Ovid’s last substantial story in Book 6 of his Metamorphoses continues its gory trend: after the slaughter of the Niobids and the flaying of Marsyas comes one of his grimmest stories of rape and its avengeance.

The Story

Ovid links from the story of Pelops with a short iteration of kings, bringing him to King Tereus of Thrace, who was descended from Mars. He married Procne, daughter of King Pandion of Athens, but from the outset their marriage seemed ill-fated: Juno, Hymen and the Graces were absent from the ceremony, but the Furies held their wedding torches instead, and a screech-owl sat on the palace roof – an ill omen indeed.

Tereus and Procne had a son, Itys, and the whole of Thrace celebrated. Five years later, Procne pleaded with her husband to let her visit her sister in Athens, or even better, for her sister to come to visit her in Thrace. Tereus agreed, and set off without her to put this request to Pandion himself. However, when Tereus met his sister-in-law Philomela, he was beguiled by her beauty and immediately lusted after her.

Tereus was therefore delighted when it was agreed that Philomela should return to Thrace, to visit Procne. Pandion gave his unmarried daughter into Tereus’ trust, and the two set off to return to Thrace by sea.

Once they arrived in Thrace, Tereus dragged Philomela off to a cabin in the forest, where he raped her. Philomela was understandably horrified, shocked, and immediately told Tereus that she would shout out the truth of what he had done to her, when her father had trusted his son-in-law to take care of her.

Tereus drew his sword and grasped Philomela by the hair. She hoped that he was going to kill her, and offered him her throat. Instead of cutting her throat, Tereus grasped her tongue with tongs, cut it out, and raped her a second time.

Tereus then returned to Procne, who immediately asked about her sister; her husband then lied, and told her that her sister had died. Procne went into mourning for her.

A year later, still kept captive in the cabin in the forest, Philomela wove her story in red lettering on white cloth, using an old loom. She persuaded a woman to take it to the queen, who then read the truth as to what had happened to her sister.

It was just coming up to the three-yearly festival of Bacchus, so Procne’s overpowering desire for revenge against her husband was channeled into that occasion. Procne found the cabin, broke into it, dressed Philomela up as a Bacchante, and took her back with her to the palace. There Procne, in her rage, proposed to cut Tereus’ tongue out, gouge his eyes out, and castrate him.

Just then, her small son Itys came up to Procne. Mother noticed how closely her son resembled his father, and a new plan was quickly hatched. Procne pounced on her son like a tigress, and stabbed him; Philomela finished the job by cutting the boy’s throat. They then cooked parts of him ready to serve.

That night, Procne dismissed the servants, and convinced Tereus that he should dine alone, on his ancestral throne. Procne there served him with the flesh of his own son, which he ate, unknowing. Tereus then called for Itys, and Procne revealed that he had just eaten him. Philomela, still spattered with the boy’s blood, rushed in and threw the boy’s severed head at his father – and her rapist.

Tereus was beside himself with grief and anger, and chased the sisters with his sword:
Then with his sword he rushed at the two sisters.
Fleeing from him, they seemed to rise on wings,
and it was true, for they had changed to birds.
Then Philomela, flitting to the woods,
found refuge in the leaves: but Procne flew
straight to the sheltering gables of a roof —
and always, if you look, you can observe
the brand of murder on the swallow’s breast —
red feathers from that day. And Tereus, swift
in his great agitation, and his will
to wreak a fierce revenge, himself is turned
into a crested bird. His long, sharp beak
is given him instead of a long sword,
and so, because his beak is long and sharp,
he rightly bears the name of Hoopoe.

One contemporary insight which Ovid provides is the importance of oral testimony in a largely illiterate society. As Philomela was unable to communicate once Tereus took her power of speech away, she was driven to use the same medium as had been the downfall of Arachne early in this book: that of weaving her story into tapestry, although this time using words rather than images.

The Paintings

This long and gory story has not been painted very often, despite its frequent inclusion in literary works and plays. In many ways, its paintings reflect the history of narrative painting.

The first two well-known paintings were made within a few years of one another, by two of the finest narrative artists. Artemisia Gentileschi painted her Procne and Philomela Showing Tereus the Head of his Son Itys in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows the climax of Ovid’s story, when the sisters’ revenge is revealed to Tereus.

One of the sisters, presumably Philomela, thrusts Itys’ severed head into the face of Tereus, who shields his eyes with his forearm. Sadly the quality of this image is too poor to read the details around them, but in front of the king’s left foot is a large platter on which are some of the cooked remains of his son.

Rubens uses a similar composition for his Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636-38). The two sisters are still dressed as Bacchantes, with one carrying her thyrsus with her left arm, and their breasts are bared. Tereus is just reaching for his sword with his right hand, and his eyes are wide open in shock and rage. In the background, a door is open, and one of the court watches the horrific scene.

The other paintings of this story are all from the late nineteenth century, and reflect the problems which narrative painting was then going through.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Philomela (1861) is a delightful Salon-style portrait of Tereus’ sister-in-law, who is shown clutching a lyre and wearing a laurel wreath. I cannot see any reference in this painting to Ovid’s story, nor any trace of narrative.

In the same year, on another tondo, Bouguereau painted a double portrait of the sisters, Philomela and Procne (1861). This time they at least appear to be involved in some sort of Bacchantic festivity, with Procne holding a tambourine. This painting was even copied and slightly elaborated by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1837–1922), although again its relationship with Ovid’s story appears tenuous to say the least.

Shortly after that, Edward Burne-Jones made this pencil and watercolour study of Philomela (1864), which appears to have been abandoned. The subject is holding a weaving showing not her account in words, as stated by Ovid, but a cartoon-like sequence of images, which refer to her imprisonment, but not to her rape. Philomela’s left index finger points to her mouth, to indicate that she is mute.

It wasn’t until the last few years of his life that Burne-Jones seems to have fully realised an image of Philomela (1896). This wood engraving was an illustration of The Legend of Goode Wimmen in the Kelmscott Chaucer.

Philomela is shown at work on her weaving, which this time does bear some text, labelling the figures in its multiplex narrative. As in his earlier study, the story shown stops short before her rape, but shows Tereus and Philomela standing outside the entrance to a cave.

Thank goodness for Artemisia Gentileschi and Rubens, who had the moral and artistic courage to tell Ovid’s story straight: grim and gory it may be, but ultimately it repays the telling.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Pieter Brueghel (or Bruegel) the Elder was one of the founding fathers of modern painting; the more that I look at his work, the more amazed I am at his extraordinary innovation. In this article I will focus on his use of figures in some of the best of his landscape paintings, and try to show how profound and lasting his ideas and their influence have been.

(Throughout this article, I will spell his name as he did prior to 1559, as Brueghel, although from that date he signed his name without the h. This retains consistency with his earlier work, and with other members of his family.)

Although only about forty of Brueghel’s paintings survive today, they span the genres from religious and traditional narrative, to pure landscape. As with Poussin, stories are so pervasive in his paintings that it is very tempting to try to read all his paintings as being narrative in intent.

Although this is only a copy, possibly painted by de Momper, of Brueghel’s original, it illustrates effectively some of the dangers we face in reading a Brueghel. It would be easy to walk past Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and miss the story of Icarus altogether. All Breughel gives us is a pair of legs thrashing in the water, a few feathers floating down in the air above them, and a shepherd looking up at the sky.

The legs, of course, belong to Icarus, who has just plunged into the sea after flying too close to the sun. His father, Daedalus, is off beyond the upper left of the panel, being watched by the shepherd.

Brueghel also flooded his landscapes with figures in a manner which has remained very popular in different types of image even today. His best example is his encyclopaedic collection of Dutch Proverbs (1559).

Here the landscape is so contrived and the figures so extraordinary in their activities that they demand our close attention. Armed with a compendium of Dutch proverbs of the day, the painting finally makes sense. Here is just a small sample to whet your appetite.

These figures represent:

• to be armed to the teeth,
• to be an iron-biter (boastful and indiscreet),
• to bell the cat (being indiscreet about secret plans),
• one winds off the distaff what the other spins (spreading gossip),
• watch out that a black dog does not come in between (two women together do not need a barking dog to add to the trouble),
• one shears sheep, the other shears pigs (one has all the advantages, the other none),
• shear them but do not skin them (don’t press your advantage too far),
• to be as tame as a lamb (very obedient).

He repeated this the following year with Children’s Games (1560), which I also show below in a detail. This time the painting appears less contrived, and until you study the figures carefully, you might not notice that this work is an illustrated encyclopaedia of the games of childhood at the time.

Knowing that Brueghel might be out to trick us, we should be wary of a more innocent work, such as The Harvesters (1565), hailed by some as the ‘first modern landscape’ painting.

Are those country people just working on the harvest, in the way that Poussin’s harvesters are behind the narrative of his Summer (1664)?

Careful study of details reveals that there is narrative coherence through many passages of Brueghel’s painting. This not just a snapshot of a moment in the country, but a cunningly composed story. In the left foreground, the corn is being cut and stood into stooks. To the right is a group who are enjoying a meal under the shade of a pear tree.

In the left middle distance a haywain is being towed along a road leading to the farm. Behind that a covered wagon and a couple of pedestrians are making their way along a narrow lane, which passes through more ripe grain ready for harvest.

In the centre middle distance is a hamlet, alongside a brook. A group of villagers are playing a traditional game on the green.

At the far side of the field being harvested, and at the right edge of the painting, two people are collecting pears which are falling from the fruit tree growing there.

Together, these details tell the story of the production, harvesting, and consumption of food at the time of plenty, in the late summer. If Brueghel had placed an identical individual in each of the groups of people, I’d term it multiplex narrative, just like in so many other paintings of the Renaissance.

Compositions such as Dutch Proverbs, Children’s Games and The Harvesters are still popular in illustrations in modern children’s books. And I fancy many parents and other adults take great delight today in helping their children to read those illustrations, and sometimes even without the excuse of a child.

So are any of Brueghel’s landscapes with figures pure, and non-narrative?

One strong contender must be The Magpie on the Gallows (1568). Even here it has been suggested that there may be allusions to popular proverbs, such as ‘dancing on the gallows’ meaning mocking the state, or the folk role of the magpie as a gossip (with its origins before Ovid, and his story of the Pierides who were transformed into magpies), and gossip as being life-endangering in times of political tension.

The figures, though, shown in the detail below, are of country people dancing to the sound of bagpipes in a fairly normal rustic feast, and there seems nothing untoward about the splendid vista beyond.

If you still have reservations about that work, what about Brueghel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565)? There are no figures particularly close by, and those on the ice are not demonstrating the many different activities which they could be undertaking.

