The previous article saw the development of Jules Bastien-Lepage‘s distinctively realist paintings during the 1870s, from his early Academic style to that of rural naturalism.

Over that period, he also developed a successful line in portraiture, attracting some of the great and good, and others who were just sufficiently rich and did not care for the growing business of photographic portraiture. Among his best-known portraits are two of the popular stage and screen actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923).

Sarah Bernhardt (1878) is a sketch in oils, with vivacious brushstrokes particularly in her exuberant clothing. This painting is now in Stockholm.

The finished work, Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (1879) in San Francisco, shows the actress contemplating a small sculpture – an appropriate act as she was herself quite an accomplished painter and sculptor. Bastien-Lepage was not as constrained in his use of colour as Whistler had been in his Symphony in White, No. 1 (1861-2), and used a range of subtle shades, patterns, and textures to great effect. This brought the recognition which he deserved, and the Cross of the Legion of Honour.

Bastien-Lepage went back to paint one more history painting, possibly his finest of all, in Joan of Arc (1879). Created during those years of revanchism, when many in France were calling for revenge against Germany after France’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, its patriotism is made the more subtle by mystical elements and its overwhelmingly rustic setting.

It shows Joan receiving her first call to arms against the English, in her vision of 1424. She is watched by Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine in semi-transparent forms, having been symbolically winding the thread of fate.

Bastien-Lepage moved on to another grand woman of tragedy, Ophelia (1881) from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. This unfinished painting shows her in anguish, as if the merest movement would see her body slide into the water. By this time, while he was travelling in Italy, his health was starting to deteriorate.

Among his portraits of this time, Marie Samary of the Odéon Theater (c 1881) shows a very successful Vaudeville performer from a theatrical family, who lived from 1848 to 1941.

Bastien-Lepage continued to paint the rural poor, here Poor Fauvette (1881), with its curious composition of the cow cut in half by a young tree, and the little girl wrapped in an old and filthy blanket.

Roadside Flowers or The Little Shepherdess (1882) is more romantic, the wide-eyed girl blossoming among the beauty of weeds.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) is another sensitive portrait of a boy too poor to secure his boots with string.

By 1884 his health was collapsing fast. A visit to Algiers to try to recover was unsuccessful. He returned to Paris, where he died in December, while still planning a new series of rural paintings. By an odd and more tragic coincidence, his friend and pupil Marie Bashkirtseff, a Ukrainian, died just over two months earlier, from tuberculosis. She was only 25.

Even the usually vituperative critic Roger Fry was later forced to admit Bastien-Lepage’s importance to Impressionism and other art, particularly Monet’s paintings. Fry considered that Bastien-Lepage achieved a clever compromise between the truth and the convention of what things look like. This brought the world round to gradually accepting those truths which “a single walk in the country with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.”

Among the painters covered on this blog whose work was influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage are Harriet Backer, Adrian Scott Stokes, Marianne Stokes, George Clausen, Giuseppe de Nittis, Julian Alden Weir, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Émile Claus, and of course Claude Monet.

I will look at Marie Bashkirtseff’s work in a future article.

References

Wikipedia.
Appreciation by William S Feldman – strongly recommended.

“Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné”
Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij et al.
Yale UP and Mercatorfonds, May 2016
Hardback in slip case, 34.2 x 25.5 cm (13.5 x 10.1 in), 607 pp., £100/$150.00
ISBN 978 0 300 22014 8
Not available for Kindle, nor in the iTunes Store.

To coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of Bosch’s death in August, the members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) have produced this massive account of his paintings and drawings. A second volume covers the more technical studies: edited by Luuk Hoogstede & Ron Spronk, Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Technical Studies, is also published by Yale UP and Mercatorfonds (ISBN 978 0 300 22015 5) and costs around £76.50.

This volume consists of three main parts. The first provides over 100 pages of introductory essays, with a meticulously-researched biography, an examination of what is a Bosch which explains what the BRCP considers is evidence of his authorship, an excellent chapter on materials and techniques, and a review of conservation aspects.

The chapter on materials and techniques has really been stolen from the second volume, as it is a synthesis and overview of the painting-by-painting account given there. Its inclusion in this volume makes this by far the more important for most readers.

The second part is the catalogue raisonné of paintings, and the third that for drawings. Together they make up the bulk of the book, and it is extremely bulky. Each entry starts by giving the usual information expected in a catalogue raisonné: attribution, dates, physical details including dimensions, location of the work, any signature or other identifying mark, a brief statement of condition, the provenance, literature, and a short analysis of the work.

Once these formalities are completed, the authors work systematically through a description and analysis of the work. As several are polyptychs which open and close, they start with its closed state, providing vivid accounts of its exterior, opening, and the sensations accompanying its opening. Each state is illustrated in overview, then there are numerous detailed views of the work, including some IR and other non-visible-light studies. Rather than litter the pages with multiple and repetitive captions, each is cited in the white space next to the relevant section of text, which works very well.

At the end of each account is a section explaining the proposed dating, including details of any commission, followed by the end-notes.

End matter is as thorough as the rest of the book. There is a compilation of three literary sources, given in the original language, and translated into English, from Felipe de Guevara (c 1560), José de Sigüenza (c 1605), and Karel van Mander (1604). The bibliography is long and extensive, and there are two indexes: the first of names, and the second a topographical index of the works.

As several other reviewers have remarked, this certainly sets the standard for catalogues raisonnés, at least for artists with relatively limited oeuvres.

The most controversial aspect of any attempt at a catalogue raisonné – and as the output of the BRCP this has to be the benchmark for many years to come – is the decision as to which works to include. They have chosen 21 paintings (of which one, the Wayfarer Triptych, is split across four locations) as being Bosch’s own, four are attributed to his workshop, seven to followers, and two to his workshop or followers. There are also 20 drawings attributed here to Bosch himself.

Comparing different choices of attributions is always complicated by different conventions in the naming of works. However, there will be those who are unhappy that the BRCP considers The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things (in Madrid) to be the output of Bosch’s workshop or a follower. The recently proposed fragment of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in Kansas City is accepted as being by Bosch himself. No doubt those and other debates will continue.

Opinion

This is a superb and definitive book, which serves almost every purpose, except of course portability. It is utterly authoritative, comprehensive, illustrated better than any other, thoroughly accessible and readable. It is also the most expensive book on Bosch in print, but worth every penny.

Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva (Мария Константиновна Башкирцева), better known as Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884), was Jules Bastien-Lepage‘s most promising pupil. Where he excelled in capturing the people of the countryside, she showed the poor of the cities. Together their paintings were a perfect complement, but together – within three months of one another – they died. She was only 25.

Bashkirtseff was born in an affluent and noble family in Gavrontsi, near Poltava in central Ukraine. She grew up travelling around Europe with her mother, eventually settling in Paris. She originally hoped to be a singer, but after an illness ruined her voice, she decided to be an artist. She then studied with Robert-Fleury from 1877, who remained her teacher throughout her brief career, and at the Académie Julian, in Paris.

A self-assured painter from the beginning, she set her sights high and had the ability and drive to paint very well indeed. Her early Self-portrait with Palette (1880) was painted in the same year that she first had a painting accepted for exhibition at the Paris Salon, and she was successful again in subsequent years until her death.

While still studying at the Académie Julien, she painted In the Studio (1881), which gives the clearest insight into what her training was like. Her class was of course entirely female, and the Académie Julien was one of the few reputable schools which accepted women pupils at the time.

Her early portraits were very skilful, if fairly conventional, as is The Artist’s Sister (1881). She started to establish herself in the art scene; it has been claimed that she wrote a column for the mysandrist newspaper La Citoyenne under the name of Pauline Orrel, but this appears to be unsupported by the original edited versions of her diaries.

When she was visiting Nice in 1882, she became a close friend of Jules Bastien-Lepage, and he acted as her mentor if not teacher (she described herself as his pupil). She also formed a close friendship with the writer Guy de Maupassant.

As she developed a more distinctive style in her portraits, so her brushwork loosened. She was an astute observer of women’s life, as shown in At a Book (c 1882), with its emphasis on the model’s unusual hair.

Young Russian Girl (c 1882) is another delicate portrait, although I suspect that the original is not as soft-focus as this image.

Although Bashkirtseff declared Bastien-Lepage to reign supreme in the countryside, she felt that she was his match when it came to the urban environment of Paris. Certainly her Autumn (1883) is an impressive and Impressionist depiction of a row of trees on the bank of the River Seine in the centre of Paris, but is unusual in being devoid of people. The leaf litter, occasional rubbish, and fallen bench strengthen its feeling of desolation in the midst of the bustling city.

Bastien-Lepage’s compromise of detailed realism blended with more painterly passages shows through in one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving. That year she was awarded an honourable mention for her painting in the Salon (according to her published diaries).

A Meeting (1884) finally justified her claim to paint the urban poor, and to match Bastien-Lepage. This painting was quite rightly a great success when it was shown at the Salon in that year, and is probably her greatest work.

Her pastel Portrait of Madame X (1884), in the Musée d’Orsay together with A Meeting, was also shown in that Salon.

By the time of that Salon in the summer of 1884, Bashkirtseff’s stuttering health was deteriorating rapidly, because of tuberculosis. She died on 31 October, less than a month before she would have turned 26, and less than three months before her mentor, Jules Bastien-Lepage, also died.

Her ambition was better fulfilled after her death than in life. Her huge mausoleum in Cimitière de Passy, Paris, contains a full artist’s studio. Three years later, her copious and revelatory diaries were published, and propelled her to international fame.

References

Wikipedia.
Homage site and virtual gallery.
An English translation of her journal, on archive.org.

To my surprise, one story which keeps recurring in my forays into narrative paintings is that of the rescue of Andromeda by Perseus. This is told in several sources, most notably Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and has been painted by dozens of well-known artists over the last couple of millenia.

The Story

I have detailed the full story here. Considering just the episode involving Andromeda, it reduces to the following summary:

• Andromeda is the beautiful daughter of the King and Queen of Aethiopia;
• Her mother, Cassiopeia, considers her so beautiful that she boasts that Andromeda is more beautiful than the Nereids;
• This boast offends Poseidon, who sends Cetus, a sea monster, to ravage the coast as punishment;
• The king is told by an oracle that the only way to be rid of Cetus is to sacrifice Andromeda to it;
• Her father therefore has Andromeda stripped and chained to a rock on the coast, to await Cetus;
• Perseus is returning on his winged sandals after he has beheaded Medusa;
• Perseus sees Andromeda as he is flying past, so stops;
• Perseus frees Andromeda, but keeps her there to lure Cetus to him, and dons Hades’ helmet to make him invisible;
• When Cetus turns up to devour Andromeda, Perseus kills the sea monster;
• In return for rescuing her, Perseus wins the hand of Andromeda in marriage.

During the Middle Ages, this became modified to tell that Perseus was riding Pegasus, the winged horse, rather than flying with his winged sandals. This was expressed fully in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium libri, which first appeared in 1360, and was revised continuously until the author’s death in 1374.

Analysis

Any painting of Andromeda alone fails any reasonable test for narrative, as it depicts but a single event and moment in time. Strangely there is a substantial minority of paintings which show Andromeda naked (or nearly so) and chained to a rock. Although a plausible excuse for showing an extremely beautiful female nude, there are inevitable overtones of rape fantasy (which are strong enough when the whole story is told faithfully). I will therefore not consider those non-narrative paintings any further.

Whether the artist is conforming to the Aristotelian structure of beginning, middle, and end, or the quest for peripateia, a complete depiction of the narrative will need to include references to Andromeda as a sacrifice to Cetus (past, or beginning), Perseus’ arrival (the pregnant moment, or middle), and the killing of Cetus (the better future, or end). However, I also include those paintings in which Cetus is either absent or very hard to discern.

The main decision for any painter trying to tell this story is thus choosing the exact moment to show. Strictly speaking, according to the text, Cetus did not appear until after Perseus had arrived and freed Andromeda, and at that time he was invisible because he was wearing Hades’ helmet. The best solutions are therefore going to vary somewhat from the text, in order to generate strong visual narrative.

This article considers the paintings in which Cetus is missing, and those timed to show an event before Perseus kills Cetus. The next article will look at those timed after Cetus’ death.

Cetus Absent or Hidden

The anonymous Pompeiian wall-painting Perseus Freeing Andromeda (c 50-75 CE) shows a close-up of the couple. Andromeda is still chained to the rock by her left wrist, and is partially clad rather than naked. Perseus has Medusa’s head tucked behind him, the face shown for ease of recognition. He is wearing his winged sandals, and carrying his sword in his left hand. There is no sign of Cetus, and the viewer is expected to complete the remainder of the story in the absence of any further cues or clues as to its outcome.

One and a half millenia later, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) painted his Perseus and Andromeda (1570-2) on slate. The same central motif, that of Perseus releasing Andromeda from her bonds, is at its centre. Andromeda is naked, and looks weakly disgruntled rather than relieved in any way. Perseus has a complete set of equipment, including his winged footwear, the head of Medusa (left outside its bag), and an unusually winged helmet, which is clearly not making him invisible.

In the far distance on the left, it is possible that Vasari has shown Cetus, but that is not established clearly. Also at the left is a horse, possibly intended to be Pegasus, but left deliberately ambiguous. The waters around are embellished with distracting nymphs and swimmers, and various activities are taking place on the coast behind. There is no indication of the menace posed by Cetus, nor of its threat to Andromeda.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) painted several different versions of this story. His Perseus and Andromeda (1639-40) shows the same moment as the paintings above, of Perseus freeing Andromeda. Andromeda is naked, but tied with rope rather than chains, and has an odd non-committal smile, as if she is just realising that she will have to hang around for Cetus to turn up.

Perseus wears a fetching suit of armour without any winged sandals, and Pegasus is seen in the distance, down on the beach. Hades’ helmet, which will shortly render Perseus invisible, has been placed on the rock ledge, at the bottom left hand corner of the painting.

