The woman had died shortly afterwards, without repenting her cruelty, and she too was condemned to eternal punishment for her sin.

The punishment consisted of Guido having to hunt her down in the woods, kill her with the same sword with which he had committed suicide, then cut her back open and remove her stone cold heart. That and her other organs he then has to feed to his dogs. After a short break, she is magically restored, and his hunt of her has to resume.

Nastagio was horrified by this, stepped back, and watched the dead Guido kill the dead woman with his rapier, and go through the sequence of cutting out her heart and organs. A few moments later, after the ghostly dogs had eaten her organs, the dead woman jumped up and the hunt started again.

When he had recovered from the shock, Nastagio came up with a plan to deal with his own predicament. He summoned his friends and relatives, and agreed to stop trying to woo the woman that he loved on one condition. That was that she and her family should join him in the same place in the pine wood exactly one week later, for a magnificent breakfast banquet.

A week later, all her family were present at the meal in the wood, and Nastagio carefully seated the woman he loved so that she would get a grandstand view of the proceedings. No sooner had the last course been served, than they heard the dead woman’s screams, and she ran right in front of them.

Many of the guests tried to stop Guido from carrying out this punishment, so he explained to them what he had told Nastagio the week before. Eventually the ghostly couple rushed off again, and the guests talked avidly about what they had witnessed. But the person who was most affected by the spectacle was the cruel woman who Nastagio loved, who had perhaps already put herself in the position of the dead woman.

Nastagio’s plan paid off: the woman he loved soon sent him a servant to inform him that she would do anything he desired. She quickly consented to marriage, and they were wedded the following Sunday.

One perhaps unintended consequence of Nastagio’s breakfast demonstration was that, for some time to come, the women of Ravenna were so frightened of what could happen to them, that they were much more favourably responsive to the approaches of men.

The title page of this story in this illustrated manuscript copy of the Decameron from the fifteenth century features a small reminder of the grim human hunt scene at its head.

This gruesome story and ingenious reversal of conventional Christian values became popular and well-known through the fifteenth century, sufficient for it to be depicted in four tempera panels given on the occasion of the arranged marriage of Gianozzo Pucci and Lucretia Bini in 1483. The couple were particularly fortunate, in that one of those who made the arrangement, and who had this gift made for them, was Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’, who was also Botticelli’s patron at the time, and the ruler of the Florentine Republic.

The first panel shows two figures of Nastagio, at the left, in the pine wood, with the naked woman running towards him, a mastiff ainking its teeth into her buttock. Behind them, at the right, is Guido, his sword in hand ready to kill the woman when he catches her. In the distance is a coastal landscape intended to locate this near Ravenna, which is close to the Adriatic, although I think that this is idealised rather than representative.

Botticelli continues to tell the story using multiplex (‘continuous’) narrative in the second painting. The dead Guido has now caught the dead woman, killed her with his rapier, and with her lying on her face, he is cutting her back open to remove her cold heart. His dogs are already eating her organs at the right, and Nastagio is visibly distressed at the left.

Behind that composite scene is an earlier scene of Guido and his dogs still in pursuit of the woman, which precedes the image of the first painting in the series.

In the third painting, Botticelli shows the breakfast banquet a week later, with the dead woman being attacked by Guido’s dogs, and Guido himself about to catch and kill her, in front of Nastagio’s guests.

Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women are rising in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

The fourth and final panel shows Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Botticelli’s series seems to have been quite celebrated, and not too long afterwards, Ghirlandaio, another Florentine master, was asked to paint not copies, but in the manner of Botticelli’s series. Two have survived, and are now both in the US.

Ghirlandaio’s first panel, now in the Brooklyn Museum, is based on Botticelli’s first, with the addition of an extra scene to its multiplex narrative. Up in the right, he adds the scene from Botticelli’s second panel, showing Guido cutting out the dead woman’s heart through her back.

Ghirlandaio’s second panel shows an almost identical breakfast banquet to that in Botticelli’s third panel. This is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I don’t know whether Ghirlandaio’s series extended to a third, completing the story with the marriage feast of Nastagio.

Boccaccio’s strange tale, twisted from source material by Dante, resulted in even more curious paintings. Today we might be only to happy to watch it in a horror movie, but seeing it come to life in a series of panels as a wedding gift? That has to be late Middle Ages.

Mention the surname Borgia and most people conjure up sinister connotations. Add the Christian name of Lucrezia and we recognise one of the classical femmes fatales, famous from books, movies, and art. This article looks at her portrayal in paintings.

Her father was Cardinal Rodrigo de Borgia, later to become Pope Alexander VI, and her mother was one of his several mistresses, apparently kept discreetly outside the city of Rome. She was born on 18 April 1480, and received an unusually broad education, becoming proficient in four main languages, as well as being able to read Latin and Greek.

Before she was even eleven years old, marriage was arranged for her, first with a Valencian noble, then with the Count of Procida. After he father became Pope, that was changed again to a second-rank count in the House of Sforza. Lucrezia married him when she was just thirteen, for the Pope’s political gain.

The Sforzas soon became of no interest to the papal court, so the Pope ordered her husband’s execution. Lucrezia warned him, which enabled him to flee, and the marriage to be annulled on the basis of it not being consummated. That at least spared him his life.

It is generally thought that, whilst awaiting the annulment, Lucrezia had an affair which resulted in her pregnancy, and the birth of a son, Giovanni Borgia, although two papal bulls were issued contradicting that, and one another.

When she was eighteen, Lucrezia was married a second time, to Alfonso d’Aragon, the Neapolitan half-brother of her brother-in-law. The following year it was she, rather than her husband, who was appointed governor of Spoleto, and a year later, in 1500, her husband was murdered, apparently on the orders of Lucrezia’s brother Cesare because of changing political allegiances.

Her father, the Pope, then arranged a third marriage, to Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, which proved more lasting and productive of eight children. However, neither husband nor wife was in the least bit faithful: Lucrezia had a long and very physical affair with her brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, which he had to terminate when his syphilis became too overt to hide any longer.

Lucrezia also had a more emotional affair with the poet Pietro Bembo, who is now commemorated in the font of that name. She fell seriously ill after the birth of her tenth child in June 1519, and died on 24th of that month.

The closest that we have to a portrait of Lucrezia is this panel which is attributed to Dosso Dossi, and claimed to show Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara from some time between 1519-30. Inevitably that remains a matter of dispute, and doesn’t match contemporary descriptions of her having very long and thick blonde hair.

It has been proposed that Lucrezia modelled for the title role of Pinturicchio’s wonderful fresco of St Catherine’s Disputation in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican Palace. She would therefore be the woman wearing a red cloak over a patterned blue dress to the left of the centre foreground. As this was painted between 1492-94, she would only have been 12-14 at the time, and in the throes of her first marriage.

There are two other contemporary portraits which have been claimed to be of Lucrezia, both painted by Bartolomeo Veneto, and otherwise unidentified.

Veneto’s early Portrait of a Young Lady probably from about 1500-10 has been thought to have a Ferrarese origin, and one of the beads worn by her is inscribed ‘SAP’. Her hair is not blonde, and she is here dressed in quite sombre clothing bearing emblems of the Passion. If the dating of this work is correct, Lucrezia would have been in her twenties when it was painted.

The second of Veneto’s paintings which has been claimed to show Lucrezia is more scandalous, and was probably completed shortly after her death. Known as an Idealised Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora (c 1520), it does at least show a blonde at last, but the Duchess of Ferrara exposing her left breast?

Had those been the only paintings possibly of Lucrezia Borgia, she would hardly have made her mark in art. But Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed an obsession with her, and revived her image on several of his watercolours in the late nineteenth century.

In the first, The Borgias painted in 1851, Rossetti has Lucrezia playing a lute in the midst of her family, two of her children dancing in front. All the figures look disturbingly sinister, particularly the man leaning on her right shoulder.

In 1860, Rossetti returned to her when his interest in her family was rekindled. In Lucrezia Borgia (1860–61), he shows Lucrezia washing her hands in a small sink after she has poisoned her husband Alfonso d’Aragon in 1500. Shown in cameo, in a reflection in the upper left, are Lucrezia’s father, the Pope, helping her husband to walk in order to hasten the effects of the poison and bring about his death. Rossetti revised her face at a later date.

Ten years later, in 1871, Rossetti returned to this same scene and composition, and painted Lucrezia Borgia again. The only minor change which he made here is the decoration on the tall pot under the sink.

Among Lucrezia’s children who survived to adulthood, one was the Duke of Ferrara for over fifty years, a second became Archbishop of Milan, and another – Leonora d’Este – was a nun and probably composer of religious motets. Members of the d’Este family, particularly Isabella d’Este, the wife of Lucrezia’s lover and brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga, were major patrons of art in the Renaissance. Isabella was patron to Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Perugino, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Dosso Dossi, and others.

Reference

Wikipedia.

I hadn’t realised that Caspar David Friedrich had at least one pupil, and a rather unusual one at that: Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), who when he was learning to paint was already a professor of obstetrics in Dresden, Germany. This and the next article look at the remarkable polymath Carus and his paintings.

Carus was a Renaissance man: an eminent obstetrician and gynaecologist who ran obstetric services in the city of Dresden, a botanist and zoologist who influenced Darwin, a physiologist and pioneer psychologist who helped develop the concept of the unconscious, a friend and influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and, as we shall see, a highly accomplished painter of Romantic ‘Gothic’ landscapes.

Carus first trained as a medical practitioner, but during those years also seems to have taken drawing classes. When he was appointed professor of obstetrics in Dresden in 1814, he started to concentrate on painting in oils, which he learned under Caspar David Friedrich, who had moved to Dresden in 1798. The two became good friends.

One of Carus’ earliest surviving works is this sketch on cardboard of the Return of the Monks to the Monastery from about 1816-18, the end of his period studying with Friedrich, and just prior to Friedrich’s marriage. Outlined by an ethereal light, a group of monks are entering the large doorway of a chapel at the right. On the hill in the centre, lit from behind by the moon, stands their isolated monastery.

Carus’ Wanderer on the Mountaintop, Pilgrim’s Rest from 1818 is closely related to Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Mists which was painted in the same year. However, I don’t know who inspired whom.

At this stage of his scientific career, Carus’ professional achievements were mainly in the field of zoology and anatomy, and in 1820 he published his first textbook on gynaecology.