So these may be staffage in a pure landscape painting after all. It also happens that this was one of the first paintings to show Netherlandish people on the ice in the winter – a theme which became very popular with successive generations of artists from that part of Europe, and whose influence extended throughout Europe, and across centuries and styles.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s works may now be few in number, but their influence has been enormous.

Following Ovid’s long account of the grim story of the rape and mutilation of Philomela, he ends Book 6 of his Metamorphoses on a lighter and happier note, which also forms a bridge to the opening theme of the next book: Jason and the Argonauts.

The Story

Ovid uses a tenuous link to introduce Boreas, the north wind: Philomela and Procne were the daughters of Pandion, who died prematurely as a result of the events of the last myth. He was succeeded by Erechtheus, who had four sons and four daughters. Of his daughters, two were egregiously beautiful: Procris, who married Cephalus, and Orithyia, who was betrothed to Boreas.

After the disgrace of Tereus, the King of Thrace, Boreas, also a Thracian, was rejected by Erechtheus. This was despite Boreas’ attempts to reform his habits, which normally made him bitterly cold, stormy, and damaging.

Boreas decided to take matters into his own hands, flew down, and abducted Orithyia:
And now impetuous Boreas, having howled
resounding words, unrolled his rustling wings —
that fan the earth and ruffle the wide sea —
and, swiftly wrapping untrod mountain peaks
in whirling mantles of far-woven dust,
thence downward hovered to the darkened world;
and, canopied in artificial night
of swarthy overshadowing wings, caught up
the trembling Orithyia to his breast:
nor did he hesitate in airy course
until his huge wings fanned the chilling winds
around Ciconian Walls.
There, she was pledged
the wife of that cold, northern king of storms;
and unto him she gave those hero twins,
endowed with wings of their immortal sire,
and graceful in their mother’s form and face.

Ovid closes the book by telling us that their twin sons, Calais and Zeto, grew up to join Jason’s Argonauts.

The Paintings

Metamorphoses gives only a brief summary of this vivid story which was popular in classical times, to the point of being the subject of a now-lost play. The myth has remained popular in paintings since classical times, and makes an interesting theme with which to trace the history of painting, at least from the Renaissance to 1900. Here are my favourites.

Rubens painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia in about 1620, and the result is a fine work from one of the greatest narrative artists at the peak of his career.

Boreas is shown in his classical guise, as a roughly-bearded old man with wings, which comply in detail with Ovid’s description of their colour too. He is sweeping Orithyia up in his arms, while a cluster of Cupids are engaged in a snowball fight – a lovely touch of humour, and a subtle reference to winter.

A few years later, probably in about 1640, Giovanni Francesco Romanelli painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia. Here Boreas has made his getaway with Orithyia, and is flying over a wintry landscape with a Cupid escort.

Sebastiano Conca’s Boreas Abducting Orithyia from about 1720 shows Boreas taking off with Orithyia from a riverbank and her friends, some of whom are decorating a herm statue (at the right). However, without any reference to winter we have to take the identity of the couple on trust.

Francesco Solimena seems to have been the first painter to depict Boreas as a much younger man, in his Boreas Abducting Orithyia, Daughter of Erechtheus (1729). He has also elaborated the scene considerably, with Orithyia’s friends tugging at Boreas’ cloak to try to restrain him, Cupid preparing to shoot one of his arrows at Orithyia, and general panic ensuing. Again, there seems no specific reference to winter.

François Boucher delivers a full Rococo interpretation in Boreas Abducting Orithyia (1769). The lead actors seem far less engaged, with Boreas devoting his efforts to blowing his wind at Orithyia’s friends, and the ground to the right bearing witness to his destructive force.

In 1822, Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon’s romantic interpretation of Boreas Abducting Orithyia strips out all the other figures, and shows just the couple themselves. Boreas is now quite youthful, and Orithyia’s eyes are closed as if she is in a swoon, or asleep. Although the sky is dark and stormy, there is nothing wintry to indicate that this is Boreas rather than any other winged figure. Links to the original narrative are being lost.

Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 returns to a fuller and more classical account. Although not as old as in the earlier paintings, Boreas is no longer a stripling. Orithyia is trying to push his head away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne. Around them the spring flowers and trees are being blasted by his north wind.

My final selection is Evelyn De Morgan’s Boreas and Orithyia from about 1896. Boreas is now bearing Orithyia aloft, above quite rugged hills and water. He is younger again, and looks decidedly miserable. In addition to a pair of magnificent wings on his back, he has accessory wings on each heel. Long white and blue sheets wind calligraphically around the couple, but there is a lack of wintry symbols.

Those are eight wonderful paintings which really bring Ovid’s story to life. Personally, given a choice, I would want to take the Rubens and Mitchell’s paintings, which seem to have captured it best of all.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

One of my early projects on this blog was to rediscover some of the artists who had been members of the Impressionist movement, either by taking part in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, or who had painted in Impressionist style outside France.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement was perhaps less radical and more diffuse, and considerably less documented. Every so often I stumble across another artist who was associated with the movement in some way, who seems to have been abandoned on the wayside of art history. Even major artists who were outside the inner circle of the original Brotherhood, like John Brett, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and Marie Spartali Stillman, have been fading from records.

So it is for Charles William Mitchell (1854–1903). Born just after the dissolution of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and with his work dismissed as being “similar in many ways” to that of John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), even Wikipedia can only find sixty words to say about him. And despite the vast riches of the Internet, the sum of his artistic output can now be found in a handful of paintings and the interior design of one church.

Mitchell was brought up in Newcastle, where his father, Charles Mitchell (1820-1895), was a shipbuilder and munitions manufacturer who had originally come from Aberdeen, where he had studied engineering at the university. The Mitchell family lived in Jesmond Dene, to the north of central Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Nothing seems to have been recorded about Mitchell’s training or career.

The Spirit of Song is unfortunately undated, and shows a nude Muse-like figure holding a lyre, set in quite English-looking countryside. With its invocation of music, it may have been painted during a period of interest in the Aesthetic movement.

Mitchell’s best-known painting is that of Hypatia, which was completed and exhibited (perhaps at the Royal Academy) in 1885. It shows a beautiful young nude woman, her very long tresses clasped to her right breast. She is stood, leaning back against a carved stone altar, on which there is a crucifix and a bowl, on an altar cloth. She holds her left arm up, her hand open and gesturing towards a mosaic on the wall behind her, and looks anxious.

On either side of the altar are burning candles, long on tall floor-standing candlesticks. The flame of that at the left is being blown towards the altar, implying that a door to the left, in the direction of the woman’s gaze, is open.

The walls are decorated with mosaics; although the images of them shown are only fragmentary, they appear to be of religious motifs. That behind the woman shows a right foot which could be from an image of Christ crucified. A curtained door leads to a room behind the altar. Scattered on the floor are a white robe (presumably removed from the woman), a candlestick holder, and other debris.

The original story of Hypatia is a strange one. A Greek mathematician in Alexandria, she was a pagan philosopher who headed the Neoplatonic school there. Known for her dignity and virtue, she became embroiled in a bitter feud between Orestes, Roman governor of Alexandria, and Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, over local Jewish dancing exhibitions.

A fanatical Christian mob kidnapped Hypatia, took her to a Christian church, where she was stripped, tortured to death, and her body mutilated and burned.

Although Mitchell may well have been aware of the historical origin of this story, he was probably most influenced by Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, which was published in 1853, and quickly became very popular, and a favourite of Queen Victoria’s.

In Kingsley’s version, Hypatia is on the verge of being converted to Christianity when she is attacked by the Christian mob. She is then dragged to a Christian church, stripped naked by the mob, and torn apart under a large image of Christ. Modern criticism of the novel stresses its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

The passage in Chapter 29 which Mitchell portrays reads:

On into the church itself! Into the cool dim shadow, with its fretted pillars, and lowering domes, and candles, and incense, and blazing altar, and great pictures looking from the walls athwart the gorgeous gloom. And right in front, above the altar, the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, His right hand raised to give a blessing — or a curse?

On, up the nave, fresh shreds of her dress strewing the holy pavement — up the chancel steps themselves — up to the altar — right underneath the great still Christ: and there even those hell-hounds paused.

She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around — shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ appealing — and who dare say in vain? — from man to God. Her lips were opened to speak: but the words that should have come from them reached God’s ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again … and then wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs, and thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philammon’s ears.

(Quoted from Wikisource.)

Commentators have pointed out that John William Waterhouse’s painting of Saint Eulalia was also exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885, and has parallels in its voyeuristic tone, perhaps. But this young Christian girl was torn apart and burned by pagans for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods in Merida, Spain. The artist has transported her to the Forum in Rome, and shown her body unmarked by her vicious murder.

Waterhouse’s painting is now in the Tate Gallery, London. Mitchell’s is in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne.

In 1887, Mitchell’s father gave the land for, and funded, the construction of Saint George’s Church in Jesmond, which is in art nouveau style. The artist designed three large mosaic figures, and was involved in other aspects of its interior design.

I have recently shown Mitchell’s marvellous painting of The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia (1893), alongside other depictions of this myth, in which the North Wind abducts his betrothed by flying off with her.

This might be compared with Waterhouse’s near-contemporary Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus (1891) and Mariana in the South (c 1897), below.

Mitchell also painted some portraits, three of which are currently held by the University of Aberdeen, including this of Mrs Mary Niven (1894). I believe that she was the wife of Charles Niven, a distinguished Professor of Natural Philosophy at the university, and mathematical physicist.

Charles William Mitchell died in 1903, at the age of only 49. Presumably other paintings of his remain in private collections. Wouldn’t it do better justice to his art for them to seen by the public?

Reference

Details and images of the interior of Saint George’s Church, Jesmond, including the mosaic figures designed by Mitchell.

Paintings based on Arthurian legends became popular themes in the nineteenth century, particular for British artists who were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Just like classical mythology, there is no common source or agreed narrative for these legends. Although painters tended to rely on the more established literary sources of the day, they often proved as contradictory as much older accounts.

In Arthurian legend, there is a common thread which tells of a woman who falls in love with Sir Lancelot. Her love is unrequited, and she dies, her body travelling by river to King Arthur’s castle at Camelot. To many today, this is the essence of the story of the Lady of Shalott, as told in two versions of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem of that name, dating from 1833 and 1842.

Tennyson’s poems were in turn derived from a thirteenth century Italian novella Donna do Scalotta, rather than the better-known compilation of legends by Sir Thomas Malory published in reworked form in Le Morte d’Arthur.

But between 1859 and 1885, Tennyson published Idylls of the King, a cycle of twelve further narrative poems based more on Malory. One of those poems, Lancelot and Elaine, tells a similar story quite differently: that of Elaine of Astolat.

I will first summarise that story of Elaine, accompanied by paintings based on it, then the story of the Lady of Shalott.