Rubens does manage a useful reference to the future, though, with a pair of matchmaking putti above the couple to indicate the eventual outcome. If Cetus is shown, it is far down on the beach, and hardly an imminent danger.

Cetus Alive

Given the importance of Cetus to the story, it is not surprising that most who have painted it have included the monster within their motif. An earlier Roman version from Boscotrecase, near the coast at Pompeii, dates from soon after 11 BCE, and puts the story into a larger landscape, much in the way that later landscape painters such as Poussin were to do.

Andromeda is shown in the centre, on a small pedestal in the rock. Below it and to the left, the gaping mouth of Cetus is shown, as Perseus flies down from the left to rescue Andromeda, kill the sea-monster Cetus, and later marry Andromeda in reward, as shown on the right side of the painting. As with many later paintings, this sophisticated image shows a composite of at least two episodes in the story, and contains two separate versions of both Perseus and Andromeda.

Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521) also shows multiple events within his large Andromeda freed by Perseus (c 1510-15). Centred on the great bulk of Cetus, Perseus stands on its back and is about to hack at its neck with his sword. At the upper right, Perseus is shown a few moments earlier, as he was flying past in his winged sandals. To the left of Cetus, Andromeda is still secured to the rock by a prominent red fabric binding (not chains), and is bare only to her waist.

In the foreground in front of Cetus are Andromeda’s parents, the King and Queen, still stricken in grief. Near them is a group of courtiers with ornate head-dress. But in the right foreground is a celebratory party already in full swing, complete with musicians and dancers, to feast their delivery from the attacks by Cetus.

Continuous (or composite) narrative is even more extensive here, with different passages showing quite different events, in no particular narrative sequence.

Not known for his narrative paintings, Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (1490–1576) manages to combine an unusually-posed nude study of Andromeda, with both Perseus and Cetus, in his Perseus and Andromeda (1553-9). Andromeda is still in her chains, gazing at Perseus as he appears to tumble from the sky, ready to hack at the sea monster. Cetus obligingly opens it vast maw, ready to swallow him whole, although it is in fact much further away.

Titian leaves the story open, though, and gives no clue as to its outcome, a curious lack of resolution.

It is perhaps Giuseppe Cesari (1568–1640) who realises the best account, in his Perseus and Andromeda (1592). Andromeda is naked, chained, and looks anxiously towards Perseus, as Cetus announces its intent to devour her. Perseus is astride a wingless Pegasus, sword in hand, the other holding the ghastly head of Medusa.

Look also at Cesari’s background, which shows the coastal ruins which have resulted from Cetus’ previous attacks. Although there are no solid clues as to the eventual outcome, this account is well-developed and almost complete. Its composition is also precursor to those of Leighton and Ingres three centuries into the future.

Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638) uses the same elements in his Perseus Releases Andromeda (1611). Andromeda lacks the fearful facial expression, but her hands suggest emotional tension. Cetus appears slightly less prepared for a drop-in snack, and Perseus’ mount is now tan rather than white, and still wingless.

The coastal scene behind this action does not appear to have suffered any attacks from the monster, though. He fills the area around Andromeda’s feet with a rich variety of shells, whose relevance is unclear, a human skull, skeleton, and some bones. These would imply that the site was used for previous sacrifices, something which goes beyond the original story.

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), in his Perseus and Andromeda (1870), provides another variation of the three elements set out so well by Cesari. He puts the shackled Andromeda, almost naked, in the foreground, with Cetus looking surprised at the imminent arrival from the sky of Perseus. He is not astride Pegasus, but wears his winged sandals, and flourishes the polished shield still bearing an image of Medusa’s head.

Andromeda’s facial expression is odd: her eyes appear closed, as if in sleep, perhaps already resigned to her fate?

Last in this section is Frederic, Lord Leighton‘s (1830–1896) Perseus and Andromeda (1891). This shows the ‘invisible’ Perseus astride Pegasus shooting arrows into Cetus, while the monster surrounds Andromeda. Cetus is shown as a fairly conventional fire-breathing dragon, complete with stereotypical wings and a long tail. Andromeda is not naked, but some modesty is preserved by draping a white robe around her waist.

The next article will complete my account, starting with paintings in which Cetus is shown as being killed by Perseus.

In the previous article, I showed examples of paintings of this classical myth in which Cetus, the sea monster, was absent or still alive. I come now to consider those in which Cetus is shown to be dead, or well on its way to death.

Cetus Dead or Doomed

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) had earlier given a fuller account of the story in his Perseus and Andromeda (c 1622) (see his later painting shown in the previous article). Andromeda is almost naked, and now fully unchained, on the left. Perseus is clearly in the process of claiming her hand as his reward, for which he is being crowned with laurels, as the victor. He wears his winged sandals, and holds the polished shield which still reflects Medusa’s face and snake hair.

One of several putti (essential for the forthcoming marriage) holds Hades’ helmet, and much of the right of the painting is taken up by the winged Pegasus, covering both versions of the myth. At the lower edge is the dead Cetus, its fearsome mouth wide open.

Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779) includes the same elements in his Perseus and Andromeda (1773-6), but set very differently. Here Andromeda is more fully dressed than Perseus, although it is the latter who is centre stage. Mengs covers both versions of the myth by giving Perseus winged sandals and Pegasus, and Medusa’s head is safely stowed in his scarlet bag. A winged putto, looking quite serious, is skipping off to the right, and at their feet rests the great snout of the dead Cetus, to which Perseus’ right index finger points.

I fancy that Mengs has timed this a little too late in the narrative, though, when it has already resolved its greatest tensions.

Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) has caught the height of peripateia and action in his Perseus Killing the Dragon (1910), as Perseus is killing Cetus. He then appears to use it to make a parody of the story, and narrative painting as a genre.

Andromeda, long freed from her chains, squats, her back towards the action, at the far left. Her face shows a grimace of slightly anxious disgust towards the monster. Perseus is also completely naked, with no sign of winged sandals, helmet of Hades, or a bag containing Medusa’s head. He is braced in a diagonal, his arms reaching up to exert maximum thrust through the shaft of a spear which impales Cetus through the head. The monster is shown as an alligator, its fangs bared from an open mouth.

Cetus Absent then Alive

Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) painted his Perseus and Andromeda (1876) as a preparatory study for two of the paintings in his great and unfinished series telling the whole myth of Perseus. Reverting to the continuous narrative more typical of the Renaissance, he composited two separate events within the story into the single canvas. The left half shows Perseus, just arrived at the rock to which Andromeda is chained; the right shows him doing battle with Cetus.

The eighth painting in Burne-Jones’ Perseus series, The Rock of Doom (1884-5), shows Perseus discovering Andromeda chained to the rock awaiting her fate in the maw of Cetus. His face looks hesitant and uncertain here, and he has removed Hades’ helmet to make himself visible to Andromeda. Medusa’s head is safely stowed in the kibisis on his left arm, and Burne-Jones is faithful to the original Greek myth in having Perseus arrive on his winged sandals, not Pegasus.

For her part, Andromeda is naked, and looking coy and afraid, her face downcast. She is still chained to the rock, awaiting rescue. In the background, Burne-Jones shows what is presumably the capital of Aethiopia, or may have accepted Strabo’s attribution to Jaffa.

There are some minor discrepancies between the forms of the rocks and chain shown in the ninth painting, The Doom Fulfilled (1888), and those in the previous work in the series, although Burne-Jones maintains continuity in the figures. Keeping Andromeda unchained in situ, Perseus dons the helmet of Hades to become invisible again, and Cetus appears, ready to devour the woman.

Perseus is here swathed in Cetus’ coils (whose form resembles an ornate capital letter), brandishing his sword and ready to slaughter the monster and bring its terror to an end. The background view of a city has been obscured by a rock wall, and this small inlet is now enclosed by a low causeway of flat-topped rocks, not unlike those of the Giant’s Causeway in the north of the Irish Sea.

Angelica Rescued

Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is an epic poem containing, among others, the tale of the knight Roger or Ruggiero, which is uncannily similar to the story of Perseus and Andromeda, although removed from the greater narrative of Perseus. I therefore include some example paintings of this version of what must be a common myth, for comparison.

One day, when out riding near the coast of Brittany, on his hippogriff (half horse, half eagle, so not too different from Pegasus), Roger finds Angelica chained to a rock on the Isle of Tears. He discovers that she was abducted and stripped by barbarians, who left her there as a sacrifice to a sea monster. As Roger approaches to free her, the monster appears from the sea, and Roger kills it by driving his lance in between its eyes. He then rides off with the rescued Angelica.

Ingres shows the story largely according to the original text, with Angelica’s head cast back almost unnaturally in her pleading look towards Roger. She appears to have a goitre, something which did not escape the critics of the day. Even so, the painting was purchased for King Louis XVIII and was installed in the Palace of Versailles from 1820.

In his first painting of the scene, Böcklin provides us with a composite image of the story. Angelica is bound to a tree, around which the fearsome sea monster is already coiled. Roger approaches from behind, riding a conventional horse, his lance ready to kill the unsuspecting monster. Nowhere does Böcklin show the sea, or show this as being particularly coastal.

Böcklin shows the story at a momentary pause in the action, just before Angelica can plead with the knight to save her life, before the monster sees Roger approaching, and before Roger can try to kill the monster. Angelica’s face seems almost emotionless, Roger’s is concealed, and the monster hardly looks menacing. There is almost no body language either. Böcklin has come close to painting a pre-action group portrait, rather than the vigorous account of a knightly rescue.

Six years later, Böcklin revisited the story, although unfortunately this painting appears to have gone missing at present. He has jumped forward to the moment after the climax of the action, and the monster’s blood is still pouring from its severed neck. Roger, his face concealed, is draping a robe over Angelica’s naked body. She stands, still transfixed by the fear which has now been resolved, her face showing the imminent relief of stress by tears. Her hands are held up in helplessness and surrender to events, and her knees slightly flexed in fear.

And there are more

Tales of rescue of a damsel in distress by a knight in shining armour are stereotypes of the fictional ‘age of chivalry’ which became such alluring motifs for the romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite, artists. Here are a couple as examples.

William Etty (1787–1849) painted his Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret in 1833, and may have induced John Millais (1829–1896) to attempt his one and only female nude, in his The Knight Errant (1870). In the latter case, the story of being stripped, tied up, and abused had left its classical roots, and mere robbers were to blame. The beautiful and naked victim still had to be rescued by a gallant knight, though.

Conclusions

Although I have a deep discomfort at the persistence and popularity of this group of myths and legends, and their underlying misogyny, they have become important narratives for artists. They have generally been tackled well as stories, and resulted in some superb paintings. If you are wondering where are the versions by women artists, perhaps the best response is that the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffman were rightly far too busy working on their next versions of Judith and Holofernes or Ariadne on Naxos to have time to fuel such male fantasies. The Andromeda myth, and its many variants and relatives, have flourished only because they have been told and painted by men for men.

What we have seen in this succession of great paintings does, I believe, confirm the doctrine proposed by Aristotle, formalised by Alberti, and scrutinised by Lessing. Depicting the moment of peripeteia, with its cues and clues to the past, and its links to the future, is the most successful.

In the case of Andromeda’s rescue by Perseus, the pregnant moment is when Perseus is getting the better of Cetus. This ensures that Andromeda’s previous exposure as a sacrificial victim is clear, that the ‘new knowledge’ of Perseus has changed her fortune, and that the instant of Cetus’ death changes her fortune for the better.

This and related ‘knight in shining armour’ narratives are not complex by any means, but have frequently been addressed using continuous narrative to composite two or more events into a single image, or by series of paintings. Indeed one of the most successful accounts, that from Boscotrecase, Italy, is one of the earliest and most sophisticated narrative paintings, and uses continuous narrative to great effect.

There might seem to be a void in the history of painting between the collapse of the Roman Empire after 300 CE, and the arrival of the ‘Gothic’ style around 1200. Whether you refer to the period as the Middle Ages or the somewhat blunter Dark Ages, this is the bit where most histories of art concentrate on architecture.

The truth is not only rather different, but quite distressing. For not only does there seem to have been quite a lot of painting in various parts of Europe over this period, but a great deal of it has been destroyed, and not just in the distant past.

The oldest known panel painting altarpiece in England, the Westminster Retable, was progressively broken up and used as wood for furniture between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; it was only in 1827 that it was recognised as being anything worth conserving. Several important works, including ancient frescoes, were severely damaged or destroyed completely during the Second World War, particularly in the allied bombing of Padua.

What remains has also been relatively poorly studied. I have yet to find a clear, coherent, and well-illustrated account of painting between 300 and 1400 CE, so this article and the next are going to be quite exploratory in nature. Please do not hesitate to correct me, or point me in the direction of better sources.

Overlooking those difficulties, paintings over this period are very different from those which preceded, or which followed, at least until the twentieth century. It is all too easy to dismiss them with condescension, as being ‘primitive’ or ‘crude’. I hope that the examples here will dispel such feelings.

The oldest surviving paintings which remain in good condition tend to be the ‘miniatures’ incorporated into religious manuscripts. Among the oldest is The Vienna Genesis from the first half of the sixth century, which was created on vellum which had been dyed purple. It probably originated in Syria, and has illustrations to accompany its texts from the Old Testament book of Genesis.

The story of Rebecca and Eliezer, shown here, comes from Genesis chapter 24. Abraham wanted to find a wife for his son Isaac, so sent his servant Eliezer back to the homeland of Mesopotamia to look for one. Eliezer reached the city of Nahor, where he stopped to water his camels and rest from his long journey. He pulled up at a well outside the city, where a young woman, Rebecca, had just drawn water. She offered him her water, and he recognised her as the chosen bride for Isaac, so presented her with the betrothal gifts which he had brought with him.

