From the cauldron of change in the painting of Jongkind, Boudin, Delacroix, Manet and others came Impressionism. One of its strands was the depiction of modern life, smoking chimneys, factories, railways and bridges. As communications improved, railways spread and cities industrialised, many new bridges were built. Not only that, but these used new materials and assumed new forms: traditional stone arches were replaced by iron, steel and concrete in ever-widening spans.

Claude Monet was an early enthusiast for railway bridges, and seems to have fallen in love with The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil, shown here in 1873. At this time, Monet was a regular commuter by train: when he, Camille and his son moved out to Argenteuil at the end of 1871, he travelled the short distance into the centre of Paris by train.

Monet liked this bridge so much that he painted it again the following year, with another steam train crossing it.

Paul Cézanne’s bridges were more usually buried in the wooded countryside, like The Bridge at Maincy, which he painted in 1879-80. This is perhaps more notable not for this humble wooden pedestrian bridge, but for its early use of constructive strokes to form the foliage.

Although not as widely known as his figurative paintings, many of Renoir’s landscapes are superb, including The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autumn from 1882, which shows a different bridge from Monet’s.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings which he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame which he had made for himself.

This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal which runs from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by a concrete bridge in 1930. Langlois was apparently the name of its keeper.

Enthusiasm for painting bridges continued among the later Impressionists too. The American Theodore Robinson found this arched stone bridge not far from Monet’s home, and composed it among trees as Bridge near Giverny in about 1892.

Alfred Sisley liked his bridges with additional buildings, as in Moret Bridge in the Sunlight (1892), one of a series of over ten similar views of the town of Moret-sur-Loing, where he lived his later years.

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot’s unusual nocturne of Night on the Seine from 1892 combines the effects of darkness with fog. It shows the river running through central Paris on a slightly foggy night, and plays skilfully with effects on lights, and their reflections, as well as being thoroughly painterly.

When he fled from the Franco-Prussian War to London in 1870, Monet had concentrated on painting the Palace of Westminster. During his visits to the city in the early twentieth century, he returned to those views and painted a series of Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, here an example from 1903. These works are among the most quintessentially Impressionist paintings, exploring a range of conditions of light and visibility.

Of all those connected with the Impressionist movement, it was Gustave Caillebotte who explored the visual geometry of bridges the most.

The first and most remarkable of these works is The Pont de l’Europe from 1876, which doesn’t show one of the popular bridges over the River Seine in Paris, but a roadbridge over the railway yards at Gare Saint-Lazare, a large plaza formed at the confluence of six avenues. Although there are several readings of the figures present, the scene is highly contemporary and dominated by the heavy trusses forming the bridge, and steam from a passing train. Its perspective projection is unusual, to say the least, and potentially ‘photographic’.

In the mid-1880s he made several views of the modern bridges over the River Seine near Argenteuil. The Bridge at Argenteuil and the Seine (1885, above) is more Impressionist in style, with its broken water surface, and appears to show the bridge painted by Renoir three years earlier. The Seine and the Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil (1885-87, below) shows Monet’s favourite bridge from just over a decade before, and bears contrast with those paintings shown earlier.

The late Impressionist Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin had fallen in love with the deep countryside near the river Lot at Labastide-du-Vert, north of Toulouse in the southwest of France. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he moved there from Paris, and there he remained for the next several years. Among those local views is this of The Bridge at Labastide-du-Vert from 1920, its traditional stone arches shimmering in their near-Divisionist construction.

Over this same period, other artists outside the Impressionist movement also painted many views of bridges, and those will be the subject of the third and final article tomorrow.

In the previous articles, we have seen how bridges were seldom prominent in landscapes painted before the nineteenth century, but were adopted as a theme by several of the Impressionists, who captured their growth and increasing diversity as railways and roads spread across Europe and North America.

Bridges weren’t only becoming more common, they were undergoing transition to something radically different from traditional stone arches. More industrial designs using steel components were transforming their appearance. The first suspension bridge, which hung a roadway from chain links rather than steel cables, was built in Pennsylvania in 1801, and during the late nineteenth century wire-cable suspension bridges were starting to become quite widespread.

Prominent in the background of Thomas Eakins’ The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) from 1871 are two bridges constructed almost entirely of girders. The artefacts of man are here starting to dominate the trees and even the river itself.

Traditional stone arch bridges were becoming romantic signs of the distant past, as used by Carl Friedrich Lessing in his Landscape with Castle Ruins and Riders from 1878.

They also found a place in allegory, such as Walter Crane’s ingenious Bridge of Life from 1884. The baby born and breastfed in the left foreground passes through life, past Clotho who is spinning the thread of life and time at the upper right. That thread passes over the bridge, and Atropos cuts it on their death, in the right foreground.

Félix Vallotton pushed beyond even Gustave Caillebotte’s unconventional views of bridges in his Le Pont Neuf from 1901. One of the oldest of the great bridges of central Paris, Vallotton here uses a combination of unusual composition and perspective to make the familiar almost unrecognisable.

When Pierre Bonnard was painting the streets of Paris, he seldom included either the River Seine or its bridges. But in The Pont du Carrousel from about 1903, he was inspired by the golden fire of an autumn dawn/dusk near the Louvre and Tuileries. Just a few years later, this bridge, which had been a feature of the front of the Louvre since 1834, was rebuilt using beaten iron in place of its wooden framework, and later in the twentieth century it was replaced altogether.

Stranger still is Colin Campbell Cooper’s painting of Main Street Bridge, Rochester from 1908. Cooper was and remains best-known for his many works showing the skyscrapers of New York around the turn of the century, but this view might appear more Italian than American. The original bridge at Rochester, New York, was a modest wooden structure across the Genesee River, which was replaced in 1855-7 by one with five stone arches. Buildings soon started to appear on both sides of the bridge, making it appear as if it was a backwater in Venice or Florence, perhaps. Cooper captured this unique cityscape when the buildings had been completed, long before their removal during the 1960s.

Modern-style bridges were spreading through the cities and towns of many countries. In the early twentieth century, Adrian Stokes and his wife (arguably the better painter) paid several visits to Hungary. During their stay in its capital Budapest in late October 1909, before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Stokes painted this view of the Margaret or Margit Bridge, which had been built by French engineer Ernest Goüin and his construction company between 1872-76.

Along with the other bridges of Budapest, this was destroyed by Wehrmacht sappers in 1945. Its post-war reconstruction was hurried, and it had to be rebuilt to its former glory between 2009-11.

The Bridge at Karrebæksminde (1912) is Laurits Andersen Ring’s intricately detailed view of the bridge connecting the large and populous island of Sjælland (Zealand) in Denmark with the tiny rural island of Enø. The structure must date from the early nineteenth century when this short canal was dug to connect Karrebæk Fjord with the Baltic.

In December 1912, Egon Schiele was in Györ, in north-west Hungary, where he discovered a bridge which today might remind us of Vincent van Gogh’s Langlois Bridge. Schiele wrote that he felt it looked “quite Asiatic, as if Chinese”, and made a series of sketches of it. He developed those into this painting of The Bridge the following year.

Others, like Émile Claus in his Sunset over Waterloo Bridge from 1916, appeared to be following Monet’s series of paintings of London’s bridges in unusual lighting conditions.

Claus was followed a decade later by Lesser Ury, in his study of bridges seen in London in Fog (1926).

If there’s one painting of a bridge which encapsulates the great changes brought during the early twentieth century, it’s surely Joseph Stella’s Cubist masterpiece of Brooklyn Bridge, painted in 1919-20.

Brooklyn Bridge had first been suggested as early as 1800, but it wasn’t until 1870 that its construction began. After a long succession of problems, it was finally opened to traffic in 1883, so by the time that Stella painted it, it was already established as a major landmark. It joins what until then had been the separate cities of Brooklyn and New York, and was the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge, although technically it’s more accurately described as a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge.

Stella’s large geometric and Cubist painting not only reflects its form, but places it within the grimy industrial atmosphere of the city. It is perhaps the first truly twentieth century bridge.

Dante and Virgil are moving steadily up the mountain-island of Purgatory, when the ground shakes underneath them as another soul has been cleansed and moves further up towards its heavenly peak. This is Statius, a Latin poet who was inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, who joins them for the ascent.

Following that, the trio are greeted by the next guardian angel, who removes another P from Dante’s forehead and welcomes them to the sixth terrace or circle, where souls are purged of gluttony. They see an unusual fruit tree which is watered from the rocks above. A diembodied voice from within its branches explains that both fruit and water are withheld, to drive the gluttons to adopt abstemious ways. The penitents here are emaciated and dehydrated, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets and their bodies wasted. Here they meet Forese Donati, a childhood friend of Dante who has advanced up the mountain rapidly thanks to the prayers of his widow.

Forese draws attention to others who are there, including clerics and poets.

They come across another tree laden with fruit, this time associated with the tree in the Garden of Eden from which Eve took the apple.

Dante, Virgil and Statius then make their way towards the next guardian angel.

After the sixth P is removed from Dante’s forehead, they move up to the seventh circle, where souls are purged of lust by a wall of flames, which all but obstructs their progress along the ascending path. They first come upon a group of shades who are extolling examples of chastity such as the Virgin Mary and the goddess Diana, then another group whose lust was directed towards the same sex, who invoke the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

They meet some poets among them, and as the daylight starts to fade, the trio are told that they too must pass through the flames in order to ascend any further.

Virgil persuades Dante to do this on the strength of his promised meeting with his beloved Beatrice. Cleansed by fire, they reach the foot of the steps to take them up to the next circle, but by now it’s too dark for any progress, so they lie down to sleep. Towards dawn, when Dante eventually drifts off, he has a third dream, which has been painted extensively as I will show in the next article in this series.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In the last article in this series, I looked at the later work of four of the Nabis who perhaps ‘kept the faith’ most in their subsequent art. In this, the penultimate article in this series, I look at five who changed more radically.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Nabi works were quite conformist, as shown in this wonderfully-textured painting of Conversation from 1891-93.

His mature work is much higher in chroma, and uses a skilful combination of assembled – even constructive – brushstrokes and detail. His pastels are particularly brilliant, such as this amusing narrative painting of Old Silenus on a Donkey, which he painted in 1925-27. Despite his relinquishing Nabi style, he remained close to Vuillard and Bonnard, and worked with them on joint projects such as decorating the art museum in Wintertur, and private villas. At the time that he was working on this pastel, he became the second recipient of the Carnegie Prize.

Félix Vallotton showed early signs of a rich range of styles, even before 1895 in paintings such as Waltz (1893). Although this sprinkling of multi-coloured dots was hardly in keeping with what other Nabis were doing at this time, it indicated his more eclectic approach.

By the turn of the century, Vallotton was painting enigmatic scenes such as this Interior with the Back of a Woman in Red from 1903. His style became more realist, although today it compares more with works from half a century later.

