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Painting a good story: Polymythic
Polymythic paintings are probably the least common type of narrative art, as they are single images containing two or more distinct stories. However, they’re among the most distinctive and fun to read,...
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Hero or hooligan: Orpheus in the underworld
Not all heroes of the Greek and Roman civilisations in classical times were swashbuckling warriors. Among those who achieved fame for their more cerebral skills was Orpheus, the great Thracian bard, an...
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Painting a good story: Multi-frame
Multi-frame narrative paintings consist of a single image containing two or more picture frames used to tell a story. Frescoes, the most common medium for older narrative paintings, can complicate, as...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles killed by the hydra’s blood
Having won her hand by defeating Achelous at wrestling, Heracles married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city when the couple reached the River Euenus, still in spate...
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Painting a good story: Multiplex returns
Multiplex narrative, in which a single painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, had all but died by the end of the Renaissance. The quest for greater realism had...
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Hero or hooligan: Heracles wrestles for a wife
Once Heracles was able to wear his lion-skin and wield his club again, when he had expiated his sins in servitude to Queen Omphale, he resumed his adventurous lifestyle. After Ilus had founded the city...
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Painting a good story: Multiplex peak and decline
A multiplex narrative painting contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story, merged together in a single image. At the height of their popularity during the Renaissance some...
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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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