Ruins of the Eldena Monastery with a Cottage near Greifswald in Moonlight from 1819-20 shows another of Friedrich’s favourite motifs, the imposing remains of the former Cistercian monastery near Greifswald in Pomerania, to the south of Germany’s Baltic coast. Founded in 1193, the abbey was dissolved in 1535, and fell derelict from 1650 onwards. Friedrich painted it from about 1809 onwards, in The Abbey in the Oakwood.

Stone Age Stronghold at Nobbin, Rügen Island (c 1820) shows a neolithic site on this island in the southern Baltic, whose famous white cliffs feature in Friedrich’s well-known honeymoon painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818). Carus again uses the muted and faintly sinister light of the moon to enhance the drama of this ancient stone circle.

Like the Norwegian Thomas Fearnley, and Friedrich, many of Carus’ paintings feature his faceless ‘pilgrim’ or traveller. In Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley from about 1820, the man with a hat and walking stick is standing in front of a narrow gorge, which promises to make his passage very difficult.

Carus seldom painted identifiable figures in his landscapes. Faust in the Mountains from about 1821 is one exception, and possibly a tribute to his friend Goethe. However, the artist doesn’t include allusions to Goethe’s story in the form of Mephistopheles or a Brocken spectre. The first part of Goethe’s Faust had been published in 1808, and Goethe was working on the second, which wasn’t published until after his death.

View of Dresden at Sunset from about 1822 is one of Carus’ finest paintings, with the famous spires and towers of the city of Dresden seen against the rich, warm light of dusk. Sat admiring the sight are two faceless figures, one wearing a distinctive top hat.

In Fantasy of the Alps. Eagles Nesting on an Alpine Peak (1822), Carus has developed his own distinctive version of the Gothic mountain and fog scene, in which the sole creatures are not human, but birds.

Carus’ Seashore in Moonlight (1823) may have been based on a view from Rügen, as the full moon would be to the south, an arrangement which is most probable when looking south across the Baltic.

Woman on the Balcony (1824) replaces Carus’ faceless male pilgrim with a young woman dressed in black, facing away from the viewer. She is here on the terrace of a castellated mansion high above rolling wooded countryside, probably somewhere in central Germany.

Carus appears to have been an enthusiastic plein air painter for his whole career. His Saxon Countryside. Sonnenstein near Pirna (Saxon Castle) from about 1824 was sketched in oil on paper, and shows this massive castle which was built high above the River Elbe near Pirna, not far from Dresden, from about 1460.

There had previously been a mediaeval castle on its site, and from 1811 it was used as a mental hospital, pioneering what is now known as occupational therapy in mental illness. From early 1940, the Nazis used part of the castle as a killing centre before turning it into a military hospital in late 1942.

The Imperial Castle, Eger (1824) had also been the site of a castle for a very long time. This is in Eger, a city in the north-east of Hungary. Its walls and towers have been attacked by Mongols and Turks, and in 1701 it was partially demolished by Austrians.

Rudelsburg Castle, which Carus painted in 1825, is another Romantic/Gothic location on the River Saale, in Saxony, central Germany. In the 19th century, its ruins became a popular focal point for walkers, and grapevines were planted in its grounds. Carus’ faceless pilgrim or wanderer has made his way here too, this time in the company of his dog.

Up to the middle of the 1820s, the paintings of Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) had shown close links with those of his teacher, Caspar David Friedrich. But increasingly Carus was developing his own style and motifs.

In about 1820, Carus had painted a neolithic site on the Baltic island of Rügen. In 1826, he painted this view of The ‘Three Stones’ in the Giant Mountains, showing a natural granite formation in what is now Poland, in the Riesengebirge Mountains, and perhaps better known as Pielgrzymy.

Carus also developed a fondness for distant views framed by foreground objects, which was to remain for the rest of his career. Barge Trip on the Elbe near Dresden (Morning on the Elbe) from 1827 is an early example, in which a faceless young woman and a faceless boatman are also prominent.

His scientific and medical career provided many opportunities to travel, and in 1828 he appears to have visited Naples in Italy, where he painted this wonderful view of Castel dell’Ovo in Naples (1828). Given that it was made in oils over a pencil drawing on paper, this appears to have been painted in front of the motif.

There has been a castle on this small peninsula in the Bay of Naples since the first century BCE. The Roman original was replaced by the Normans in the twelfth century, but most of the current structure dates from the fifteenth century, and a more modern fishing port developed along this peninsula during the nineteenth century.

He also developed further ‘Gothic’ views of awe involving looming crags and swirling cloud in paintings such as Clouds of Fog in the Saxon Highlands, from about 1828.

Friedrich had earlier painted the ruins of a former monastery at Oybin in Saxony, in the far east of what is now Germany, on the border with the Czech Republic. Carus celebrated its remaining architectural details and continued his theme of windows in Gothic Windows in the Ruins of the Monastery at Oybin in about 1828.

Carus appears to have visited Naples on other occasions too. In about 1829-30, he stayed close to Castel dell’Ovo, which he had painted in 1828, and framed a view from sea level in his Balcony Room with a View of the Bay of Naples (via Santa Lucia and the Castel dell’Ovo). The district of Santa Lucia consists of the waterfront buildings seen here between Carus’ accommodation and the Castel dell’Ovo.

Landscape at Sunset is a quick plein air oil sketch which could have been painted almost anywhere, but most probably shows countryside not far from Dresden in Saxony. It dates from 1830.

View of Dresden from Brühl’s Terrace is another late twilight view, from 1830-31. This shows an elevated embankment above the River Elbe in Dresden, a popular terrace for walking. It is named after the Count who had a city palace and gardens built here in the eighteenth century. The nearby church is the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, which only gained the status of cathedral in 1964. Sat in a corner is a woman, and under the stone is what appears to be a skulking cat.

Carus completed his first book on psychology in 1831, and over the following thirty years published groundbreaking works in the field, in which he made some pioneering explorations of the psyche and the unconscious. In the late 1840s, he also published a systematic treatise on physiology.

On 22 March 1832, Carus’ friend Goethe died in Weimar. That same year, Carus painted his tribute to him in The Goethe Monument. I have been unable to locate any physical monument corresponding to this Romantic image.

Carus seems to have been back in Italy in 1833, when he painted this moonlit view of the dome of Saint Peter’s, in Italian Moonlight (Rome, Saint Peter’s in Moonlight).

Although Carus’ nocturnes show quite a progressive style, his daytime landscapes remained traditionally realist, as shown in this Memory of a Wooded Island in the Baltic Sea (Oak trees by the Sea) from 1834-35.

His panel showing Memories of Rome (Raphael and Michelangelo Looking at St. Peter’s) from 1839 is a beautiful invention. Raphael idolised Michelangelo, and the two masters were in Rome together between 1508 and 1512, while the latter was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They are alleged to have met in the street, but Michelangelo positively disliked Raphael, and Raphael tried very hard to have Michelangelo taken off the Sistine Chapel project – which was hardly likely to have brought about a meeting such as this.

After about 1840, most of Carus’ surviving paintings are small oil sketches on cardboard or paper, probably made for his personal pleasure rather than to be developed into larger studio works for exhibition.

His Gothic Church over Treetops in Moonlight from about 1840 brings together all his most enduring themes and symbols: the Gothic, religion, night, and a thin sliver of a moon.

He appears to have painted this View of Florence (1841) from the window of his accommodation when visiting the city. The dome is that of the Duomo (Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore), Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, which is slightly exaggerated in its height here.

In 1844, Carus accompanied the King of Saxony on an informal tour of Britain. He stayed at Windsor Castle as the guest of Queen Victoria, visited the universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge, and travelled through Wales and Scotland too. During this visit, he appears to have painted the ruins of Tintern Abbey, on the Welsh border, a classical ‘Gothic’ site which was popular with contemporary artists including JMW Turner.

This delightful View of Hosterwitz from about 1850 appears to show the rolling countryside around Dresden; Hosterwitz is at the south-eastern edge of the city, roughly midway between Dresden and Pirna, on the north-east bank of the River Elbe.

Carus died in Dresden on 28 July 1869, at the age of eighty, but his innovative ideas lived on in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and in Carl Jung’s psychology of the unconscious.

There have been plenty of hoaxes in painting, almost invariably over the identity of the artist (or forger) who painted a specific work. It’s unusual for most of a generation of painters to be caught up in someone else’s forgery, but around 1800 that is exactly what happened. This article explains how masters including the great French narrative painter Ingres were duped.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were times of great discovery, but relatively limited critical examination of new ‘discoveries’. The sciences and technologies used to examine the origins of works of art were not well developed, and there was a tendency to trust ‘gentleman’ scholars of the day.

In 1760, the Scottish poet James Macpherson published a cycle of epic poems translated into English from their original Scottish Gaelic. He claimed to have collected these from oral sources, then rendered them into modern Gaelic – a process similar to that used about fifty years later by Elias Lönnrot to compile the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

The central character in Macpherson’s epic is Ossian, who was based on a pre-existing legendary Irish Gaelic bard Oisin. Macpherson’s new and exciting extensions to the corpus of Celtic/Gaelic folklore and myth came from Ossian’s retelling of endless battles and unhappy loves from his earlier days.

By the time that Macpherson published his collected edition of the poems in 1765, several characters had emerged from their rather fragmented narrative. Ossian’s father Fingal appeared based loosely on an existing hero from Irish Gaelic tradition, Fionn mac Cumhaill (‘Finn McCool’), and there were Ossian’s dead son Oscar, and Oscar’s lover Malvina. The first names Fiona and Malvina first appeared in Macpherson’s Ossian writings.

These had initially been translated into English and then, taking Europe by storm, into the other major languages of Europe. Their French translation was completed by 1777. When Macpherson died in 1796, so great was his fame that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Yet today Ossian and Macpherson’s momentous discovery have been all but forgotten, and are generally excluded from accepted Celtic/Gaelic tradition.

The prolific narrative painter Nicolai Abildgaard wasted no time in reading Ossian and retelling the stories in paint. His Fingal Sees the Ghosts of His Ancestors in the Moonlight was completed in 1778, and a suitably Romantic expression.

Abildgaard went on to assemble a whole series of works painted from the lines in Ossian. Later came Ossian’s Swansong from about 1782.

In about 1794, Abildgaard added Culmin’s Ghost Appears to his Mother.

Between 1790-1815, Europe and North America reached peak Ossian. In France, Napoleon and Diderot were fans, and Voltaire wrote parodies. Thomas Jefferson intended to learn the Scottish Gaelic language to read them in their original form, and some compared Ossian with giants such as Homer.