Elaine of Astolat

Sir Lancelot is due to take part in a tournament, at which he will appear in disguise, for reasons relating to his secret affair with Queen Guinevere. The knight seeks the help of Bernard of Astolat, who lends him armour, colours and a shield. While he is borrowing these, Bernard’s daughter Elaine falls in love with him, and begs him to wear a token of her affection at the tournament – something which he finds difficult. Elaine is entrusted with his shield until Lancelot returns.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Lancelot’s shield.

Despite its confusing title, Edward Reginald Frampton’s Elaine, the Lady of Shallott (1920) shows a similar scene, with the shield tied to a lectern.

John Melhuish Strudwick’s painting of Elaine from 1891 is slightly more ambiguous: although Lancelot’s shield is shown in front of Elaine – clearly an object of some veneration – in the background to the left there is what appears to be a loom, and the shield could perhaps be interpreted as a mirror, both more evocative of the Lady of Shalott.

Lancelot wins the tournament, but is slightly wounded in the process. He recuperates in Bernard’s castle, with Elaine devotedly nursing him back to health. However, she learns that her love for the knight will remain unrequited. When Lancelot departs, Elaine wishes for death, and ten days later dies of a broken heart.

Elaine had made clear that on her death, she wished her body to be taken by boat to Camelot, bearing a last letter. Her wishes are followed by her father and brothers, who place her in a boat with one of their servants, who is stricken with grief at her death.

Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s Elaine (1870) is shown making that final journey, her dead hands holding her last letter and lilies. As with all paintings of this phase of the story, she is dead when placed in the boat, and accompanied by a servant.

It is not known who painted this, The Lady of Shalott reaches Camelot (before 1887), but Elaine’s body, complete with flowers and letter, and accompanied by the servant, has now arrived at Camelot.

King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, and the rest of the court come to receive it, all weeping in sadness at the young woman’s death.

Lancelot Speed’s illustration of Elaine in the Barge, for a 1912 edition of The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights, shows a more modest depiction of the same scene.

After this, Tennyson has Sir Lancelot wondering whether Elaine’s love had been more true than that of Queen Guinevere, and suffering from deep remorse as a result.

The Lady of Shalott

The story of the Lady of Shalott is not told in association with any related events at Camelot, and her origins are mysterious. She apparently lives in a castle which is connected with Camelot by river, and is subject to an equally mysterious curse. This confines her to weaving images on her loom, and forbids her from looking directly at the outside world.

John William Waterhouse’s third and final painting of this story gets its title from Tennyson’s poem: “I am Half Sick of Shadows” said the Lady of Shalott (1915). It shows her, thoroughly world-weary at her loom, with a large mirror facing the viewer, acting as her window on the world so that she does not fall foul of the curse.

But one day, as she is sitting and weaving, the Lady of Shalott sees Sir Lancelot in her mirror.

William Holman Hunt and Edward Robert Hughes’ The Lady of Shalott (1905) shows her thrown into chaos: she is so taken with the sight of the knight that she gets up and looks directly out of her window. Knotted up in the threads of her weaving, she knows that she has broken the curse, and will die.

She leaves the tower in which she has been confined, and goes down to the river, where there is a boat bearing her name.

Already weakening, she gets into the boat and casts it off from the shore, as shown in John William Waterhouse’s first painting of The Lady of Shalott (1888).

As the boat floats slowly down the river towards Camelot, she dies, as shown in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s The Lady of Shalott (c 1875, above), and the following paintings with the same title, by Walter Crane (1862) and Arthur Hughes (c 1872-73).

When the boat, bearing just the body of the Lady of Shalott, with neither flowers nor a letter, reaches Camelot, Sir Lancelot sees her for the first time:
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”

Interpretations in painting

Although the two stories have many similarities in literary terms, they have very different implications for the visual artist. Elaine’s is a tale of unrequited love made more interesting with its Arthurian setting, and offers opportunities to explore the thoughts and desires of a young woman in love with the impossible.

The Lady of Shalott’s story, as shown in the paintings above, is more complex, and has themes which are particularly relevant to the visual arts. These include the reality of images, seen directly or in reflection, or created by weaving, and the symbolic association of the thread of life, which was about to be broken for the Lady of Shalott.

References

Wikipedia on the Lady of Shalott.
Wikipedia on Elaine of Astolat.
(But note that even Wikimedia Commons merges its paintings under the single heading of the Lady of Shalott!)

Arthurian legend became very popular among artists of all media during the nineteenth century. Like all legends and myths, there are multiple sources and interpretations, and it is easy to get narratives confused. I hope that you enjoyed my recent comparison between the stories of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat: these quite different legends (which may, of course, have a common origin) have confused at least one painter, and Wikimedia Commons, which lumps them both together.

While I was writing that article, it occurred to me that this was an ideal hypertext for Storyspace, in which I could combine the three poems by Tennyson with the dozen or so significant paintings which were inspired by them. This article is the first of two or three in which I will describe how I am developing a Storyspace hypertext (which should also be eminently usable in Tinderbox) in response.

The content which I need to incorporate is:

• two versions (1833, 1842) of Tennyson’s short poem The Lady of Shalott,
• Tennyson’s much longer poem Lancelot and Elaine,
• about a dozen paintings which are based on those poems.

The three poems are thankfully available from Wikisource, and I already had almost all the paintings from my research for my earlier article, although I did locate an additional work showing Elaine of Astolat.

My design is to assemble the three poems in containers, to enable the reader to work through each in manageable sections. This is easy for The Lady of Shalott, which is divided into four parts; I intend providing a parallel text version of that poem, but will implement that later this week.

So each section of poem was then copied in from the Wikisource copy, and its sections joined up in sequence using normal links. Lancelot and Elaine is much longer, and required quite a lot of work to divide it up sensibly, then link all the sections in order.

My plan for the paintings was to place thumbnail images (no larger than 256 pixels in either dimension) in the relevant section of text, which would then link to a writing space (note) containing a larger version (maximum 1024 pixels) of the image and its caption. Those paintings would be placed in a gallery container, which can also be browsed separately from the poems.

At this stage I am not concerned with building a timeline: as with parallel text, I will cover that in the next article, once the main hypertext is complete.

To make life easier, I first created a series of prototypes, tucked away in a container named Prototypes. That container has the usual Action script to set the $IsPrototype attribute to true for all the writing spaces inside it, just in case I forget to do so myself.

At the moment, the prototypes merely set uniform colours for the tiles of each of the different types of content. When I come to assemble the timeline, they will be used a little more seriously.

With all the text sections and paintings placed in their respective writing spaces, I then pasted in thumbnails of each painting at the appropriate points in each poem. This is very quick and simple: in the Finder, I select the thumbnail image and use the contextual menu to copy it; I then locate the correct place in the writing space, and paste it there.

Painters tend to paint scenes in common with one another, so in several places in the text, I had two or more thumbnails in succession. In order to use these as ‘text’ links to the paintings, these need to be separated by a blank line. You can then place the cursor in the blank line before a painting, hold the Shift key, and click just to the right of the lower part of that thumbnail, to select the whole of the painting as the link anchor. This means that when the reader clicks anywhere on the thumbnail, they will be taken along that link.

Once all the paintings were in place in the Gallery, I switched from Map to Outline view and ordered them alphabetically. This may also reorder them in the Map view, so is worth doing before you place them in their final positions.

In previous projects, I had been stuck with images which were too large to look good on the tiles in the Map view. Here I have placed a thumbnail image first for each painting (not shown here), then the larger image. The images shown in the Map view are thus of the uppermost thumbnail, and are a much better size.

This does leave a thumbnail above every larger image, but that actually looks quite useful as a prefatory overview of the painting. The caption text is then placed and styled below the large image, following which are text links to take the reader back to their place in the poem.

Every painting shown here thus has one or two text links back to the poems. This is in itself a useful feature, as it allows a reader to browse the gallery and use its images to refer back to the poems.

The top-level Map view features a modified start writing space, made transparent, superimposed on one of the paintings as an adornment. There are the three containers for the poems, each listing the sections within, and the gallery container, likewise listing its paintings in alphabetical order. The Prototypes container and me writing space are tucked away out of view.

The introductory writing space is not finished yet, but starts with an introduction, details navigational controls and provides text links to get the reader started, and concludes with acknowledgements.

I intend adding links and references, and more editorial content explaining and summarising Tennyson’s narratives, and how the paintings fit in with them.

This initial version of the hypertext document – which works with Storyspace version 3.2 and later, Storyspace Reader, and Tinderbox 7 – is available here: Elaine&TheLadyOfShalott

I hope that you enjoy a little Tennyson with your paintings, and the other way around.

The seventh book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses starts with a series of myths concerning Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece. Although these take up the first half of this book, Ovid only summarises long and complex stories which are told more fully elsewhere.

They also present a problem in consistency of theme. For the Metamorphoses to provide reasonably comprehensive coverage of all the major contemporary myths, they are essential. But they lack the transformations which are promised by the title, and which Ovid has so far been able to maintain.

The Story

Ovid drops us into the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece just as Jason has learned of the three tasks he must complete to obtain the prize. Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, considers that her father’s demands are too harsh, and as a result feels torn between desire and reason. She recognises that she has fallen in love with Jason, and is already considering wild thoughts of marriage to him.

She resolves to provide him with every aid that she can to assist his mission, in the hope that this will ensure their marriage, and secure her future glory. Medea therefore goes to an old shrine to Hecate, where she meets Jason and teaches him how to use magic herbs to accomplish the tasks.

The following day, watched by the king, Jason succeeds in the first task of yoking a team of fire-breathing bulls, and using them to plough a field which had never been ploughed before. This is enabled by a herbal ointment provided by Medea.

As he is ploughing, Jason sows the teeth of a dragon, required for his second task. As with those sown by Cadmus before he founded the city of Thebes, those teeth instantly grow into an army who point their spears at Jason. Medea told him to throw a large rock into their midst, which draws their attention and they kill one another, instead of Jason.

Jason moves on to his final task, which will provide him with the Golden Fleece – but has to get past the dragon guarding it:
But the dragon, still
alert, — magnificent and terrible
with gorgeous crest and triple tongue, and fangs
barbed as a javelin, guards the Golden Fleece:
and Jason can obtain that quest only
if slumber may seal up the monster’s eyes. —
Jason, successful, sprinkled on his crest
Lethean juices of a magic herb,
and then recited thrice the words which bring
deep slumber, potent words which would becalm
the storm-tossed ocean, and would stop the flow
of the most rapid rivers of our earth:
and slowly slumber sealed the dragon’s eyes.
While that great monster slept, the hero took
the Golden Fleece; and proudly sailed away
bearing his treasure and the willing maid,
(whose aid had saved him) to his native port
Iolcus — victorious with the Argonauts.