Vallotton then painted a series of narrative works, including his Perseus Killing the Dragon, from 1910, which adopted a similar style for their very contemporary interpretations of classical myths.

He then became a major war artist for the period of the First World War, capturing some of its most moving images, such as this view of Châlons War Cemetery from 1917. In his final years, like so many great painters, he returned to landscapes of profound serenity and timelessness.

Paul Ranson had conformed to the Nabi style, as seen in his Four Women at a Fountain from 1895.

Ranson’s subsequent career was cut short by his early death, but prior to that he too embraced a more conventional realism. In the year before his death, and with the support of several of the other Nabis, he and his wife Marie-France established the Académie Ranson to teach artists Nabi concepts and techniques.

Although he died in 1909, his Academy survived the First World War. In 1931, his widow handed its management over to Harriet Von Tschudi Cérésole who even kept the school open, in reduced circumstances, during the Second World War. It finally closed its doors in 1955. During its early years, its teaching was supported by most of the Nabis who remained in Paris, including Denis, Sérusier, Roussel, Vallotton and Vuillard.

For all his reputation as a sculptor, Georges Lacombe’s paintings compared favourably to those of the other Nabis, and conformed with their common style, as shown in his painting of Chestnut Gatherers from 1893-94.

Lacombe later embraced Japonisme, being influenced by the popular Hokusai print of The Great Wave, and was possibly the most chromatically intense of all the Nabis who remained working in France, as shown in his late painting of Paul Ranson on the Grounds from 1905-08. This is closest in style to the later works of Pierre Bonnard. However, Lacombe’s career was cut short by tuberculosis, and he died from that in 1916, at the age of only 48.

By far the most radical development in painting style came from the Hungarian Nabi, József Rippl-Rónai, who neither seems to have been particularly close to the centre of the group, nor does he appear to have painted in conformity with other Nabis.

Following his return to Hungary, he developed what is known in Hungarian as kukoricásnak, or ‘corn style’, with dazzlingly high chroma and coalescent tiles of paint which appears to have been derived from Post-Impressionism, and makes his works shimmer.

In the early twentieth century, the former Nabis diverged into the rich mixture of styles and movements which were to characterise (better) painting during the rest of the century. In this sense, the story of the Nabis is in microcosm the story of art over the following hundred years. What I find most unusual about them is their convergence on a set of artistic and aesthetic ideals which enabled each of them to go on to more individual expression. For that, they surely merit a more prominent place in art history.

For most of his career, from the early 1860s until around 1900 when he stepped back and painted more for his own pleasure, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) had two main themes in his work: floral still lifes, which he started to paint in large numbers from about 1862, and group portraits, for which he is known today. In this article, I’m going to survey the latter in the context of similar contemporary paintings, in an attempt to understand both Fantin himself and those distinctive works.

Large group portraits have long been popular themes in painting, and Fantin seems to have made his in the spirit of the many magnificent examples from the Dutch Golden Age, of which Rembrandt’s Night Watch from 1642 is by far the most famous. But Fantin’s works are nothing like those paintings, and must instead be seen in the context of works from the same era.

It was perhaps Courbet’s Painter’s Studio from 1855 which was the most discussed at the time. Still enigmatic, it purported to be an allegory, but this remains open to question. Its figures include individuals who had influence over Courbet’s life and artistic career, including Courbet’s first patron and key critics of the day, but on the left are a motley crew who could well be allegorical representations of the Emperor Napoleon III and his supporters.

Just a couple of years beforehand, Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862) drew many of Manet’s circle into its crowd, including the poet Baudelaire, novelist Gautier, composer Offenbach, the artist’s brother Eugène, and Fantin himself.

Fantin may also have seen Courbet’s lost group portrait The Source of Hippocrene, which was intended for the Salon of 1864 until being irreparably damaged in the studio.

Following a long series of studies, shown and examined in Bridget Alsdorf’s book (see reference below), Fantin’s first group portrait Homage to Delacroix was completed in 1864. Its figures include two – Champfleury and Baudelaire – who had appeared in Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, together with those who Fantin rated as the brightest and best among modern painters, including his friends Whistler and Manet. Inevitably he included himself among such distnguished company.

But Fantin neither poses us the puzzle of Courbet’s allegory, nor the social gathering of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries. Instead we have seven men looking at the viewer, and three gazing somewhere else. It almost looks like a real group portrait, but lacking interactions between the figures, it’s clear that it is eleven individual portraits (including that of Delacroix).

Fantin’s second group portrait, started as he was finishing Homage to Delacroix and exhibited at the Salon the following year, crashed and burned so badly that he cut it up shortly afterwards. As far as we can tell now, Fantin threw the nude figure of Truth into another agglomeration of men in drab clothing, in The Toast! Homage to Truth.

Deterred by the failure of his second attempt, Fantin didn’t try a third group portrait until 1870, when he exhibited A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870). This group has purpose, being gathered around Fantin’s friend Édouard Manet at his easel. Although still dressed for a funeral, this stars three of the Impressionists, Renoir, Bazille and Monet, together with the great Naturalist author Émile Zola, Zacharie Astruc and others. It still refers to Courbet’s Painter’s Studio.

In human terms, this is even more disconnected that the first. Directions of gaze are all over the place: Manet isn’t even looking at his brush, and none of the figures is remotely aware of the presence of any of the others, let alone relating to them in any way.

Nevertheless, Fantin’s painting prompted Frédéric Bazille to paint his Studio on the Rue La Condamine, which is in almost every respect the exact opposite of Fantin’s painting. Of the six figures included, only one (the pianist) isn’t interacting with others. The space is wide open instead of closed in, and the scene appears natural rather than posed or assembled from individual studies.

Fantin seems to have been encouraged by this success, and followed with his fourth group portrait, By the Table, just in the nick of time for the Salon in 1872. Having shown many of the painters of the avant garde, it was now the turn of writers and poets, and here he was unlucky in his timing and choice. Just a few weeks beforehand, the growing scandal surrounding Verlaine and Rimbaud had erupted into a bit of a swordfight after dinner.

Now we have eight from the literary avant garde, one absent and replaced by a floral display. Even Verlaine and Rimbaud appear unaware of one another’s presence, and gazes lead in many directions. But it seems to have been the scandal which sealed the fate of this painting.

For his fifth group portrait, Fantin went for something completely different: a tribute to one of his favourite composers, who had died seven years previously. He started work on The Anniversary. Homage to Berlioz at the end of 1875, after hearing Romeo and Juliet, and invokes a cast of five characters from Berlioz’s works, together with the Allegory of Music, the Muse Clio, and a self-portrait. Even here, the only figures interacting are Romeo and Juliet.

Fantin doesn’t appear to have attempted another group portrait for nearly a decade, until he decided his sixth and final one would show members of a Wagner fan club in Paris at the time: Around the Piano (1885). Although well-known in their own musical circle, few outside would have recognised their names or faces. Yet again, they are each gazing at something different, not interacting, and although Emmanuel Chabrier is playing the piano, the other figures (bar one) appear distracted.

This marks the end of the line for Fantin’s group portraits, but others continued to try their luck with them. Two notable paintings by former Nabis complete the series.

Maurice Denis was one of the few artists to take a deep interest in the late paintings of Paul Cézanne, and in 1900 paid his respects (although Cézanne didn’t die until 1906) in this Homage to Cézanne.

The artist to whom this group of Nabis are paying their respects is represented by a painting, Cézanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples. Although not entirely cohesive as a group, there are clear interactions taking place, and gazes reflect that, with Odilon Redon at the left and Paul Sérusier (foreground, at the right edge of the painting) clearly engaged with one another.

In 1902-03, Félix Vallotton painted a smaller group of Nabis in his Five Painters. Only Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel seem to be joined in discussion, and there’s a strange array of hands around the centre of the canvas.

Fantin’s group portraits are important paintings, but almost entirely because of their place in the historical record, rather than as works of art. They show ad hoc aggregates of figures from the avant garde of the day who are consistently behaving as if no one else is present. Rather than looking like groups of people, they form catalogues, against which the viewer is expected to check the list of contents.

It’s not as if Fantin didn’t know how to paint groups of interacting people. Early in his career, he made no less than five separate copies of Veronese’s Marriage Feast at Cana (1562-3), a complete lexicon of human engagement and interaction. Yet none of this is reflected in his own group portraits.

In the next article in this series, I will survey Fantin’s floral paintings.

Reference

Bridget Alsdorf (2013) Fellow Men, Fantin-Latour and the problem of the Group in Nineteenth Century French Painting, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 15367 4.

I am very grateful to @SuperNormaled for prompting me to look at Fantin in more detail.

Following on from my long series about the different media used in painting, I thought it might be interesting to examine some paintings to see how those media have been used to create works of art. In this first article, I look at one of the greatest fresco paintings of all time, Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, Italy.

Masaccio was only twenty-six at the time that he completed this six metre (21 feet) high fresco in 1428. It is so startling in its use of perspective projection that, when viewed from the right place, it works as a trompe l’oeil. Yet accurate linear perspective projection had only been invented a few years earlier.

As was usual at the time, this was commissioned by ‘donors’ or patrons probably from the Berti family: the man dressed in red, kneeling in prayer at the left, and his wife at the right.

The finished painting shows the traditional Christian Trinity of God the Father (top), God the Son or Christ (on the crucifix), and God the Holy Spirit (white dove flying from God the Father). At the foot of the crucifix are the Virgin Mary (left) and Saint John the Evangelist. The tomb at the bottom of the painting is that of Adam, the first man. The inscription on that tomb reads Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch’io sono voi anco sarete: ‘I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be’.

For all his youth, Masaccio was a very experienced and successful fresco painter by this time, and had completed a series of superb paintings in the Brancacci Chapel, for example. He was mastering the use of linear perspective projection, and must have made the decision to make this work a showpiece for the new technique.

The two principle sources of information about perspective in Florence in the period 1425-1435 were Filippo Brunelleschi himself, its ‘inventor’, and Leon Battista Alberti, who was in exile in Genoa and wasn’t allowed back into Florence until 1428. It was Alberti’s later book which was to provide the geometric foundation for most linear perspective in the Renaissance.

Donatello, the sculptor, was a close friend of Brunelleschi and might have been able to work with Masaccio on perspective. However, he was probably away most of the time working on commissions in Pisa and Siena. It’s therefore most likely that Masaccio worked with Brunelleschi on the drawings, to ensure that it was projected correctly.

In addition to the geometric composition, Masaccio would have completed a final study which was used as the basis for other details. This is traditionally squared up to facilitate scaling up to full size, as has already been done in Gustave Moreau’s pen and ink drawing above.

He would also have made a preliminary plan for the painting. Because buon fresco is painted into fresh, wet plaster, the artist can only plaster and paint a certain area each day – known in Italian as the giornata, a day’s work. Before starting to paint, Masaccio should have evolved a plan of the painting campaign, which starts at the top and works downwards.