Among the painters who told stories from Ossian in their work were JMW Turner and JAD Ingres.

In France, it was the now-forgotten narrative painter Paul Duqueylar who stole the limelight at the 1800 Salon in Paris, with his Ossian Reciting His Songs (1800).

The following year, François Gérard painted Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp (1801). Later, after Napoleon had fallen from power, Gérard’s original was sold to the King of Sweden and was lost in a shipwreck during delivery. Gérard painted several replicas, including that above which is now in the Châteaux de Malmaison, Paris, and that below which is in the Kunsthalle Hamburg.

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, known simply as Girodet, decided to conflate Ossian with a politically-motivated list of ‘French heroes’. His study for this, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes is claimed to be from 1805, but might more realistically be dated to 1801.

Girodet’s finished painting was given the dual title of Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes and was probably completed in 1802. It is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by Ossian.

Later paintings focussed their attention on the young and beautiful Malvina, who was caring for the old and blind Ossian. Johann Peter Krafft’s Ossian and Malvina from 1810 shows the two together.

Originally attributed to Girodet, it is now though that Ary Scheffer painted The Death of Malvina, or Ossian Receiving the Last Breath of Malvina between about 1802 and 1811, although this looks suspiciously as if its canvas has been cut down.

The young JAD Ingres made his first drawing of an Ossianic motif when he was still a student in Rome, in 1809. Shortly after his return to Paris, he was commissioned to paint two works for the bedroom to be used by Napoleon when he visited Rome. The Songs of Ossian (1811-13) is his ink and watercolour study for the painting that was to be drawn from Ossian.

Ingres completed the finished work in 1813, and it is probably the best-known painting based on Ossianic stories. It shows an episode from Ossian’s epic, with the aged Ossian asleep on his harp, dreaming in monochrome of past wars and loves.

In a sense, it should not have mattered whether the original Ossianic myths were genuine or not. These paintings depict stories which, at the time, had general currency among those likely to view them. However, when Ossian fell from favour later in the nineteenth century, their literary references were forgotten, and their narrative lost.

Macpherson’s claims were disputed from the moment of their first publication. Among their greatest sceptics was Samuel Johnson, at the time one of the authorities on the English language and its culture. A committee was set up by the Highland Society which attempted to establish the authenticity of Macpherson’s sources. While that was deliberating, an Irish manuscript came to light which conflicted with the claimed myths of Ossian.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, although Macpherson wasn’t regarded as a complete fraud, there was sufficient doubt over his claims that Ossian lost its previous popularity. If Macpherson didn’t engineer a hoax, he doesn’t seem to have represented the origin of the Ossianic writings entirely accurately. Their bubble had burst, and all those fine paintings were victims.

Reference

Wikipedia.

With the massed Egyptian army approaching Jerusalem, Tancred had completed his duel with Argante, leaving the Circassian dead and Tancred badly wounded. Erminia, in company with Vafrine (who had been spying for the crusaders in the Egyptian camp), stumbled across Tancred, and had given him much-needed aid and seen him carried away to recover inside the city. Night has now fallen.

Vafrine goes to Godfrey, and tells him of the Egyptians’ plans to kill him and Rinaldo during their imminent attack. Vafrine’s opinion of the strength of the Egyptian army is encouraging: although very large in number, he considers that most of them are of limited value in combat, the exception being one company of Persians.

Godfrey and his commanders then discuss their strategy, deciding to change the dress of the day so that any Egyptian imposters will be caught out of rig, and to fight them out in the open.

The twentieth and final canto starts with the arrival of the Egyptian army late the following day. Godfrey won’t be rushed, though, and decides to join battle at dawn of the next day. When that time comes, he deploys his forces on the plain by the city, with a rear party remaining inside the walls guarding Jerusalem.

Godfrey’s forces take possession of a mound, around which he disposes his men. He then tours each unit before addressing them en masse. Emiren does the same for his Egyptian troops, then the crusader trumpets launch the attack. The first blood is claimed by a crusader woman, Gildippe, who kills the King of Hormuz. She is joined by her husband, Edward, and the couple have a long string of successes fighting together.

Ormondo, wearing false colours as a crusader, gets close to Godfrey in his bid to kill the leader, but is recognised and dies swiftly under a hail of arrows and other weapons. Rinaldo then enters the battle when enemy forces try doubling back on the crusaders and unleashing their archers.

David Teniers the Younger’s painting of Rinaldo’s Feats against the Egyptians from 1628-30 captures Rinaldo in action against his Egyptian foe.

Rinaldo then reaches Armida, who is riding in her golden chariot with a heavily-armed escort.

Teniers shows this in another oil-on-copper painting of Armida in the Battle Against the Saracens from 1628-30. Armida stands on her chariot in her role as an archer. Rinaldo is at the far left, concentrating on fighting those around her.

Armida recognises her lover Rinaldo, and turns first white, then burns with a passionate mixture of anger and desire. Rinaldo, though, passes her by and carries on fighting, ignoring her. Three times Armida takes aim at Rinaldo with her bow, and three times she cannot loose her arrow at him.

Finally, as shown in Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s fresco of Armida as an Archer Aims at Rinaldo (1819-27) in the Casa Massimo in Rome, she lets her arrow fly. It bounces off Rinaldo’s armour, so Armida shoots a succession of arrows which are equally unsuccessful.

Prince Altamor comes up to clear a way through for Armida’s chariot; while he is attending to that, Rinaldo and Godfrey attack his troops and put them to flight.

Soliman has been watching all this from a tower in Jerusalem, and now decides to join the battle, where he quickly claims the lives of many of the crusaders. The wounded Tancred leaves his bed to rescue Raymond, who has been lying injured, and bring him back to safety.

Soliman is attacked by Gildippe, but he strikes back and mortally wounds her. As her husband Edward comforts her in her final moments, Soliman kills him too; the couple appear in the painting from Overbeck’s series shown above, lying dead in the foreground.

Adrastus, who had promised Armida that he would kill Rinaldo and present her with his head, now challenges Rinaldo, who kills him almost immediately. This exposes Soliman, who senses that his death is imminent, and so it proves to be. By now most of the Egyptian forces are in full retreat. Emiren stops their standard-bearer from running away, and persuades him to return to die with honour, as those who remain fighting the crusaders are being slaughtered.

Armida now sits alone in her chariot, her guard of honour dead or run away. Fearing that she will be captured, she mounts one of her horses and rides off. Tissaphernes follows her, but runs into Rinaldo, who quickly kills him. Rinaldo looks around to see where else he might be needed, but the Egyptians are melting away in defeat, and he decides to follow Armida’s tracks.

Those take him to a dark and lonely place, where Armida is nursing her defeat, and has just taken her sharpest arrow with which to kill herself. Rinaldo stops her from doing so. When she turns and sees who it is, she swoons into his arms. He cries tears of pity on her, which wakes her from her faint. She accuses him of being cruel in both his departing and his return, and for stopping her suicide, then dissolves into floods of tears. Rinaldo promises to be her servant and her champion, and to take her back to the lands of her relatives if she wishes.

This dramatic moment has been surprisingly rarely depicted in paint. This image of Cesare Dandini’s Rinaldo and Armida from 1635 is not of high quality, but shows Armida about to impale one of her arrows into herself, and Rinaldo grasping her hand in restraint.

Teniers also paints it in his Reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida from 1628-30, adhering more literally to Tasso’s words in showing Rinaldo coming from behind.

Godfrey has struck down the standard of the Egyptians. Emiren, their general, makes one last personal attack on Godfrey, who kills him. The leader of the crusaders then takes Altamor captive; the latter promises that he will be ransomed for a great amount of gold and gems. Those Egyptians who have fled to make a last stand at the wall of Jerusalem are finally killed, ending all resistance against the crusaders.

Godfrey finally leads his crusaders back into the city, as the last light of the sun dims in the west. He goes to the temple, where he pays his respects, and fulfills his vow to deliver Jerusalem.

I’m not sure whether this scene of the Consecration of Godfrey (1819-27) in Overbeck’s fresco in the Casa Massimo, Rome, painted between 1819-27 is intended to show these closing moment in Tasso’s epic. Peter the Hermit stands holding the crucifix, as Godfrey, still wearing his armour, sinks on bended knee.

In the next article, I will attempt a short overview, featuring the finest of these many paintings.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

The Paris Salon of 1883 was very large, with nearly 2,500 paintings on display. Among those emerged a new school of painting – not that of Impressionism, which had remained fiercely independent and even then was hardly popular, but of a new form of realism: Naturalism. For the next couple of decades, it was not Impressionism or even Post-Impressionism which dominated painting in Europe, but Naturalism.

In this and subsequent articles in this series, I’m going to try to construct a history of this major movement in its paintings and artists. I start here trying to consider what makes a painting Naturalist.

Among the many increasingly loose and colourful landscapes, dozens of portraits, and traditional paintings in that Salon, or painted that year, were some which trod new ground. They are often strikingly realist in their style, but show motifs which went beyond what had previously been considered to be genre.

Most surprising for those viewing the Salon that year would have been Fernand Pelez’ painting Homeless (1883), its hard realism showing what many of them went out of their way to avoid on the streets of Paris. Pelez skilfully avoids the sentimentality which had counfounded so much earlier social realism. Neither was this rural poverty, but a vividly real image of what was visible not far from the Salon in the Palais des Champs-Élysées (the Palais de l’Industrie, built for the 1855 World Fair).

That year, Jean-Eugène Buland exhibited Pas le sou (Not a penny), but his major new painting was one of his finest: Le Tripot (The Dive) (1883), a group portrait of five hardened gamblers at the table of a seedy, downmarket gambling den.

Several paintings in that Salon showed ordinary people engaged in their everyday work in factories and similar industrial environments. This example, by the American artist Charles Frederic Ulrich, who worked for much of his career in Germany, wasn’t exhibited at the Salon, though. The men here are blowing glass to be made into the covers of watches and clocks.

Leading this new movement was a former pupil of Alexandre Cabanel: Jules Bastien-Lepage, who reached his zenith in 1883 before dying prematurely the following year.

Many of Bastien-Lepage’s paintings of this time are single-figure portraits, mostly of children, but his Love in the Village, which was exhibited at the Salon in 1883, shows a young couple on either side of a tumbledown fence, chatting intimately among the vegetable patches.

One early reading, by Mette, the wife of Paul Gauguin, held that the girl was under age, and the relationship accordingly beyond the pale. The girl not only faces away from the viewer, but her whole body is turned away, leaving that issue unresolved and unresolvable.

