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Patrons and painters: Rubens the diplomat
When Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was admitted as a master to the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp in 1598, that part of Europe was extremely turbulent. To the north, the Protestant Netherlands had...
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Orlando Furioso: Orlando victorious, and Rinaldo in pursuit of Angelica
Orlando, his brother Oliver, and Brandimarte have been fighting King Agramante, Gradasso and King Sobrino on the island of Lampedusa. With Brandimarte just about to cut Agramante’s throat, he is killed...
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Raphael and Painting: 9 The Loggia Frescoes
Following the architect Bramante’s death in 1514, Raphael was appointed his successor. Although relatively little of the constructional work which he undertook for Pope Leo X survives, one of the gems...
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Gustave Moreau and Symbolism: Oedipus and the Sphinx
Three times the aspiring artist Gustave Moreau had tried to turn his new concept for history painting into a canvas for the Salon, and had to abandon. Over the winter of 1863-64 he made a fourth...
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Gustave Moreau and Symbolism: Salome
For artists like Gustave Moreau who remained in Paris, the Franco-Prussian War and the violence, destruction and death of the Commune in its aftermath must have been terrifying. Yet it was also a...
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A Blossom Festival in paintings 1
This year, you may have been reduced to viewing the cherry blossom in Japan and Washington DC online. In a bid to help us all get our springtime dose of tree blossom, today and tomorrow I’m showing a...
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A Blossom Festival in paintings 2
In the first of these two articles yesterday, I looked at a selection of paintings of tree blossom spanning much of the nineteenth century. This sequel takes the account on to just before the Second...
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Gustave Moreau and Symbolism: Jupiter and Semele
In the previous two articles in this series, I looked first at Gustave Moreau’s narrative painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), in which he told a story from classical myth and added symbols which...
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Patrons and painters: Titian and the bluestocking poet
In 1531, Titian had already established himself among the ranks of the great masters like Raphael and Michelangelo. In March of that year, he received a commission to paint what became one of his most...
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Orlando Furioso: Travellers’ tales
Rinaldo, riding furiously down Italy towards Orlando, has been put up for the night in a palace, where he’s shown an enchanted goblet which his host promises will tell whether his wife is faithful....
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Raphael and Painting: 10 Last easel paintings
While Raphael oversaw the painting of frescoes in the loggia of the Palazzo Apostolico in the Vatican, he and his workshop continued work on many easel paintings. Raphael (1483–1520) and workshop, The...
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Agaves and the Country Estate: paintings of Victor Borisov-Musatov
Among the Russian painters associated with Mikhail Vrubel and Symbolism in the early twentieth century is Victor Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905). Described on Wikipedia as mixing “Symbolism, pure...
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Pro-Raphaelite…
Aside from his exceptional corpus of paintings, Raphael’s legacy to art can be summarised in three general advances: the assimilation of other styles, as Raphael learned from contemporary advances by...
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… or Pre-Raphaelite
Yesterday I showed examples of paintings which developed Raphael’s legacy. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a small group of young artists decided that they wanted to return to what they argued...
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Raphael and Painting: 11 In memoriam Raphael
At around ten o’clock in the evening of Good Friday, 6 April 1520, the artist and architect Raphael died in the Vatican in Rome, following a short fever. He was only thirty-seven, but in the course of...
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The collector who taught Poussin classics
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) took three attempts to get to Rome. On his first journey there in 1617 or 1618, he got as far as Florence, where he suffered some sort of accident, and was forced to return...
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Orlando Furioso: A funeral but no wedding
Rinaldo has raced down the length of Italy and caught a ship to take him to the island of Lampedusa. He arrives there just as Orlando and Oliver have won their victory, and Agramante and Gradasso lie...
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Russian Folk Tales of Viktor Vasnetsov 1
Sometimes labels can be very misleading. I saw the Russian artist Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1848–1926) labelled as a Symbolist, but then when I looked at his paintings more closely I saw one of...
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Russian Folk Tales of Viktor Vasnetsov 2
By the late 1880s, Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1848–1926) had established himself as the leading Russian painter of folk tales. He was living in Kiev, in the Ukraine, where he worked with Mikhail...
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Mark of the Unicorn in paintings 1
Unicorns aren’t legendary beasts at all. In classical Greek times, they didn’t feature in myth or legend, but in the natural histories written by Strabo and others. Artists well into the Renaissance...
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