This exquisitely-painted miniature uses ‘continuous narrative’ to good effect. In the background is a symbolic representation of Nahor. Rebecca is shown at the left, having walked out of the city with her pitcher on her shoulder, along a colonnade. In front of her is a pagan water nymph, presumably the spirit of that well. Rebeccah is shown a second time, giving Eliezer her pitcher to slake his thirst. His train of camels is also taking water.

The miniature above, showing the miracle of the Healing of the Blind Man, and that below, of The Raising of Lazarus, are two folios from another slightly later religious book, Purpureus Rossanensis (The Rossano Gospels) (c 550 CE). This is thought to be the oldest surviving illustrated manuscript of the New Testament.

In the story of the healing of the blind man, Christ comes across a man who had been blind from birth. He mixes his saliva with some mud, and applies it to the blind man’s eyelids, telling him to go and wash his eyes. He does so in the section at the right, and finds that he can see at last. This was also famously painted by Duccio nearly 800 years later, shown below.

I will explore the narrative of the raising of Lazarus in more detail in the next article.

Three centuries later, in the late ninth century, a complete bible was made at Rheims on purple-dyed parchment, for Charles the Bald to present to Pope John the eighth on 25 December 875, the day of Charles’ coronation as emperor. Its surviving 334 folios contain 24 full-page paintings, of which I show just three. The work has been attributed to Ingobertus, and has remained in the Benedictine Abbey of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Rome, since the coronation.

Deuteronomy summarises the three long sermons of Moses which make up the bulk of this, the fifth book of the Old Testament. At the top, Moses is seen in his wilderness wanderings, and receiving the law. Below that he is shown preaching to the Israelites, and at the bottom they are seen entering the Promised Land, I believe.

The painting for the book of Proverbs shows scenes relating to Solomon, to whom they are attributed. In the centre, Solomon sits in judgement. Below that is a clear depiction of the Judgement of Solomon over the two women who both claimed a living baby was theirs. At the top are other scenes of Solomon’s life and reign.

I find the painting for the book of Revelation to be the most curious, given the quite graphic verbal descriptions of the apocalypse found in its text. However, I think these images show Saint John on the Island of Patmos (centre), which was later to be a popular theme for paintings, and the ‘seven churches of Asia’ to which the epistolary content of the book was addressed.

The Menologion of Basil II is an illuminated church calendar and service book compiled for the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, who ruled between 976 and 1025. It contains about 430 miniatures painted by eight different artists, each of whom is named. My example folio from this book shows the Adoration of the Magi, a simple part of the story of the birth of Christ, in which three ‘wise men’ (Magi) observed a comet, interpreted it as a sign of a great birth, and travelled to Bethlehem to offer gifts to the infant Christ.

Unlike later versions, this painting is sparse, and omits distracting detail such as the animals associated with the shed in Bethlehem. The infant Christ is sat on the Virgin Mary’s knee, and an angel brings the three wise men to present their gifts and pay their respects.

Probably the best-known and most extensive embroidery showing a historical event in Europe, the Bayeux Tapestry was made in England about ten years afte the Norman Conquest of 1066 CE, to record not just the invasion and Battle of Hastings, but the background to those momentous events. It is read (as I would expect!) from left to right, and starts with Harold (before he became King) being sent to Normandy by King Edward the Confessor. William (later to be conqueror of England) invites Harold on a campaign against Conan II, the Duke of Brittany.

As with the entire embroidery, Scenes 16 and 17 (shown above) are accompanied by Latin text to support their meaning:
Scene 16: HIC WILLEM[US] DUX ET EXERCITUS EIUS VENERUNT AD MONTE[M] MICHAELIS (Here Duke William and his army came to Mont Saint-Michel)
Scene 17: ET HIC TRANSIERUNT FLUMEN COSNONIS, HIC HAROLD DUX TRAHEBAT EOS DE ARENA (and here they crossed the Couesnon River, here Duke Harold dragged them from the sand).

These events are shown clearly in the embroidery above, with Mont Saint-Michel shown as a green hillock just to the right of centre. Inevitably many of its characters are shown several time across its length, although they only seem to appear once in any given scene.

The next article will cover the period from 1100 CE to the early Renaissance, concentrating particularly on depictions of the story of the raising of Lazarus.

References

Sekules V (2001) Medieval Art, Oxford History of Art, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 19 284241 1.
Bartlett R ed (2001) The Medieval World Complete, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 500 28333 2.

The Vienna Genesis.
The Rossano Gospels.
Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura.
Menologion of Basil II.
Bayeux Tapestry.

The start of our journey through some of the wonderful art of the Middle Ages relied on ‘miniature’ paintings made on vellum and included in religious manuscripts, and the embroidery of the Bayeux Tapestry. There are surviving wall paintings, including frescoes, but most are in a sorry state of repair, and their details all but vanished.

Thankfully the situation changes radically once we consider works completed between 1100 CE and the early Renaissance after 1300: there are many wall and panel paintings to study. I will first offer a small selection to show how they evolved, then focus on the common theme of the New Testament story of the miracle of the Raising of Lazarus, and trace that through time. Almost all these paintings come from Italy; I will look at the early paintings from northern Europe in a future article.

Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s panel painting of Saint Francis of Assisi and Scenes of His Life (1235), from the altar in Pescia, must be one of the most beautiful objects created before the Renaissance. Around the central figure of Saint Francis are six scenes. Reading from the top left they represent him kneeling in the wilderness, where he had his vision and received the stigmata (marks of crucifixion on the hands and feet, as shown in the central figure). Below that is the episode in his life which is perhaps remembered by most, when he preached to the birds, then at the bottom a miracle in which he healed a girl with a dislocated neck.

On the right are three of the miracles attributed to him: that at the top is the ‘miracle of the pear’ in which Saint Francis coaxed a crippled boy to stand by holding out a pear, as well as a leper who is waiting to be healed. Below that is the healing of a cripple in the waters of a bath, and at the bottom is the casting out of demons.

This pattern of showing key scenes from the life of a saint was to become an established approach for many altarpieces and other polyptychs through the Renaissance.

Giotto’s (1266–1337) frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua show a more elaborate depiction of The Adoration of the Magi (c 1305). The infant Christ rests on the Virgin Mary’s knee; she was originally clad in her signature ultramarine blue, but that has worn away with the years. Mary is accompanied by Joseph and an angel, and the Holy Family is within a wooden shed. The three ‘wise men’ pay their respects and present their gifts, but are now accompanied by camels and at least two attendants. The comet which attracted their attention is shown as a fireball crossing the sky.

Bartolo di Fredi (1330–1409), in his spectacular frescoes in San Gimignano, tackles a crowd scene in his The Israelites safely cross the Red Sea, but Pharaoh and his troops are drowned (1356). This depicts the Old Testament story from Exodus, in which Moses parts the waters of the Red Sea and leads the Israelites across, but their Egyptian pursuers are overwhelmed as the waters return, and drown them.

As in most other paintings of the period before the development of realism during the Renaissance, di Fredi painted the elements and symbols within the story, but did not attempt to cast them into an imagined reality. On the right, the Israelites are making steady progress on the carpet of dry land which Moses provided them. On the left, the Egyptians are in the water, emphasised by the presence of fish and fishermen in the background.

The Raising of Lazarus

The story of Lazarus is one of the more popular miracles in the New Testament, although it is only contained in the Gospel of Saint John (chapter 11, verses 1-44).

Christ is told that Lazarus has fallen ill, and his two sisters seek his help. However, Jesus tells his disciples that he intends waiting for Lazarus to die, so that God can be glorified. He then delays for two days before returning to Bethany, by which time Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days. His sisters and the village are still in grief and mourning, so Jesus asks for the stone covering Lazarus’ tomb to be removed. Jesus them commanded Lazarus to come out of his tomb, and Lazarus emerges, still covered in the linen cloths used for burial. Jesus tells the people to remove those cloths and let him go.

The Raising of Lazarus from The Rossano Gospels (c 550 CE) shows this in a continuous strip, with Lazarus’s sisters pleading at the feet of Christ in the centre. At the left are his disciples, and at the right the completion of the miracle, with the tomb opened and Lazarus emerging, alive in his funeral bandages. This is a simple story told simply and very effectively.

The righthand section of a fresco from the church of San Baudelio in northern Castilla, Healing of the Blind Man and The Raising of Lazarus (c 1129-34), tells this in a single image (as it does for the healing of the blind man on the left, too). The moment shown is the removal of the stone from a coffin-like grave, revealing Lazarus underneath.

In choosing just this single moment in time, the painting relies on the viewer being able to add the previous events, and to resolve the story of the miracle, just as is required for the blind man on the left.

Duccio (c 1255–1318) opts for more complexity, in his marvellous panel painting of The Raising of Lazarus (1310–11). Lazarus’ two sisters are shown pleading with Christ, reminding the viewer of the start of the story, but at the right the stone has been removed from the tomb, and Lazarus appears alive again.

Although Duccio has painted some wonderfully realistic faces, there is barely a glimmer of any expression on them: they are frozen in serious mode, even that of the sisters and Lazarus. However he has started to show some body language, with hands held out, and one bystander holding his cloak to his nose in case the opened tomb stinks.

Giotto’s early version of The Raising of Lazarus (c 1305), one of his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, uses a similar composite image to tell the story. At the left, Lazarus’ sisters remain at Christ’s feet, but at the right the stone has been removed and Lazarus – still not looking in the best of health – has emerged from his tomb.

Many of the figures have their arms raised or active: Christ’s in blessing Lazarus to achieve the miracle, others in amazement, but facial expressions are still fixed and devoid of emotion.

Giotto’s later version from Scenes from the Life of Mary Magdalene (c 1325) in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi, has similar narrative elements, but the crowd is now tucked away off to the left, to be replaced by a more developed landscape. Some of the faces are now modelled to show what appears to be the beginnings of emotion: Lazarus’ sister looks to have been weeping in grief, for instance.

Giotto’s high reputation is well deserved. Here Lippo Memmi (1291–1356) has painted his Resurrection of Lazarus (c 1325) in his frescoes at San Gimignano. His figures are much older in style, with simpler modelling of their faces and garments. His approach to the narrative is made more difficult, as Christ, Lazarus’ sisters, and the tomb are squashed together. Lacking separation in space, it is harder to envisage them as being separated in time, which could confuse some viewers. He does, though, use ample body language to help tell the story.

Giovanni di Paolo (1403–1482) painted his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1426) a century later, when the Renaissance was in full swing. But this panel from the predella in San Domenico, Siena, is still firmly rooted in Duccio’s panel, even down to its composition, and the chap covering his nose with his cloak. The positions and colour-codings of the various figures are remarkably similar, although di Paolo has started to elaborate their hair, clothing, and landscape behind.

And another three hundred years later…

Conclusions

Narrative painting continued to thrive during the Middle Ages, although surviving European examples are almost confined to telling stories from the Bible. Continuous or composite narratives, in which more than one moment in time is shown in a single image, were popular, and even in quite simple compositions proved effective, and not confusing. However, they rely to a degree on spatial separation, and may become more confusing in more condensed images.

By the time of Duccio, around 1300, some painters were using body language very effectively in their narratives. However, facial expressions were little used until the rise in realism of the Renaissance. Most earlier paintings which modelled faces realistically used fixed neutral expressions throughout, although Giotto’s later paintings were starting to show more emotion in faces.

The best artists of the Middle Ages created superb paintings by any standards, even though they did not wish to depict any literal reality.

Some narrative paintings need thinking about, to understand their story properly. Sometimes, the more that you think (and read) about a particular painting, the more puzzling it becomes.

Take the two paintings which I recently showed from an Etruscan tomb, excavated by and named after Alessandro François, in 1857.

The Liberation of Caelius Vibenna (c 340 BCE) shows a captive being freed at the left, then a series of quite gruesome killings.

Opposite that painting in this tomb was a fresco showing someone calmly beheading a naked youth, which I interpreted as being the sacrifice of Trojan prisoners.

Don’t these strike you as odd scenes to have painted in your family tomb? Given that the Trojans were taken prisoner around a millenium earlier, even an Etruscan warrior proud of those whom he had killed would seem to have odd tastes for their interment.

Who was doing what to whom?

The first step in discovering what these paintings are really about, and how they come to be there, is to identify the figures shown, and the actions taking place. This is difficult for Etruscan art, because, unlike the Greeks and Romans, they left virtually no written texts which might help us, and almost all that we know about them has come from the study of their tombs and grave-goods. Thankfully there are now some excellent accounts written by scholars, which I will rely on.

The first painting, The Liberation of Caelius Vibenna, reads from left to right as:

• Macstrna (Romanised as Mastarna, who later became Servius Tullius, the legendary sixth king of Rome, and was assassinated in 535 BCE) liberates Caile Vipinas (Caelius Vibenna), a local Etruscan hero;
• the Etruscan hero Larth Ulthes (Lars Voltius) kills Laris Papathnas Velznach (Lars Papatius or Fabatius, a Volsinian);
• the Etruscan hero Rasce (Rascius) kills Pesna Arcmasnas Sveamach, who is Sovanese);
• the Etruscan hero Aule Vipinas (Aulus Vibenna, brother of Caile or Caelius) kills someone whose name is lost, but was an ally of Rome).

Note that each Etruscan hero is carefully made to look the same, with the same brown hair and beard, to aid identification.

During the troubled years prior to Macstrna/Mastarna becoming King of Rome, some Etruscans allied themselves with Rome. The killings shown here were part of a surprise attack by loyal Etruscan warriors on those allies of Rome, which the heroes inevitably won. This painting is therefore a celebration of that victory as an achievement of loyal Etruscans some two centuries previously.

Those who fancied even more gore could peek around the corner into the vestibule of the tomb, where there is a painting of Marce Camitlnas thrusting his sword into a subjugate Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, better known as Gnaeus Tarquinius, a Roman who may have been involved in the capture of the brothers Caile and Aule Vipinas (Caelius and Aulus Vibenna).