Once ready to start the painting, a team of carpenters will have erected wooden scaffolding to give Masaccio and his assistants access to the whole of that section of the wall, to the full height of over six metres (21 feet). Masaccio is likely to have taken considerable interest in this: he was going to be working at sufficient height that any failure of the scaffolding would be likely to result in his serious injury or death. A surprising number of fresco painters did indeed fall from or with scaffolding and suffer the consequences.

The first stage would have been completed by assistants, who laid a rough underlayer of plaster known as the arriccio over the whole wall, and left it to dry for several days. This layer often contains abrasive sand particles to provide a key for the final layer of plaster.

Once that had dried completely, Masaccio and his assistants transferred the drawings onto the surface of the arriccio. This may have been performed by scaling up from the squared drawing and painting using a red pigment sinopia, or full-size drawings may have been pricked to make holes in the paper and a bag of soot banged against that paper when held against the wall – a technique known as pouncing. Masaccio is known to have used both techniques, and may well have used each in different sections of this work.

On each day of painting, assistants would prepare the colours by mixing pigments in water. That day’s supply of plaster, the intonaco (meaning plaster), is then prepared by mixing water with lime. That day’s giornata is covered with a thin layer of intonaco, and about an hour later Masaccio started painting into it. He then had about eight hours before the intonaco dried and he could apply no more fresh paint.

Like many of the best fresco painters, Masaccio extended his painting time by using paint mixed with milk or casein and a little lime – effectively a lime-based casein paint – which could be laid onto dry intonaco.

The geometric requirements of this painting also merited special measures. When the intonaco was first applied, it was marked to indicate key construction lines, such as those in the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and down the pillars at the side. The remains of these incised lines are still visible when the fresco is viewed in raking light. In this case, there is evidence that Masaccio used lengths of string attached to a nail sunk at the vanishing point of the linear projection, below the base of the cross.

Giornate can sometimes become obvious over time, as shown in Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.

During the conservation work and movement of Masaccio’s painting in the 1950s, the opportunity was taken to study its construction. Leonetto Tintori drew up a plan of all the identified construction lines and edges of giornate; I have sketched in the latter from a reproduction of a drawing made at that time, which has since been destroyed.

It’s estimated that the whole painting would have required some 24 giornate, although because of the long history of damage and attempts at its restoration, that number must remain flexible. Assuming that Masaccio painted six days a week, that would have required a minimum of four weeks working for at least ten hours each day. Fresco painting doesn’t permit easy alterations: if any repainting was required and couldn’t be accomplished using dry technique, that day’s giornata would have to be removed, replaced and repainted.

Masaccio’s linear perspective projection was implemented very well, accounting for the painting’s breathtaking three-dimensional effect. But within a few months of its completion, Masaccio was dead.

Extraordinarily, this magnificent work was covered over during renovations made by Vasari (the early biographer of artists, of all people) in about 1570. For nearly three centuries, it remained forgotten and invisible, then in 1860 it was rediscovered and moved (an extremely dangerous procedure for frescoes) to another wall in the church, leaving the tomb at its foot in place. When that tomb was rediscovered in the twentieth century, the rest of the painting was moved back to be reunited with its foot, and conservation work completed in 1954.

Additional details are given in this superb movie produced by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

It’s now part of our folk history that humans were once cavemen and cavewomen, but that’s only since Darwin and others in the mid-nineteenth century introduced the idea that people today have evolved from a more primitive past. We also know now that the earliest surviving paintings are those made in caves around thirty-five to forty thousand years ago.

In this article and its sequel tomorrow I’m going to look not at paintings in caves, but Western paintings of caves, to see how their associations and reading have changed. I think it provides a fascinating insight into changing ideas.

Early modern paintings of caves associate them not with the primitive, but the sacred.

The right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych showing The Hermit Saints Anthony, Jerome and Giles from around 1500 places Saint Giles standing to pray inside a small cave. He’s surrounded by a collection of strange objects, such as the bleached skull of a bird, and a tiny wizened tree.

For Giorgione, in his The Adoration of the Shepherds or the Allendale Nativity from 1505-10, a cave was sacred enough to house the Holy Family itself for the birth of Christ, rather than the more literal and conventional stable.

Caves also featured in several classical myths, where they were associated with some of the most ‘sacred’ figures.

When the hero Aeneas consults the Cumaean Sibyl, François Perrier shows her emerging from her cave at the right, in his painting Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1646.

The one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus was another mythical cave-dweller, this time in Homer’s epic Odyssey. Jacob Jordaens pictures Odysseus’ crew fastening themselves to the underside of sheep as they prepare to escape from the blinded giant, in his Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus, which was probably painted in about 1650.

In more modern literature, caves started to take on other associations, possibly derived from the habit of some mythical monsters such as dragons living in caves.

In Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, far from being a sacred place, it is now The Cave of Despair, as shown by Benjamin West in his painting of 1772. (This refers to Book 1, Canto 9.) The Knight of Holiness, bearing a red cross, vows to battle the creature Despair. When he finds the creature’s cave, it is littered with corpses, and Despair has only just finished killing the latest. Despair then tries to convince the knight that he should kill himself – an action which Una prevents him from doing.

With the Age of Enlightenment came more adventurous travel, and the tendency for artists to depict unusual locations which they have visited. In 1774, Joseph Wright of Derby visited Italy, where he entered a sea cave at the northern end of the Bay of Naples, and made a series of paintings of the view from inside the cave. This version of A Grotto in the Gulf of Salerno, Sunset was painted in 1780-81, long after his return to Britain.

One rather less than sacred place which was traditionally underground is the Underworld.

Martin Johann Schmidt’s Labour of the Danaides from 1785 shows the Danaïds paying their penance in the Underworld by trying to fill this leaky barrel with water – known as a Sisyphean task after Sisyphus who was similarly condemned to roll a huge boulder uphill only for it to roll back down.

Living in caves was increasingly being associated with poverty and destitution for reasons other than being a hermit. When the great Greek statesman Aristides was banished, he sheltered in a cave with his two daughters, as shown here by Charles Brocas in his painting which was exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1806. His left arm clutches their few possessions: a thin cloak, and small statues of the goddess Athena, and of Zeus himself. Thankfully, this banishment was rescinded after only three years, and Aristides returned to prove a successful general.

It wasn’t only dragons that lived in caves. According to JAD Ingres’ brilliant painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx, shown in its original form in 1808 but extensively reworked in 1825-27, it was at the entrance to the sphinx’s cave that the famous encounter with Oedipus took place. He used the deep shadow of the cave interior to great effect too.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg revisited the story of Ulysses Fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus in 1812, showing Ulysses about to make his way out of the Cyclops’ cave, as his captor strokes one of his sheep. In contrast to Ingres, he lights the interior of the cave well enough to make his narrative clear.

During the Greek War of Independence, Ary Scheffer called on multiple associations of caves in his moving painting of Greek Women Plead for the Virgin’s Help (1826). This cave is both a sacred place, with its icon of the Virgin Mary, and sanctuary for these women in their distress. Outside the mouth of the cave are Ottoman troops, ready to rape and murder the young Greek women kneeling in front of the icon.

The nineteenth century brought further change in the associations of caves, even before the arrival of Darwin and concepts of evolution. I’ll look at those in the next and concluding article tomorrow.

Before the early nineteenth century, caves had been sacred places where hermits lived, legendary and mythical hideyholes for sibyls and dragons, and most recently sites on the Grand Tour. Over the next century, they were to be associated with a great deal more besides.

Heinrich Jakob Fried’s painting of The Blue Grotto, Capri (1835) shows one of the most famous sights of the island of Capri, which has been the motif for many paintings since. This has to be visited by boat, and is at the north-western tip of the island. It features in August Kopisch’s book, published in German in 1838, describing his re-discovery of the cave in 1826, which popularised the island for northern Europen tourists. Fried visited the cave in 1835, and probably painted this in a studio in Naples shortly afterwards, just in time for the publication of Kopisch’s book.

Legend has it that witches also occupy caves. In 1816-17, following his ostracisation over alleged incest with his half-sister, Lord Byron wrote Manfred: A Dramatic Poem. Its eponymous hero is tortured by guilt in relation to the death of his beloved Astarte. Living in the Bernese Alps, he casts spells to summon seven spirits to help him forget and sublimate his guilt. As the spirits cannot control past events, he doesn’t achieve his aim, and cannot even escape by suicide. In the end, he dies.

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

Caves also played a significant role in Thomas Cole’s narrative series The Voyage of Life, first versions of which he completed in 1839-40.

The first, Childhood, establishes the scene: the lush coastal undercliff, rich in flowers and the vibrant green of vegetation. A boat has emerged from a large cave in the cliff – symbolic of the mother’s birth canal and the process of birth. A young baby is standing in the boat, which has an angel at its tiller. A carved angelic figure forming the prow holds out an hourglass as the symbol for time.

Meanwhile in Australia, the immigrant artist Conrad Martens painted this surprisingly painterly view of Stalagmite Columns at the Southern Entrance of the Burrangalong Cavern in 1843.

Thomas Cole may have been one of the first artists to explore those symbolic associations of caves, but he isn’t the best-known. During the 1860s, Gustave Courbet took to painting views of the underground sources of rivers near his home town of Ornans in north-eastern France. These have been inevitably interpreted in similarly Freudian terms.

The cave shown in Courbet’s Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne, from about 1864, is the source of stygian waters, and already a noted place for tourists to visit.

The Grotto of the Loue (1864) had a personal meaning for Courbet, as it is from here that the river runs down through his native town of Ornans. It’s tempting to suggest that in painting these the artist was seeking to symbolically return to his mother’s womb.

Apocryphal stories of apostles, saints, and other key people in the early Christian church were often extremely unconventional, and sometimes downright weird.

Jules LeFebvre made his career from painting nude women for all sorts of ‘acceptable’ reasons. He even found a religious motif which could feature a nude: Mary Magdalene In The Cave, which he painted in 1876. This refers to a French legend which held that Mary Magdalene, her brother Lazarus and some companions fled across the Mediterranean to land at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer near Arles. From there, Mary went to live in isolation in a cave on a hill near Marseille, now known as La Saint-Baume, and the setting for this painting.

John Melhuish Strudwick managed to work a small hut-like cave into his account of Circë and Scylla from 1886. The jealous Circe, dressed in brown rather than blue, is sprinkling a potion into the water from inside this small cave, as Scylla at the left walks down to bathe. Little does the latter know, but that potion is about to turn her into a sea monster.

With the populations of Europe and North America turning to the seaside for recreation, sea caves were starting to become more familiar, and holiday haunts for children.

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

Georges Lacombe’s Cave in Camaret (1890-97), a sea cave at the end of the Crozon peninsula in the far west of Brittany, not far from Cape Finistère, wasn’t seen as a holiday haunt, though. In this case, the cave seems as laden with mystery as the deep woods further inland.

Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs from 1903 follows on with this association. Its literary reference is most probably to the Naiads of Homer’s Odyssey, book 13, who live in a sea cave, updated to encompass more contemporary references to Wreckers, who lured ships onto the rocks in order to steal their precious cargos – sirens without the socially unacceptable habit of cannibalism.

As with so much, the First World War brought new and even more chilling associations.

Alfed Roll, then in his late sixties, seems to have spent some of the war in the city of Reims, where in 1915 he painted Reims Under Bombardment, 1915, Vision of a Cavern. The city had first come under shelling on 4 September 1914, and the German army continued to bombard it at irregular intervals through the remainder of 1914, 1915, and into 1916, reducing its ancient cathedral to ruins. Roll shows locals taking shelter in a capacious cave or cellar under the city, as a veiled and ethereal woman bearing a lantern walks through.

Roll refers back to the earlier tradition of the cave being sacred: at the left is a statue of the Virgin and Child, and lit by the lantern is a mother and baby. Oddly, though, the lantern bearer appears naked under her diaphanous robes.

My final painting of a cave is one of Georg Janny’s wonderful flights of the imagination, taking him to The Dragon’s Cave in 1917. Although this doesn’t have any direct references to a classical story, we’re back in the realms of myth and legend.

That’s a surprisingly wide range of associations of caves, and despite the rapid spread of folk history that ‘primitive’ humans lived in caves, that doesn’t appear to have been represented in paintings before 1918.

Dante, Virgil and the Latin poet Statius are making their way up the final climb towards the top of the island-mountain of Purgatory. As they reach the steps which lead from the seventh terrace, where lust is purged, to the terrestrial heaven, night has fallen and they are unable to go any further upward.

Dante once again falls asleep just before daybreak, and has his third dream, of Leah and Rachel. Unlike his two previous dreams, this third one is both tranquil and clear.

The two Biblical sisters, who both married Jacob, are presented in a pastoral setting. Leah, who is conventionally seen as representing the active way of life by ‘doing’, gathers flowers and weaves them into a garland. She became Jacob’s first wife, and bore him seven children. In contrast, she refers to her younger sister Rachel, representing the contemplative way of life by ‘seeing’, who she says is constantly looking at her own reflection in a mirror. Rachel became Jacob’s second wife, and died during childbirth according to the account in Genesis Chapters 29-30 and 35.

When they awake in the morning, Dante, Virgil and Statius ascend the remaining steps and enter the terrestrial heaven which lies above the slopes of Purgatory. Virgil has completed his mission as guide, and tells Dante that he can now wander where he wishes. Heaven is described as a lush forest with a rich flora and fauna, and gentle breezes.

Dante meets Matelda (who I will detail in the next article in this series), who is strolling and plucking flowers in much the same way that Leah was in his dream. Dante follows Matelda along the bank of the combined Rivers Lethe and Eunoe, until they come across a holy procession on the opposite bank. Further on there are seven trees of gold.

In the procession are twenty-four elders walking in pairs, then four animals each with six wings, between which is a two-wheeled chariot, as might have been in a classical Roman triumph. Beside one wheel are three women, who are sometimes considered to represent the personifications of faith, hope and charity, although Dante doesn’t identify then explicitly.

In the next article about Dante’s visit to Purgatory, he will meet his beloved Beatrice at last.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats. His painting shown above comes from his early career, and isn’t well-known.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927) was an outstanding watercolour painter who was born in London, into an affluent family of Greek origin. With her cousins, she became known in Pre-Raphaelite circles as one of the ‘three Graces’, and modelled extensively for Rossetti and others. She was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and specialised in highly-worked watercolours, several of Italian literary themes, which are comparable to the better paintings of Rossetti. I have written a series of three articles about her life and work.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

There were many movements in art during the nineteenth century. Some, like Impressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites, are now well-known and celebrated in exhibitions, books, even movies. Others, like the Nabis, are today little-known. Unless you visit somewhere like the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, with its large collection of Nabi works of art, you could easily miss them.

Over the last four months, I have been looking here at each of the Nabis in turn, and piecing together their story and a little of their work. This is a brief summary of those articles, with a full set of links so that you can follow up matters of detail.

The Nabis make interesting comparison with the Pre-Raphaelites: they were mainly young men, freshly trained or still pupils. Although at its height the Nabi movement was close, intense and devoted, that didn’t last long, and its members developed their own distinctive styles and pursued individual careers, some of them like Pierre Bonnard becoming of great international importance. Most remained close friends, and continued to collaborate on later painting projects.

Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, the Nabis had significant impact on painting internationally, which lasts even to today. The personal relationships of the Pre-Raphaelites were also intertwined and fraught; if anything, the Nabis had an almost religious approach to their art, and several remained close to the Catholic church throughout.

Article: 1 Beginnings

Although many of the Nabis first met at school or during their art training, their early guide, and the real founder of the movement, was Paul Gauguin. He drew a personal following during the latter half of the 1880s at Pont-Aven in Brittany. Prior to that, most of the Nabis had been fairly conventional realists, and hadn’t even been caught up in the Impressionist movement.

Gauguin led the young Paul Sérusier to paint the single most radical work of any of the Nabis, The Talisman, in 1888. Although adopted by the new movement as its touchstone, it is probably the least representative of their paintings.

Article: 2 Infancy

The group formed around 1889, inspired by the paintings of Gauguin and others which were exhibited outside the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year, and its manifesto was published by Maurice Denis the following year. By that time, Gauguin was moving on with his next project, his trip to Tahiti from 1891-93, and played little further part in the Nabi movement.

Other than Gauguin and ‘synthetism’, their influences were japonisme, decorative art, and (as so often is the case) trying to return to the ‘purity’ of more ancient painting.

Characteristic of their style is the use of muted colour, richly decorative patterning particularly of textiles, which often ignored three-dimensional form, and flattening of depth.

Article: 3 Peak

At their height, in the mid-1890s, the Nabis exhibited successfully and were the avant garde of painting in France. Many of their paintings showed, and concerned, the lives of women.

Article: 4 Divergence

From about 1896, although they continued to exhibit together and remained close, the Nabis’ style started to separate.

For example, Georges Lacombe was influenced by Hokusai’s print of The Great Wave, and he was one of several who concentrated on views of Brittany. Not only did their styles diverge, but their themes and motifs grew different too. They exhibited together in 1897, but had already started travelling independently, bringing them into contact with different influences.

Their final exhibition as a group was in 1900, when only Bonnard, Denis, Ibels (a print-maker and illustrator), Roussel, Sérusier, Vallotton and Vuillard remained Nabis.

Article: 5 Destinations – Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Sérusier

By 1906, although several remained close friends, the Nabi movement was long gone. Several continued to ‘keep the faith’ and their later works still showed Nabi influence. Most moved away from muted colours, though, and quickly used similar high chroma as had become popular with other artists at the time.

Pierre Bonnard went on to become one of the most important independent painters of the first half of the twentieth century, and his work remains highly influential. Even in his late paintings, like Nude in Bathtub painted in about 1938-41, he shows Nabi traits.

Article: 6 Destinations – Roussel, Vallotton, Ranson, Lacombe, Rippl-Rónai

Others may not have achieved the fame of Bonnard, but deserve to be better known.

Ker-Xavier Roussel’s pastels are some of the finest of the twentieth century.

Félix Vallotton painted enigmatic interiors, classical myths, and finally timeless landscapes.

Perhaps the most radical of all is József Rippl-Rónai, though, whose ‘corn style’ was the foundation of modern Hungarian painting.

I have written accounts of the careers and works of each of the Nabis who painted:

Meyer de Haan, ‘Dutch’

The Dutch Nabi: Meijer de Haan

Maurice Denis, with ‘beautiful icons’

The beautiful icons of Maurice Denis 1
The beautiful icons of Maurice Denis 2

Georges Lacombe, ‘sculptor’

Much more than the Nabi Sculptor: Georges Lacombe

Paul Ranson, ‘more Japanese than the Japanese Nabi’

Paul Ranson: the heart of the Nabis 1
Paul Ranson: the heart of the Nabis 2

József Rippl-Rónai, ‘Hungarian’

József Rippl-Rónai 1: The Hungarian Nabi
József Rippl-Rónai 2: Father of modern Hungarian painting

Ker-Xavier Roussel

A Peculiar Beauty: the paintings of Ker-Xavier Roussel 1
A Peculiar Beauty: the paintings of Ker-Xavier Roussel 2

Paul Sérusier, ‘with the shiny beard’

Paul Sérusier: 1 The Talisman
Paul Sérusier: 2 Harvest

Félix Vallotton, ‘foreign’

One of the most versatile, unpredictable and fascinating painters of his period.

Paintings of Félix Vallotton 1 The Foreign Nabi
Paintings of Félix Vallotton 2 Mysterious Interiors
Paintings of Félix Vallotton: 3 Myth and Mists
Paintings of Félix Vallotton: 4 War and the Land

Jan Verkade, ‘obeliscal’

Like an obelisk: Nabi paintings of Jan Verkade

Édouard Vuillard, ‘Zouave’ (North African infantry)

Le Nabi Zouave: Édouard Vuillard 1
Le Nabi Zouave: Édouard Vuillard 2

Pierre Bonnard, dubbed ‘very Japanese’

One of the major artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I have a long series devoted to his career and work, now that the latter has come out of copyright.

Japonisme and the Nabis, 1888-1892
Oil sketching and Marthe, 1893-1895
Bustling Paris and the bedroom, 1896-1899
Light and Travel, 1900-1904
Pleasure and Patrons, 1905-1907
Light and Mirrors, 1908-1909
Le Midi, 1910-1911
Form or Colour, 1912-1914
Tea, coffee, and models, 1915-1917
Domestic Symphony, 1918-1920
Beaches and Bathing, 1921-1923
Marriage and the Coast, 1924-1926
Fruit and French Windows, 1927-1930
Bathrooms and tabletops, 1931-1936
At home with Marthe, 1937-1943
Mimosa and memories, 1944-1947
Marthe
Pierre Bonnard’s Journey into Light: Landscapes 1894-1946
On Reflection
The world beyond

I hope that you come to enjoy the paintings of the Nabis as much as I have.

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) is today known almost exclusively for his group portraits, which I considered in the previous article. He painted most of those over a period of just eight years out of a career which spanned more than forty. They were almost universally received badly by the critics, so much so that one of them he cut up after it had met with derision at the Salon.

During his lifetime, his most successful paintings were a long series of floral still lifes, which he started painting soon after 1860 and continued until his ‘retirement’ around 1900. This article considers that mainstay of his work.

Floral still lifes, such as this Still Life with Chrysanthemums from 1862, were the first of his original works to attract attention from prospective purchasers. His friend Whistler promoted them when he was visiting London, resulting in early sales to Britain which seem to have been sustained throughout his career.

The other paintings of his which he sold successfully at this time were copies he made in the Louvre: particularly full-size (or nearly) replicas of Veronese’s Marriage Feast at Cana (1562-3), of which he eventually made and sold at least five. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a usable image of any of those copies.