Bastien-Lepage here uses his favourite compositional devices. The horizon is very high, so that almost all of the image is made up of the figures and their landscape background. The foreground has meticulous detail, from the mud on the man’s boots to the plaits in the woman’s hair, but the further than you look into the distance, the more sketchy those details become.

More typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot.

Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé Marie Bashkirtseff showed two works in that Salon, Jean et Jacques and Parisienne, which I have been unable to identify or locate.

Bashkirtseff’s The Umbrella was painted that year, 1883, and shows her take on Naturalism. Tragically, she was to die the following year, less than two months before Bastien-Lepage, at the age of only twenty-five.

Though a young movement in painting, Naturalism had originated in literature during the 1860s, and was being expressed most clearly in the novels of Émile Zola from 1871 onwards. It had already reached the Nordic countries by 1883, where it was embraced by the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg.

Krohg became fascinated by the exhausted mother of a sick child, as shown in his Mother and Child from 1883. As with other works of his from around this time, the figures are shown in a barren, almost clinical setting to enhance the impression of objectivity, and avoid any tendency to sentiment.

Krohg’s particular social concern was for the ‘fallen woman’ and the scourge of prostitution. In 1883, he painted Madeleine, the first of a long series of works addressing this.

Some common features of these paintings are:

• They tend to show ordinary people, rather than nobility, gods, or heroes,
• who are going about their normal daily activities,
• in their normal surroundings.
• They are painted with the impression of objectivity,
• rather than overt sentiment.
• Painting style is a neutral realism, showing such detail as is necessary for their purpose,
• sometimes being ‘photographic’ in quality.

Naturalism didn’t dominate the 1883 Salon, but the Naturalist works exhibited there attracted the attention of both the public and the critics. Other paintings of note which were popular that year included the following.

Virginie Demont-Breton’s The Beach (1883) earned her ‘hors-concours’, and was purchased by the state.

Georges Rochegrosse’s huge and gruesome painting nearly nine metres high of Andromache shows a spectacularly-imaged scene from the sack of Troy.

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

Jean-Joseph Weerts’ The Death of Barra (1880) is another large history painting with calculated popular appeal. It shows a romanticised story which had started with a young boy who was killed by a gang of horse thieves during the uprising in the Vendée in 1793 – one of the French nation’s less glorious moments. During the French Revolution, this was turned into propaganda by false claims that the boy had been killed because he had stood up for the French Republican movement against the Royalists. Weerts has embroidered this further.

Alexandre Cabanel himself exhibited two portraits in the Salon, but that year painted Ophelia, which was influenced by John Everett Millais’ painting of her from 1851-52. He probably wasn’t aware that his former pupil Bastien-Lepage had started to paint her two years earlier, but that work remained incomplete on his death in 1884.

Édouard Debat-Ponsan was also known for his Naturalist paintings, but had recently returned from a stay in Istanbul. In a passing Orientalist phase, he exhibited The Massage. Hammam Scene (1883), which proved highly popular.

Absent from the Salon was the arch-realist of the century, and another enthusiastic Orientalist, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1883, Gérôme finally completed The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, which he had started twenty years earlier. It is perhaps one of his least successful classical Roman scenes, containing surprisingly clumsy historical errors. Among them is the fact that this shows the Circus Maximus, where such martyrdoms and crucifixions didn’t take place.

I hope that this gives a clearer picture of what was happening as Naturalism was becoming popular. My next task is to identify its roots and origins.

On the fifth day of the Decameron’s stories, Fiammetta had chosen the theme of the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness. The previous article in this series looked at Filomena’s story, the eight of that day, of Nastagio degli Onesti. This article looks at the story of Cimon (or Cymon) and Iphigenia, told by Panfilo, and the first of that fifth day.

Cimon and Iphigenia has probably been painted more than any other story in the whole of the Decameron, by masters from Rubens to Frederic, Lord Leighton. What is most peculiar, though, is that all the paintings of this show a scene from the second page of a story which runs on for another ten pages, and develops quite a different plot and nature.

It is also important to bear in mind that the Iphigenia here is not the daughter of Agamemnon who had to be sacrificed to bring favourable winds for the Greek fleet to sail against Troy, although you may detect some connections which Boccaccio makes.

Cimon’s father was a very wealthy Cypriot, but Cimon – a nickname given in honour of his apparent simplicity and uncouthness – was his problem child. He was exceedingly handsome and had a fine physique, but behaved as a complete imbecile. He appeared unable to learn anything, even basic manners, so was sent to live with the farm-workers on his father’s large estates.

One afternoon in May, Cimon was out walking when he reached a clearing surrounded by very tall trees, where there was a fountain. Lying asleep on the grass by that fountain was a beautiful young woman, Iphigenia, wearing a flimsy dress which left nothing to the imagination. Sleeping by her were her attendants, two women and a man.

Cimon was immediately enraptured, leaned on his stick, and stared at her. As he did so, his simple mind started to change.

As with many of Boccaccio’s stories, this is shown on a wedding cassone, here from about 1525. It is relatively simple: there’s no sign of Iphigenia’s attendants, but there is a second image of Cimon walking along a path at the far right.

In about 1617, Peter Paul Rubens joined talents with Frans Snyders (who painted the still life with monkeys at the lower right) and Jan Wildens (who painted the landscape background) in their marvellous Cymon and Iphigenia. This is accurate in its details too, with the correct quota of attendants, and a splendid fountain at the left. Cimon really looks like Boccaccio’s uncouth simpleton.

Willem Van Mieris’ Cymon and Iphigenia from 1698 treats the scene more in the vein of Poussin or Claude, and again remains faithful to Boccaccio’s details.

Benjamin West was more coy in both his depictions of this scene. His earlier Cymon and Iphigenia from about 1766 (above) was well-received at the time. Six years later, in 1773, he reversed the composition, and was even more modest in the display of flesh, as shown below.

A few years later, in about 1780, Angelica Kauffman painted this delightful tondo of Cymon and Iphigenia, another variation on the same theme. The cultural contrast between the young man and woman is not so stark.

When he was only eighteen, John Everett Millais painted what was to be his last work before he embraced the Pre-Raphaelite: Cymon and Iphigenia (1848). At first sight this bears little resemblance to Boccaccio’s story, which is to be expected, as Millais didn’t use the Decameron as his literary reference, but a later re-telling by the English poet John Dryden, to which this is more faithful.

In 1884, Frederic, Lord Leighton painted what I think remains the most luxuriant and sensuous version of this scene. This study shows Leighton confirming his composition and use of colour.

The finished painting,Cymon and Iphigenia from 1884, shows Iphigenia stretched out languidly in her sleep, in the last warm light of the day; behind her the full moon is just starting to rise. Leighton has changed the season to autumn, with the leaves already brown but the days still hot. Cymon stands in shadow on the right, idly scratching his left knee, gazing intently at Iphigenia.

As far as the painters are concerned, that’s it, and presumably the couple lived happily ever after.

Not according to Boccaccio, though.

When Iphigenia finally awoke, she was surprised to see Cimon there, and recognised him immediately. Cimon insisted on accompanying her to her house, then went to his family home, where he turned over a new leaf, and over the period of four years transformed himself into the best-dressed, most cultured and refined young man on Cyprus.

Despite this transformation, Cimon was unable to persuade Iphigenia’s father to allow him to marry the young woman, but was told that she was betrothed to a noble on the island of Rhodes. When the time came for her marriage, Cimon took an armed vessel and gave chase to the ship carrying Iphigenia to Rhodes. He boarded her ship and abducted her.

With Iphigenia on board, Cimon headed for the island of Crete, where he and his crew had relatives and friends. But shortly after they altered course, a storm blew up, so violent that it threatened to sink them. Unable to tell where they were heading, they ended up taking shelter off the coast of Rhodes, where they were caught up by the ship from which they had just abducted Iphigenia.

Cimon and his crew were forced ashore when their vessel ran aground, were quickly rounded up and thrown into prison, and Iphigenia was returned to her family ready for her wedding.

Iphigenia’s fiancé implored the chief magistrate of Rhodes, Lysimachus, to put Cimon to death, but he was kept in prison with the rest of his crew. It happened that Lysimachus was deeply in love with a young woman of Rhodes, who was betrothed to Iphigenia’s future brother-in-law. To Lysimachus’ relief, that marriage had been postponed several times, but it was then decided to hold both weddings in the same ceremony.

Lysimachus was aggrieved by this, and decided that the only way that he could marry the Rhodian woman that he loved was to abduct her. In order to do so, he needed the help of Cimon and his crew, who would undoubtedly be delighted to be able to abduct Iphigenia again. Lysimachus offered Cimon a deal whereby they would together make off with their loves from the scene of the joint wedding, and they agreed to proceed with that plan.

Two days later, at dusk, as the weddings were just starting, Lysimachus, Cimon and his crew entered the house of the two bridegrooms and siezed their two brides. Unfortunately, the two grooms appeared armed and resisted. Cimon killed Iphigenia’s fiancé with a single blow to the head, and the other woman’s intended husband fell dead following a blow from Lysimachus.

Lysimachus, Cimon, their crew, and the two abducted brides then fled to a ship, on which they sailed to exile in Crete. The two couples were married there, amid great and joyous celebrations. In time, the people of Cyprus and Rhodes forgave them for the violent way in which they had stolen their brides; Lysimachus and his wife were able to return to Rhodes, and Cimon and Iphigenia returned to live happily ever after on Cyprus.

None of which was even hinted at by those paintings, marvellous though they are.

Here in the UK daylight is now brief, the weather often grim, so I think it’s time to head off for a long weekend somewhere lighter, warmer, and less glum: this weekend we’ll go to Granada, in Andalusia, southern Spain, and visit the Alhambra there. In this first of three articles about paintings of the Alhambra, I’ll trace some of its history. The next two will consider more general views of the palace complex.

The Alhambra is one of the oldest, grandest, most fascinating and beautiful palaces in Europe. It started as one of many Roman hill forts, which had been used in a series of campaigns to control a succession of tribal revolts, and stamp the Empire’s presence close to North Africa. It was rebuilt in 889 CE, but nothing palatial became of it until around 1250, when the ruling Nasrid emir started to turn it into something much grander.