These paintings appeared on one side of the tomb; the other side contained the far older Greek narrative of the sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners, a more sophisticated painting which was almost certainly copied in part from a Greek original. Other similar images have been found in Italy, such as the Revil Cista shown below.

Troy and its aftermath

Reading this from the left, we have:

• Agamemnon, King of the Mycenaeans and brother-in-law of Helen, who was murdered after his return from Troy;
• the ghost of Patroclus, beloved comrade and friend of Achilles, who was killed in battle by Hector of Troy;
• the winged Etruscan female angel of death, Vanth, whose wings embrace Patroclus and Achilles;
• Achilles, who is leaning forward to behead the Trojan slave at his feet, but was killed before the fall of Troy when Paris shot an arrow into his vulnerable heel;
• the Etruscan death demon, Charun, armed with his hammer;
• Telemonian Ajax, who dies by falling on his own sword at the end of the Trojan War;
• a Trojan slave waiting to be killed;
• Locrian Ajax, who drowns returning from Troy, and is holding another Trojan slave off the right edge of this image.

To understand these, we must go back to the legend of the Fall of Troy.

Troy was a legendary (and probably historical) city which ruled over a substantial area of the west of what is now Turkey. Designed to be impregnable, it had accumulated considerable riches when the early Greek civilisation was becoming established. Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave a golden apple “for the fairest” woman, leading to a contest between the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. This was judged by Paris, son of King Priam of Troy.

The goddesses played dirty, and each promised Paris a reward should he choose them. When he chose Aphrodite as the winner, she had promised him the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, who also happened to be married to the King of Sparta, Menelaus. Aphrodite then helped Paris seduce and abduct Helen back to Troy.

When Helen was being courted, her unsuccessful suitors formed a pact to return her to Sparta in the event that anyone dared try to seduce her, and Agamemnon, King of the Mycenaeans and brother of Menelaus (so brother-in-law of Helen) raised a fleet of more than a thousand ships (“was this the face that launched a thousand ships?”) and a great army to attack Troy.

For ten years, the Mycenaeans (Greeks) and their allies laid siege to Troy, during which many of their heroes were killed in battle. The war was not just long, but very bitter, and the warriors became vengeful, and both sides committed atrocities. At the end of this period Odysseus (Ulysses) had the idea of building a wooden horse, into which Greek soldiers would be placed, in order to get them into the city: the Trojan horse.

The Greeks landed this horse on the shore, and sailed off, apparently leaving it as a peace offering. In fact they sailed only just out of sight, and waited.

The Trojans hauled the horse up and into the city, dismantling some of their defences to get it through the walls. They then went and drank and feasted what they had presumed to be their victory.

While the Trojans were busy getting drunk, the Greek soldiers inside the horse let themselves out through a trapdoor, lit signal bonfires to summon the Greek ships, and opened up the rest of Troy’s defences. The Greek army poured into the city as its inhabitants were still recovering from their partying. The city was sacked: all the precious metals and jewels were stripped, the temples desecrated, most of its population murdered, and the buildings were set alight.

Some prisoners were taken. Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior Hector, was given to Neoptolemus, and Hecuba, Priam’s widow, to Odysseus. Astyanax, infant son of Hector and Andromache, was killed by being thrown from the city’s walls.

The dominant aim was to completely destroy the city of Troy and its lands, and to kill almost all of its people. It was calculated genocide.

(It is commonly supposed that the legend of Troy is told in Homer’s epic Iliad. In fact, that covers only a small fraction of the whole, and does not, for example, even mention the Trojan horse. However the overall legend remains deeply embedded in much of European culture – even in our language, and in computer security.)

If this scene makes a direct literary reference, it is to Book 21 of the Iliad:
[Achilles] drew twelve youths alive out of the water, to sacrifice in revenge for Patroklos son of Menoitios. He drew them out like dazed fawns, bound their hands behind them with the belts of their own shirts, and gave them over to his men to take back to the ships.

Troy and the Etruscans

The Etruscans, who populated much of what is still known as Tuscany in Italy, formed as a civilisation from about 800 BCE, roughly the same time as the classical Greek civilisation was forming, and around five hundred years after the supposed fall of Troy. At this time, Rome consisted of small settlements, and the city of Rome was traditionally supposed to have been founded in 753 BCE, becoming a mighty Republic in about 509 BCE.

The origin of the Etruscans remains controversial. Among several proposals, it has been suggested that they may have viewed themselves as descendents of the survivors of Troy, and there has been some genetic evidence to support that (and some to contradict it, too). There is no doubt that, at the time that this tomb was constructed, these Etruscans were greatly influenced by the Greek civilisation, and had earlier been resisting the rise of Rome.

However, the popular idea that the Romans obliterated the Etruscans in another wave of genocide is incorrect: from two centuries before this tomb was built, the Etruscans had been steadily integrating with the Romans, and were assimilated (often in positions of power and influence) rather than exterminated.

Explaining the paintings

There are two halves or faces to this tomb: the Etruscan, celebrating heroes who fought against allies of Rome, and the Greek/Trojan, recording the Greek sacrifice of Trojan captives. The story behind the paintings as a whole thus depends on whether the Etruscans thought themselves to be Trojan, or Greek.

If they thought themselves to be Trojan, one explanation is that the paintings told the story of their survival against the odds, the few who escaped the genocide, and the heroes who resisted against Rome.

If they thought themselves to be Greek (or Greek sympathisers), they could be paying respect to the Greek warriors who ensured the destruction of Troy, just as their own local heroes had stood up and fought against Roman allies.

It all depends on where the Etruscans of that time thought that they had come from. Moreover, we do not know who these paintings were made for, but they were certainly never intended to be seen by the likes of you and I.

Vanth, Charun, and Angels of Death

You may also be surprised to see a winged angel of death in the paintings. Vanth, that goddess of death, is one of the more common figures shown in Etruscan tombs. My next article will look at how she came to be there, and how – seven hundred years later – Christian angels spread their wings.

References

Wikipedia on the Trojan War.
Wikipedia on the Etruscan Civilisation.

Bryce T (2006) The Trojans and their Neigbours, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 34955 0.
Lowenstam S (2008) As Witnessed by Images. The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 8018 8775 8.
Haynes S (2000) Etruscan Civilization. A Cultural History, J Paul Getty Museum. ISBN 978 0 892 36600 2.
Holliday PJ (1993) Narrative Structures in the François Tomb, pp 175-197 in Narrative and Event in Ancient Art, ed Holliday PJ, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 43013 5.
Rouveret A (2015) Etruscan and Italic Tomb Painting c 400-200 BC, pp 238-287 in The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World, ed Pollitt JJ, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 86591 3.

I identified two of the figures in the striking and gruesome painting on the wall of an Etruscan tomb at Vulci as being Etruscan gods: Vanth and Charun. Unless you are already familiar with Etruscan myths, these should have come as a surprise, particularly because of Vanth’s resemblance to the winged Christian angels which were to start appearing around seven hundred years later.

Vanth and Charun have been identified as the deities associated with death. They are often seen as a couple, accompanying those who have just died, or are about to die. They certainly had their work cut out as Achilles carved his way through the necks of Trojan captives.

The Farewell of Admetus and Alcestis (c 325 BCE) is an Etruscan vase painting of the Greek myth of Admetos, the King of Pherae, and his wife Alcestis, described in several sources, including Euripides’ play Alcestis. When Admetos’ fated day of death came, Apollo intervened to help him – according to Aeschylus, by making the Fates drunk, so that they agreed to reprieve him from death if he could find a substitute. His wife Alcestis substituted for him.

In this painting, Alcestis is shown making her farewells to her husband, as two versions of Charun (Etruscan, not Greek!) await their victim. Charun on the left wields his trademark hammer, while Charun on the right holds his characteristic snakes, but seems to have borrowed Vanth’s wings.

In Euripides’ version, as Alcestis is being taken to the underworld, Admetos decides that he does not wish to live. Heracles intervenes and Alcestis’ life is saved. Being a Greek, Euripides has Alcestis being taken down by Thanatos, the Greek (and male) version of the Etruscan Vanth, complete with wings.

This wall painting from the Tomb of the Charuns (or Demons) shows a typical appearance of Vanth (left) and Charun (right), either side of a door in an Etruscan tomb, although here the door itself is painted rather than an opening. It is also interesting to note that Vanth appears to have a halo above her head, although given the condition of this painting it is far from certain (and unusual too).

Charun

Going back to the original scene of Achilles killing Trojans, the version of Charun shown there is fairly typical, but not stereotypical, in that he does not have snakes with him there. His distinctive hammer or mallet is used to open the bolt on doors, particularly that to the underworld, it would appear.

This painted krater was also found in the François Tomb, and shows Charun alone, without a partner Vanth.

Vanth

Of the two deities shown in the painting of Achilles killing Trojans, it is Vanth who merits the rest of this article, which promises to explain why angels have wings.

Vanth is by no means the only Etruscan deity to come with wings attached, although she is probably the most consistently winged. In this wall painting of Typhon, from much later, around 150 BCE when the Etruscans had been assimilated into the Roman Empire, the Greek monster Typhon has acquired wings in his Etruscan form.

Ancestry

Winged female deities go back much further than even the Greeks, with the likes of the Mesopotamian Ishtar, shown here incised into the terracotta of the Ishtar Vase which may date to as early as 2000 BCE.

More detailed and sophisticated, the famous Burney Relief shows Ishtar too, and has been more confidently dated to Old Babylonian times, around 1800 BCE.

If you know your Greek deities, you will also recall that the goddess of victory, Nike, and the gods Eros (love and life) and Thanatos (death, similar to Vanth) were usually shown as human bodies with angelic wings. So it would seem an easy step to suggest that the early Christians simply borrowed this ‘pagan’ symbolism when they developed the first depictions of Christian angels.

But it is not so simple.

Angels

Nowhere in the Old or New Testaments (nor in any of the apocryphal writings, I think) are the angels of the Israelites or of Christians described as being winged. Cherubim (‘cherubs’) and seraphim were, but not angels. The few depictions of angels in the Christian tradition to around 390 CE omitted wings too (I have been unable to locate a suitable image to illustrate this, I am afraid). Then, between about 390 and 400, they suddenly acquired wings, and by 600 CE wings were universal and mandatory.

This breathtaking mosaic in the vault of the chapel of San Zeno, in Santa Prassede, Rome, from 817-824 CE, shows them very clearly, as does every painting of the Annunciation.

The few Moslem miniatures which show angels followed suit. This painting of The Archangel Israfil by Zakariya al-Qazwini from 1280 is even more cross-faith, as a Moslem depiction of an Old Testament (Israelite Jewish) angel following this Christian tradition.

The wings of angels were often key elements in paintings, as in the sublime Wilton Diptych (c 1395-9), where they impose a clear rhythm.

Another highly original and beautiful depiction of winged angels is in Hieronymus Bosch’s panel Ascent of the Blessed, one of the four panels making up his Visions of the Hereafter (c 1505-15).

These wings enable clear distinction between humans, and other human-like creatures, and the messengers of God. Being messengers, just as Eros, Thanatos, and Vanth before them, there is a feasible rationale for them requiring their wings in order to move swiftly from heaven (or the pre-Christian underworld) to earth, and in their duties on earth.

There is also a deeper and perhaps archetypal role in the ‘angel of death’ – Greek (Thanatos), Etruscan (Vanth), and Christian.

Depictions such as Horace Vernet’s The Angel of Death (1851) and Marianne Stokes’ Death and the Maiden (1908) were only too familiar to many Christian families across Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as they must have been to the Etruscans, Greeks, and Trojans long before.

References

Wikipedia on angels.
Wikipedia listing of Etruscan deities.

de Grummond NT (2006) Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend, University of Pennsylvania Museum. ISBN 978 1 931707 86 3.
Haynes S (2000) Etruscan Civilization. A Cultural History, J Paul Getty Museum. ISBN 978 0 892 36600 2.
Holliday PJ (1993) Narrative Structures in the François Tomb, pp 175-197 in Narrative and Event in Ancient Art, ed Holliday PJ, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 43013 5.
Lowenstam S (2008) As Witnessed by Images. The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 8018 8775 8.
Rouveret A (2015) Etruscan and Italic Tomb Painting c 400-200 BC, pp 238-287 in The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World, ed Pollitt JJ, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 86591 3.

The App Store is an excellent way of getting minor updates to purchased apps, but fails to address the detection of major (paid-for) updates.

I think that I have used (and paid for) each major release of GraphicConverter since it was first released as shareware in 1992. When it became available in the App Store, I switched to that release, for its ease of update delivery. Over those years it has handled all my routine image work, such as opening and converting unusual formats, simple cropping, and rescaling – particularly of images for this blog.

I don’t use it for processing my own photographic images, for which I am delighted with Affinity Photo, and formerly used Adobe Photoshop, for their workflow from raw file formats.

By chance, I happened to search the App Store just recently, and stumbled across GraphicConverter version 10, which was released through the store on 25 May. If you are still using version 9, you will almost certainly want to purchase this new version.

There is a huge list of new features and improvements, some 84 in total. Among the most notable are:

• face detection, with its small faces database,
• support for Picasa and MS Gallery xmp data for face rectangles and names,
• a collage feature,
• support for selecting layers of PDFs,
• reverse animation,
• auto rotation for small angle rotations to correct the horizon,
• detection and conversion of Apple Live Photos to GIF animation,
• extraction and assignment of MP4 cover art images,
• APNG (Animated PNG) export,
• basic BigTIFF import,
• opening vCard (.vcf) images,
• faster LZW TIFF export,
• copy with soft edges improved.

However it has retained its lightweight footprint, and is as simple and quick to use as version 9. It costs £19.49.