To basic vases of flowers against a plain background he added different forms, as in Flowers and Fruits from 1865. As was traditional among still life artists, the fruit, polished tabletop, bowl and knife also introduce different surface effects.

That same year, in Still Life with a Carafe, Flowers and Fruit, he added the more complex optical properties of glassware, with its reflections and transmitted light.

His paintings of Flowers and Fruit continued through 1866, above and below, with increasingly sophisticated combinations of forms, textures and surfaces. The flowers are here more unusual, and painted in intimate detail, as precise as might appear in a dedicated botanical painting, but arranged into more extensive compositions.

At the end of the 1860s, his brushwork seems to have become more painterly, as seen in this Still Life from 1869. But each petal in the flowers is still meticulously painted individually, with subtle changes in colour shown. In contrast to his earlier arrangements, he includes just one variety of white flower here, leaving the fruit to expand the range of colour, texture and reflection.

In Vase with Apples and Foliage from 1872, the flowers have gone altogether, and the whole painting has a coarser facture, as if he might have been leaning towards Impressionism.

The following year, he painted his response to the fraught experience he had with his group portrait of the literary avant garde in 1872, Still Life: Corner of a Table (1873). Here he extended his composition to show the same table and objects which had featured in the group portrait, now lacking its figures. This is Fantin’s only link from his flower paintings to those group portraits, although he had included small floral displays in the latter, and might be symbolising his abandonment of formal arrangements of figures to return to his world of still life.

In the mid-1870s, Fantin married the accomplished floral painter Victoria Dubourg (1840-1926), who seems to have moved in the same artistic circles in the late 1860s, when her portrait was painted by Edgar Degas. Sadly very few of her own paintings are accessible now, and none is reliably dated. Her motifs and style appear similar to those of her husband, and some have suggested that floral still lifes which he signed may have been largely painted by his wife.

A single bloom marks the return of flowers in Fantin’s Still Life with Grapes and a Carnation, from about 1880. His brushwork remains loose, with the white tablecloth with obvious marks, and even the grapes are quite painterly.

This mis-titled painting not of Poppies, or peonies for that matter, from a decade later shows a return to a more meticulous realism, again showing a single variety of white flower, each bloom rendered petal by petal.

This last floral still life of Zinnias, from about 1897, takes his motif and style back to the 1860s, with a riot of different coloured blooms, and no fruit or other distractions apart from its glass vase. Even the surface on which the vase stands merges in with the neutral background, as if the floral display is suspended in midair.

Fantin’s flowers are superb paintings, and it’s not hard to see why they proved so successful with buyers. Unlike his group portraits, they each appear thoroughly real, painted with insight and feeling. Although it’s always hard to gain insight into someone more than a century after their death, contemporary accounts of Fantin portray him as a bit of a loner who spent most of his time painting or with his small family circle.

The evidence from his paintings is that he related best to his floral arrangements, not the figures who featured in his group portraits. His late soft-focus paintings of women in myth and musical performance may have been his fondest fantasies when he retired, but Fantin had a feel for flowers which shines through in each of these paintings. To see his art, look not at his groups of human figures, but at these crowds of flowers and fruit.

Reference

Bridget Alsdorf (2013) Fellow Men, Fantin-Latour and the problem of the Group in Nineteenth Century French Painting, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 15367 4.

I am very grateful to @SuperNormaled for prompting me to look at Fantin in more detail.

The next time you visit London, take a few moments to go the National Gallery and locate this small jewel of a painting. It’s as exquisite as the finest Fabergé egg, and as minute in detail. No one knows who painted it, although it’s most probable that it was made in France towards the end of the fourteenth century. In this article, I’ll consider how the Wilton Diptych was created.

This painting was a luxury object intended from the outset for the personal devotions of a monarch, or someone of close rank and stature. Its interior shows on the left, King Richard II (its most probable owner) kneeling as he is presented by the three saints, Saint John the Baptist (carrying the Lamb of God), Saint Edward the Confessor (holding the ring he gave to Saint John the Evangelist), and Saint Edmund (holding an arrow from his martyrdom). On the right is the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child with a throng of eleven angels, one of whom bears the standard of the Cross of Saint John.

It was painted on two small panels of oak wood using egg tempera, in a workshop which was clearly very experienced at making such works. Each panel is made of one wider board and a narrower strip. The two parts of a panel were joined by a craftsman using simple butt joints and were glued together with such care that the joins are almost invisible. They started off about 2.5 cm (1 inch) thick, and were then carved down to form an integral frame with a recessed painting surface.

The two panels are hinged together using gilded iron fittings, so that the completed diptych could be folded shut for portability.

To prepare the panels for painting, the bare wood was first covered with a thin layer of parchment, then over that a single layer of gesso was applied. This was composed, as was traditional, of natural chalk and animal-derived glue. The gesso extended over the frame mouldings to prepare them for gilding.

As the origin of the diptych remains a mystery, there are no surviving drawings or studies, but the paintings would undoubtedly have undergone careful development, possibly even requiring the approval of the patron. When the artist was ready, they then made a detailed outline on the gesso surface using any combination of black chalk, metalpoint, and brushed paint or ink. Although the final painting has many small changes relative to this underdrawing, the overall designs were followed quite closely.

Much of the surface of the panels was then to be gilded. Those areas were first marked out with incisions into the gesso ground, then covered with a thin layer of red bole (clay), containing animal-derived glue. The gold leaf was then applied with dilute glue in water, and after a couple of hours the gold leaf was burnished into place. These gilded areas were then patterned using a range of different punches. The resulting effect is of a jewelled surface, with intricate reflected patterns from different sections of the gilding.

Some details used a different method of gilding, known as mordant gilding, in which a binding medium is applied to give low relief, and the gold leaf applied onto that without burnishing. The optical properties of unburnished and burnished gold generate additional surface effects.

The first paint to be applied was an undermodelling layer of dull green earth (with lead white) as the base for all flesh, and probably some tonal modelling such as charcoal black for dark areas. All paint used appears to have been egg tempera, freshly prepared each day using the yolk of freshly-laid chicken eggs, pigment and a little water.

Michelangelo’s abandoned ‘Manchester Madonna’ shows this process well, with different sections ranging from the terre verte underlayer and bare gesso through to fully-modelled flesh.

Paint was applied using fine brushes and a slow build-up of hatched strokes. Egg tempera becomes near-dry in a matter of seconds, and there is little or no opportunity for correction or reworking, particularly when working in such fine detail. As thin layers were built up, glazes were applied to enrich the colours and optical properties. Unfortunately some of these thin glaze layers have worn away over the last six hundred years.

Details of jewels and similar objects such as the white hart brooches were raised using thicker areas of lead white, to give the impression of enamelling. Coupled with mordant gilding, they mimic the three-dimensional form of jewels and act as point reflectors of light, sparkling as if they really were gems in the paint layer. Although it has been suggested that these details may have been added using oil paint, no evidence of that has yet been found.

The finest strokes of paint seen here are less than 0.5 mm across.

Yet we don’t even know who painted this, or where.

Reference

Dillian Gordon, Ashok Roy, Rachel Billinge, Caroline M Barron, Martin Wyld (2015) The Wilton Diptych, Yale UP for The National Gallery. ISBN 978 1 857 09583 8

In Europe, oil painting appeared first in the north around 1180, and didn’t appear in Italy until the middle of the fifteenth century. In the workshops of the van Eycks and their contemporaries it had flourished in ways simply not possible with other media such as egg tempera and fresco. But in Italy, with the southern Renaissance well under way, drying oils were still not used as a primary painting medium.

By 1500, Italian painters had not just caught up with developments in the north, but were – in some respects at least – in the lead in technical development. The artist largely responsible for that wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci, for all his accomplishments, but a Sicilian known as Antonello da Messina. In this and the next two articles in this series, I’m going to look at how Antonello became the first Italian Master in oils, and established the medium at the centre of Italian art.

Although Giogio Vasari’s 1568 account of the history of art, The Lives of the Artists, was less than reliable on the origins of oil painting and the role of the van Eycks, it should surely be more trustworthy when it comes to more recent events in Italy, and the history of oil painting there. According to Vasari, impressed by a painting by Jan van Eyck which had been brought to Italy, Antonello travelled to Bruges and there learned to paint in oils from van Eyck himself.

After van Eyck’s death, Antonello is supposed to have returned to Italy, and painted for many years in Venice, where his oil paintings were greatly successful. Among the great works in oils by Antonello which Vasari singles out for praise was one for the church of San Cassiano, in Venice. Vasari thus attributes to Antonello the role of bringing painting in oils from van Eyck’s workshop to Italy.

Subsequent research into the lives of Jan van Eyck and Antonello da Messina (more properly known as Antonello d’Antonio) have raised some fundamental problems with this alluringly simple story. First, van Eyck and Antonello’s lives overlapped very little, insufficient for them to have met: Jan van Eyck is well attested to have died on 9 July 1441, and Antonello was almost certainly born between 1429 and 1431 making him no more than twelve at the time.

Antonello most probably trained in Naples between about 1450 and 1455, returning to Sicily by 1457, although soon afterwards he left and didn’t return until 1460. He was probably away from Messina again between 1465 and 1471, only to go to Venice in late 1474. Antonello did paint the San Cassiano altarpiece (which I will show in a subsequent article) in 1476, but later that year was back in Messina. He died suddenly in 1479.

So, if Antonello didn’t learn to paint in oils in van Eyck’s workshop, where did he? The answer is a bit more complex, in that Antonello was probably a pupil of Niccolò Colantonio (c 1420-1460) in Naples, and was in contact again with northern European techniques when he was in Venice in the 1470s. Colantonio seems to have learned oil painting from Flemish artists who were brought to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, who was King of Naples from 1442-1458, and an enthusiast for northern European paintings.

Colantonio painted in oils himself, and had clearly come under Flemish influence. As early as 1445, he painted Saint Jerome in His Study, an unusual hybrid of styles with a distinctively northern motif, using oils as his primary medium. By the time of his death in 1460, Colantonio doesn’t appear to have painted anything revelatory or revolutionary, but accomplished much in his teaching.

Piecing together Antonello’s accomplishment is even harder. His workshop in Messina, Sicily, produced copies and variations of originals which he created (common practice in Italy at that time). With three recognisable painters (Antonio and Pietro de Saliba, and Salvo d’Antonio) plus Antonello himself, it is extremely difficult to know which version of any given painting believed to have come from the workshop was actually the master’s.

There are also considerable difficulties in dating Antonello’s paintings. Most of those that I will show here are normally dated within the last five years of his life, when he was working in Venice, possibly Milan, and Messina. Those of his surviving works which are dated to his early career are painted in tempera grassa, egg tempera to which drying oil has been added. As an intermediate between pure egg tempera and pure oil paint, it was the stepping stone for his technique. Sadly, those early paintings are now much worse for their age.

