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Hero or hooligan: Heracles in drag
With his twelve labours for King Eurystheus completed, Heracles was absolved of his sin of killing his wife Megara and their children, and was granted immortality by Hera and Zeus. He then fell in love...
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Henri Regnault’s too brief history paintings
Today the best-known artist to die in the Franco-Prussian War is the French Impressionist Frédéric Bazille, but he wasn’t the only promising young painter to fall victim to that brief conflict: also...
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Painting a good story: Multiplex to 1600
A multiplex narrative painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, merged together in a single image. In its heyday during the Renaissance it was relatively common,...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 9-12
When Heracles returned to King Eurystheus with the mares of Diomedes, he should have had just two remaining labours to complete, making a total of ten. The next he was assigned was to acquire a belt...
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Painting a good story: Series after 1800
Most accounts of the history of narrative painting claim that it died during the nineteenth century. Although the stories told in visual art certainly changed, if anything there was more narrative...
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Brushstrokes: Lovis Corinth’s narratives
While landscape painters were racing through Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, those who painted figures in narratives, like Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), were negotiating their way...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 4-8
With the first three of what he thought were to be his ten tasks for King Eurytheus completed, Heracles went on to attempt to capture the Erymanthian Boar and bring it back alive to the king. Capture...
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Painting a good story: Series to 1800
The simplest way to tell a story in visual art is over a series of images, with each in the series depicting a single instant in time, then read by the viewer in sequence. This has been used throughout...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles’ labours 1-3
After the infant Heracles astonished his parents Amphitryon and Alcmene by strangling a couple of serpents in his crib, the seer Tiresias told them that he would vanquish numerous monsters, so it was...
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Painting a good story: Origins
For many centuries much of the population of Europe was illiterate, and their only sources of stories were those told orally, or depicted in paintings. With the exception of the Dutch Golden Age, those...
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Hero or hooligan: Birth of Heracles
Greatest of all classical Greek heroes was Heracles, also adopted by the Romans under the Latinised name of Hercules. While lesser heroes like Jason had short series of labours or tests of their...
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Hero or hooligan: Odysseus restored
The Phaeacians had spirited Odysseus back to a hidden harbour on the island of Ithaca while he was asleep. When he awoke, it took Athena to confirm that he wasn’t on yet another distant coast, but was...
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Hero or hooligan: Odysseus on Phaeacia
Calypso had detained Odysseus for seven years before he escaped from her island of Ogygia on a raft. He was then wrecked in a storm inflicted by Poseidon, and swam ashore on the island of the...
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Painting legendary self-sacrifice: Did the Horatii save Rome?
Publius Horatius Cocles, lone defender of Rome’s Sublicius bridge, came from one of the great families that made up the original Romans: the Horatiuses, or in Latin Horatii. By far the most famous of...
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Painting legendary self-sacrifice: Did Horatius Cocles save Rome?
Artists are no strangers to propaganda, and paintings often bear messages extending well beyond their artistic intentions. That’s most explicit in religious works, where expounding the values and...
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Hero or hooligan: Odysseus escapes the Sirens
At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she advised that he would have to sail past the Sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their death with their...
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Hero or hooligan: Odysseus with Circe
Odysseus and his crew had made haste to depart from the island where he had blinded Polyphemus to escape being eaten by him. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus...
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In memoriam Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov: 2, 1887-1926
One hundred years ago today, on 23 July 1926, the Russian painter of folk tales Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov died. By the 1880s he had established his reputation, and was living in Kyiv, Ukraine,...
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Hero or hooligan: The cunning of Odysseus
The one classical hero we know most about is Odysseus, whose ten-year journey back from the war against Troy is recounted by Homer in his Odyssey. However, there’s a surprising lack of information...
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In memoriam Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov: 1, 1874-82
The Russian artist Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1848–1926), who died a century ago, on 23 July 1926, was among the most prolific painters of folk tales. In this article and its sequel next week, I...
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