The Paintings

Despite its sustained popular appeal in other artistic media, the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece has been painted remarkably little. Its best and most complete visual representation remains that painted by the Carraccis around 1583-84 in Bologna, one painting of which I show later.

Several artists, notably those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have explored the role of Medea, and her relationship with Jason at this stage of the story. In John William Waterhouse’s Jason and Medea (1907), Medea is depicted as a sorceress, preparing the potions which Jason was about to use to accomplish his tasks. Jason appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge.

Several other painters of this period made portraits of Medea alone; these are shown in my previous article.

The frescoes of the Palazzo Ghisilardi Fava in Bologna give a superb account through eighteen separate images. Although this work was directed by Annibale Carracci, it is thought that his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico also made significant contributions during the painting, between about 1583-84.

This work uses elaborate multiplex narrative to summarise much of Ovid’s account: at the left, two of the fire-breathing bulls are still yoked, in front of King Aeëtes. The army sprung up from the dragon’s teeth appear behind the wall, armed still with spears but no longer fighting.

In the foreground, Jason has put the dragon to sleep using Medea’s magic concoction, and is unhitching the Golden Fleece while he can. At the right, two of the Argonauts offer to help Jason (shown a second time) carry the fleece away.

Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865) bizarrely excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, one of the standard tools of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s later rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that is not borne out by the only clues which Moreau provides, in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Cooke has deciphered their Latin as reading:
nempe tenens quod amo gremioque in Iasonis haerens
per freta longa ferar; nihil illum amplexa timebo
(Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing)
et auro heros Aesonius potitur spolioque superbus
muneris auctorem secum spolia altera portans
(And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil)

These imply that we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, whilst Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was irretrievable amid his surfeit of symbols.

This is the sort of narrative which you would expect Rubens to have painted, and he did prepare some sketches of the motif. It was his pupil and collaborator Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607–1678), though, who produced a finished painting of Jason and the Golden Fleece in 1630, probably within Rubens’ workshop.

Following Rubens’ death in 1640, Quellinus went on to become his successor as the Master narrative painter of the day, although his works are far less known now than those of his teacher.

Although the later paintings have a certain fascination about them, I feel that they are perhaps contriving to be a little too clever. The story of Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece is nowhere told better than in the Carraccis’ original frescoes; sadly images available of them are of limited and variable quality, and do not do justice to the whole cycle, but I hope the one above has whetted your appetite for a visit to Bologna to see them for real.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

In the previous article, I built a Tinderbox/Storyspace document containing the full text of Tennyson’s three poems about, and thirteen paintings depicting scenes from, two Arthurian legends: Elaine of Astolat, and the Lady of Shalott.

This article describes two options for producing a composite or ‘parallel’ text version of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, and how to add a timeline. It takes that early document through to a test version for its final release.

Composite text

The two shorter poems, versions of The Lady of Shalott, would most easily be set in a two-column format so that you can compare them line by line. At present, that isn’t an option in Storyspace or Tinderbox; this may seem restrictive, but multi-column text would be very difficult to accommodate in resizeable windows on a wide range of display resolutions. It is bad enough in tightly-prescribed layouts such as PDF files.

My plan is therefore to append the later (1842) version of each of the four sections of the poem after its earlier (1833) version.

There are two straightforward ways of doing this: using Composite Notes, which work better with Tinderbox, or using included text, which works better with Storyspace.

Recent versions of Storyspace will display composite notes properly, but cannot yet create them. I therefore open my document in Tinderbox, and the first step is to create aliases to each of the notes (writing spaces) which are to form the composites. This is easily done by selecting them, and using the Make Alias command in the contextual menu.

Aliases are shown with their Map view text in italics, and lose their links on creation. I then cut them from their current single-poem container, and paste them into a new container for the parallel text version.

There it is just a matter of dragging each until they touch, in the correct pairs, and form composite notes. Note that selecting a composite now shows the two versions, one after the other.

A common problem is that the order of one or more composites is reversed. To fix that, open the Outline view, and drag the aliases (inside their new container) into the correct order. This will then be reflected in the text content.

I then link them together using plain links. One of the advantages of using this approach is that the thumbnail image links still work perfectly correctly, although this then poses the task of adding another text link to the bottom of each of those painting notes to return the reader to this composite version of the text.

The snag with using composite notes is that, while Storyspace displays them properly, it can have problems moving to a composite using a link: instead of seeing the composite, this may take the reader to just one of the notes, which is kludgy. After testing this, I decided to use the alternative system, based on included text. I saved the document from Tinderbox, and opened it again in Storyspace.

I had already, presciently, created a prototype ready for my composite texts. What I had not done was the important step of turning off Smart Quotes for that prototype. Because I am going to need plain double-quote characters in the include code, this will save me having to manually correct every one from its ‘smart’ form.

I then create the container for the composite writing spaces, and create each of them, set to my prototype. Their content is minimal: two include statements to bring in the text from the single-poem writing spaces, and a red line formed from underspace characters as a separator.

When I have got the details for the cited writing spaces correct, switching to Read mode brings across all the included content. The only disadvantage with using include is that, although the embedded thumbnail images are displayed, their links are not functional. Here, that makes life a bit simpler, as the paintings then don’t need return text links.

Timeline

I already have all the content that I need to make a timeline; I just haven’t yet added the event information to that content. I start by adding dates to the three poems. As their containers do not use a prototype, it is easiest to make $StartDate and $EndDate – the two attributes from the Events list which work with timelines – key for those three writing spaces, and there to insert the period of a year corresponding to the publication dates.

The other items which I want to appear on the timeline are, of course, the paintings. First I create a new prototype so that I can make clear visual distinction between paintings showing Elaine of Astolat and those showing the Lady of Shalott. I then make $StartDate and $EndDate key attributes for those two prototypes.

Then it is just a matter of opening the gallery container, selecting those writing spaces which need to have their prototype changed, and switching them over. Then for each painting I set those two Event attributes according to the date of creation of that painting, again using full years.

I have completed almost all my links, so this is a good time to make each of the link types invisible, or they will make the timeline a real mess.

I then open a new window, switch it to Timeline view using the command in the View menu, and drag the text section into a thin bar at the right. One important control to use here is adjusting the $TimelineEnd date. This usually has to be a little more recent than the last item displayed, so that its text is not clipped.

Tidying up

I have added some extra notes about the stories and their interpretation in painting, and one with a set of weblinks. I therefore reorganise the Map view to bring better order there.

I also need to revise the user instructions in the opening writing space, and add text links to the composite text, and to my additional notes, and return links back to here.

I finally work through each of the threads leading from that opening writing space, to check that everything is properly linked and fully functional. I additionally check that each works consistently across the current versions of Storyspace, Storyspace Reader, and Tinderbox.

Here is my test release, ready for you to open in any one of those three apps: Elaine&TheLadyOfShalott3

I hope that you enjoy it, and look forward to your comments.

Ovid opened Book 7 of his Metamorphoses with a brief summary of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, with emphasis on the role of Medea, the sorceress. He continues his cycle of Jason and Medea with a myth in which Medea is the principal actor, and which explores the unusual theme of rejuvenation by means of sorcery.

The Story

With Jason and his Argonauts returned to their homes, there is celebratory feasting. But one person is unable to take part: Jason’s father Aeson, who is too old and nearing death. Jason asks Medea, now his wife, if she can transfer some of his own youth to extend his father’s years.

Medea chides Jason for suggesting such an act, which Hecate forbids, but then tells him that she will go one better, and try (with Hecate’s consent) to rejuvenate Aeson without using any of Jason’s future life.

For three nights Medea engages in rituals to seek Hecate’s help, and the goddess sends down her chariot to help Medea prepare for the task. The sorceress then takes the chariot in her quest for the ingredients required for her magic potion. For nine days and nights, Medea flies round gathering herbs and other arcane substances from the corners of the world.

Medea then builds two turf altars, and slaughters a sheep before preparing her potion. She calls for Aeson to be brought out to her, and uses a spell to put him to sleep on a bed of magic herbs before sending Jason and others away. She purges the body of Aeson with water, sulphur, and fire, while her potion brews in a cauldron:
And while she stirred the withered olive branch
in the hot mixture, it began to change
from brown to green; and presently put forth
new leaves, and soon was heavy with a wealth
of luscious olives. — As the ever-rising fire
threw bubbling froth beyond the cauldron’s rim,
the ground was covered with fresh verdure — flowers
and all luxuriant grasses, and green plants.
Medea, when she saw this wonder took
her unsheathed knife and cut the old man’s throat;
then, letting all his old blood out of him
she filled his ancient veins with rich elixir.
As he received it through his lips or wound,
his beard and hair no longer white with age,
turned quickly to their natural vigor, dark
and lustrous; and his wasted form renewed,
appeared in all the vigor of bright youth,
no longer lean and sallow, for new blood
coursed in his well-filled veins. — Astonished, when
released from his deep sleep, and strong in youth,
his memory assured him, such he was
years four times ten before that day!

With Aeson now forty years younger, Bacchus (who has been watching this from heaven) asks for the recipe so that he can rejuvenate his own nurses.

The Paintings

Portrayal of the ‘dark arts’, particularly in a myth in which their outcome was a resounding success, was a contentious if not forbidden subject in Christian Europe. Few artists seem to have attempted this, and this story has been largely ignored by the Masters.

This monochrome image seems to be the only one available of Pellegrino Tibaldi’s fresco of Medea Rejuvenates Aeson, which he painted in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Medea, naked as became traditional in depictions of witchcraft, is shown purging Aeson’s body with water. Pellegrino relocates the event from outdoor turf altars to a more substantial indoor stone trough, around which are scattered jugs and other remnants from Medea’s sorcery. At Aeson’s feet are statues, the most prominent of which shows Hecate.

About a century later, Domenicus van Wijnen painted his Medea Rejuvenating Aeson (late seventeenth century), which invokes alchemy as well as witchcraft. Medea, naked again and reclining in Hecate’s golden chariot, points her wand at the body of Aeson lying on the ground, as she casts a spell. Above her, a glass sphere containing a small devil shoots a trail of flame and sparks like a rocket.

Medea is assisted by four putti and has what appears to be Hecate herself behind her, and a full moon is seen rising above the horizon. Scattered around the scene are objects associated with witchcraft, including a glass cauldron, a jar of brown liquid, a sacrificial knife, old books, and a burning candle.

Bartolomeo Guidobono’s Medea Rejuvenates Aeson from about 1700 is more of a puzzle to read, as Medea (now dressed in an unkempt and wild manner) is accompanied by two men. The near-lifeless and pale body of Aeson rests behind her, but a younger man – possibly the rejuvenated Aeson – is materialising under a table.

