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Reading visual art: 145 Divine flight
Just as humans have always wanted to fly, the ability has commonly been ascribed to those elevated to the status of god or goddess. While some systems of belief have been happy to award all their...
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Sea of Mists: German Romantic painters
This series of articles looks at the German Romantic painters, their influences, paintings, and those that they influenced. This article provides a brief overview with links to each of the individual...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Yellow
As we near the end of this alphabet of landscape painting, this week we reach the letter y, standing for yellow, one of the most important and versatile colours in the artist’s palette. It’s most...
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Heroines 9: Blood of a centaur and the troubled woman
Paintings only too easily become separated from their original titles. Devoid of that crucial clue, Evelyn De Morgan’s full-length portrait of an overtly troubled woman, above, becomes an insoluble...
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Heroines 10: Ariadne’s revenge
Among Ovid’s Heroines, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one who not only survives, but emerges from her crisis rather well in the end. The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her...
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Changing Paintings: 31 Rejuvenating Aeson
Following Ovid’s brief summary of the adventure of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Book 7 of Metamorphoses continues his account of Jason and Medea with an unusual myth about human rejuvenation. Once...
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Reading visual art: 146 Swimmers in narrative
Painters have often used collections of nude women in or near water to appeal to their male patrons, but relatively few have depicted people actually swimming. In this and tomorrow’s articles I examine...
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Reading visual art: 147 Swimmers in views
If paintings of swimmers have been rare in narrative, they have been landmarks elsewhere, where some of the most significant paintings in the Impressionist canon are those painted by Claude Monet and...
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A to Z of Landscapes: Zeitgeist
For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art. Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538),...
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Edward Poynter’s classical stories: 1 to 1880
In his day, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was one of the most eminent and influential British artists, but like so many in the later years of the nineteenth century, his work was soon reviled with the...
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Bonington’s brilliant decade of landscape paintings: 1
In the first half of the nineteenth century Britain had three landscape painters of international repute: John Constable (1776–1837), whose work sold better in France than in England, JMW Turner...
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Bonington’s brilliant decade of landscape paintings: 2
The first of these two articles on the short life of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828) left him at the end of 1825, established as a successful painter of watercolour landscapes, many of which were...
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Changing Paintings: 32 Medea’s murder by proxy
Up to this point in his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s account of the sorceress Medea has told of her better achievements, in enabling Jason to win the Golden Fleece, and to rejuvenate his father Aeson. Such...
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Reading visual art: 148 The horse in myth and legend
Since its domestication somewhere on the steppe of Ukraine and south-western Russia around five millennia ago, humans have been dependent on the horse as a means of transport and drawing wheeled...
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Reading visual art: 149 The horse in later narrative
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the horse in narrative, I showed examples from classical myths and legends, culminating in that of Saint George and the dragon. This leads to the...
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Edward Poynter’s classical stories: 2 from 1880
By 1880, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was well-established as one of the leading artists of the day. Although he had painted some spectacular panoramas and some scenes from popular classical...
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The Real Country: Paintings of life in the countryside
If you have any interest in rural history, you may have noticed how few of its accounts are illustrated. There are extensive quotations from written accounts of life in the country, farming practice,...
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Heroines 11 & 13: Canace and Laodamia in secret
Two of Ovid’s fictional letters from heroines have become so obscure that their paintings have all but disappeared. To discover them we have to look in the collections of the Vatican, and in a...
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Heroines 12: The many faces of Medea
There are some mythological subjects that artists would do best to avoid, while others almost guarantee success. Medea, sorceress and jilted wife of Jason of Golden Fleece fame, is clearly one of the...
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Changing Paintings: 33 The origins of Theseus
Ovid tells one final story about the downfall of Medea after she has married King Aegeus in Athens, linking back to the saga of Jason, and forward to his next thread telling the story of Theseus. As...
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