Maximilien-Jules-Constant Luce (1858-1941) is one of those artists who we have all heard of, but cannot remember where we saw their work. For his paintings are in galleries and museums around the world – Musée d’Orsay holds quite a few of his very best – but seldom do they appear in special exhibitions, or in prominent places. In his long lifetime, he painted more than 2,000 works in oils – rather more than Cézanne – and was an Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist. But memory of him has faded badly.

He was born in Paris, and started his apprenticeship to a wood engraver in 1872, just after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). This fired his enthusiasm for art, and he attended evening school, first in drawing, and then starting to paint in oils. In 1876 he moved to work for Eugène Froment, who made woodcut prints for a wider range of clients. He pursued his training in painting at the Académy Suisse and in Carolus-Duran’s studio. Among the latter’s most famous pupils had been John Singer Sargent, who had trained with him just a few years earlier.

In 1879 he joined the army, serving in Brittany, and leaving in 1883, when he started painting full-time. The following year he was introduced to Divisionist technique and ‘pointillism’, and his previously Impressionist style changed accordingly. He first exhibited with their group, the Société des Artistes Indépendents, in its spring Salon of 1886. He continued to exhibit in that Salon each year (except 1915-19) until his death. His first solo show took place in Paris in 1888, but consisted of only ten paintings.

As a Neo-Impressionist, he was an active anarchist (as was Pissarro and most of the other Neo-Impressionists). However, colleagues in the movement and the influential critic Félix Fénéon viewed his work as being more ‘muscular’ and less ‘cerebral’, in contrast to Seurat’s ‘scientific’ approach.

Morning, Interior (1890) is one of his best-known Divisionist paintings from this period. Although it adheres to the technique of applying small marks of contrasting colours to build the image, Luce’s marks are less mechanical than those seen, for example, in Seurat’s paintings. In places they become more gestural and varied, particularly in highlights.

In 1892, he went to London with Pissarro, then later that year went to the south of France with Signac.

This portrait of his (then unmarried) partner and model Ambroisine ‘Simone’ Bouin, Madame Luce on the Balcony (1893), shows an even wider range of marks, and in parts of the foliage in the background they have started to become organised in the way that was most distinctive in the late paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Sadly, Luce and Bouin did not marry until a few months before she died in 1940.

Luce painted in most genres. Although his many landscapes are often beautiful, it was in other genres that he was perhaps most individual and distinctive. In his The Good Samaritan (1896), for example, he combines a brilliantly colourful dusk landscape with a classical narrative painting, showing the parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament. This uses an unusual combination of the contemporary with a very traditional donkey. His marks are steadily moving away from pure Divisionism.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Luce’s style had moved on from the slowly collapsing Neo-Impressionist to a more Post-Impressionist approach. His Charleroi Foundry, Casting (1896) shows this well, and is a good example of his many industrial genre works. More than any artist since the days of Philip de Loutherbourg, Joseph Wright of Derby, and others who painted the Industrial Revolution, Luce featured heavy industry and its workers.

Where the famous Impressionists had shown us small glimpses of smoke billowing from the chimneys of factories sprawling out into the countryside around Paris, Luce painted Industrial City (1899) and other works, particularly around the heavy industrial zone of Charleroi, in the ‘Black Country’ of Belgium.

He also painted several views of the cathedral of Notre-Dame and central Paris, of which his Quai Saint-Michel and Notre-Dame (1901) is perhaps the best-known. His city views were usually densely populated, much as Pissarro’s were.

The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is another of his explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. Construction work in the French capital continued to be very active in the early twentieth century, and Luce painted its many different facets. Note the factories on the opposite bank, infiltrating the surrounding residential and commercial districts.

Although only a boy at the time, Luce must have retained vivid memories of the Paris Commune which followed the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. He finally committed these into paint in his A Street in Paris in May 1871 (also known as The Commune) (1903-6). By this time his technique had abandoned Divisionism entirely.

Construction Site (1911) is another depiction of those at work in Paris at the time, and shows the high chroma influence of the Fauves.

The Execution of Varlin (1914-17) is a second historical painting from the Paris Commune of 1871. Eugène Varlin was a political activist who had started his career as a bookbinder, and become a socialist revolutionary and pioneer trade unionist. During the seige of Paris by the Prussians in 1870, he had distributed aid from his co-operative restaurant.

In March 1871, he took part in the storming of the Place Vendôme, following which he was elected to the Council of the Paris Commune. In ‘Bloody Week’ in May, he fought against government troops. When the Commune was suppressed and broken, he was captured, taken to Montmartre, tortured and blinded by a mob, and finally shot, as shown here.

Luce was one of the most expressive artists (who was not a war artist) to show scenes relating to the First World War. In his La Gare de l’Est (1917), a collection of wounded and battle-weary soldiers are shown at the entrance to this large Paris railway station.

The Gare de l’Est in Snow (1917) is even better-known, and a classic painting of falling snow in a large city.

Luce continued to paint after the First World War, and finally died in 1941, during the occupation of Paris. Although his career had been long, and had produced many excellent paintings, it was not until 1997 that his work appeared in a major retrospective exhibition in America. He remains badly underappreciated today.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Reading a painting, and working out its narrative, is not a science, and even experts can sometimes get it wrong. This article follows up my comments about Velázquez’s popular painting known as Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) originally made here, where I expressed doubt as to its currently accepted reading.

The painting in question is Velázquez’s The Spinners (Las Hilanderas, The Fable of Arachne) (c 1657).

Painted originally for Don Pedro de Arce, huntsman to King Philip IV, it became part of the Royal Collection, where it is believed to have been damaged by fire in 1734. When it was repaired, new sections were added to the left, right, and upper edges. Until 1928, it was believed to depict the tapestry workshop of Santa Isabel, with spinners working in the foreground, and tapestries hanging in the background.

Then in 1928, Diego Angula proposed that it depicted the legend of Arachne, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 6, lines 1-145.

The story of Arachne

Arachne, in Roman legend, was described in three different accounts, of which Ovid’s, in his Metamorphoses, is probably the most popular and appropriate here: we know, for example, that Velázquez had three different versions of this retold in Spanish, although any differences between those versions and Ovid’s original are not clear. Unusually, this myth was Roman in origin, and there is no trace of it in the surviving Greek literature, nor has it been found in Greek vase paintings.

Arachne was the daughter of a humble family, whose mother had died, but her father had started as a shepherd and become a dyer of wool in purple. Arachne became the greatest weaver in the world, and boasted that her skill was greater than that of the goddess (Pallas) Athena. The latter set up a contest between them, posing as an old woman who then challenged Arachne before revealing herself.

Unfortunately for Arachne, she not only produced work more beautiful than Athena’s, but it showed the many lapses of the gods and their unfairness to mankind. Athena was enraged by this, ripped Arachne’s work to shreds, and sprinkled her with Hecate’s potion, which turned her into a spider. She and her kin were thus condemned to weave for all time.

This has been depicted slightly earlier in Rubens’ Pallas and Arachne (1636-7), which clearly shows the weaving contest, with Pallas Athena striking Arachne with her boxwood shuttle in front of the looms, and a clear visual reference to the Rape of Europa in the tapestry in the right background.

Proposed readings

Reading this painting has been complicated by the fact that it was probably damaged by fire in 1734, as a result of which it was significantly enlarged, presumably as part of its repair.

One current reading of this painting – given by Kilinski (2013) and many others – is that the foreground section shows the weaving contest between Athena, as an old woman on the left, and Arachne, as a young woman on the right. The background area then displays their completed tapestries, of which Arachne’s is visible, and shows a copy of Titian’s The Rape of Europa, a Greek myth which is identified as the first offensive scene woven by Arachne in the contest.

The snag with that reading is that it does not fit what the painting actually shows: the older woman at the left is not weaving but spinning, using a spinning wheel which would also have been an anachronism at the time of Arachne’s contest. Ovid’s account is also clear in stating that, before the contest started, Athena revealed herself in her full glory, and did not retain the appearance of an old woman. Furthermore, the woman on the right is not weaving either, but is winding spun yarn into skeins. Neither is there any evidence in the foreground of the presence of any dyed yarn which might be suitable for weaving.

Barolsky (2014) recognises that the women in the foreground are not weaving, but still maintains that the tapestry of The Rape of Europa in the background “conjures up the story of the competition between Arachne and Minerva”. He too considers the woman at the spinning wheel must be Athena/Minerva, as well as the woman in the background wearing a helmet, which makes the painting have continuous narrative (a composite of two temporally distinct scenes). That would, of course, be unique in Velázquez’s works, and very unusual for a painting of this time.

But the most remarkable reading is that of Wendy Bird (2007), who accepts that the foreground figures have nothing to do with weaving, but are “engaged in carding, spinning and winding yarn”. She then proceeds to claim that the painting contains earthy erotic imagery referring to lust and prostitution.

The foreground figures

Although the painting contains an inset background containing itself another image, of the hanging tapestry, it is best to start with the dominating foreground, which occupies most of the canvas, and is most detailed.

The five women shown in the foreground, going from left to right, are:

1. a young woman, bending down from a position against a pile of fabrics and materials;
2. an older, but by no means old, woman holding a distaff and operating a spinning wheel to spin wool. She is dressed very modestly, with her hair covered, but her left leg is bare from the knee down to her bare foot;
3. a woman sat low, carding wool. Her face is dark and lacks features;
4. a younger woman with her back to the viewer, who is winding wool with her left hand, and holds a ball of undyed wool in her right. She appears to have removed some of the clothing from her upper body, which is clad in (very modest) undergarments;
5. at the right edge, a girl who appears to be observing or assisting the fourth woman, and rests on a wicker basket.

There is also a cat, at the second woman’s feet, and fleeces hanging at the top right.

Taken together, this group of women are engaged in the carding, spinning, and winding of undyed wool, which would have ended up in skeins (not balls) for washing and dyeing. None of their activities is directly related to weaving, except insofar as the wool, after dyeing, may then go on for weaving. Neither are there any references to the story of Arachne – such as a spider, spider’s web, etc. – in the foreground. The common mythological reference for spinning, to the Fates, is also unsupported: there are five women, not three, none appears to have shears or scissors, and so on.

The second woman, although apparently older than the others, does not meet Ovid’s description of having “long grey hair, and with a staff to steady her weak limbs. She seemed a feeble woman, very old, and quavered as she” spoke.

The background

Although highlighted, the background is relatively small, and lacking in detail. However the figures seen there, from left to right, are:

1. a well-dressed woman facing away from the viewer, her right hand resting near a viola da gamba (the size of a modern cello);
2. a person (of indeterminate gender) wearing a helmet and upper body armour, facing away from the viewer, and probably holding a spear in her right hand, although this is marked only by a vertical white line;
3. a woman whose right forearm is outstretched, engaged apparently with the second woman, and facing towards her;
4. a well-dressed woman, standing with her back to the viewer, apparently looking towards the fifth woman;
5. another well-dressed woman, seen side-on but looking directly at the viewer.

None of these people are engaged in any form of weaving or wool-working, and the musical instrument is not being played.

Behind them, and close by the third woman, is an ornately-edged tapestry showing the same image as Titian’s painting The Rape of Europa (1560-2), or its near-identical copy by Rubens in 1628-9, which was probably in Madrid at the time that Velázquez painted this work, in about 1657.

These paintings are so similar that it is immaterial as to which Velázquez may have used as the basis for this painting.

The second person may be intended to represent Pallas Athena, as her helmet and armour are possibly characteristic. I write “possibly”, because the strongest tradition shows her helmet with exuberant decoration along its midline, as shown in Crane’s illustration.

There are no other references to the story of Arachne – such as a spider, spider’s web, etc. – nor to the Fates. The figures shown are not in any form of altercation, nor is the second person wielding a boxwood shuttle, tearing down or up any tapestry, or showing any of the behaviours described by Ovid.

Putting it together

Velázquez was not a prolific painter of classical myths, but he has a well-deserved reputation for constructing complex paintings which can be read at several different levels, and are quite intensely cerebral – his most famous Las Meninas (1656) is a good example which continues to generate much speculation.

Attempts to suggest a simple reading, in terms of wool-working or Ovid’s story, simply do not correspond with what is actually shown in the painting. Instead we need to look at each of the references made by Velázquez, their meanings, and how they might assemble into a coherent whole. Although this approach was mentioned by Wendy Bird (2007), she considered that the “interpretations of the fable of Arachne” “seem unrelated to” the painting.

Arachne’s crimes, in the eyes of Pallas Athena, were to criticise the gods in her art, and to be conceited enough (perhaps justly) to claim that she was better than the gods in her art. The image of the rape of Europa is particularly appropriate to the former reason, and particularly relevant to any artist late in their career, when they are looking back at what they created, and passing on advice to future generations.

I do not believe that Velázquez uses the spinning workshop in the foreground as a reference to Arachne (although Ovid did briefly mention Arachne’s spinning in his laudatory introduction to her weaving skills), nor to time (the Fates are not being cited), nor to sexual promiscuity (which appears out of kilter with the whole painting).

Rather the spinners – the title of the painting – represent the craft foundation for the tapestry art, both in material terms, and in providing the content through which the art is expressed. This is almost a meta-narrative in defence of narrative painting, and the fundamental craft basis for the art.

It was Velázquez looking back at his career, and passing on its lessons to artists of the future.

References

Wikipedia on this painting.

An English translation of the story of Arachne, quoted from above, is in Tufts’ superb Perseus digital library. The translation is taken from: Ovid, Metamorphoses, by Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922.

Barolsky P (2014) Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso, Yale UP. Pages 147-8. ISBN 978 0 300 19669 6.
Bird W (2007) The bobbin & the distaff: erotic imagery and the meaning of Velazquez’s ‘Las Hilanderas’, Apollo Magazine.
Kilinski K II (2013) Greek Myth and Western Art, The Presence of the Past, Cambridge UP. Page 138. ISBN 978 1 107 01332 2.