There is now a panoply of symbols associated with magic, including a snake and toad, large tomes of spells on top of which is a lizard, an open fire on a small stand, and an assortment of more normal animals including a dog, fox, and deer. The table in the background has further magical equipment, such as an orrery, and a bat is flying to the right of Medea’s head.

Corrado Giaquinto’s splendid Medea Rejuvenating Aeson from 1760 is theatrical in tone. Set outdoors by the arches of a large stone structure, three gods watch Medea work her spells. At the front of the trio is Diane, wearing a crescent moon as a diadem. To the right is Neptune with his spiked crown and trident, and to the left is (probably) Hecate.

Medea stands in a dramatic pose as if on stage, in the midst of casting a spell, her wand held over the inert body of Aeson, which rests on a bed of flowers and leaves. Behind that is a more Christian-looking altar, with candles burning at its sides. There is a cauldron heating over an open fire at the bottom right, and the body of a black sheep on a more classical altar to the left.

Sorcery and witchcraft became increasingly popular in the late eighteenth century as themes for painting and other arts, with some innovative works by Fuseli and others. Although those painters would have been well aware of this myth, it still doesn’t seem to have made its way onto canvas.

Popular interest in ‘gothic’ stories of revivification was inspired by the publication in 1818 of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but by this time narrative painting was in crisis, and Frankenstein’s monster does not seem to have been depicted in painting until the twentieth century. By then Shelley’s story had already appeared in plays and movies.

None of the Pre-Raphaelites seems to have shown any interest in portraying this particular story, but Frederick Sandys’ painting of Medea (1866-68) comes close. He shows Medea at work, preparing a magic potion. In front of her is a copulating pair of toads, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo.

Although Sandys’ portrait is a most effective depiction of Medea, it probably refers not to her rejuvenation of Aeson, but her preparation of potions for Jason. This leaves us with Giaquinto’s faithful account, and the curious failure of nineteenth century painters to respond to this and similar themes, for example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Most real landscapes contain real figures. Just as the Renaissance brought the realism of surface textures and optical effects to paintings, so it brought real figures to its realistic landscapes.

Not that anyone could paint a pure landscape in the fifteenth century, of course – they still had to be background views seen behind a figurative foreground, usually depicting a solemn religious scene. But there among the soaring rocky peaks, dense woods, green pastures, and post-mediaeval towns, are people.

These figures are characteristic of the miniature background landscapes which became popular in paintings of the northern Renaissance, the first great masterpieces painted using oil paints. Like their elaborate textured and patterned fabrics and precise reflections, the figures are minute details in small views within relatively small paintings. Every man, woman, horse, and cart is a tiny jewel.

One of the earliest and best-known examples is in Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c 1435). Look behind the figures, beyond the open arches, in the detail below, and two small figures stand at the castellated wall, their backs towards the viewer. Go even deeper into the painting and there are crowds crossing the bridge, and two small boats are packed to the gunwhales.

Van Eyck and his workshop did very similar details in the Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (c 1441-43). Behind the figure of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary at the right is another very similar town scene (detail below), with crowds crossing a bridge and in a boat on the river. Further to the right a substantial cart is being led along a road on the proximate riverbank, and a pair of swans float serenely on the mirror-like surface of the water.

Rogier van der Weyden’s plainer if not austere Saint Ivo or Portrait of a Man Reading (1450) flowers into delightful detail (below) in its miniature landscape, shown through the open window. In addition to a small and colourful group of figures under the trees, there is traffic along the road on the other side of the lake, and another pair of swans on its water.

Most of these figures appear to be straightforward staffage, but that cannot be assumed. In Rogier van der Weyden’s workshop painting of The Dream of Pope Sergius (c 1437) the figures are part of a complex multiplex narrative (detail below).

Sergius dreamed that an angel told him that Bishop Saint Lambert had been killed. The smaller figures here tell the story of the Pope’s subsequent actions: nearest the viewer, the Pope and two of his cardinals meet a noble and a friar as they leave the building. A cardinal is seen crossing the bridge, near which a woman is doing her washing in the river. In the distance, the Pope presents a bishop’s mitre and staff to Saint Hubert, successor to Saint Lambert, on the steps of Saint Peter’s Cathedral. Beyond that, other figures travel out of Rome along a road.

In the right panel of Rogier van der Weyden’s Miraflores Altar (c 1440), the risen Christ, still bearing his stigmata, is accompanied by a background scene (detail below) showing the resurrection, with three sleepy soldiers, Christ standing beside his empty tomb, and a winged angel. In the distance are the three Marys.

These figures in their miniature landscapes are a marker of the influence of the northern Renaissance when its oil paints and techniques moved to Italy. After Antonello da Messina had learned northern techniques, he too painted tiny figures in his Saint Jerome in his Study (c 1475).

As shown in the detail below, the small windows at each side of the saint reveal landscapes. Two figures are rowing a boat across a pond, others watch from its banks, and deeper into the view there are two people on horseback and a flock of sheep.

These landscape miniatures are arguably the beginning of modern Western landscape painting, and it is significant that even at this stage and relatively small scale, they often merit staffage. This practice was by no means universal: in several works from the northern Renaissance, figures are omitted completely from their embedded landscapes, giving them an eery and desolate appearance.

It looks likely that among their other achievements, the van Eycks, Rogier van der Weyden, and Robert Campin also discovered how effective staffage can be in landscape painting, almost six hundred years ago.

So far in Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medea’s sorcery has worked for the good, in enabling Jason to win the Golden Fleece, and in making his father Aeson young again, at no cost to Jason’s lifespan. In the following brief summary of Medea’s downfall, Ovid tells us how Medea’s powers are abused, and bring disaster.

The Story

Medea pretends that she and Jason have fallen out, and flees to Pelias’ court in Colchis (Pelias is Aeson’s half-brother, thus Jason’s uncle). She tells that court how she rejuvenated Aeson, which prompts the Peliades (three daughters of Pelias) to ask Medea to do the same for their father; they have fallen into Medea’s trap. To ensure their commitment, Medea first demonstrates her rejuvenation procedure on a sheep:
Straightway a wooly ram, worn out with length
of untold years was brought, his great horns curved
around his hollow temples. After she
had cut his scrawny throat with her sharp knife
Thessalian, barely staining it with his
thin blood, Medea plunged his carcass in
a bronze-made kettle, throwing in it at
the same time juices of great potency.
These made his body shrink and burnt away
his two horns, and with horns his years. And now
thin bleating was heard from within the pot;
and even while they wondered at the sound,
a lamb jumped out and frisking, ran away
to find some udder with its needed milk.

The Peliades are hooked, and plead with Medea to do the same to Pelias. She sets out to gather her magic herbs and other ingredients, and to prepare her potion once more. As that is under way, Medea urges the Peliades to drain the blood from Pelias in preparation for his treatment, by cutting his throat and other sites of major blood vessels.

The daughters cannot bear to watch one another, but attack their father while he is still in bed. He tries to prop himself up on his elbow and ask them what they are doing, but is cut short as Medea plunges his body into the boiling cauldron, which now contains water, not the magic potion.

Knowing that she had deceived the Peliades in her plan to get them to murder their father, Medea flees in her chariot drawn by winged dragons. Ovid takes her on a whirlwind tour of fifteen locations where mythical transformations had occurred, finally reaching the city of Corinth. This section ends with a very brief mention of the subsequent history of Medea, whose husband Jason then abandons her. She uses sorcery to take revenge on his new bride, and murders her two young sons as revenge against Jason, their father:
But after the new wife had been burnt by
the Colchian witchcraft and two seas
had seen the king’s own palace all aflame,
then, savagely she drew her sword, and bathed
it in the blood of her own infant sons;
by which atrocious act she was revenged;
and she, a wife and mother, fled the sword
of her own husband, Jason.

Medea finally flees again to Athens, where she marries King Aegeus.

The Paintings

Few patrons would, it seems, have wanted a painting of these terrible events to hang on the wall of their home. They have thus been frequently portrayed in other arts, but relatively seldom painted. Some fine depictions on canvas have also been lost, including one by Poussin. There are still some excellent survivors, though.

Georges Moreau de Tours’ The Murder of Pelias by His Daughters (1878) is one of very few paintings to show the Peliades committing this horrendous act. The old man is resting rather uncomfortably on a couch, behind which his name is inscribed in Greek. Medea shrinks into the shadows behind, her face half-covered, as the young women set about Pelias with their daggers. The daughter at the back appears to be offering Medea a knife so that she can join in, but she sits impassively in front of her boiling cauldron.

Richard Dadd’s watercolour of Jason and Medea, or The Flight of Medea with Jason – Chief of the Argonauts, shows Medea fleeing on foot with Jason, rather than in her sky chariot, which is in accord with non-Ovidian accounts of this myth. Iolcus is shown in the distance, and Medea’s maid is watching to see if they are being pursued.

Painted while Dadd was in Bethlem Hospital, Medea’s masculine appearance probably results from his lack of access to female models.

Ovid’s brief mention of Medea’s murder of her own sons has proved a more popular theme in painting.

Eugène Delacroix’s first version, titled simply Medea (1838) and now in Lille, captures the scene well. The mother looks anxiously into the distance, to see if she is being followed, or there are any witnesses about. The boys seem to know what is about to happen: one is crying as Medea’s arm is holding him by his neck, and the other is hiding under her skirts.

Delacroix made at least two later copies, including Medea about to Kill her Children (1862) which is half the size, and now in the Louvre.

Henri Klagmann’s Medea (1868) shows the boys playing at mother’s feet, as Medea, grasping the handle of her knife with her left hand, wrestles with her conscience.

JMW Turner tries to bring together many of the elements in this tragedy in his ingenious Vision of Medea (1828), which he painted when staying in Rome with Sir Charles Eastlake during the autumn and winter of 1828.

Jason has abandoned Medea for his new bride Glauce (or Creusa), and Medea is now in the midst of an incantation to force his return. In the foreground are the materials which she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in her chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Turner didn’t show this painting at the Royal Academy until 1831, where it was considered to be a wonderful “combination of colour”, but generally incomprehensible.

We are fortunate to have a series of fine paintings which show the sequence of events leading to the downfall of the sorceress Medea.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Narrative or landscape?

The earliest landscape paintings could not stand alone, but formed the backdrop to other genres, particularly narrative works. In the great majority of cases, artists leave clear and unambiguous evidence as to whether the figures in a landscape are intended to be part of a narrative. Whether Poussin or Turner, most narrative landscapes make that clear to the viewer.

Where Poussin did not tell us that a painting was narrative, as in his wonderful Landscape with a Calm (c 1651), we are safe to assume that its figures are just what we might expect in a real landscape: narratively incoherent but essential to it.