At that time, much of the south of the Iberian peninsula wasn’t ruled by people from Europe to the north, but Muslim dynasties who had swept up from the south. The Emirate of Granada was the last substantial part of Iberia to remain under Muslim rule, and in 1333 the Sultan of Granada, Yusuf I, decided to transform the Alhambra into a royal palace. In doing so, he and his successors built one of the most exquisite expressions of Arabic Muslim art and architecture along a ridge about half a mile (0.7 km) long overlooking the city of Granada.

This plan from Openstreetmap and its contributors shows the modern site, as of 2013.

Constantin Uhde’s plan of 1892 shows the layout of the Nasrid palaces:

• Red is the site of the Palace of Comares and the Palaces of the Ambassadors.
• Green is the Palace of the Lions.
• Yellow is the Mexuar.
• Blue is the Garden of Lindajar and later quarters of the Emir.

A few paintings have tried to imagine how the current remains of these Nasrid palaces would have looked in their heyday between 1350 and 1492. Among them is Edwin Lord Weeks’ undated view of A Court in the Alhambra in the Time of the Moors. Weeks was a noted Victorian painter of Orientalist views.

There are several legends associated with the Moorish period before 1492. When Marià Fortuny moved to Granada in 1870 or 1871, he told one of those in The Slaying of the Abencerrajes (c 1870), dating from the early 1400s.

At that time, the two major family dynasties who were competing for power in Granada were the Abencerrages or Abencerrajes, and the Zegris. One of the former family fell in love with one of the royal court, and was caught trying to climb up to her window. The king flew into a rage, ordered the whole family to be confined in one of the most beautiful courts of the Alhambra, where he had them killed by the Zegris. Fortuny shows their bodies littering the floor of that court.

Another grim vision of events of that era is Henri Regnault’s (in)famous Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Grenada from the same time, 1870. This shows the immediate aftermath of a summary beheading performed on the steps of the Alhambra. Regnault’s use of contrasting colours makes the spilled blood seem intensely red. The low angle of the view also enhances the stature of the executioner and gives the scene immediacy.

While much of the rest of Europe was engaged in the futile succession of Crusades in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula underwent its own traumatic and bloody ‘reconquest’ to evict the Moors. In the 1480s and early 1490s, a largely guerilla war was waged by the forces of the Reyes Católicos, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, which led to the surrender of the last Nasrid sultan, Muhammad XII of Granada (known locally as Boabdil) in 1492 – a defining moment in the history of modern Spain.

In 1879, Francisco Pradilla Ortiz was commissioned to paint La Rendición de Granada (The Surrender of Granada) by the Spanish Senate, which he finally completed in 1882.

Muhammad XII is mounted on the left, holding the keys to the city, which he is about to hand over to Ferdinand II, whose hand is already reaching out to receive those keys, and Queen Isabella I on her white horse. Apparently Muhammad was spared the ignominy of having to kiss the royal hands, and was allowed to simply hand the keys over. Dominant in the background is Muhammad’s palace, the Alhambra.

The detail below shows Muhammad.

Following on from La Rendición de Granada, Pradilla painted El Suspiro del Moro, or The Moor’s Sigh. The two paintings seem to have been started at about the same time, in 1879, but he took another decade to finish this after he had completed the Surrender.

This shows the legendary sequel: after Muhammad XII had surrendered Granada, he is claimed to have ridden up to a rocky viewpoint from where he could take a final view of the Alhambra and the valley of Granada: the location now known as Suspiro del Moro. For a while, Muhammad remained in exile in Las Alpujarras, but soon crossed to Fes in Morocco.

Pradilla shows the former ruler dismounted, after he had walked over to take his last look at Granada in the distance. Although this was painted in oils, the hills behind Granada appear as if they had been painted using watercolour washes – an unusual effect demonstrating his great technical skills.

Pradilla is by no means the only artist to have painted this great historical moment. Vicente Barneto y Vazquez’ undated version is The Capitulation of Granada above, and shows the moment that Muhammad handed over the key to Ferdinand.

Wonderful though Pradilla’s paintings are, I have a liking for the more human story told in Manuel Gómez-Moreno González’ Salida de la familia de Boabdil de la Alhambra (Departure of the Boabdil Family from the Alhambra), which was completed at about the same time, in 1880. Here is the royal family and its entire retinue packing its bags and setting off for wherever destiny would take it, leaving this magnificent complex of palaces.

Tomorrow I will show more of those buildings, their gardens, and surroundings.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Given the very pleasant climate of Granada and the Alhambra, by rights it should have been painted as much as the Roman Campagna, which in the eighteenth century was the cradle of plein air oil painting, and the high school for landscape art in Europe.

Yet the great pioneer landscape painters, such as Poussin and Claude, spent much of their careers in Rome. Landscape painting in Spain was not exactly at the forefront, and Diego Velázquez seems to have painted more landscapes when he was in Italy than during the remainder of his career in Spain.

Early paintings of the Alhambra were mainly formal topographic views, painted in watercolour during the eighteenth century, such as José de Hermosilla’s View of the Alhambra from the Torres Bermejas Castle of 1767. These are similar to the views of landmarks which were being produced in Britain at the time.

Others, like John Frederick Lewis in 1835, came to record details of the remains of the Alhambra’s buildings, as in The Torre de Comares, Alhambra, drawn carefully in graphite and only slightly highlighted and coloured with watercolour and gouache.

While every seriously aspiring landscape painter was flocking to paint en plein air in the Roman Campagna in the early nineteenth century, the Alhambra seems not to have been in the circuit.

It seems to have been the vogue for Orientalist views in the middle of the nineteenth century which first attracted artists to paint the Alhanbra in oils. This is David Roberts’ undated view of Alhambra and Albaicin. Roberts is much better-known for his sketches turned into prints from multiple tours of Egypt and the ‘near east’ made between 1838-40. This work probably originated in sketches made when he visited Spain in 1832, and would have then been painted in this form back in Britain after about 1833, and turned into a print by 1837.

Achille Zo was a Basque painter who, during the 1860s, specialised in views of Spain, such as this Patio in the Alhambra from 1860. These were very well received at the Salon in Paris, earning him a gold medal in 1868, following which he too turned to Orientalism.

It was probably the fine collection of paintings of the Prado in Madrid which attracted many great artists to visit Spain. In 1867, Franz von Lenbach and a student of his travelled to Madrid to copy the Masters there for his patron Baron Adolf von Schack. The following year, von Lenbach painted two works in Granada: The Alhambra in Granada (1868) is a magnificent sketch including the backdrop of the distant mountains, and appears to have been painted in front of the motif.

Von Lenbach’s Tocador de la Reina shows the exterior of the Queen’s Dressing Room in the palaces, with his student sketching.

Just two years before he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, Henri Regnault toured Spain including Granada, where he painted this view of the Colonnade of the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra (1869). I suspect that this was unfinished, and that he intended to complete the detail in its lower half.

Martín Rico y Ortega was one of the most important painters in Spain at this time. Influenced mainly by the Barbizon school, he painted this finely-detailed view of La Torre de las Damas en la Alhambra de Granada (The Tower of the Ladies in the Alhambra) in 1871-72. It captures the dilapidation which the Alhambra had fallen into before more recent work to restore it to its former glory.

If Marià Fortuny’s more Impressionist view of a Courtyard at Alhambra (Patio in Granada) from 1873 is to be believed, some parts of the Alhambra had been turned into smallholdings, with free-ranging chickens.

More distant views of the ridge, such as Heinrich Hansen’s undated painting of Granada with the Alhambra in the Nineteenth Century, show its imposing grandeur.

John Haynes Williams (or Haynes-Williams) recognised the merits of views painted from the Alhambra as a high point, in his undated Albaicin from the Alhambra.

The late nineteenth century saw new visitors to copy Masters at the Prado: those Americans who came to study painting in France and Germany. Among then, Childe Hassam visited during the summer of 1883, with his friend Edmund H Garrett, and painted this sketch of The Alhambra then. This shows the Palace of the Ambassadors, and remains one of the most frequently-painted parts of the site.

From even further afield, the Anglo-Australian Tom Roberts visited Granada when he was in Spain in 1883, when he painted this detailed realist view of A Moorish Doorway, Alhambra. Roberts had migrated with his family in 1869, returned to Britain to study at the Royal Academy Schools from 1881, then went to Spain with the Australian John Peter Russell. He returned to Australia in 1884, becoming one of the early Australian Impressionists.

The next and concluding article considers paintings of the Alhambra during the final years of the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth, with examples from both Sorolla and John Singer Sargent.

Landscape painters came to the Alhambra in the Andalucian city of Granada relatively late. But once they started to visit the Prado in Madrid to view and copy its magnificent collection of masters, a steady succession travelled south to paint the Moorish palaces of the Alhambra.

For Edmund Wodick, who must have visited Granada to paint this spectacular landscape in early 1886, it was probably the last work that he completed. Shortly after this, he developed pneumonia and died at the age of 69. He painted this just outside the city walls, looking across at the Alhambra and its towers, down towards the lush green plain and the snow-capped peaks in the far distance.

Long before the brash colours of the Fauves, those who painted the Alhambra in the rich light of dawn or dusk surprised viewers with the intensity of its colours. Henry Stanier’s view of the Alhambra from San Nicolas from 1886 is a good example, and another from late in an artist’s career. Stanier was a topographical draughtsman and sometime Orientalist from the city of Birmingham in England, whose work is now almost forgotten.

Local painter and amateur archaeologist Manuel Gómez-Moreno González was fascinated by the history of the Alhambra, and was the first to compile an account of its depictions in paintings. His own works showing the site include La Alcazaba y Torres Bermejas (The Alhambra and Castle of Torres Bermejas) from about 1887, made from an unusual viewpoint below its ridge.

The Alhambra dominates the left, with the much smaller castle to the right. The snow-clad peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which rise to over 3,000 metres (10,000 feet), look like a bank of white cloud peeking over the skyline in between.

Hernandez Miguel Vico, another local artist, also favoured a view from below in his undated painting of Alhambra and Cuesta de los Chinos. In 1877, he exhibited an interior of the Alhambra at the Salon in Paris, but I have been unable to locate an image of that.

The founder of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, John Ferguson Weir, had studied in Europe, and his brother Julian Alden Weir was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later in his career, John Ferguson Weir returned to Europe on several trips, and in about 1901 painted this fine view of The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

As far as I can tell, Laurits Tuxen was the first Danish artist to paint a View of the Alhambra. He did so in 1902, the year after marrying his second wife. He was one of the leading members of the Skagen Painters, ‘Danish Impressionists’ if you like, and completed this en plein air on 4 May, in marvellously fine weather.