Madonna with Child, popularly known as the Salting Madonna, (c 1470-77), may have been one of Antonello’s earlier oil paintings, which probably started with his transition from tempera grassa in the late 1860s. It history seems murky until it ended up in the collection of George Salting, who first exhibited it in 1904. It wasn’t attributed to Antonello until 1930, but has since become generally accepted as his work, even if the date remains contentious.

It is most remarkable for its rich material effects, in the glistening precious stones of the crown (detail below), the diaphanous veil, and luxuriant fabrics of the Virgin’s clothes. These are similar to the optical fascination among the painters of the Northern Renaissance, but expressed in a highly individualistic composition with those symmetric angels in miniature.

Antonello didn’t abruptly cease painting in other media. In 1473, he and his workshop completed a polyptych for the San Gregorio church adjacent to the Benedictine convent in Messina. This Enthroned Madonna is its central panel, out of a total of five which survived breaking up some sixty years later. In the early twentieth century, it was the victim of an earthquake, and was left in heavy rain for many days, but repeatedly underwent conservation work which still continues.

The angels crowning the Virgin are reminiscent of the Salting Madonna, although here the figures are presented in a gilded surround indicative of conservativism of the commission. The infant Christ is holding an apple, signifying original sin, in his right hand and cherries, marking the blood of the Passion to come, in the left. Antonello’s signature is painted in the cartellino (small label) at the lower edge, which is characteristic of many of his works.

Christ Crucified, probably from 1473, is also painted in tempera, probably with some oil paint. This work was unknown until it surfaced in a private collection in 1848 and was bought by the National Gallery in London. Although it has been cut down in size over the years, what remains of it is in excellent condition.

The mourning figures at the foot of the cross are the Virgin Mary on the left, and Saint John the Evangelist on the right. Behind them, and the visual reference to the place of skulls, is a superb landscape with castellated buildings and the sea beyond.

In addition to a succession of religious works, Antonello painted many portraits, of which his Portrait of a Man is both sophisticated and in fine condition. Some have wished that this might have been a self-portrait, but the subject appears much younger than the artist would have been.

Antonello’s Saint Jerome in his Study is perhaps his first real masterpiece. Heavily influenced by the northern European paintings which he must have seen, this was painted in oils to their same high standard. Rather than using linseed oil as its binder, analysis has shown that it used walnut oil. This flies in the face of what is usually written about drying oil usage in Italy at this time: walnut oil is said to have been preferred for lighter pigments, because it discolours less on drying than linseed oil. In this painting, that reason for using walnut oil doesn’t appear to be convincing.

This painting has an unusually long provenance too, being first recorded in 1529, before making its way to Rome. When it went to Britain later, it was originally attributed to Dürer before it was bought by the National Gallery in 1894 and finally recognised as one of Antonello’s.

It has so much detail that it can be read in terms of architecture and perspective of a Humanist study, its fascinating collection of symbolic objects, and for its fine landscape views (detail below). Antonello’s cartellino is placed in the middle of the painting, on the wooden panelling of the saint’s desk.

Between 1475 and his death just four years later, Antonello was at his most productive. All the remaining paintings which I will show in the next two articles are thought to date from this period, when he was first in Venice and then back in his home town of Messina.

References

Caterina Cardona, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (eds.) (2019) Antonello da Messina, Skira. ISBN 978 88 572 3098 2.
Thomas Skorupa (2015) Antonello da Messina and his Workshop, The Master’s Legacy, Logos Verlag. ISBN 978 3 8325 3929 0.

It’s unusual for paintings to contain words beyond the artist’s signature. In terms of popular neuro-psychology, we’d suppose that when reading a painting our brains are in ‘image’ rather than ‘verbal’ mode, although that doesn’t seem to work with fully integrated text and images such as comics and graphic novels. Nevertheless, the great majority of painters – until the twentieth century – paint the image of a guitar rather than the word, when depicting someone playing the instrument.

In these three articles, I’m going to look at exceptions, where artists have incorporated significant text content into a painting. This first article shows some examples of paintings of stories in which the words play an important part. The second looks at words used to extend the references of the image, and the third shows some unusual examples of signatures and dedications.

Stories in which written text plays a key role are quite common in literature, but few are regularly painted. Perhaps the most popular is the story of Belshazzar’s Feast, and its greatest telling is that of Rembrandt, painted around 1635-1638.

This is one of Rembrandt’s most beautiful paintings, in which he has captured the exquisite detail of the jewels and decorations on Belshazzar, and its rich, golden light shines across the room.

Belshazzar is stood, taken aback to the point where his eyes appear to be popping out, as he watches the disembodied hand trace out the foreign letters on the wall behind him. His right hand is steadying him against a salver on the table, having knocked one of the Temple vessels over, and his left hand is held up in amazement, as if to push the vision away from him. On Belshazzar’s left, a woman in a bright red robe is also transfixed by the writing on the wall, sufficient that she has tipped the contents of the goblet in her right hand onto the floor.

There is, unfortunately, a problem with the Hebrew writing on the wall. Rembrandt is believed to have been advised by a friend who was a learned Rabbi, but one of the characters is incorrect, and they are arranged inappropriately in columns, rather than horizontally from right to left.

Contrast that with the British painter John Martin, best known for his apocalyptic visions expressed onto vast canvases. The version shown here is half the size of the original, which was even too large for the National Gallery to accept.

Martin chooses a different moment in the story, and the other end of the scale as far as its pictorial scope. The thousand lords are shown feasting in vast open-roofed halls. Above them are the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with the Tower of Babel in the distance, and a ziggurat slightly closer. The writing on the wall burns bright at the far left, but its characters have been carefully made illegible (detail below).

Less well known is the myth of Paris and Oenone, told in Ovid’s Heroides.

Oenone was an Oread on Mount Ida, where Paris, son of the King of Troy, was a shepherd. They fell in love, and Paris carved her name on the trunk of many trees as a mark of his love. Jacob de Wit’s Paris and Oenone of 1737 shows the lovers suitably accompanied by a couple of amorini and their flock of sheep, as they recline by a trunk so inscribed (detail below).

Even in classical times, it was apparently common practice for lovers to carve the name of their partner into the bark of a tree trunk to mark their love. It is quite possible that accounts of Paris doing this ensured that the practice was propagated through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance.

Other short inscriptions play important roles in the identification of scenes, figures and stories.

In the upper distance of Tintoretto’s Ascent to Calvary are banners declaring the oversight of the Roman authorities, in their inscriptions of SPQR. Also commonly featured in paintings of the crucifixion are the letters INRI, for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum – Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. This follows a tradition established in classical Greek pottery, where the figures involved in their narratives are often named, so there’s no doubt in the mind of the viewer.

William Blake’s genius extended to the illustration of his own writings and those of others, in which he frequently incorporated text with images, often in whole books. I show here one example, taken from his late illustrations to accompany Dante’s Inferno.

According to Dante’s verse, inscribed above the gate of Hell is a forbidding series of lines which leave the traveller in no doubt as to where they are going: to everlasting pain and tortured souls. This culminates in the most famous line of the whole of the Divine Comedy:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate
traditionally translated as Abandon hope all ye who enter here, but perhaps more faithfully as Leave behind all hope, you who enter.

At this stage of Blake’s preparations for engraving, his watercolour has the words roughed in using script.

Many of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings are strongly literary in their allusions. One interesting example is that of Sappho and Alcaeus from 1881. Although now associated popularly with lesbian love, in fact very little is known about Sappho’s life, and she may have fallen in love with Alcaeus, a contemporary poet.

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

The inclusion of textual content was also common in the trompe l’oeil, which became popular during the Dutch Golden Age and periodically ever since. Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts specialised in painting novel still lifes, such as his Board Partition with Letter Rack and Music Book from 1668. He manages not just to incorporate fragments of text, but music too.

Tomorrow I will show examples of paintings in which words are not so much an integral part of their story, but literary references which the educated viewer will cherish.

In the first article in this series of three, I looked at paintings in which words are an integral part of their story or reading. Today I come on to a selection of those in which included text extends the references in the painting itself. In most cases, these are quotations which those sufficiently learned would recognise.

In earlier modern paintings, these are almost invariably quotations from the Bible or classical sources.

Robert Campin’s Nativity from about 1415-30 follows the trend popular in the northern Renaissance of depicting the stable as a dilapidated thatched structure of the type seen widely across the countryside of northern Europe. The artist also adorns it with inscriptions to link it to the Biblical text, although these are sufficiently fragmented as to make it very difficult to reconstruct their contents.

The tomb at the foot of Masaccio’s great fresco of The Holy Trinity from 1426-8 is that of Adam, the first man. The inscription above his skeleton reads Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch’io sono voi anco sarete: I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be – a sobering reminder of our mortality.

Pietro Perugino’s fresco portrait of the Roman statesman Cato in the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia, Italy, from 1497-1500, is supported by a Latin inscription which reads:
Quisquis, vel celebri facturus verba corona surgis, vel populo reddere iura paras, privatos pone affectus: cui pectora versant aut amor aut odium, recta tenere nequit.
I haven’t located a good translation of this epithet, but it refers to him restoring rights to the Roman people regardless of his popularity or dislike.

Paintings of the Virgin Mary are commonly annotated with text, although as many were exhibited in churches, few of those gazing at them would have been able to make any sense of the words, so many of those inscriptions are sufficiently brief as to be easily committed to memory.

Fra Bartolomeo’s Madonna della Misericordia from 1515 shows the Virgin Mary in her role as the Madonna of Mercy. The inscription at the top, underneath the body of Christ crucified, is Misereor sup(er) turbam, a quotation from Jesus’ words as given in the gospel of Mark, chapter 8, verse 2, meaning I have compassion on the crowd, which is the theme.

Textual snippets were also common in Vanitas paintings when they becaame popular in northern Europe, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although once again the words appear to have been more decorative than meaningful.

Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40 features an unusually androgynous angel with butterfly wings, cradling a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Within the skull is an inset window, through which there is a tiny landscape view.

Latin quotations enjoyed a revival of popularity in nineteenth century painting, particularly among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and those around it.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a leading Pre-Raphaelite painter, a poet, and translator, whose first painting of Pandora, completed in 1871, was modelled by Jane Morris. She has just cracked open the lid of the jewelled casket held in her left hand, and it emits a stream of noxious red smoke. As this coils around her head winged figures appear in the fumes.

This was one of Rossetti’s earlier paintings of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, and the subject of Rossetti’s late passionate obsession. Rossetti’s source for the story of Pandora was most probably Lemprière’s dictionary of classical mythology, which erroneously referred to Pandora’s box, rather than the more traditional jar. The inscription on the side of the jewel casket reads “Nascitur ignescitur”, meaning born of flames.