Some artists have, though, gone out of their way to challenge the viewer. This copy of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus provides minimal clues: a pair of legs thrashing in the water, a few feathers floating down in the air above them, and a shepherd looking up at the sky.

The appearance of staffage

Even in the early Renaissance, and characteristically in its northern section, landscape miniatures incorporated within religious and other paintings were populated with figures.

Look behind the principal actors in Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c 1435), beyond the open arches, in the detail below, and two small figures stand at the castellated wall, their backs towards the viewer. Go even deeper into the painting and there are crowds crossing the bridge, and two small boats are packed to the gunwhales.

These figures are pure staffage: a word actually borrowed from German, but formed in pseudo-French, from staffiren, meaning to fit out or garnish. It is properly used to describe all the accessories of a picture or painting, but most commonly applies to the human and animal figures, and their mobile equipment such as carts. It could equally be used of vegetation and other objects which were not in the original view, but were added by the artist for ‘effect’, such as some trees used for repoussoir.

In Canaletto’s fine view of Alnwick Castle, painted in about 1750, figures are dotted fairly evenly across its very green grass. Only one group appears to be working at any real activity: the two men in the foreground, at the lower left corner, who seem to be using a crowbar on something in the riverbank. Around the castle, there is a shepherd and companion with an unrealistically tiny flock of sheep, and three small groups of people talking, looking, or just present. These all seem remarkably everyday, even humdrum.

Other purposes

Foreground figures can be vital for instilling a sense of scale to the whole view. James Ward’s vast and imposing painting of Gordale Scar (1812–15) benefits greatly from the herds of cattle and deer at its foot. Without them it would be easy to misjudge the scale of the cliff faces and the huge cleft in them.

Turner was extremely skilled at using human and animal figures to enhance the effect of a landscape view. In The Lake, Petworth: Sunset, Fighting Bucks (c 1829) he may well be drawing comparison between the cricket match which appears to be taking place in the left middle distance, and the two white buck deer engaged in battle in the right foreground. But, as in other similar dusk views around Petworth, the figures are not the dominant part of the painting, it is the landscape and effects of light.

Thomas Fearnley is by no means the only landscape painter to have used little figures to draw the viewer into their highly detailed landscapes, and make them marvel at seeing what they could not have seen in reality. It’s a very effective trick which adds interest to a view, and enriches the dialogue between the artist and viewer.

Human landscape

Staffage is even less appropriate when much of the substance of the landscape are its inhabitants, as in Richard Parkes Bonington’s Fishmarket near Boulogne (1824). His fishmarket is the people, with the backdrop of the sails of the fishing boats illuminated in his golden light. Yet many of those figures are gestural, only partly formed or suggested: it is the mass of their assembly which is such an important part of his motif.

Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Spring (1897), also changes the balance between figures and landscape: this is a landscape composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

As shown the detail below, Pissarro forms each figure quite roughly, but in sufficient detail. Three white horses range in tone and colour, with highlights on the front of each head. You can see which people are wearing hats, and spot ladies in their fashionable clothing.

Colin Campbell Cooper’s approach to cityscapes is quite different to Pissarro’s. The buildings – which at first seem to dominate his paintings – provide backdrop, rhythm, and vertical form. All the finer details, over which he must have lavished such care and attention, are in the figures, vehicles, and the action in the street. The figures may be Lilliputian in scale, thanks largely to his elevated and distant viewpoints, but they are essential to the image.

Joint effort

Some landscape painters, who struggle to paint realistic figures, team up with figurative painters to paint spectacular works together. Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude’s Brudeferden i Hardanger (Bridal journey in Hardanger) (1848) demonstrates how effective this can be, both artists working in meticulous detail to produce what appears a seamless integration.

List of articles

0 Introduction
1 Little people in grand views
2 Figures, narrative, ground
3 Seeing the Andes
4 Drawing a line under Turner
5 Pissarro and the human landscape
6 Constable’s gestures
7 Among skyscrapers
8 Nicolas Poussin
9 Pieter Brueghel the Elder
10 Canaletto, Master of Staffage
11 A helping brush
12 Renaissance realism
13 Conclusions and contents (this article).

Ovid has traced the downfall of Medea in Book 7 of his Metamorphoses, eventually taking her to the court of King Aegeus in Athens, whom she marries. He has one final story to tell us about Medea and her sorcery, which provides a link back to her saga, and forward to the next, more heroic figure of Theseus.

The Story

In this brief bridge between the stories of Medea and Theseus which dominate Book 7, Ovid only hints at the early life of his new hero Theseus, the son of King Aegeus of Athens. I will therefore provide the background.

Aegeus had been childless, but following the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, the King of Troezen got him drunk and packed him off to bed with his daughter Aethra. She was instructed in a dream to leave Aegeus asleep, and to go to a nearby island, where she was also impregnated by the god Poseidon. Theseus, who is presumed to have been conceived that night, was thus considered to have double paternity, by god and man, a common qualification for the heroes of myth.

Aegeus returned to Athens, after burying his sword and sandals under a massive rock. He told Aethra that when his son grew up, she should tell him to move the rock, as a test. If he succeeded, then he should take the sandals and sword as evidence of his paternity.

When Theseus was old enough, his mother Aethra showed him the rock, and gave him Aegeus’ instructions. Theseus moved the rock, found the sandals and sword, and then undertook an epic journey overland to visit his father in Athens.

Ovid’s story starts with the arrival in the court of King Aegeus of Theseus, who has not yet been recognised by his father. Medea then tries to get Aegeus to administer the poison aconite to Theseus, before he is recognised, in a bid to keep Aegeus to herself. She prepares the poison in a cup which the king then offers to the young Theseus, as his enemy. At the last minute, just as Theseus is about to drink the aconite, Aegeus recognises that the sword borne by Theseus is his, and knocks the cup away, saving his son’s life:
Medea worked on Aegeus to present
his own son, Theseus, with a deadly cup
of aconite; prevailing by her art
so that he deemed his son an enemy.
Theseus unwittingly received the cup,
but just before he touched it to his lips,
his father recognized the sword he wore,
for, graven on its ivory hilt was wrought
a known device — the token of his race.
Astonished, Aegeus struck the poison-cup
from his devoted son’s confiding lips.
Medea suddenly escaped from death,
in a dark whirlwind her witch-singing raised.

Medea flees, never to be heard of again, leaving Aegeus to give thanks to the gods. Ovid then introduces Theseus with a short resumé of some of his accomplishments, such as the killing of the Minotaur and of Procrustes, which he will enlarge upon subsequently.

The Paintings

Oddly, Ovid’s explicit and very visual tale has not proved popular among painters, who have preferred to show the earlier scene, of Theseus discovering his father’s hidden sword and sandals – equally visual, but only alluded to in this book of the Metamorphoses.

One of the earliest depictions is Laurent de La Hyre’s Theseus And His Mother Aethra (1635-36). This shows the young Theseus lifting a heavy pillar to reveal a pair of shoes and a sword.

In one of his rare collaborative paintings, Nicolas Poussin worked with Jean Lemaire to show the same scene, of Theseus Recovering his Father’s Sword (c 1638). What I find fascinating here is the marked contrast between the two actors: Theseus, destined to be a great hero, looks quite rough and brutish, whilst his mother Aethra wouldn’t look out of place standing in for the Madonna, perhaps.

Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s rather more sketchy Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms (1768) adds a river god for good measure, and has Aethra giving Theseus marching orders to go find his father.

Antonio Balestra’s Theseus Discovering his Father’s Sword (c 1725) makes Theseus look a little less enthusiastic to follow his mother’s directions.

Then in 1832, the theme chosen for the prestigious Prix de Rome (a competition for the best history painting by a young French artist) was the moment that Aegeus recognised Theseus, just before the latter swallowed enough aconite to kill himself. I have found two paintings which were contenders for that great honour.

In Antoine-Placide Gibert’s Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), the three principal actors are arranged almost linearly across the canvas. Just left of centre, Theseus stands, his head in profile, the fateful cup in his left hand, and his father’s sword in his right. The king is just right of centre, looking Theseus in the eye, and appearing animated if not alarmed. At the far right is Medea, her face like thunder, sensing that her plot to kill Theseus is about to fall apart.

It was Hippolyte Flandrin’s Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832) which won the Prix de Rome that year, with its more neoclassical look which appears to have been influenced by Jacques-Louis David.

Flandrin establishes the scene as Athens, with a view of the Acropolis in the background. His timing is different from Gibert: this painting shows the moment immediately after Aegeus has recognised his son, and the cup of aconite lies spilt on the table; it is thus post-climactic. Theseus, conspicuously naked, stands in the middle of the canvas, his father’s sword held rather limply in his right hand. Aegeus stands to the left of centre, talking to his son quite emotionally.

But of all the characters shown in this painting, it is Medea who is the most fascinating. Stood at the far left, she appears to be on her way out. She is po-faced, and looks as if she has come not from Greece, but from central Asia, perhaps.

Sadly, although Gibert’s painting shows great promise, his work has now been almost entirely forgotten. Flandrin hasn’t fared much better, and is now best-known for two other paintings of male nudes.

The myths of Theseus were, at one time, as popular as those of Heracles or even Aeneas or Jason. In about 1340-41, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a very long (almost 10,000 line) epic poem Teseida, or The Theseid. This in turn inspired The Knight’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) painted these three scenes from Boccaccio’s epic on the front of a cassone – the visual equivalent of Ovid’s catalogue of the adventures of Theseus.

Although thin on the ground, these are fine paintings which tell their stories well. Fortunately, as Ovid tells more tales from the myths about Theseus, most are covered better in the visual arts.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Progressing through the second half of Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medea has been despatched into oblivion following her attempt to poison Theseus, whose career was summarised at breakneck pace. This leads Ovid into a linked series of little-known tales centred on the island kingdom of Aegina.

The Story

King Aegeus of Athens was delighted that his son Theseus had returned, but his pleasure was short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there.

When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, its king, Aeacus, refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.

King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague which almost destroyed the people there. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague which she sent against the people of the island.

Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like the occasional epidemics of the plague which have struck the population of Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.

Aeacus then saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being tranformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh:
“All this I thought the fancy of my dream,
until my brave son Telamon, in haste
threw open the closed doorway, as he called,
‘Come quickly father, and behold a sight
beyond the utmost of your fondest dreams!’
I did go out, and there I saw such men
each in his turn, as I had seen transformed
in that weird vision of the moving ants.