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (1858–1921) seems to have become filed in the ‘Symbolist – too difficult’ tray and vanished into art history’s all-too-common voids. As I hope to show here, although not a particularly prolific artist (he was also a sculptor and designer), he painted works of mysterious beauty and fascination. If you’re looking for a quick thrill, though, he may have little appeal.

He was born into an affluent family of lawyers, and started painting when a child. He initially went to university to read law, but developed a passion for literature, and dropped out. In 1876 he enrolled in a drawing course at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and graduated from there in 1879, winning third prize for historical composition. One of his fellow students there was James Ensor. Khnopff started travelling to Paris in 1877, where in 1878 he attended the Exposition Universelle, and for a year from 1879 attended classes at the Académie Julian.

At first, he mainly painted portraits, exhibiting in Brussels in 1881, but had a poor critical reception. In 1883, he was one of the co-founders of the avant garde group of Les XX, and exhibited regularly with them from 1884 until the group collapsed in 1893.

Khnopff’s wonderful portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (1885) is one of these early works, and probably his most famous today. This little girl was born in Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels, to a friend in the prosperous middle class. She is shown looking directly at the viewer, a small figure in front of the much larger door behind her. X-ray studies have shown that she originally held a single flower or small bouquet in her left hand, which was removed during painting.

Khnopff’s desire is to transcend physical reality with a new reading of the here and now, something which I think this painting achieves strongly, but with subtlety. Immediately recognised as a major work, it was exhibited in the Salon of Les XX in 1886, and toured internationally afterwards.

Khnopff’s favourite model, his sister, is the subject of his Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff (1887). In contrast to Jeanne Kéfer, Marguerite averts her eyes from the viewer, looking to her left, and her left arm is folded behind her back, with her right elbow, almost as if the two arms belonged to different people. Khnopff was an enthusiastic user of photography as an aid to his painting, and took several photos of Marguerite in different clothes and poses to help him compose the next painting.

Lawn Tennis, or Memories (1889) is almost a pastel collage of paintings of his sister, that on the left dressing her in the same high-necked white dress as in her portrait of 1887. He shows here how skilled he has become at constructing the feeling of otherworldliness which is so characteristic of his paintings.

In 1889, he visited Britain, where he made friends with Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and others whose work he had long admired. As this connection developed, he exhibited regularly in Britain, and from 1895 to 1914 he reported on the continental European scene for the art journal The Studio.

He also painted some landscapes, among them his At Fosset: Rain (1890), which was painted at the Khnopff’s family country home in the forest of the Ardennes. Empty of people and animals, its bright areas in the field at the lower left, the blank white wall of the building, and at the horizon, seem almost unnatural.

Silence (c 1890) is another pastel which has a simple motif – a young man dressed in a gown and gloves, holding his left index finger to his lips as if calling for silence – which appears to have a different reality. This strange feeling is enhanced by the low position of the viewer, which makes the figure seem almost angelic.

Among his most enigmatic works, I Lock my Door upon Myself (1891) was inspired by, and quoted from, a poem by his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-94), Who Shall Deliver Me? which considers God’s role in resolving inner turmoil:
God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.
All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.
I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?
If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run! Death runs apace.
If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!
God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys
Myself, arch-traitor to myself;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.
Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me
Break off the yoke and set me free.

The sculpted head in the background is of Hypnos, god of sleep, who lived in the underworld with his twin brother Thanatos, god of death. They had already been painted by JW Waterhouse in his Sleep and His Half-Brother Death (1874). To the right of that head is a view of a mediaeval town, with a single dark figure. Three rare orange lily flowers are shown in the foreground, and the blue eyes of the woman pierce through the viewer.

Art, or Caresses (1896) is an even more extraordinary work, showing an androgynous youth holding an ornate caduceus (less the intertwined serpents) in his right hand, so presumably being Mercury/Hermes. His nipples appear to have been tattooed, or bear jewellery, and he is bare to the waist. He stands cheek-to-cheek with a leopard with a young woman’s head, perhaps a form of sphinx.

The background encourages even greater speculation as to its interpretation. Behind the leopard’s body is a wooden booth, which has non-Roman characters or ideograms written on it. Further in the distance to the right are two blue columns, with bases and caps of gold.

Khnopff’s Incense (1898) places Marguerite in a heavy cope of brocade bearing a thistle motif. Her hands are in long silk gloves, the left holding a silver and glass incense burner by its base. Her head is covered with more folds of fine fabric, and behind – either seen through glass or reflected in a mirror – are the windows of a cathedral.

Seen now as one of the masterpieces of European symbolism, it is as mysterious as the wry smile on the model’s face.

From 1900, Khnopff was influenced by the Vienna Secession, and in a series of design and decoration projects came to know Gustav Klimt and others associated with it; these included the banker Adolphe Stoclet who commissioned work from Klimt and him. Although something of a recluse, thanks to increasing popularity of his paintings he attracted quite a following, and was awarded the Order of Leopold.

Secret-Reflection (1902) is a pair of paintings in pastel and crayon on paper. In the upper image, sister Marguerite is again swathed in clothes, this time a brilliant blue robe draped on her body, and a pale indigo wrap on her head, with elbow-length white silk gloves. Her right hand is caressing the mask of a woman, which seems to be fixed to a cerulean blue fluted column, similar to the pair seen in the distance in his Caresses.

The lower painting shows a flooded town, probably the city of Bruges from his childhood memories, which was often a source of his motifs.

Khnopff’s The Abandoned City (1904) was inspired by Woensdagmarkt Square in Bruges. Deserted, its cobbles fade gradually to a flat beach from the North Sea coast, with small waves rolling in. Although the majority of the image is taken up by the sky, it has only ill-defined areas of light and dark, and is as featureless as the square is desolate.

Anyone seeking illumination from the personal papers of Fernand Khnopff must remain frustrated, as his family burned them all following his death.

These paintings paved the way for the likes of Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) in the later twentieth century.

References

Wikipedia.

Draguet M (2004) Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, Getty Museum. ISBN 978 0 892 36730 6.

Half way up our stairs hangs a miniature replica of the Rosetta Stone, with the same rather uninteresting royal decree of 196 BCE written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek. It proved the key to deciphering hieroglyphs, and opening up the world and culture of the ancient Egyptians. I sometimes wonder whether we could do the same today with the bewildering variety of formats used for electronic publishing.

My aim for this article seemed clear: I wanted to see how easily I could generate a publishable ‘smart-linked’ document. To keep the task as simple as possible from the outset, I concentrated on HTML5 output of an interactive plan, based on a project which I worked through some months ago in Storyspace.

The opening page is a drawn plan of Piazza San Marco (Saint Mark’s Square) in Venice. On this I wanted to have buttons, each bearing a thumbnail of a painting of the Piazza from that point. Click on the button, and you are taken to a large image of that painting, where another button will return you to the plan on the first page.

Using QuarkXPress 2016 to do this is a joy, and a lesson in efficient, purposeful interface design. I first created my project, for electronic publishing to an iPad or similar tablet, and in a couple of minutes I had my pages laid out.

The first page contained my plan, dragged-and-dropped from its PNG original, and swiftly scaled to fit. On that I placed prepared thumbnails for each of the paintings, again scaled to my desired size.

Successive pages consisted of a scaled high-resolution image of each painting, and a thumbnail of the plan to act as the button to take the reader back to the plan on the first page.

Setting the thumbnails up to act as buttons could not be easier: open the HTML5 pane, select the graphic, and set the Tap/Click Action to Go to Page, and the respective page number. Once that is done, save the project, and export to HTML5. It really is as simple as that.

I then ended up with a 15.7 MB folder containing nearly 200 items: open its index.html file and Quark’s App Studio engine fires up, and the interactive plan works beautifully. In Firefox, but for some reason Safari – even Apple’s Technology Preview – provoked an App Studio problem. Even when I asked Safari to pose as Firefox, I could not get it to open the HTML5 export. No doubt there is a simple explanation which you will be able to give in a comment here.

So for publishing in HTML5, QuarkXPress 2016 is truly simple to use, and wonderfully efficient.

The snag – and this is not the app’s fault – is that setting up HTML5 buttons like this only works for HTML5 export, of course. If you want to produce an interactive PDF or ePub version, your HTML5 controls will not work, and you have to rework the document into a form appropriate for publishing in those formats. Hence the Rosetta Stone.

QuarkXPress 2016 will also publish existing projects to HTML5, and make a beautiful job of it too. This was a less interactive draft of the same material which I had prepared in QuarkXPress 2015, exported from 2016, and viewed a few moments later in Firefox.

Another potential route, offering even more sophisticated links and full hypertext structure, are Eastgate Systems’ complementary products, Storyspace and Tinderbox. The former is primarily intended as a hypertext authoring environment, and comes with limited export features (which the user can develop themselves); the latter is the most powerful note-making and -organising environment for OS X, which comes with built-in support for smarter exporting.

As they share a common file format, I took my earlier Storyspace hypertext project, opened it in Tinderbox, and exported to HTML from that. This provided source files which can be used as the basis for a more sophisticated interactive site, but requires considerably more work in terms of HTML5 (or whatever) development.

You may also note that, in Storyspace, my interactive plan is more complex: it allows you to view only those works painted in certain periods. I am sure that can be implemented in HTML5, but at a much higher cost in programming skill and effort.

The perfect solutions will of course be Storyspace reader apps for OS X, iOS and Windows, which are promised by Eastgate. But they rely on an even trickier Rosetta Stone to convert source code from the current OS X version.

In the meantime, we have some outstanding tools now: QuarkXPress 2016, Storyspace, and Tinderbox are each a joy to work with, modestly priced, and don’t cost you any monthly rental charges.

Over this series of articles, I have shown examples of different modes of visual narrative: most commonly that in which the painting shows a moment in time, usually termed monoscenic, with some instances in which a single painting shows two or more moments in time within the same frame, something often referred to as continuous narrative. This article considers how best to classify these and other modes, and proposes a terminology which will I hope make future discussion easier and clearer.

Andrews (1995) has reviewed some of the terms used by different authors, which has been made the more complex by the fact that most have developed their classification in a limited context, for example considering only classical Greek and Roman art. He makes the broad distinction between monoscenic and continuous modes, lumping all those which show more than a single moment into the latter category. Unfortunately this quickly becomes less clear when he considers examples, and starts describing paintings as having “continuous scenes”.

Kilinski (2013) more ambitiously divides the modes into:

• monoscenic, a single, often dramatic or culminating moment fills the image;
• expanded monoscenic, in which there are also elements that allude to other actions or actors beyond that visually present;
• synoptic or simultaneous, in which more than one moment and/or locale is represented in a single scene;
• cyclic, in which the narrative is divided into separate scenes without repeating characters in any single frame;
• sequential cyclic, in which there is a clear progression through the cycle;
• continuous, in which figures are repeated in a common background in which time changes with the reappearance of the figure(s) but not necessarily the locale; most commonly seen in very wide formats such as scrolls.

The current Wikipedia article on narrative art also uses the terms:

• simultaneous, in which discernible organisation is only apparent to those acquainted with its purpose, with geometric or abstract designs;
• panoptic, which equates to Kilinski’s cyclic mode;
• progressive, showing a single scene in which characters do not repeat, but in which a sequence of actions take place to convey the passage of time;
• sequential, a continuous narrative in which framing shows the progress of time, as in comics and manga;

There are no doubt several other classifications, and further terms, which have been used elsewhere.

Few of these texts have considered the first and most important issue of what defines visual narrative, which surely determines the root of any classification. I discussed that in my article So what is a narrative painting? which stressed the importance of the image referring in some way to two or more events. Thus a simple depiction of a moment is most unlikely to be sufficient to qualify as narrative, even if the viewer might associate that image with a known story. The clearest visual narratives contain references to, or depictions of, more than one instant in the story.

The next obvious and logical division depends on whether the graphical content of the image is of a single moment in time, or two or more moments. If from a single moment, then the term monoscenic might have been appropriate but for its connotations in the theatre and movies, where a scene can last for a considerable period of time, allowing actors to move from one side of the stage to the other, victims to die, and much more besides. The term instantaneous appears much more appropriate to what we are looking for in a painting, photograph, or other image.

Andrews’ use of the blanket term continuous to cover all non-instantaneous modes is of limited value, as it does not actually describe how the image differs from the instantaneous, and the narrative is not depicted in any continuous form. I prefer the more descriptive multiplex, or for images which are clearly divided into a group of frames, each containing the instantaneous, multi-frame.

There is another mode which needs to be separated here too: when a series of instantaneous images is used to tell the story, which would logically be described as multi-image.

Another important question which most texts omit is how to handle images containing discrete areas which contain other images, such as paintings or other pictorial devices such as a flashback or flash-forward (analepsis or prolepsis, respectively). These are rhetorical devices which do not themselves alter the mode of narrative, nor are they usually a distinct frame in the way that multi-frame images are.

For the moment I propose that they should not affect the basic classification of the mode of narrative, but can qualify an image as being narrative, and can be usefully appended to the mode, e.g. ‘instantaneous narrative with an embedded analeptic painting’. Embedded images can also add another story to the main story, making the whole image polymythic.

This provides the following classification:

• narrative, in which a story is depicted, almost invariably containing reference to, or depictions of, more than one instant in the story;
• instantaneous, in which the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it is likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, in which a series of separate images (e.g. paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, in which a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, in which two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, most commonly in comics or manga;
• polymythic, which is a single image containing two or more stories.

It is simple to embed this into a flowchart enabling the classification of paintings, photos, and other images. Here is an interactive version as a Zipped Storyspace document: narrativeclass1
for which you will need a copy of that app from Eastgate Systems.

Examples

Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida (c 1630) shows a single instant, but has multiple references to events before and after that moment, so it has instantaneous narrative.

Gérôme’s Cleopatra before Caesar (1866) also depicts a single instant, but again has references to prior events, particularly the screwed up carpet, which was used by Cleopatra to gain entry. Her dreamy look towards Caesar also anticipates her affair with him. It therefore has instantaneous narrative.