The early twentieth century brought two of the greatest artists to have painted the Alhambra: Joaquín Sorolla, who seems to have been most active in Granada in 1909, and John Singer Sargent, who visited in 1912 at least.

Sorolla came from Valencia, and is still best-known for his magnificent paintings of people and activities on the beach there. He travelled extensively during his career, but doesn’t seem to have painted in Granada until 1909, the year in which he also spent five months in the USA. These four oil sketches are a marked contrast to the more familiar finished paintings which he exhibited.

Los Picos Tower is a virtuoso oil sketch looking along the precipitous walls and towers at the edge of the site, and beyond to the dazzling white buildings of the city.

Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada (1909) shows this classical view with some of Sorolla’s very vigorous brushstrokes texturing the paint.

Torre de las Infantas de la Alhambra (Tower of the Children) (1909) looks past another tower towards the distant mountains, the sunlight filtering through a curtain of trees.

In Sorolla’s Albaicin, he looks down from one of the Alhambra’s towers at the bleached white buildings below.

The only available image of Sargent’s paintings of the Alhambra which I have able to find is this watercolour showing his sister Emily, also a keen artist, sketching In the Generalife (1912). Behind her is Jane de Glehn, and to the right is a Spanish friend known only as Dolores.

The unusual highlight effect seen in bushes above them, and on parts of the ground, was produced by scribbling with a colourless beeswax crayon, which resists the watercolour paint.

Théo van Rysselberghe had first visited Spain in 1881 or 82, when he too went to the Prado, and travelled on to Morocco. He visited Andalucia in company with John Singer Sargent in the Spring of 1884, but doesn’t appear to have painted the Alhambra until after his retirement to the Côte d’Azur in 1911. He then painted Fountain at the Generalife in Granada in 1913, in his late high-chroma style.

The last two paintings in my selection are both by the eclectic Valencian painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain, and show his wide range of styles. Unfortunately, neither is dated, and could have been painted at almost any time in his long career, although I suspect that both were completed after 1900.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

His View of the Alhambra is one of my favourite paintings of this motif, for its intriguing foreground details, and the poplars lit as white-hot pokers in the fiery light of the sunset.

What better way to end our long weekend away from the chill and gloom of winter.

In the last dozen articles in this series, I have worked through the plot and sub-stories of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, showing the best of the paintings which have been made to accompany it, and to tell his tales. This article provides a short summary, links to the individual articles, and the very best of those paintings.

Jerusalem Delivered is a fictional elaboration of the events at the end of the first Crusade, starting with the departure from Antioch, after its capture, and ending with the full possession of the city of Jerusalem.

Clorinda saves Sophronia and Olindo

The crusaders’ leader, Godfrey of Bouillon, is visited early one morning by the Archangel Gabriel, who spurs the French noble to lead his army south to the Holy City. During their journey, they are provisioned by sea, and meet little opposition.

The ruler of Jerusalem, Aladine, hears of their progress, and starts preparing to receive them. Ismen, formerly a Christian soothsayer now turned to ‘pagan’ sorceror, arranges a trap to oppress the remaining Christians in the city, by having a sacred icon of the Virgin Mary stolen. Aladine attributes this to a Christian, and uses it as an excuse to persecute the Christians.

Sophronia, a young Christian woman, tells Aladine that she stole the icon, and is condemned to burn at the stake. Her lover Olindo insists that he is the thief, and is tied on the other side of the stake for execution with her. Just as the kindling is about to be lit, the beautiful ‘pagan’ knight Clorinda arrives and intervenes.

Sophronia and Olindo are spared, but Aladine banishes them and all other able-bodied Christians to beyond the city limits. Most flee to Emmaus, where the crusaders have just arrived.

Clorinda fights Tancred, and Armida meets Godfrey

Godfrey of Bouillon politely rejects overtures from two ambassadors of Egypt, inviting him to abandon his mission to capture Jerusalem. One, the Circassian Argante, warns Godfrey of dire consequences before he heads off to join Aladine in Jerusalem.

Soon after the crusaders arrive at the city, Clorinda leads an initial skirmishing party to size up the French forces. Godfrey sends Tancred to support the French, and when he knocks Clorinda’s helmet off, he falls hopelessly in love with her. Inside Jerusalem, Erminia, former princess of Antioch, reveals her love for Rinaldo, another of the crusader knights. Argante shows himself to be a fearsome warrior, and claims the life of Dudon.

Godfrey decides a plan of action, and realises his need for a good supply of wood to build siege towers and engines.

The ‘pagan’ wizard Hydrotes sees his beautiful niece Armida, a sorceress herself, as an essential weapon in the campaign. He directs her to sow chaos inside Godfrey’s camp.

Armida tells the crusaders a story of woe, and beguiles many of the finest of Godfrey’s knights to follow her on a fool’s errand.

Erminia and the Shepherds

In the midst of the strife brought by Armida, Rinaldo accuses Gernando of being a liar; they settle this when Rinaldo kills Gernando in a duel. Godfrey condemns Rinaldo to death, and he storms off from the camp. Armida then leads many other knights away on her diversionary mission.

In an attempt to expedite matters, Argante challenges the crusaders in one-to-one combat. Godfrey approves Tancred as the knight to face the Circassian. They fight viciously, wounding one another, but are brought to a halt by nightfall.

Erminia decides to go and tend Tancred’s wounds, so dresses up in Clorinda’s armour and slips out of the city in the dead of night. However, that makes her appear to be Clorinda to the crusaders, and she flees in panic. Tancred them rides off in pursuit of her, thinking her to be Clorinda. Overnight, both Erminia and Tancred become lost, and fail to find one another.

Erminia happens on a small family of shepherds, who console her, and dress her in their country clothes.

Tancred and Rinaldo lost, and Clorinda killed

Tancred is trapped in Armida’s magic castle, behind the bars of its dungeon. The following morning, with his combat against Argante due to restart soon after dawn, he is nowhere to be found. Raymond of Toulouse is drawn by lot to fight as his substitute, and proves a match. The devil, though, gets a ‘pagan’ archer to loose an arrow which strikes Raymond without wounding him. At this breach of chivalry, the affronted crusaders and defenders of Jerusalem join battle – which turns bloody until the hand of God intervenes with a massive thunderstorm.

Rinaldo and Tancred are still missing, but the crusaders riot in fear that the former has been killed. Godfrey realises that he must attack the city soon.

Arab forces then attack the crusaders by night, which develops into more general battle. Knights return from their mission for Armida, reporting that they had been rescued by Rinaldo, who had not been killed after all. They report that Armida has taken Tancred prisoner.

Godfrey prepares for assault on the city, first celebrating mass on Mount Olivet. The following day the crusaders bring their siege towers and engines up to tackle the walls of Jerusalem, but make slow progress against a strong defence. At nightfall the towers are pulled back, but Clorinda sneaks out of the city and sets alight to the towers, burning them to the ground.

She is caught outside the walls by Tancred, who cannot tell it is her and engages her in combat. Eventually he wounds her mortally, recognises her, and she asks to be baptised before she dies. Tancred does so, and she goes in peace.

Armida abducts Rinaldo

The wounded Tancred is carried back to his tent.

Ismen enchants the forest which is the crusaders’ only supply of wood, preventing them from cutting replacement timbers for new siege towers. The weather turns oppressively hot and dry, causing crusaders to collapse and even die of heat and dehydration. After prayers of the crusaders, the weather breaks and there is heavy rain.

Godfrey has a vision which reveals the importance of finding Rinaldo to break the spell so that he can obtain timber again. Charles and Ubaldo leave on a mission to discover Rinaldo. They learn that Armida had originally intended to kill him, but just as she was about to sink her dagger into his sleeping body, she fell in love with him and abducted him instead.

In Armida’s Garden

With the help of a wizard, Charles and Ubaldo sail in a magic ship to the Fortunate Isles. Overcoming various obstacles, they see the couple together in Armida’s garden, where Rinaldo has clearly become Armida’s dandy, and no warrior knight.

Rinaldo rescued

Showing Rinaldo his image in a polished shield, Charles and Ubaldo get him to see how he has changed, and to return to the siege of Jerusalem with them.

Armida first tries to lure him back, then weeps, and finally departs in rage in her own chariot, to wreak vengeance.

Erminia saves Tancred

Rinaldo and Godfrey are reunited, and the leader asks him to solve the problem of the enchanted wood. Rinaldo enters the wood and breaks Ismen’s spell, enabling timbers to be felled to build fresh siege towers.

Meanwhile, the King of Egypt is leading a massed army towards the crusaders at Jerusalem. Joining him is Armida, with forces provided by her evil uncle. There are several volunteers who promise to kill Rinaldo for her, in return for her hand in marriage. The King of Egypt also plots how he will kill Godfrey using deception. Those plans are discovered by a crusader spy, Vafrine.

With new towers built, Godfrey resumes the assault on Jerusalem before the Egyptian forces are due to arrive. Rinaldo, Tanred, Godfrey and others lead the ascent of the walls, and crusaders enter the city, where they quickly start massacring its ‘pagan’ defenders.

Argante and Tancred agree to conclude their previous combat beyond the city walls. After a bitter fight, in which both men are wounded badly, Tancred finishes the Circassian off, then collapses at dusk.

Vafrine has completed his mission spying on the Egyptian forces when he is recognised by Erminia, who wants to defect to the crusader camp. On their way back, they stumble across Argante’s body, then the wounded Tancred.

Erminia cuts tresses from her hair to make improvised bandages for Tancred’s wounds, and he is taken into Jerusalem for further care. Vafrine goes on to brief Godfrey of the Egyptians’ plans, to help him plan his defence.

Rinaldo saves Armida, and Jerusalem is delivered

The Egyptian army arrives late the following day, but Godfrey won’t be rushed, and battle commences at dawn the next day. Egyptians wearing false colours, as crusaders, get close to Godfrey but are quickly recognised and killed.

As the battle rages on, Rinaldo sees Armida as an archer in her chariot, but passes her by and continues fighting. She struggles to loose her arrows at him, and those that she does shoot bounce off ineffectively. With the Egyptian forces in full retreat and their leaders all dead, Armida flees on one of her horses.

Rinaldo catches her, just as she is about to stab herself with one of her own arrows in a bid to end her life. She swoons into his arms, he cries with pity for her, and Rinaldo promises to be her servant and her champion.