“They all advanced, and hailed me as their king.
So soon as I had offered vows to Jove,
I subdivided the deserted farms,
and dwellings in the cities to these men
miraculously raised — which now are called
my Myrmidons, — the living evidence
of my strange vision. You have seen these men;
and since that day, their name has been declared,
‘Decisive evidence.’ They have retained
the well-known customs of the days before
their transformation. Patiently they toil;
they store the profits of their labor; which
they guard with valiant skill. They’ll follow you
to any war, well matched in years and courage,
and I do promise, when this east wind turns,
this wind that favored you and brought you here,
and when a south wind favors our design,
then my brave Myrmidons will go with you.”

Aeacus called these hard-working people Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex). Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, whence Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them into the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.

The Paintings

One of my major references to artistic productions concerning classical myths, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts 1300-1990s, which stretches to over 1300 pages in two volumes, doesn’t even have an entry for Myrmidons, and extensive searching has failed to reveal a single painting depicting Ovid’s story. I find this very strange, as it is rich in visual imagery and opportunities.

The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.

That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, which shows Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.

If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he – together with Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus – was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.

Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.

Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.

Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a profoundly radical vision.

Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.

I am puzzled as to how this very visual story has escaped the attention of painters for so long, particularly as Ovid’s next myth, of Cephalus and Procris, has been so popular as to become quite hackneyed.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

The final story in Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is its best, and a true jewel in the author’s crown. Although it has been told elsewhere, this account is by far the best. It is told by Cephalus, the envoy from Athens, to the sons of King Aeacus on the island of Aegina, following the king’s account of the Myrmidons.

The Story

Having told Cephalus of the plague and the Myrmidons that followed it, King Aeacus falls asleep, so his son Phocus takes Cephalus and his companions to their accommodation. There Phocus notices the unusual javelin which Cephalus is carrying, with its gold tip on a shaft of wood which he cannot identify. This leads Cephalus to tell him that the javelin killed his wife, and so to explain the circumstances.

Within two months of his marriage to the beautiful Procris, when he was laying nets to catch a deer at dawn, Aurora saw Cephalus and tried to abduct him (she has a track record of affairs with humans). Cephalus protested and explained to Aurora his love for his wife, and she let him go, warning him that if Aurora saw him again, he would regret ever marrying Procris.

As he went back to his wife, Cephalus started to worry whether his wife had been unfaithful to him. He became aware that Aurora had changed his appearance, and entered the city of Athens unrecognised. When he got home, his household and wife didn’t recognise him either, so Cephalus put Procris to the test: with his wife still thinking him a stranger, he offered her great riches to spend a night with him, and managed to get her to waver with uncertainty.

He then revealed himself to be her husband, and accused her of being unfaithful. She said not a word, but fled to the mountains, where she joined the followers of Diana.

Cephalus yearned for his wife, so begged her forgiveness, and admitted that he too would have given way when made such an irresistible offer. Procris returned to him, and the couple lived happily again together. She brought back with her gifts from Diana: a hunting dog who outran all other dogs, and the unusual javelin.

Then the city of Thebes was put into difficulty again, after Oedipus had broken the siege imposed by the Sphinx. This time the problem took the form of a wild beast which ate all its livestock. All the younger men, including Cephalus, went to hunt for the beast, but it eluded them and their dogs.

Cephalus then unleashed Diana’s hound to chase the beast. The dog caught the beast, but it broke free again. Cephalus prepared to throw his javelin, then noticed that his dog and the beast had suddenly been transformed into marble statues:
“I then turned to my javelin’s aid; and while
I poised it in my right hand, turned away
my gaze a moment as I sought to twine
my practiced fingers in the guiding thongs;
but when again I lifted up my eyes,
to cast the javelin where the monster sped,
I saw two marble statues standing there,
transformed upon the plain. One statue seemed
to strain in attitude of rapid flight,
the other with wide-open jaws was changed,
just in the act of barking and pursuit.
Surely some God — if any god controls —
decreed both equal, neither could succeed.”

Cephalus returned to his now blissfully happy marriage with Procris. He went hunting alone at dawn, always feeling safe with his javelin. As the heat of the day came on, he would call on an imaginary zephyr of the cool breeze, talking to it as if it was a real nymph. One day he must have been overheard, and word was taken back to Procris that he was meeting a woman when he was supposed to be hunting. His wife was shocked, but refused to accept the story without herself witnessing her husband’s deceit.

The following morning, Cephalus was out hunting at dawn again, and when he grew hot, he rested and spoke to his imaginary zephyr as usual. He thought that he heard a sound nearby, which he suspected was an animal. He turned and threw his javelin at that noise.

He next heard his wife’s voice, rushed towards it, and found her mortally wounded, with his javelin buried in her chest. He took her up into his arms and tried in vain to stop blood from pouring from the wound. Knowing that she was dying, Procris implored him not to take the zephyr as his wife. He then realised the fatal misunderstanding, that Procris believed that he had been unfaithful.

As Procris died in his arms, Cephalus tried to explain to her that the zephyr was only imaginary, and that seemed to bring her some comfort in her last moments.

Ovid ends the book with Cephalus and his audience in tears, as Aeacus arrives with his other two sons and the army which they have been raising to counter the forces of Minos, setting the scene for the start of Book 8.

The Paintings

In complete contrast to Aeacus’ story of the Myrmidons, that of Cephalus and Procris has proved very popular with painters, and has been told by several of the great Masters. Those paintings concentrate on two scenes from this long story: the abduction of Cephalus by Aurora, and the death of Procris by Cephalus’ javelin.

Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (1630) shows the dawn scene of Cephalus trying to avoid the obviously amorous intentions of the goddess Aurora, who is seated and nearly naked. Behind Cephalus is the winged horse which draws the chariot of the dawn. A winged putto is holding up an image for him to view, presumably showing Procris, to help his resolve.

At the left is a river god. Beyond the horse is another deity bearing a coronet: although it is difficult to see, that might be Diana, given her association with hunting and this myth.

Peter Paul Rubens’ oil sketch of Aurora Abducting Cephalus was probably made in 1636-37, late in Rubens’ life, for his workshop to complete a painting for King Philip IV of Spain’s hunting lodge at Torre de la Parada, near Madrid.

In addition to showing the willing Aurora trying to persuade the reluctant Cephalus to join her in her chariot, it includes some details which are at odds with Ovid’s story: Diana’s hunting dog and javelin, which Procris gave to her husband after their reconciliation, later in the story. Here they may be intended as attributes to confirm his identity.

Over the following couple of centuries, there was a steady stream of paintings showing the abduction of Cephalus, but to my eye the next major work using this theme was Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s romantic Aurora and Cephalus (1810). Instead of a substantial chariot, the seductive figure of Aurora is bearing a sleeping Cephalus aloft on a bed of cloud, as dawn breaks over the mountains below.

This fails to show any resistance on the part of Cephalus, though.

Forty years later, Pierre Claude François Delorme uses a similar motif recomposed into his Cephalus Carried off by Aurora (c 1851). This features interlocking arms and embraces quite ingeniously: Aurora cradles Cephalus’ shoulder and chest, Cephalus reaches out to Cupid, and Cupid back to Cephalus.

To modern tastes, the cherubic faces in the cloud behind Aurora are a little overdone, I suspect.

Of those paintings showing the tragic death of Procris, the greatest has to be one of the earliest, Paolo Veronese’s Cephalus and Procris (c 1580).

In the foreground, Procris has fallen, the javelin embedded in her upper abdomen, and her life is fading fast. Cephalus isn’t embracing her, though, merely holding her hand as he tries to plead his innocence.

Veronese leaves us with two small puzzles too. The first is the large hunting hound behind Cephalus’ right shoulder, remembering that Diana’s dog was turned into stone while hunting the beast of Thebes. Even more puzzling is another figure, and a second dog, in the distance, at the left edge of the painting. These might represent the first part of the scene, before Cephalus throws his javelin, in multiplex narrative.

Peter Paul Rubens offers another oil sketch, of Cephalus and Procris (1636-37), which shows the couple just before Cephalus throws the fateful javelin, which rests at his side.

There is another painting which has been claimed to show The Death of Procris, but which is more accurately titled A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph, made by Piero di Cosimo in about 1495.

A brilliant painting, it uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to a dying or dead nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance.

There is no reason to show Cephalus as a satyr; Procris was impaled in the chest by the javelin; Procris was behind cover, where she was spying on Cephalus, not out in the open; and Cephalus had only one hound, a gift from Diana, which had in any case already been turned to marble. It’s a superb painting of another, quite different, story.

I think that I’ll take Guérin’s Aurora and Cephalus, wondering whether Cephalus really did reject Aurora’s advances, and the Veronese to complete this tragic tale.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Ovid completed Book 7 of his Metamorphoses with the wonderful but tragic story of Cephalus and Procris, an aside to his thread about Minos, King of Crete, waging war against the Greeks. He opens Book 8 by returning to that war, and to the ill-fated life of Minos.

The Story

Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and the city of Alcathous, ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman which ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter, Scylla, regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From watching him, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, hoping also to marry him.

That night, she is determined to act. She sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair, ending its protection over the kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and gives him the lock of hair.

She is shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships.

Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea:
And as she spoke, she leaped into the waves,
and followed the receding ships — for strength
from passion came to her. And soon she clung
unwelcome, to the sailing Gnossian ship.
Meanwhile, the Gods had changed her father’s form
and now he hovered over the salt deep,
a hawk with tawny wings. So when he saw
his daughter clinging to the hostile ship
he would have torn her with his rending beak; —
he darted towards her through the yielding air.
In terror she let go, but as she fell
the light air held her from the ocean spray;
her feather-weight supported by the breeze;
she spread her wings, and changed into a bird.
They called her “Ciris” when she cut the wind,
and “Ciris” — cut-the-lock — remains her name.

Nisus is thus transformed into an osprey, which pursues Scylla, who is transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then gives a short summary of the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he could not escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, which had resulted in the birth of a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man – the Minotaur.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne had helped Theseus kill the Minotaur. Theseus then abducted Ariadne and took her to the island of Naxos, where he abandoned her.

Ariadne met Bacchus, who comforted and married her. Theseus took Ariadne’s wedding diadem and set it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The Paintings

Although once again a visual story told vividly by Ovid, Scylla’s betrayal of Nisus and her failed attempt to run away with Minos, appears never to have been depicted in a painting of significance (before the twentieth century). Even the well-known story of Pasiphae and the Minotaur has been told in remarkably few paintings, although the issues of bestiality probably encouraged artists to keep well clear.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé (1880s) but then to have abandoned it.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread which enables him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those articles referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Much earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau had painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Henry Fuseli captured some of the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He is almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, which suggests that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

From so few paintings, Ovid’s story, and the well-known legend of the Minotaur, is told well. In its historical and social context, Watts’ painting stands out as an important work even among the Tate’s many great paintings.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Tinderbox and Storyspace are extremely sophisticated and powerful tools for working with extensive networks of notes. Tinderbox edits and maintains notes for use within the app, and exports them to HTML and other formats. Storyspace is primarily intended for using similar structured notes and other content to generate hypertext documents, for which there is a free reader app for macOS.