Sometimes paintings with instantaneous narrative can make quite small and subtle references to other events in the story, and confirm their narrative nature. In Burne-Jones’s Cinderella (1863) the only such reference is the missing slipper on Cinderella’s right foot. This has instantaneous narrative.

Although Detaille’s Le Rêve (The Dream) (1888) contains two images, these are not in fact linked by normal narrative, but the dream image shown in the clouds could be considered as a form of analepsis, or flashback. Thus the painting has instantaneous narrative.

Gallen-Kallela’s triptych showing the Aino Myth (1891) contains three separate images which tell one of the stories from the Kalevala myths. It is therefore multi-image narrative, within which each image is itself conventional instantaneous narrative.

Immediately on looking at this Roman painting of Perseus and Andromeda, you can see the duplicated images of Perseus: one flying in from the left, the other being congratulated at the right. If intended to be a literal telling of the story, Cetus the sea monster would not appear until after Perseus had freed Andromeda from her chains. It therefore contains at least two different moments in time, but is not divided into frames. It is therefore multiplex narrative.

One and a half millenia later, in Piero di Cosimo’s Andromeda freed by Perseus (c 1510-15), Perseus appears three times: flying down from the top, stood on Cetus about to kill the monster, and in the subsequent party at the bottom right. Andromeda also appears at least twice. These separate events are mixed together in its multiplex narrative.

Moving more than a millenium forward, Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos (1913) also combines two separate events into a single image: the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, and the arrival of Dionysus/Bacchus to be her future husband. He does this without any duplication of actors, though, and it remains multiplex narrative.

Masaccio’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of The Tribute Money (1425-8) contains three images of Saint Peter, and two of the tax gatherer, which are carefully set and projected into the same single view. Although each is spaced apart from the next, no pictorial device is used to separate them into frames. This too is multiplex narrative.

The five different sets of Adam and Eve shown in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Garden of Eden (1530) are set within the representation of the garden as a whole, making this multiplex narrative.

This detail of Krishna Storms the Citadel of Narakasura (c 1840) contains two near-identical representations of Krishna, which make it multiplex narrative.

My final example of multiplex narrative is that of the Heiji Monogatari Emaki (Sanjo Scroll) (late 1200s), in which time advances from right to left, and there is duplication of actors.

Although linked, and often told together, the stories of Echo and of Narcissus can be separated, and it is therefore possible to classify JW Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus (1903) as being very unusual, and showing polymythic narrative.

A few paintings appear even more complex: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) may contain one narrative in the foreground, a second in the background, and a third in the painting of The Rape of Europa shown in the far background. This would make it polymythic narrative at the very least.

I hope that those examples illustrate the practical application of the terminology proposed above.

References

Wikipedia.

Andrews L (1995) Story and Space in Renaissance Art, the Rebirth of Continuous Narrative, Cambridge UP. ISBN 0 521 47356 X.
Kilinski K II (2013) Greek Myth and Western Art, The Presence of the Past, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 1 107 01332 2.

You will know Degas, of course, and probably Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the rewriting of the history of Impressionism, you almost certainly didn’t hear about Jean-Louis Forain (1852–1931), or see those works of his which are owned by a large number of major galleries and museums around the world, but not on display in most.

For the period up to about 1900, Forain was a follower of Degas (1834-1917), and painted fairly similar motifs: dancers, horse racing, women washing themselves. But his style was quite different, and he produced some radical and controversial paintings too. After 1900, he concentrated on social realism in law courts and everyday life, in a similar vein to his other muse, Honoré Daumier (1808-79). But throughout, Forain’s paintings were distinctive, incisive, and often savagely satirical.

This, the first of two articles, will look at Forain’s life and works up to 1900; the second will complete the account from 1900 on.

Forain was born in Reims, but when still a child moved to Paris. He first worked as a caricaturist for the thriving Parisian press, but wanted to develop more artistic skills. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Gérôme and Carpeaux. He became a close friend of Rimbaud, as well as Paul Verlaine and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

He soon became a member of the group centred on Manet and Degas, which met and debated in the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes in Montmartre, and adopted Degas as his artistic mentor.

Impressed with Degas’ many paintings of dancers and ballet, Forain started to produce his own interpretation of the sordid relationships between rich, much older men and the young girls, in paintings such as his The Admirer (1872/1886).

It was not long before Forain’s depictions of night life in Paris became controversial. His candid view of endemic prostitution shown in his watercolour The Client (1878) surpassed those of Degas, and perhaps even Forain’s more conventional political satires. These paintings were later to inspire Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

Forain’s gouache view of The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (c 1878) was painted several years before Manet’s much more famous painting (1882). I do not know whether Manet saw Forain’s, and if he did, whether it was of any influence. Forain shows the reflection of the barmaid, but much of the reflection is taken over by his characteristic brushmarks.

As one of the youngest of the Impressionists – he was twelve years younger than Monet, and eighteen younger than Degas – he did not take part in an Impressionist Exhibition until the fourth, in 1879, but took part in most of the remainder. He was not only successful in exhibiting in the Salon of 1884, but attracted favourable comment from the critics.

Forain was also very skilled working in pastels, capturing the ‘morning after’ so well in his After the Ball, or The Reveller (1881).

At The Theatre (1882) is another watercolour which shows influence from Manet and Degas.

Le Jardin de Paris (The Garden of Paris) (c 1882) is an outdoor nocturne, this time painted in oils.

The Public Garden (c 1884) shows the impossible demands being made by the women’s fashion of the day.

Forain followed Degas in his fascination for scenes of women bathing, for example in his The Tub (c 1886-7).

He continued to produce popular satirical artwork too, and in 1892 published the first volume of an anthology of his drawings to accompany (and often help disrupt) recent political problems, such as the Dreyfus Affair.

In 1891, Forain married the painter and sculptor Jeanne Bosc (whose work seems to have vanished completely). Judging by his exquisite twilight landscape The Artist’s Wife Fishing (1896), she also enjoyed fishing.

Reference

Wikipedia.

The first of these two articles traced the life and works of Jean-Louis Forain up to 1900. Largely influenced by Degas, with his interests in dancers, horse racing, and women washing themselves, for instance, his paintings had been distinctive, some controversial, but had hardly broken new ground.

Forain remained fascinated by the internally contradictory world of the ballet. His Dancer and Admirer Behind the Scenes (1903) continues to explore the controversial issue of young girls, often from quite poor backgrounds, and their relationships with rich, much older men.

As a caricaturist and political satirist, Forain had long admired, and been inspired by, the work of Honoré Daumier in the middle of the 1800s. He now started to focus more attention on some of the broader and personal issues of the day, including legal processes. One of the first of his social satires, Trial Scene (1904) shows a court completely disinterested in the matter before it, with a judge incapable of remaining awake.

He makes further social comment in his Counsel and Accused (1908), where a lawyer inhabiting a different world is shuffling through disordered papers, while his client and her children sit waiting in the office.

He also turned his wicked wit against himself and colleagues, with his Artist Painting a Young Woman in White (1907). A young woman poses partly undressed, in a dismal and dingy studio. The painter transports her into an ethereal scene on his canvas.

Artist in the Studio (1910) shows an ugly and obese sculptor posing his nude model on a small stage.

The Beach (c 1910-1914) is one of the relatively few outdoor scenes among his surviving works from the twentieth century, and is quite unlike those of other Impressionists, or those of other Post-Impressionists of the day. He had earlier made a few paintings on the Mediterranean coast, but his style here has changed considerably. His gestural approach to water breaking over rocks is very ‘modern’.

During the First World War, Forain’s artistic skills were used to improve military camouflage; he volunteered to work in the section largely composed of artists, directed by de Scévola.

He continued to paint the ballet too. His Backstage ― Symphony in Blue (c 1900-1923) may have the influence of Whistler in its title, but it too has become far more gestural in style. The two young dancers are almost spectres of light, in discussion with a figure barely differentiated from the shadows.

The Picture Dealer (c 1920) will have made him no friends among the dealers of the day. A very obese top-hatted dealer is making off with a couple of canvases, presumably bought for a pittance from the dishevelled and underfed painter and his cowering wife.

Still he returned to the ballet, in his The Dancers (c 1925), with its sinister old men chatting up even very small girls.

In 1931, in recognition of his long and successful career and works, he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

In today’s sanitised view of Impressionism, the movement appears gloriously sensual, but obsessed with the shallow and ephemeral. Forain had no interest in flowery meadows or the new picturesque. His Impressions show us the seamy side of society: its hedonistic nighttime pursuits of socialising, the sex industry, and the corruption of its organs of justice.

How marvellous it would be to see an exhibition of socially realist Impressions, rather than yet more beautifully bland landscapes. Or even a book in print about him, perhaps?

Reference

Wikipedia.

Probably his earliest surviving painting, this depiction of the popular Christian story satisfies convention, but shows signs of Bosch’s developing originality and genius.

The Artist: Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450–1516)
The Painting: The Adoration of the Magi (catalogue raisonné no. 10)
Dates: c 1470-80
Media: oil and gold on oak panel
Dimensions: 71.1 x 56.7 cm
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 1913), New York, NY
Credits: Photo Rik Klein Gotink and image processing Robert G. Erdmann for the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story of the adoration of the infant Christ by three wise men, kings or Magi “from the east”, is one of the most popular and enduring among paintings in the Christian canon. The outline given in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 2 verse 11, had become elaborated by convention. Three wise men had seen a new star – possibly a comet or an unusually bright planet – which they believed would lead them to the birth of a great prophet. They travelled by the guidance of that star, to arrive at Bethlehem.

There they found the newborn Christ with Mary his mother, paid homage to him in the shed in which the holy family was lodging, and presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

The painting

The painting shows, at its centre, the naked infant Christ sat up on the Virgin Mary’s lap. She wears her customary blue robes, which flow out onto a dais covered with folds of gilt fabric. Her eyes look down at the infant. To the left, and closer to the viewer, an old Joseph kneels, supporting himself on a walking stick.

The Magi are shown in front of Mary and Jesus, in the lower right of the panel. The first to pay homage kneels to present a golden ewer and basin. He has removed his hat, which incorporates a gold coronet. Deeper into the view are his colleagues: the nearer, apparently from Africa, bearing a spherical ciborium of frankincense which is decorated with a phoenix, and the third holding his Gothic ciborium containing myrrh. In the centre foreground is a seated dog with a collar.

This homage is set in the ruins of an old castle, shown in deep perspective projection. The left wall has a small round tower, at the foot of which is an open area where an ox and the hindquarters of an ass are visible. Peeping out from a window in the wall is the face and hands of a man. There is a larger window along the right wall, through which two shepherds are leaning, one warming his right hand over a small open fire. Above them four angels spread a large green tarpaulin to provide some shelter, and a fifth is just peeping up from the top of the tower.

In the distance is a rich rolling coastal landscape, with shepherds tending their flocks, scattered trees and small woods, a walled town with a tower, and a large castle at the mouth of a river. There are also signs of a military conflict, with three small armies on the move, each bearing flags. On the bank just below the bridge at the right, crows pick at the skeleton of a dead animal. Further in the distance, on the bank opposite the large castle, a body hangs from a gibbet.

At the very top, in the centre, a bright star is visible even in the daylight.

Composition

More commonly shown as a linear or even frieze-like format, the adoration of the Magi has also been painted showing depth in the ‘portrait’ orientation. Bosch’s approach is unusual in several respects, in setting the scene in a castle with stone walls, and in aligning the viewer to look down its length. Combined with its detailed landscape, it gives the view a very unusual appearance of great depth behind the key actors in the foreground.

Painted less than a century after the ‘discovery’ of linear perspective projection in Florence, and early in Bosch’s career, it is not surprising that its perspective projection looks slightly awkward. The (single) vanishing point for the stonework appears to be directly above Mary’s head, just below the background tree, which would of course be incompatible with that background.

Details

The key actors and objects in the painting are completed in fine detail, with very effective modelling of volumes and surfaces. To some extent their detail and quality contrasts with the simpler rendering of the floor, and to a lesser extent the walls, which give the impression of pastiche or collage, particularly in the shepherds leaning through the window.

Unlike many later paintings of the adoration of the Magi, Bosch keeps this relatively simple, and does not crowd Mary and Jesus out with trains of camels, passing cattle, and sundry assistants. This keeps attention on the most important figures of Mary and Jesus.

Bosch’s rich imagination is, though, starting to take hold of some of the periphery, where he adds fascinating but irrelevant details: the fifth angel struggling from the top of the tower, birds and vegetation in the top window of the tower, the small fire to warm the shepherds, a pot and staff left on the top of the wall at the right edge, and the many slightly more sinister incidents occurring in the landscape.

His landscape is in keeping with the tradition developed by Jan van Eyck and others in the Northern Renaissance, and is much more natural and populated than those typical of Italian painters of the time.

History

In the early twentieth century, this was considered to be a geniune painting by Bosch’s own hand. However, in 1937, de Tolnay listed it as contested, describing it as “a pastiche”, and it fell from favour thereafter. Its status was re-evaluated in 2002, and it was proposed that it should be returned to the list of Bosch’s own works.

Since then the major Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) has undertaken extensive and detailed analysis, particularly of the dendrochronology (tree ring dating) of the wood panels on which it was painted, and of the underdrawing, which was performed using a brush, which was Bosch’s favourite technique. Their evidence is presented in detail in the 2016 catalogue raisonné, and makes a very strong case for this work being attributed to Bosch himself.

Although it has been suggested that this painting was one of a triptych showing scenes from the life of Christ, there is little evidence to support that, and many experts now consider that it was commissioned alone.

References

Wikipedia.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij et al. (2016) pp 216-223 in Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné, Yale UP and Mercatorfonds. ISBN 978 0 300 22014 8.