With the ‘pagan’ armies defeated and departed, Godfrey now leads his crusaders into the city, as the sun sets. He goes to the Temple, having fulfilled his vow to deliver Jerusalem.

In the final article in this series, I will consider the fates of the heroes and heroines of Tasso’s epic.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

Having looked at the new wave of Naturalist paintings in the Salon of 1883, I proposed that their common characteristics include:

• They tend to show ordinary people, rather than nobility, gods, or heroes,
• who are going about their normal daily activities,
• in their normal surroundings.
• They are painted with the impression of objectivity,
• rather than overt sentiment.
• Painting style is a neutral realism, showing such detail as is necessary for their purpose,
• sometimes being ‘photographic’ in quality.

The earliest roots of these appear in genre paintings during the Dutch Golden Age.

These became popular in Dutch and Flemish ‘cabinet’ paintings, such as Gabriël Metsu’s Washerwoman (c 1650). This painting appears authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman is a servant, dressed in her working clothes, in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer. Her expression is neutral, without any sign of a smile.

Genre painting then largely fell into disfavour. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, now known better for his still lifes, continued to develop it in paintings such as his take on a Laundress in about 1735. This shows a more humorous view of life ‘below stairs’ in a contemporary household, with a small child in tatty clothing blowing a large bubble from a straw, and through the doorway a maid hanging clean washing on an indoor line.

Another important strand of development was the controversial, even politicised, contemporary event. Géricault’s monumental painting of The Raft of the Medusa made in 1818-19 is perhaps the most important example.

This shows a well-known and scandalous story of the day, in which over 130 people on board the French frigate Méduse died when they abandoned onto a makeshift raft. Just fifteen of the 147 people on that raft survived thirteen days before being rescued, and gave harrowing stories of drowning, dehydration, and cannibalism.

Although Géricault undoubtedly painted what was in his mind’s eye, he undertook considerable research, interviewing survivors and making studies of material from the morgue in his efforts to make this as objective as he could. This quest for objectivity was a major theme of the nineteenth century, spilling over from the sciences into creative arts, underlying many of the changes seen in painting.

Gustave Courbet took it up in the middle of the century, most notably in The Stone Breakers (1849), which was tragically destroyed by fire during the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. This painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1850, and established him as the great-grandfather of Naturalism.

Shown in the same year was his monumental A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), which brings some important lessons. This huge painting shows in remarkably unemotional and objective terms the funeral of the artist’s great uncle in the small provincial town of Ornans. The event took place in September 1848, but the painting gives the impression that it is a faithful record.

Courbet actually painted the work entirely in the studio, using those who were present as models. It shows a moment which could only have existed in the artist’s memory: like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it doesn’t necessarily represent an image which ever existed in reality. But it has been carefully researched, imagined, composed, and painted to give the impression of accuracy and objectivity, rather than some Romantic fantasy.

At the same time, social realism was arriving on the farms of France, thanks to the paintings of Jean-François Millet.

Millet’s The Sower was completed in 1850 and shown at the Salon that year; it has since been recognised as his first real masterpiece. This farmworker is striding across a field, sowing seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, caught in the sunlight, is another worker ploughing with a pair of oxen.

Millet’s The Gleaners of 1857 is sparse, concentrating on just three figures. There are no distractions: it is about the rural poor, who made ends meet by salvaging scraps after the harvest had been cut. This is unavoidably about poverty, and the sector of the population who only just managed to survive each winter. It smacked of socialism, and got the thumbs-down from the rich and middle classes when they saw it in the Salon that year.

Millet followed that with L’Angélus (The Angelus), completed around 1857-59. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet gave it its present title. At some stage, it is thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It is dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church (whose steeple was a late addition, after Appleton failed to collect the painting from Millet) is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening.

Next to the man is his fork, which he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, which now rests at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow, which has a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home. In the gathering dark, viewers often misread the barrow and think that it contains a small child.

With the hostile reception of The Gleaners, Millet didn’t exhibit this painting until 1865, although he had sold it in 1860 for a meagre 1,000 francs. When sold in 1890, its price reached 750,000 francs.

Jules Breton was also important, more in his compositional devices than in any social realism, though. His Gleaners from 1854, which was highly successful at the Salon of 1855, is a marvellous painting, but hardly the story of people who spent most of their lives on the edge of survival. But its foreground detail, high horizon and widescreen effect were to be used very successfully by Jules Bastien-Lepage and others.

Another important artist in the late gestation of Naturalism was Édouard Manet, long considered to be a precursor of Impressionism, but who was thoroughly realist.

Manet’s Olympia (1863) shocked those seeing it at the 1865 Salon because here was an ordinary person, a ‘common prostitute’ indeed, seen in a role normally assigned to a mythical goddess such as Venus. And she was very much at her place of work, staring straight at the viewer.

A decade later, Manet painted the same model, Victorine Meurent, in The Railway (popularly known as Gare Saint-Lazare) (1873). A genre symbol of modernity, it brought modern technology and urban life to what was at the time a largely unappreciative public.

For me, the immediate precursors to the Naturalist paintings I showed from 1883 were not the early works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, formative though they were in his own brief career, but the paintings of the rural poor by Léon Augustin Lhermitte.

Lhermitte’s sketchy Procession near Ploumanac’h from 1879 shows a religious festival in Brittany, with a small stream of locals making their way along a track on the open hillside towards the church. Its unabashed and unemotional bleakness is quite different from the densely-populated processions being painted by Jules Breton.

Lhermitte’s founding masterpiece of Naturalism is The Harvesters’ Pay from 1882, which looks objectively at the economic and social aspects of the harvest. Four of the harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose.

In the centre of the painting, one of the workers is counting out his pay in front of his wife, who is feeding a young infant at her breast. To their left, another worker just sits and stares blankly into the distance, dead-beat tired and wondering whether his pittance was worth all that effort.

Most importantly, Lhermitte painted these in the early years of the Third Republic, a time when social concerns were sweeping across much of Europe.

In the next article, I will look at how Naturalism spread beyond France.

My recent long weekend looking at paintings of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, reminded me of how few Spanish landscape painters are now known outside the country of their birth. The work of Martín Rico y Ortega (1833–1908) was widely recognised in the late nineteenth century, and can be seen today in some of the major American collections, as well as those in Spain.

Rico was born in one of the most famous villages near to Madrid, El Escorial, which is known for its royal palace, Monasterio del Escorial, which has a superb collection of European paintings over the period 1400-1700. I don’t know whether Rico saw any of the paintings and so became inspired to become an artist, but he went to study first at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the most prestigious academy in Madrid.

While he was studying there, he painted a series of watercolour landscapes of his home town and its environs. Among them is this View of the Village of El Escorial with the Church of Saint Barnabus (1852-58). This appears to have been painted in front of the motif, and for the rest of his career, Rico was to be an enthusiastic painter en plein air.

His Bullfighting Party in El Escorial (1852-58) is another promising watercolour from his student days.

Rico progressed to oils by 1858, when he painted Guadarrama Landscape, which was shown at the National Exhibition of that year. This rugged area is now a national park, and is to the north-east of El Escorial. The mountains shown are the Sierra de Guadarrama. This dramatic view shows the influence of his Professor of Landscape Painting at the Academy, who was a renowned Romantic.

The following year, Rico painted Near Azañón (1859), further to the east in arid country, and introduced the lone figure of a ‘wanderer’, popular in Romantic and Gothic landscapes earlier in the nineteenth century.

When he had completed his studies in Madrid, Rico was awarded a scholarship to travel to France to continue his training there. Unfortunately, his attempt to become a pupil of Charles-François Daubigny were unsuccessful, so he concentrated on painting river scenes around Paris in his realist style, influenced mainly by the Barbizon School.

Country View from 1861 appears typical of his landscapes from this time.

While he was painting en plein air, he met and befriended the great Swiss landscape painter Alexandre Calame, and accompanied him to his native Switzerland.

In 1862, Rico painted this Swiss Landscape, with the encouragement and advice of Calame.

Perhaps Rico’s finest painting of his early career is Washerwomen of Varenne from 1865. A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river. They transform this landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.

Rico also made friends with Camille Pissarro, presumably when the two met painting outdoors near Paris. However, in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Rico, like most foreigners in France, had to leave the country. He returned to Spain, where he went to stay with Marià Fortuny, who had just moved to Granada.

Under the influence of Fortuny, Rico’s style started to mature. I suspect that Gathering Oranges, Granada was painted during the two years or so that they shared a studio in Granada.

Rico may have started A Summer’s Day on the Seine (1870-75) before he left France, and perhaps completed it when in Spain.

Rico’s finely-detailed view of La Torre de las Damas en la Alhambra de Granada (The Tower of the Ladies in the Alhambra) was painted in 1871-72, when he was working with Fortuny in their Granada studio. It captures the dilapidation which the Alhambra had fallen into before more recent work to restore it to its former glory.

In 1872, Rico seems to have visited the French port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, at the southern end of the Bay of Biscay, where he painted this marvellous view of the Mouth of the Bidasoa.

Rico was finally ready to make the last step which would secure his future: to leave his native Spain and paint in Venice, which I will examine in the next and concluding article.

In the years prior to 1873, the Spanish landscape painter Martín Rico y Ortega (1833–1908) had trained in Madrid and Paris, and painted even further afield in Switzerland. But it was when he was sharing a studio with Marià Fortuny in Granada, during 1871-72, that he developed his mature style.

In 1873, Rico and Fortuny left Spain and travelled to Italy, where they visited Rome, Naples, Florence and Venice. Of these, it was Venice that became Rico’s enduring love, and its was his paintings of that unique city which made his art and reputation. The following year, Fortuny stayed near Naples at Portici, where he tragically caught malaria and died later in Rome.

From then on, Rico travelled to Venice to paint each summer. Unfortunately the dating of those paintings is not very clear, but here follows a selection of some of the best in approximate order of date.

Many of Rico’s views of Venice show lesser-known canals and less-frequented areas, like A Canal in Venice from about 1875. Although populated by the occasional gondola and a small clutch of children, they have a wonderful air of peace and serenity. His broken reflections are painted more tightly than those of John Singer Sargent, but Rico is reputed to have painted mainly en plein air.

He continued to paint some views when back in Spain, including this marvellous Doorway of a House in Toledo (1875-78). Its dazzling sun-bleached walls are shown here near noon, with little shade offered even in the backstreet at the right, and only the working animals and a small dog out in the sun.