Occasionally, inscriptions within a painting spill out onto the frame. Louis Welden Hawkins’ Portrait of Séverine from 1895 shows a popular journalist, who was then at the height of her fame. Séverine’s original name was Caroline Rémy (1855-1929), and she was a famous defender of humanitarian causes. Hawkins made this frame himself. On its left are olive branches and the inscription PAX (peace), and on the right are ears of wheat and the inscription PANIS (bread). He also makes his signature the title of a book.

In a few instances, inscriptions in paintings have grown out of control and extend far beyond the pithy quotation.

In Gustave Moreau’s Jason from 1865 the context of the painting is given in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column at the left.

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

Moreau thus informs us that we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, whilst Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. And she was a spoil which Jason was quick to dispose of when it suited him: when he met Glauce (or Creusa), he decided to move on and marry her too.

Edward Burne-Jones originally planned that his series telling the story of Perseus and Andromeda would include a lengthy Latin inscription. In this preparatory version of Perseus and the Graiae from 1875-8, he follows classical conventions in setting the text in block capitals. He uses V for the modern letter U, points separate its words, and there is no punctuation to mark sentences. As Latin is a highly inflected language, its word order has no effect on meaning, and is much more flexible than English, for example. Working out the grammatical and sentence structure of the inscription is therefore not an easy task even when you do know Latin.

Others may have found this purist approach too incomprehensible, and in the final version painted in oils he dropped the inscription altogether, elaborating on the background instead.

In Lovis Corinth’s Homeric Laughter (1909), one of the artist’s most complex, even abstruse, paintings of classical myth, he offers a clue to its reading in the long inscription (originally in German translation):
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaestus
together with the reference to Homer’s Odyssey book 8 line 326.

This refers to a section in which Odysseus is being entertained by King Alcinous, after meeting Nausicaä on the island of the Phaeacians. To cheer Odysseus up, the bard Demodocus tells a tale of the illicit love affair between Ares/Mars (god of war) and Aphrodite/Venus (god of love), which has featured extensively in art. One day Hephaistos/Vulcan catches the couple making love in his marriage bed, and throws a very fine but unbreakable net over them. Hephaistos summons the other gods, who come and roar with laughter at the ensnared couple.

Monumental wall paintings are prone to including long textual passages too.

Elihu Vedder’s Minerva of Peace (1897) in the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington DC is a good example, although it’s a mosaic rather than painting. In addition to the scroll listing the goddess’s spheres of influence, the inscription below is a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica. It reads Nil invita Minerva, quae monumentum aere perennius exegit, meaning Not unwilling, Minerva raises a monument more lasting than bronze, and thankfully uses modern text conventions for comprehension.

My final example for today is an extended signature in which Botticelli pours out his fears.

In 1500, Botticelli was feeling his age. His great successes with the elite families were long past, and his workshop largely idle. From that came a painting of the nativity with a most curious combination of the traditional set alongside elements which today look quite bizarre: his Mystic Nativity, now in the National Gallery in London.

At the very top is an inscription in Greek, which means: “This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture.” This refers to the chapters from Revelation which the martyred Savonarola had used in his preaching.

Tomorrow, I will concentrate on signatures and dedications.

So far in this series, I have looked at paintings in which words are part of the story, and those in which words extend the visual content to literary references. In this last article, I look at text which expands on the most widespread use of words in painting, the signature.

Some artists never signed their work, others used graphical devices such as Hieronymus Bosch’s owls (although he signed some of his works as well). On other occasions, signatures became extended, elaborated, or simply got out of hand.

On Jacopo Tintoretto’s Portrait of Jacopo Sansovino from before 1546, the artist inscribed a short dedication to his friend, a major sculptor and architect of the day, ending with the signature “Jacobus Tintorettus his greatest friend”.

Other Renaissance painters characteristically wrote an extended signature on the painting of a small note, a distinctive trompe l’oeil, known as a cartellino.

Many of Antonello da Messina’s paintings include his cartellino. In the case of his magnificent Saint Jerome in his Study from around 1475, he places it in a position of prominence, close to the centre, stuck to the wooden panel on the side of the saint’s desk. But seen in detail (below) this may actually be a dummy, with unreadable text.

More typical is the cartellino at the lower edge of his Christ Blessing from about the same date, which states the year and Antonellus Messeneus me pinxit, Latin for “Antonello da Messina painted me”. Use of cartellini was a technique handed on by Antonello to his logical successor, Giovanni Bellini, who continued the practice through much of his career.

Books were another popular place for a signature and sometimes a bit more.

In Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-portrait from 1554, the artist puts a small notebook in her own hand for this purpose. There she also makes clear that she’s still unmarried, in the word virgo.

By all accounts, Murillo was very reluctant to paint his self-portrait, but a few years before his death he acceded to the wishes of his children and painted this ingenious trompe l’oeil, in which his hand rests on the false frame and his palette, brushes and sketching materials rest on either side. This was probably based on the frontispiece engraving which had become popular in printed books.

The inscription reads Bart[olo] Murillo seipsum depingens pro filiorum votis ac precibus explendis, meaning Bartolomé Murillo portraying himself in fulfilment of the wishes and prayers of his sons [children].

Before the system of patronage was largely replaced by dealers in the nineteenth century, patrons who commissioned works usually expected to appear in them. But artists also had other individuals who they wanted to name, in particular those to whom they wanted to dedicate a work. Rather than scribble a note to be attached to the back of the canvas, such dedications were often incorporated into the painting.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema often found ingenious pictorial locations and devices for his signature. In 1888, he painted A Priestess of Apollo as a wedding present for Sir Charles Hallé (1819-1895), the famous conductor who founded the Hallé Orchestra in 1858, and his second wife, the widowed violinist Wilma Neruda. He wrote his dedication to the couple in the graffiti inside the arch.

In Tintoretto’s Saints Jerome, Louis of Toulouse and Andrew (1555-56), the artist records the lives of the four family members remembered in this painting: Andreas Renerius, the father, who presumably died in 1555 which is thus the date of the commission, and his son Jacobus, who died thirty years later. Aloisius is recorded as nepos, which originally meant grandson, but also grew to mean nephew and from that gave rise to the term nepotism; as this individual died in 1625, he was more likely to be the grandson, and Daniel, who died in 1654, was probably the great-grandson.

Tintoretto himself died in 1594, so the last two would have been added by another artist. The painting itself is thought to have been for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice, which at that time was the seat of several of the city’s financial magistrates. Inscriptions like this can thus be valuable in establishing a painting’s provenance.

It turns out to be a little more complex: in 1560-1566, an anonymous follower of Tintoretto painted a double portrait of Andrea Renier (Andreas Renerius) and his son Daniele, which is now in the National Gallery of Art. That Andrea Renier was appointed the podesta (governor) of Brescia in 1559, and died the following year.

Sometimes even simple inscriptions turn out to be puzzles.

The final cantos of Dante’s ‘Purgatory’, from the meeting with Matelda (also known as Matilda) to the end of this book, have been enormously popular among artists. However, there has been confusion between the two main figures, Matelda and Beatrice, and Dante wrote about Beatrice extensively in two other works, ‘Paradise’ and ‘Vita Nuova’. Disentangling these isn’t easy, so for continuity and consistency I cover the conclusion of ‘Purgatory’ in this and the next article, which will appear here tomorrow.

It’s also worth noting in passing that if modern identification of Beatrice is correct, as Beatrice Portinari, she and Dante were both married to their own spouses at the time of Beatrice’s death. Dante’s declared love for Beatrice was emphatically ‘courtly’ rather than physical, and therefore could have been considered not to be adulterous.

Soon after Dante, Virgil and Statius enter the terrestrial paradise at the top of the island-mountain of Purgatory, Dante comes across a beautiful woman on the opposite bank of a stream. She is gathering flowers, and tells Dante that he is in the Garden of Eden. She is Matelda, and leads him to a holy procession.

In the middle of that stream of people is a two-wheeled ceremonial chariot being drawn by a Gryphon, whose huge golden aquiline wings stretch out of sight. There’s a clap of thunder, and the procession comes to a halt opposite Dante. He sees the figure of his beloved Beatrice inside the chariot, amid lavish ornamentation and garlands of flowers. She has a white veil, a green robe, and a dress the colour of flame. Their reunion brings him elation, which is quickly dashed when he realises that his companion Virgil has quietly departed.

Beatrice steps out of the chariot and, standing beside it, admonishes Dante for straying from the path of righteousness after her death some years before.

This reduces Dante to tears of contrition, and he faints away.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

George Dunlop Leslie (1835–1921) was a British painter who trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He specialised in genre painting, and was also a successful illustrator. He became part of the Saint John’s Wood Clique, and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites although his own style remained light academic. The painting shown here was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, and was well-received by critics. It was bought by a wine merchant known for his collection of works by Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, and Arthur Hughes.

Carl Wilhelm Friederich Oesterley (1805–1891) was bornn in Göttingen, Germany, where he earned his doctorate in art history, and became a professor in the field. He was also a keen painter, particularly of religious works, and was court painter to the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany.

Andrea Pierini (1798–1858) was an Italian artist about whom almost nothing is known today.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) was an eminent British painter from an artistic family, who trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London. His early works were influenced by Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton, but he became increasingly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, particularly Rossetti and Millais. Many of his paintings have literary and mythical themes. By 1915, when he painted the works shown here, he was gravely ill with cancer, from which he died in 1917.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Dante’s beloved Beatrice has stepped out of the chariot in which she has been part of a religious procession. She admonishes Dante for straying from the way, he cries in contrition, then faints away.

He recovers consciousness as Matelda is plunging him into the River Lethe, and she then pulls him out of the water to the other bank.

Dante goes to Beatrice and the Gryphon, which alternates between eagle and lion in form. As Beatrice removes her veil, Dante is dazzled by her radiant beauty. He joins the procession as it makes its way back to the tree of knowledge within the lush forest. The Gryphon attaches the chariot to it, which brings new apple blossom on the tree. Dante falls asleep at its foot; when he awakes the Gryphon has left and he is encircled by seven nymphs representing the cardinal virtues.

Then there is a series of violent events (representing Christian church history): first an eagle crashes through the tree of knowledge, stripping its leaves and flowers, into the chariot. Finally, a giant appears and drags the chariot and a whore into the forest (representing the movement of the Pope from Rome to Avignon in France almost a century earlier).

Beatrice, in an enigmatic prophesy, tells Dante that God will soon send someone to destroy the giant and the whore, and restore the papacy. Matelda then leads Dante and Statius into the River Eunoë, where Dante is cleansed and remade.

It is now noon on the Wednesday after Easter, and Dante is ready to ascend to Paradise in the heavens.

The artists

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin (1860–1943) was a French painter who was born in Toulouse, who trained in that city and with Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris. Although considered to be one of the later Impressionists, he also worked in realist style, and later was a Neo-Impressionist (Divisionist). His paintings were particularly successful between 1889 and the early twentieth century.