Contemporary romantic poems and the legends of the mythical King Arthur of Britain of around 500 CE were central themes in much of Pre-Raphaelite art. Although never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself, Arthur Hughes (1832–1915) ‘converted’ to its ideals and style in 1850. He had studied at the School of Design in London from 1846, and progressed to the Royal Academy Schools the following year.

Over the period from 1850 to 1875, he painted several of the popular Arthurian legends, and related stories. From 1855 onwards, he started illustrating books, and his drawings achieved fame alongside the texts of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days, and Christina Rossetti’s poetry.

His son, Arthur Ford Hughes (1856-1914) was a less well-known painter, and he was the uncle of Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914).

Ophelia

Of his leading female roles, Shakespeare’s Ophelia (Hamlet) and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) have been the most popular with artists. Hughes’ first painting of Ophelia (c 1851-3) was started soon after his initial success in exhibiting his Musidora (1849) at the Royal Academy, and was one of his first Pre-Raphaelite works.

It shows Ophelia sat under a willow tree, by the stream in which she is shortly to drown herself, having been driven to madness by Hamlet’s murder of her father, and his rejection of her love. To ensure that the viewer is in no doubt as to the moment which he shows us, Hughes inscribed the relevant lines from Hamlet Act 4 Scene 7 around his painting.

Although it meets the criteria for a narrative painting, with its forward reference in the stream, it conveys no sense of the imminent tragic outcome, relying on the viewer’s own knowledge of the original play. It was John Millais who painted the story’s resolution at almost exactly the same time, in his Ophelia (1851-2), showing Ophelia’s drowned body in the water.

Another interesting comparison, outside Pre-Raphaelite circles this time, is with Jules Bastien-Lepage’s unfinished Ophelia (1881), in which her face expresses strong emotion, and her toppling into the water seems imminent.

A decade later, Hughes returned to this story, in his Ophelia (“And will he not come again?”) (c 1863-71). This time he refers to an earlier moment in the play, in Act 4 Scene 5, just after Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, when Ophelia, already “distracted”, sings:
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead;
Go to thy deathbed;
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God ‘a’mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God b’ wi’ you.

Despite that reference to a scene which takes place inside the castle, Hughes has painted Ophelia some minutes before her drowning, when she is picking wild flowers and standing in front of an old willow tree which overhangs a much more substantial body of water. The latter is almost black in the deep shade, and is revealed as water only by the presence of a few bright reflected objects on its surface. Rather than picturing a moment closer to the tragic climax of this story, Hughes has moved slightly away from it, and its reading is just as reliant on knowledge of the original play.

The Eve of St Agnes (1856)

While Hughes was studying at the Royal Academy Schools, Holman Hunt painted his The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes) (1848). This is based on John Keats’ poem The Eve of St. Agnes (1819).

Madeline has fallen in love with Porphyro, who is an enemy to her family. Older women have told Madeline that she can receive sweet dreams of love on the night of St. Agnes Eve, which precedes the day on which the patron saint of virgins is celebrated (21 January). On that night, Porphyro gains entry to the castle in which Madeline lives, and looks for Angela, who remains a friend to his family despite the feud.

Angela reluctantly agrees to take him to Madeline’s room, so that he can gaze at her sleeping there. Once there, he hides in a large wardrobe, and watches her prepare for bed, seeing her full beauty in the moonlight. He then creeps out to prepare a meal for her, but she wakes partially, and seeing the same figure which she had just been dreaming, takes him into her bed. She then wakes fully and realises her mistake. They declare their mutual love before escaping from the castle past drunken revelers, and flee into the night.

Rather than Holman Hunt’s elaborate and ingenious composition, Hughes opts for a triptych, read from left to right. At the left, Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre, he has woken Madeline, who has not yet taken him into her bed. At the right, he almost quotes from Holman Hunt’s version, showing the couple’s escape over drunken revellers. There is also a second, undated version in the Ashmolean, Oxford, in which the painting at the left shows a slightly later moment, where Porphyro meets Angela at the entrance to the castle.

Once again, Hughes felt the need to provide the viewer with an excerpt of the original text:
They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
And supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

This painting was very well received when shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, with the critic John Ruskin, and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti being enthused by it.

Aurora Leigh’s Dismissal of Romney (‘The Tryst’) (1860)

Miss Ellen Heaton, one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s patrons and a friend of writer Elizabeth Barret Browning, commissioned Hughes to paint a scene from Browning’s poem Aurora Leigh (1856). That tells the story of Aurora, an orphan who was brought up by her aunt and aspires to be a poet. On the morning of her twentieth birthday, her cousin Romney Leigh proposes marriage to her, which she rejects in favour of her chosen path as a poet. Romney disparages her writing and wishes her to devote her time to his philanthropic work. But Aurora says:
Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:
You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir.
A wife to help your ends,
in her no end!

Hughes’ painting shows Romney at the left, a decidedly androgynous figure, just after his rejection, about to take his leave of Aurora. She stands clutching a book of her poetry, which he has just been making fun of. Both stare wistfully into the distance, but neither at the other. Romney’s hat was reworked twice; as its paint has become less opaque over time, traces of the earlier forms can be seen.

Its narrative effect is curious. It does contain the backward reference of the book of poetry, but the moment chosen is sufficiently after the climax of the story to make the painting look static and only weakly narrative. Miss Heaton had wanted Hughes to show the quarrel leading to the rejection; the critic John Ruskin was brought in to mediate, and sided with Hughes. The painting was not shown to the public in Hughes’ lifetime, and it was only in 1964 that Rosalie Mander rediscovered it and established its obscure story.

Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail (1870)

The Holy Grail, a central theme in many tales of Arthurian legend, was a vessel with magical powers which range from providing happiness to eternal youth and food. It was originally supposed to have fallen from the sky, but in the twelfth century became entangled with the legend of the Holy Chalice, the vessel used to serve wine at Christ’s Last Supper, and further enhanced when later writers claimed that it had also been used to catch Christ’s blood when he had been taken down from the cross.

Hughes’ painting of one of the more prominent knights of the Round Table of Camelot in quest of the grail is dominated by the neutral and protective ‘grail angels’, who cast their golden light over the night scene. This was probably based on Tennyson’s poem The Holy Grail published in 1869 as part of his collection of Arthurian legends retold in The Holy Grail and Other Poems. This may represent the moment when, having left Sir Percivale behind, Galahad is taken up to a heavenly city in a boat like a silver star.

The Lady of Shalott (c 1872-3)

Many of the Pre-Raphaelites painted The Lady of Shalott, taken from Tennyson’s Arthurian ballad of that name, published in two versions, in 1833 and 1842. It was elaborated from the story of Elaine of Astolat, as retold in the obscure thirteenth-century Italian novella Donna di Scalotta.

This Lady lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She is subject to a mysterious curse which confines her to weaving images on her loom, and must not look directly at the outside world (she can use a mirror, though, to view it). One day, while she sits and weaves, she catches sight of the knight Lancelot. His appearance is such that she stops weaving and looks out of her window directly towards Camelot, invoking the curse. She then abandons her castle, and finds a boat on which she writes her name. She floats in that boat downriver to Camelot, dying before she arrives there. Lancelot sees her body, and the poem ends:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Walter Crane’s painting of 1862 shows the classical end-point, of the Lady dead in her boat in a wood near the castle.

Hughes chose the same moment, which is after the climax of the story, but brings in not Sir Lancelot to voice his short eulogy, but a nun and four peasant women instead.

Later still, JW Waterhouse (1888) preferred to show the Lady, already suffering the consequences of the curse, as she sets out to drift downstream.

Conclusions

Arthur Hughes’ narrative paintings may meet the definition of narrative, in having forward or backward references, but are generally static tableaux. Where there is the potential for action, as in his Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail (1870), that is exploited little. This is in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite approach to narrative.

His earlier narrative paintings, in particular, were reliant on inclusion of text quotations on the canvas, and most needed the viewer to be very familiar with the written source of the story. Although effective, this limited their accessibiity and appeal.

References

Wikipedia

Poulson C (1999) The Quest for the Grail, Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920, Manchester UP. ISBN 978 0 7190 5537 9.

Unless you happen to have studied Symbolism, or have visited galleries in Poland or the Ukraine, you are most unlikely to have seen the amazing paintings of Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929).

He was born in Radom, a city to the south of Poland’s capital Warsaw, when it was controlled by the Russian Empire. He moved to Kraków at the age of 17, and trained there in the School of Fine Arts. In 1876 he went to Paris, and studied for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts with Henri Lehmann, also attending the Académie Suisse.

When he returned to Poland in 1879, the country had been partitioned. He based himself in Kraków, visiting Paris, Munich and Vienna fairly regularly until the First World War, as well as making two trips to Italy, and an archaeological expedition to Greece and Turkey. He served as Professor in the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1897 to 1900, and again from 1912 to 1921. His paintings were exhibited and attained high recognition in many international salons, including those of Berlin and Munich in 1892, and in Paris in 1900.

Melancholia (1890-4) is one of Malczewski’s greatest and most brilliant works, in every sense. Its dense parade of figures streaming across the studio summarises the struggles of the Polish people over the previous century’s succession of partitioning and uprisings. This cornucopia of figures contains the heights of heroism and aspiration, and depths of suffering, but eventually sinks into the lethargy and apathy which developed during the late 1800s.

In the years around the turn of the century, Malczewski worked and reworked the theme of death in a series of paintings, of which Thanatos (1898-9) was the earliest. Here, the Greek myth has been revised completely from its traditional male guise. The figure of death is a young woman, still bearing her symbolic scythe, but closely allied with Eros. Naked under her scant scarlet robes, she sizes up an old man who is cowering at his window.

His next examination of the theme, Thanatos II (1899), takes place under the cold moonlight of the artist’s mansion in Gardzienice. Holding her scythe, Thanatos has regained her traditional wings, which seem more butterfly than bird. Behind her the mansion looks to be burning, figures and several dogs gathered on the lawn in front of it.

Then in Death (1902), her skin assumes the ghastly green of the putrefying corpse, as she closes the eyelids of a figure of the artist himself.

Medusa (1900) shows another recurrent theme, that of the Gorgons from Greek myth. Here the snakes which adorn Medusa’s hair curl and sweep in symmetry, amid more natural locks.

In his Portrait of Tadeusz Błotnicki with Medusa (1902), Malczewski combines the image of his contemporary and friend, the distinguished Polish sculptor Tadeusz Błotnicki (1858-1928), with an attending Medusa.

Portrait of The Actress Helena Sulima as a Gorgon (1903) is another unusual portrait, this time casting its subject in the role of Medusa or one of her sister Gorgons. Helena Sulima (1882-1944) had already become a successful actress in Polish theatre, and in 1912 debuted in her film career, which was to last until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Malczewski painted a series of works showing scenes from the Old Testament story of Tobias, the son of Tobit, taken from the Book of Tobit. The first, Angel, I will follow you (1901) shows Tobias as a young boy meeting his guardian angel. Although largely forgotten now, this story had been painted by Verrocchio, Filippino Lippi, and the Pollaiuolos in the past.

Polish Hamlet – Portrait of Aleksander Wielopolski (1903) is an incisive political commentary on the career of Aleksander Ignacy Jan-Kanty Wielopolski (1803-1877), who was head of Poland’s civil administration under the Russian Empire, from 1862 to 1863. An aristocrat and conservative, he was sent to London to try to obtain the assistance of the British government during the 1831 November Uprising in Poland. He then wrote a controversial letter responding to the Galician massacres in 1845, and tried to stop the growing Polish national movement in 1863. However, in forcing the conscription of young Polish men into the Russian Army, he provoked the January Uprising of 1863, which forced him to flee into exile in Dresden.

I believe that Wielopolski is here shown in the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Ophelia at the left, and Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, at the right, the two women representing the Polish nation.

In his The Artist and The Chimera (1906), Malczewski returns to his innovative re-interpretation of classical Greek mythology. His chimera is part woman, part eagle, its fearful claws scratching at the artist’s bare chest as he lies captive under it. Chimeras were a theme in several of his paintings, but were usually less predatory or threatening.

In Saint Francis of Assisi (1908) Malczewski modernises the Fates (Parcae) in this fascinating allegorical portrait, starring the artist in the title role.

All three Fates appear similar, with similar clothing, hair, and features. Clotho is at the left, with a pink apron, Atropos holds a modern pair of scissors rather than the traditional shears, and has a light purple apron, and Lachesis is on the other side of St Francis, with a pale blue apron. The right of the painting contains a group of semi-human mythical creatures, rather than the traditional birds and small animals typically associated with this saint.

Eloe (1909) is a very complex pair of intertwined figures developed from his theme of winged angels. The female stood in the foreground appears to be winged, and there is a recumbent figure behind her, who seems to be resting on feathered wings which girdle the first angel. The symbolism here has perhaps become a little too obscure to be readily interpreted.

Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1911), which casts Malczewski in the title role, is a simpler composition showing the New Testament story. The model used as the Samaritan woman looks to be Maria Bal or Balowa (née Brunicka), his favourite model and believed to have been his long-term mistress.

Finally, Malczewski’s Portrait of Brigadier Józefa Piłsudskiego (1916) shows this hero and Chief of State, who was so important in the building of the Second Polish Republic after the First World War. Józef Klemens Piłsudski (1867-1935) was sent to Siberia in 1887 following a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III, imprisoned in Warsaw Citadel in 1900 for operating a socialist underground printing press in Łódź, and a leader in the building of Polish military forces in anticipation of the First World War.

Behind the image of Piłsudski are faint dancing wraiths in the form of skeletons.

This is a tiny sample of Malczewski’s extensive works which I hope gives some impression of his brilliant and distinctive paintings, and his importance in Symbolism. Search the major collections outside Poland, though, and you will be very lucky to find a single work of his: The Tate in London, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Met in New York have not a single work between them. The only places that you are likely to see many of his wonderful paintings are in Poland and the Ukraine.

References

Wikipedia.
Culture.pl – an excellent account in English.