In A Spanish Garden, which he completed before 1881, a young child is playing in the small pond surrounding a fountain.

When Rico painted famous landmarks in Venice, such as the Courtyard of the Doge’s Palace in 1883, he seems to have caught them when there are more pigeons than people. A small splash of colour to the left of centre is a carpet which is being beaten, suggesting that this was painted in the early morning, although the clock at the left is hard to read.

This undated view of the Grand Canal just catches the dome of the church of Santa María della Salute, Venice, and is also known by the fuller title of Grand Canal and the Church of Santa María della Salute, Venice.

Canal in Venice is another undated view of one of the minor ‘backstreet’ canals which is profoundly serene.

Rico’s undated cross-canal view of Venice reminds me of Claude Monet’s 1908 paintings of the Palazzo Da Mula Morosini, although clearly a different location and contrasting style. However, this does appear to be a ‘proper’ plein air oil sketch with rougher facture, for once.

In 1883, Rico apparently visited Paris in the late Spring or early summer, where he painted this superb wide View of Paris from the Trocadero. His style is again a little looser, but he is painstaking in even distant detail, which encompasses the Hôtel des Invalides, the Pantheon, and the towers of Notre Dame beyond. Fortuny’s influence remains strong even here, nearly a decade after his death.

Some of Rico’s later paintings of Venice are more populous and bustling, such as his San Lorenzo River with the Campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci, Venice from about 1900. He again strikes a careful balance between the painterly and detailed realism.

In about 1902, he painted a more direct view of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with a small fleet of gondolas.

Rico seems to have maintained his summer visits to Venice right up to the year of his death. This unusual view Near the Grand Canal, Venice was painted in 1908. A person is in the water beside the gondola, and the boatman is assisting them with a boathook while the other occupants seem quite detached from what is going on.

Martín Rico, the great Spanish landscape artist who painted Venice most successfully, died in Venice that Spring, on 13 April 1908, at the age of 74.

On the tenth and last day of stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the theme is set by Panfilo, the ‘king of the day’, as those who have performed liberal or munificent deeds in the cause of love, or for other reasons. Emilia is called on to tell the fifth of the day’s stories, which concerns Messer Andsaldo and Madonna Dianora. Messer was a contemporary title for a gentleman who wasn’t quite nobility.

This is set in the town of Udine, in Friuli, which is in the north-east of Italy, not far from the borders with Austria and Slovenia. It is set in January, a time when that part of Italy is frosty and snowy.

Madonna Dianora was the noble and faithful wife of an exceedingly rich man, Gilberto. Another nobleman, Messer Ansaldo, who was renowned for his courtesy, fell deeply in love with Dianora, sending her incessant messages in the hope that she would return his love. Dianora became fed up with this badgering, so decided to set Ansaldo an impossible task.

She gave Ansaldo’s messenger a reply, that she would return his love only if he demonstrated it by providing her with a garden near Udine in which there were plants, trees, and flowers as if it were the month of May, rather than January. If he was unable to do that, then he should desist from troubling her again.

When Ansaldo heard of this demand, he realised that Dianora was trying to be rid of his attentions by setting him an essentially impossible task. However, making enquiries he located a magician who said that he could pull this off, provided that Ansaldo would pay him a great price. Ansaldo agreed, and waited for it all to happen.

The weather grew bitterly cold at the start of January, but the magician transformed a meadow next to Udine into a miraculous garden, with trees in full leaf, abundant vegetation, flowers, and rich fruit – all amid the surrounding snow. Ansaldo invited Dianora to visit, reminding her of the pledge that she had made.

Dianora had already heard reports of this enchanted garden, and went to visit it in the company of other ladies.

As far as I know, there are only two paintings showing the enchanted garden of Messer Ansaldo, the first by Marie Spartali Stillman, and the second painted over twenty-five years later by John William Waterhouse, shortly before he died.

Marie Spartali Stillman’s earlier The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889) condenses the story slightly to include both Dianora’s viewing of the garden in company, and her subsequent meeting with Ansaldo. Surrounded by his enchanted blooming garden, and with snow on the ground outside, Ansaldo (at the right) is welcoming Dianora (just right of centre) and the other ladies to see. Dianora is torn between her honour as a married woman, and her promise.

Stillman painted this when in London, and exhibited it at the New Gallery later in 1889 with a written explanation of the scene. Failing to sell it in the UK, she took it with her to the USA in 1900, where it was bought in Boston by a distant relative of her husband. The painting then disappeared until its re-discovery in the 1980s.

John William Waterhouse’s The Enchanted Garden was painted at the end of his career, between 1916-17. Although it shows influence from Stillman’s painting, which he may well have seen over twenty-five years before when it was hanging in the New Gallery, and both share a very similar look, their composition and details are quite different.

Ansaldo is again at the right, and Dianora on the left, with her ladies marvelling at the garden between them. Dianora doesn’t look in despair by any means, just puzzled and slightly fearful of consequences.

When Dianora had confirmed that Ansaldo had achieved the impossible, she was thrown into the depths of despair, realising that she had to honour her promise. At first her husband was unable to discover what was the matter, but eventually she confessed the full story to him. He was angry, but told her that her errors were from the purest of motives. He told her to go to Messer Ansaldo and do everything she could to get out of her obligation. However, if she couldn’t escape it, she could give him her body, but not her heart.

Dianora burst into tears at this, but the next morning at dawn, followed her husband’s instructions and went to Ansaldo.

Messer Ansaldo asked her why she had come, and she explained that it wasn’t out of love, but her obligation to stick to her word, and that her husband had told her to do so.

Ansaldo told her that he never intended to hurt her or harm her reputation, and that he would treat her as a sister, not a lover. Dianora was delighted, and returned to her husband full of praise for Ansaldo’s manners. Her husband Gilberto and Messer Ansaldo became lifelong friends as a result.

Even the magician waived his fee, and despite Ansaldo’s every attempt to get him to take his money, the magician insisted that he too had to be generous in the circumstances.

Thereafter, Messer Ansaldo got over his love for Dianora, which he replaced with a deep and proper affection.

If painting is about light, so it must also be about its opposite, darkness. Their combination in the single term chiaroscuro is both appropriate and confusing, as it has been used to describe so many different uses of contrast between light and dark, including the general build-up of three-dimensional form using shade.

In this and the next article, I’m going to take a whirlwind trip through the history of the most distinctive form of chiaroscuro painting, what has been termed compositional chiaroscuro. In this, a painting is dominated by very dark tones, with dramatically-lit highlights. This is most readily seen by looking at a painting’s monochrome luminosity profile, now easily performed using imaging software.

My favourite painting by Caravaggio, his Narcissus of the end of the sixteenth century, shows the typical pattern of an abundance of pixels of near-black luminosity, and a long tail rising to its far less frequent highlights.

An almost identical pattern is seen in another great work by a master of darkness, Georges de la Tour, his Mary Magdalene with a Night Light from 1630.

Although most strongly associated with Caravaggism and ‘Tenebrism’ in the first half of the seventeenth century, this form of chiaroscuro is to be seen in some paintings from much earlier, in the Renaissance.

The earliest good example that I have seen is this wonderful nocturne by the early Netherlandish painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Nativity at Night, which is thought to be from about 1490. Chiaroscuro makes narrative sense here, and results in a scene of great tenderness and reverence, thanks to its soft transitions of tones.

Beccafumi’s The Annunciation from 1545-46 is rather different, though, as its motif is not normally associated with the dark or darkness. This implies that he used the extreme contrast to heighten the effect of his painting, something which was quite unusual at the time.

Fifty years later, chiaroscuro rose to become popular, and in the case of some artists, a signature style.

El Greco’s An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool (Fábula) from 1589-92 deliberately exaggerates the light of a glowing coal being used to light a candle to heighten effect in telling this fable.

Then, for the couple of decades of his tragically brief career, Caravaggio became the master of chiaroscuro. Here is his brilliant Narcissus of 1594-96, which uniquely combines the effect with reflection, to tell the story of Narcissus so powerfully.

Caravaggio’s paintings attracted a strong following, and brought a phase of Caravaggism.

Lavinia Fontana’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes from 1600 has several good reasons for its use of chiaroscuro. Here is Judith withh the decapitated body of Holofernes, passing the head she has just hacked off to her maidservant. The darkness hides some of the more ghoulish parts of the scene, heightens the sense of drama, and is entirely appropriate for the location and time of day.

Many of Adam Elsheimer’s exquisite oil paintings on copper use very strong chiaroscuro too, showing stories which are set during the night, such as that of Ceres at Hecuba’s Home from about 1605.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s father was a well-known Caravaggist, and she followed suit for the early years of her career. Her painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes from 1620-21 shares all the same reasons as that of Lavinia Fontana above.

For Gerard van Honthorst, sometimes referred to as a Utrecht Caravaggist, dimly lit indoor scenes were associated with pleasures, often fairly sinful ones, as in his Merry Company from 1623. He also shows us how directional lighting can transform appearance, turning quite ordinary or ugly faces into caricatures.

One of the great exponents of chiaroscuro in religious painting was Georges de La Tour, whose series of paintings of Mary Magdalen are among the finest examples of the style. The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame is one example which probably dates from around 1630.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful painting of The Death of Hercules from 1634 uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of that of Caravaggio to change the death of a mythical Greek hero into a moving Christian martyrdom, its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Realtively few landscape painters have attempted to use chiaroscuro in their work, because of its direct conflict with their primary aim of showing their view.

One exception to this is Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with a Storm from about 1651, which must be one of the earliest ‘Gothic’ landscape paintings. It uses darkness to heighten the sense of terror, and to encourage the viewer to share the fears of those pictured. The same landscape picture in more everyday light would have looked very bland.

One of Roger Fry’s withering (and quite unwarranted) criticisms of the painting of Rembrandt was of the master’s use of chiaroscuro, most generally known in the paintings of his late career.

Although several of his best-known chiaroscuro paintings were made in his old age, Rembrandt had long used it when appropriate, here in Saint Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling) from 1631.

But together with his increasingly radical and painterly style, it really came to the forefront in the paintings he made after 1650, such as Bathsheba with King David’s Letter (1654). This is not the brash even harsh chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, though: in fifty years, it had evolved considerably.

Among the last of the Caravaggists was Elisabetta Sirani, whose enigmatic painting of Cleopatra, or possibly The Flea, from the middle of the seventeenth century, is a fine example.

Then, after little more than fifty years, chiaroscuro fell into disfavour, and almost vanished.