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was born in Bordeaux, and studied briefly under Jean-Léon Gérôme before becoming a sculptor. He then turned to drawing and print-making before painting in oils and pastels, becoming one of the great pastellists of the early twentieth century. He is known now as a Symbolist, and throughout his career was highly experimental, producing unusual images that can appear surrealist.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was of Italian descent but born in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in 1882. A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

One of the best-known examples of Pre-Raphaelite art is John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia, one of the most brilliant works of the artist’s career, and completed when he was only twenty-three. Although painted painstakingly according to Pre-Raphaelite techniques, the Brotherhood’s brief existence had ended before Millais started work on it, and his style was maturing away from his earlier more characteristic paintings, such as Isabella (1848-49) and Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50), which had caused the controversy which split the Brotherhood asunder.

Its origins are very Victorian. Millais was a child prodigy who met like-minded young men including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt and formed an artistic movement. They had no need of traditional workshops staffed by skilled craftsmen to provide their materials, as artists’ colourmen were only too happy to sell them prepared canvases, paint and brushes. Oil paint was even becoming available in convenient metal tubes using ‘modern’ pigments, although at that time their cost would have limited use. These artists chose their own motifs rather than depending on the whims of patrons, and exhibited their paintings at the Royal Academy and other exhibitions and galleries.

Themes based on literary references were extremely popular, and Shakespeare’s characters well known by all. Next weekend I will look in more detail at the evolution of paintings of the death of Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in detail. Suffice it to say here that it was high on the list of themes at the time, and thoroughly visual.

One principle in Pre-Raphaelite painting was the desire for luminous colour, and in an effort to exploit the optical properties of the paint layer, the commonly-used early technical solution to this was to apply paint to brilliant white ground which was still wet. I will consider this technique in more detail later, but this demanded careful planning in order to reserve space for each passage. Another principle was to paint from nature as much as possible, so Millais had to separate the figure of Ophelia from the background in his planning.

Although Millais made several preliminary studies, only four appear to have survived: one for the figure is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, a more finished sketch is in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, a study for the head is in Birmingham City Art Gallery, and an oil study for the head is currently unlocated, according to Townsend and others (see the reference, below).

In early June 1851, Millais ordered the canvas on its stretcher from Roberson, a popular and reputable artists’ colourman in London which has been trading since 1810 and continues to do so today. This was delivered already primed with three layers of oil ground, consisting of lead white oil paint with white extenders of chalk, barium sulphate and china clay. On top of this is a further layer of ground which contains a mixture of zinc white and lead white, applied after the canvas had been stretched, presumably before its delivery. This cost the artist 15 shillings, or £0.75!

Millais made quite extensive and partly scribbled drawings onto the ground before starting to paint the background en plein air in July. He chose a site in Surrey, on the bank of the Hogsmill River, between Ewell and Kingston, where the land is flat and the ground wet, even in summer. At that time of year, there are usually many biting flies or midges, and these troubled the artist during his eleven-hour working days. He apparently painted under an umbrella, and may have worn a ‘midge net’ to protect his face from being bitten.

During this phase, William Holman Hunt was painting close by. The pair had gone to prospect for suitable sites near Ewell in late June: Millais for Ophelia, Hunt for The Hireling Shepherd (1851-52), and both completed the landscape phase of their paintings by the end of October.

The Pre-Raphaelite principle of painting in front of the motif paralleled movements in France such as the Barbizon School and Impressionism, but with one major difference: Pre-Raphaelites painted in painstaking detail, demanding prolonged and protracted work outdoors, to the point where such detailed paintings became almost impractical.

One puzzle with this painting is its apparent lack of flies in the paint layer. If you have ever tried painting en plein air under constant fly attack, you will understand that midges and other flies are attracted by the odour of oil paint, and usually become embedded in wet paint in large numbers. Yet I haven’t seen any remarks made following close examination of Ophelia that there are the bodies of flies in the paint, nor the marks made by the artist trying to remove them from the wet paint.

Although Millais is claimed to have started work on the figure in late January 1852, by which time the landscape would have been dry to the touch, he didn’t purchase the dress worn in the finished painting until March.

Millais’ model for the figure of Ophelia was Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddall (1829–1862), one of the Pre-Raphaelite women who tragically died only a decade later from an opium overdose, after Rossetti taught her to paint and married her. An experienced model for several artists of the day, this time she was challenged in her work. Apparently from late January until March, each day she lay in a bath of tepid water, heated from underneath by lamps. It is famously reported that one day the lamps failed, she became chilled, developed a cold, and had to receive medical attention. Her father threatened Millais with legal action to recover the costs of that medical aid. Her dress wasn’t purchased until March, though, when Millais paid £4 for it.

The Pre-Raphaelite predilection for painting onto (or into) a wet brilliant white ground was sometimes claimed to be the secret of their success in oils. One paint sample has shown that Millais may have used the technique in this painting, but Townsend and others don’t see any more general evidence here.

There’s a good case that light passing through translucent layers of paint will be reflected from a white ground underneath, but the Pre-Raphaelite requirement that paint be applied to the ground when it’s still wet is harder to justify. It’s more likely that the practice was based on the concept of giornate in fresco painting. Because most Pre-Raphaelite paintings were so slow to paint, to use this technique the artist has to apply fresh zinc white ground to just the area which they will be painting that day, much as the fresco painter applies plaster for each day’s work before they start painting that day.

This paint section cut by Elizabeth Steele from a painting by Honoré Daumier shows the normal appearance of oil paint which has been applied to a thoroughly dry white ground: the ground, the thick layer of bright white in the lower part of the section, is clearly separated from the coloured upper paint layers. Painting into a wet white ground loses that separation, and may actually reduce reflection as a result.

Whether he did paint on a wet white ground, Millais laid down thin translucent layers of colour. His technique for flesh was different, and more similar to the multiple fine brushstrokes used when painting in egg tempera. This results in flesh which looks quite uneven when examined closely, but at normal viewing distances it has a thoroughly fleshy texture.

Perhaps the greatest challenge, more than the midges of summer or long tepid baths, were the flowers. The painting features elaborate references to the symbolic meaning of flowers, while being constrained to species which occurred in Surrey. These include: roses as a symbol of love; willow, nettle and daisy for forsaken love, suffering, and innocence; pansies for love in vain; violets for faithfulness, chastity, or a premature death; poppies for death; finally forget-me-nots for remembrance.

Many of these would have been in flower when Millais was painting outdoors in the summer, but those which adorn the figure of Ophelia would have presented a problem, as at that stage all the painting had there was the white space reserved for the figure. It’s not clear how Millais solved this. It is apparent, though, from the detail above that he superimposed zinc white to make the decoration in the dress sparkle.

When it had been exhibited at the Royal Academy later in 1852, Millais’ job was still not complete. To generate additional income, a print-maker then turned the oil painting into a print, an example of which is shown below.

Millais still wasn’t fully satisfied, and in 1873, over twenty years after it had been exhibited, he made some additions and alterations to some of its lush vegetation and the figure’s face.

Sometimes it may seem that nineteenth century and more modern painting lacks the craft tradition of earlier times. In the case of Millais’ Ophelia, that certainly isn’t true.

Reference

Joyce H Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge, Stephen Hackney (2004) Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques, Tate Gallery. ISBN 978 1 854 37498 1.

Antonello da Messina (1430–1479) had almost certainly learned to paint in oils when he was a pupil of Niccolò Colantonio (c 1420-1460) in Naples. By late 1474 he was working in Venice, where he painted a succession of superb oil paintings which must have had great impact on other Italian artists of the day. These include Saint Jerome in his Study, which I showed in the previous article, and at about the same time the paintings shown below.

It’s not clear how long Antonello remained in Venice, but he was still there in 1476, and is recorded as having returned to Messina on the island of Sicily, far to the south, by September.

This version of Calvary or Crucifixion with Saint Mary and Saint John Evangelist is dated 1475 in its cartellino at the foot. Like so many of Antonello’s works, it then apparently vanished for 350 years until it reappeared in the Netherlands.

It reuses some of the elements from Antonello’s earlier and plainer Christ Crucified, but here includes the other two victims of crucifixion and a different landscape background, which result in an altogether grander but still pious and contemplative composition.

Also believed to have been painted while Antonello was in Venice is one of his better-known paintings of the Madonna and Child, known as the Benson Madonna, and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. This is reported as being painted in egg tempera and oil, showing again that Antonello didn’t completely abandon more traditional media even then.

Its nickname reflects that it was once owned by a Robert Benson. It has sadly had quite a troubled life, and before coming into the care of the National Gallery of Art had been transferred from its original panel to plywood. During that process and associated cleaning and repainting, it lost several details, and is now rather plainer as a result. It remains one of the great paintings of this popular motif from the Italian Renaissance.

The main reason for Antonello going to Venice was most probably a commission from Pietro Bon there to paint what would have been his largest and most elaborate work, a polyptych altarpiece for the church of San Cassiano. This is securely dated to 1475-76, and for the next century or more was studied by a great many artists, making it as influential in its day as any of the works of Leonardo da Vinci.

Tragically, this magnificant work was dismembered in 1638-39 to be taken to England, then following the English Civil War it moved on to Brussels, where it was copied by David Teniers. Its fragments were next takem to Vienna, where only the central panel was exhibited. Two more panels were discovered in a store, but two others had been lost.

In addition to its elaborate details of fabrics and clothing, Antonello has embarked on some of the Flemish exercises in depicting optical test pieces, such as a glass of water, and the fine glass rods just to the right of the female saint’s face. This is strongly reminiscent of Jan van Eyck’s optical explorations, such as in The Arnolfini Portrait (1434).

Another of Antonello’s paintings dated by his cartellino is the magnificent Salvator Mundi (Christ Blessing) from the same year, 1475. This shows great sophistication in the modelling of the face and rendering of hair, and in style is quite unlike contemporary paintings from the northern Renaissance. It’s closer to the distinctive Italian style seen in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, such as his controversial Salvator Mundi claimed to be from about 1500, twenty-five years later.

Paint analysis shows that the dominant drying oil used here was walnut oil rather than linseed.

Another of Antonello’s paintings fairly securely attributed to his time in Venice is his outstanding Virgin Annunciate from 1475-76, again painted in both oil and egg tempera. There is an almost identical copy, made by Antonello’s nephew Antonello de Saliba, in the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice. Not a full annunciation with the Archangel Gabriel, this considers the Virgin Mary in isolation, at a lectern with a book open in front of her.

Although it shows signs of its age and a badly executed cleaning in the nineteenth century which removed much of its upper paint layer, Antonello’s rendering of flesh is masterly. For many years, this painting was attributed to Dürer, but was finally accepted as one of Antonello’s finest works in the mid nineteenth century.

In the next and concluding article I will look at a selection of Antonello’s later works.

References

Caterina Cardona, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (eds.) (2019) Antonello da Messina, Skira. ISBN 978 88 572 3098 2.
Thomas Skorupa (2015) Antonello da Messina and his Workshop, The Master’s Legacy, Logos Verlag. ISBN 978 3 8325 3929 0.