This is a revised and updated index to articles and tutorials posted here about Tinderbox, Storyspace, and hypertext.

Storyspace Reader (free from Eastgate)

Download from Eastgate Systems or here (with free document on the Fall of Icarus).

Hypertext for almost all
Storyspace 3.2 and Storyspace Reader for OS X includes a downloadable example hypertext document complete with the Storyspace Reader app, for Macs running OS X Yosemite or El Capitan
Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 1 – basic use and navigation
Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 2 – views and customisation
Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 3 – advanced navigation

Tinderbox

Parallel Text in Tinderbox 7: Porting Metamorphoses Book 1
The Best of Both Worlds: making hypertext for both Tinderbox and Storyspace
Adding Timing Features to an App: Tinderbox and Storyspace
Exporting HTML from Tinderbox 7: Using CSS for a Help Book
Using HTML from Tinderbox 7 to make a Help Book
Improving HTML from Tinderbox to Make a Better Help Book
Building a text database using Tinderbox
Moving a blog to Tinderbox: Troubleshooting Macs
Moving a blog to Tinderbox: Progress and tidying up
Moving a blog to Tinderbox: Guiding decisions
A Tinderbox Scrapbook for Source Code: exporting in WordPress markdown
A Tinderbox Scrapbook for Source Code: plain text and public order
Completing and using a Swift Scrapbook in Tinderbox
LaTeXport: writing LaTeX documents using Tinderbox
LaTeXport: loose ends
LaTeXport: revenge of the templates, and on to Tufte Book
Adding ‘parallel’ text and a timeline to the Lady of Shalott, in Tinderbox and Storyspace

Storyspace Tutorials

Purchase and download from Eastgate Systems.

Storyspace: the original hypertext app, history and introduction (1)
Getting started with Storyspace 3 – beginner’s tutorial, part 1 (2)
Using guards to structure reading – tutorial, part 2 (3)
Building an interactive timeline – tutorial, part 3 (4)
Digging a bit deeper with attributes, prototypes, and actions – tutorial, part 4 (5)
Structuring hypertext using rules instead of links – tutorial, part 5 (6)
Appearance attributes, badges, captions, and more (7)
Some selected readings on hypertext (8)
Handling notes and references (9)
More on references (10)
Timelines, outlines, and linked windows (11)
Exploding poetry, progress bars, and Summary Tables (12)
Making First Impressions: 1 Content and structure (13)
Making First Impressions: 2 Prototypes and containers (14)
Making First Impressions: 3 Joining up (15)
Making First Impressions: 4 Ready for early test (16)
Marking Time: Storyspace and Tinderbox, an introductory tutorial on creating timelines (17)
Storyspace 3: Space and Time, more from the Map view, quick and simple use of Map and Timeline views (18)
Analysing narrative paintings of Icarus and Daedalus (19)
Storyspace 3.1: a world of difference (20)
From database to hypertext: exporting from FileMaker Pro to Storyspace (21)
Alternative methods of importing into Storyspace and Tinderbox (22)
Storyspace 3.1.2 and Tinderbox 6.6.0: details updated (23)
QuarkXPress 2016, Storyspace/Tinderbox, and HTML5 (24)
Dynamic stories: text substitution and stretchtext in Storyspace (and Tinderbox) (25)
An illustrated glossary of links in Storyspace 3 (26)
Stretchtext: a hidden gem in real hypertext (27)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 1: imports and prototypes (28)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 2: links and stretchtext (30)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 3: alt stories and references (31)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 4: sidethreads and projections (32)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 5: galleries and timelines (33)
Porting from WordPress to Storyspace, 6: glossary and index (34)
Analysing and telling changing narrative in Storyspace 1 (35)
Analysing and telling changing narrative in Storyspace 2 (36)
Analysing and telling changing narrative in Storyspace 3 (37)
Analysing and telling changing narrative in Storyspace 4 (38)
Analysing and telling changing narrative in Storyspace 5 (39)
The Salome Story: analysing and telling changing narrative on your Mac (40)
The Salome Story: first full release version for Storyspace and Tinderbox (41)
Parallel hypertext: Storyspace metamorphosed 1 (42)
Parallel hypertext: Storyspace metamorphosed 2, including a full Latin and English version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1 in Tinderbox/Storyspace format (43)
Parallel hypertext: Storyspace metamorphosed 3, including the same parallel text with 21 paintings (44)
The Best of Both Worlds: making hypertext for both Tinderbox and Storyspace (45)
Adding Timing Features to an App: Tinderbox and Storyspace (46)
Building a text database using Tinderbox (47T)
Tennyson, Pre-Raphaelites, and Storyspace: a rewarding combination (48)
Adding ‘parallel’ text and a timeline to the Lady of Shalott, in Tinderbox and Storyspace (49)

In the index of topics below, these are numbered in sequence from 1 onwards.

Additional articles of relevance are:
Storyspace 3.2 and Storyspace Reader for OS X
Structure in non-fiction
Structure in narrative (non-fiction) text
Telling the story: narrative across media, including spoken, written, movies, graphic novels, paintings, photos, and music
The Story in Paintings: Using Storyspace for analysis
Tools for making timelines
Marking Time: introducing the timeline
Marking Time: Timeline 3D
Marking Time: Aeon Timeline
Marking Time: other routes to timelines
Marking Time: making good timelines
Hypertext for almost all
but these are not included in the indexed series. There is also a whole series on narrative in paintings, which is detailed at the top of the Painting Topics page in the main menu.

Index of Topics Covered

^ (caret) Article 25
adornments (Map view) Article 13 Article 15 Article 18 Article 41 Article 48
Aliases Article 10 Article 19 Article 49
Align commands Article 37
Appearance attributes Article 6, Article 7
AppleScript Article 5 Article 21
attributes Article 5, Article 7 Article 42
Attributes view Article 1
backlinks Article 10
badge Article 7, Article 9 Article 39 Article 40
Badge attribute Article 7
Bernstein, Mark Article 1, Article 8
blowhole command tool Article 44
Bolter, Jay David Article 1
Bookends Article 9
Border attribute Article 7
Breadcrumb Bar Article 11
buttons Article 6
caption Article 7, Article 9
^ (caret) Article 25
Chart view Article 1
Checked attribute Article 3
Color attribute Article 6, Article 7
colour, specifying Article 7 Article 36
colo(u)r schemes Article 13
compatibility Article 45
composite writing spaces Article 45 Article 49
conditional text Article 25 Article 30 Article 42 Article 45
container Article 9, Article 11, Article 12 Article 14 Article 15 Article 19
context Article 32 Article 36
co-ordinates Article 18
cross-references Article 2
CSV import Article 22 Article 23
custom attributes Article 5
custom badges Article 7
date picker Article 23 Article 28 Article 35
debugging Article 44
delivery Article 41
Document settings Article 13
document state Article 41
Duplicate writing space Article 43
Eastgate Systems Article 1, Article 8
Edicts Article 15
emoji Article 34
end matter Article 34
endnote Article 9
Events attributes Article 11
Explode command Article 12 Article 21 Article 22 Article 44 Article 47T
export Article 24
FileMaker Pro Article 21
find command Article 34
find() Article 6
footnote Article 9
gallery (Map view) Article 33
Getting Started with Hypertext Narrative Article 2
glossary Article 34
Go Back command Article 9 Article 20
guards Article 3 Article 23 Article 26 Article 45
help Article 2
hide/show text Article 42
history Article 1, Article 8
HTML export Article 24
hypertext Article 1, Article 8, Article 11
ID attribute Article 46
images Article 3, Article 4 Article 14 Article 19 Article 20 Article 37
importing text Article 12 Article 21 Article 22 Article 23 Article 28 Article 30 Article 31 Article 47T
In Memoriam Web Article 1
index Article 34
introduction Article 1
iOS Article 21
Joyce, Michael Article 1
Landow, George P Article 8
line numbers Article 42 Article 43
links Article 2, Article 3, Article 9, Article 10 Article 30 Article 31 Article 32 Article 35 Article 45 Article 49
lists Article 10 Article 26
log access Article 46
Make Web Link Article 38 Article 39
Map view Article 1 Article 15 Article 18 Article 31 Article 33 Article 38 Article 44
MapBodySizeText attribute Article 44
me writing space Article 42
Moretti, Franco Article 7
MyString attribute Article 5
narrative Article 8 Article 19 Article 31 Article 36
note, note+ links Article 26
notes Article 9
OnAdd action Article 15 Article 28
OnVisit action Article 5, Article 6 Article 46
Opacity attribute Article 6, Article 7
Outline view Article 1, Article 11 Article 48 Article 49
parking space Article 2, Article 4, Article 9 Article 37
parallel text Article 42 Article 43 Article 45 Article 49
plain links Article 26
plot Article 12
poetry Article 12
progress bar Article 12
projections Article 32
prototypes Article 5, Article 6, Article 9, Article 11 Article 14 Article 15 Article 20 Article 28 Article 33 Article 35
references Article 9, Article 10 Article 13 Article 31
References attributes Article 9, Article 10
release Article 41
Requirements attribute Article 26
Reset Margins command Article 34
rich text import Article 23
Rules Article 6 Article 15
runCommand() Article 5 Article 46
scaling views Article 31
scripts Article 5
sculptural hypertext Article 1
sequential number Article 46
Shadow attribute Article 6, Article 7
Shape attribute Article 7
shark links Article 26 Article 45
shell command Article 5
shipping Article 41
sidenote Article 2, Article 9
sidethread Article 32
Smart Quotes Article 36 Article 43 Article 49
Smith, John B Article 1
start writing space Article 2
stretchtext Article 23 Article 25 Article 26 Article 27 Article 30 Article 31 Article 32 Article 34 Article 36
substitution, text Article 25 Article 30
Subtitle attribute Article 14
Summary Table Article 12
tab-delimited text Article 22
testing Article 44 Article 46
Text attribute Article 5, Article 9 Article 14
text colo(u)r Article 36
text generation Article 5, Article 9 Article 25
text links Article 2, Article 9 Article 14 Article 26 Article 31 Article 36 Article 37 Article 38 Article 48
text reflow Article 34
text substitution Article 25 Article 36
TextFontSize attribute Article 15
timeline Article 4, Article 11, Article 17 Article 18 Article 33 Article 49
Timeline view Article 1, Article 11, Article 17 Article 18 Article 19 Article 20 Article 30 Article 33 Article 39 Article 40 Article 49
timing Article 46
Tinderbox Article 1, Article 8, Article 9, Article 17 Article 24 Article 45
toggle switch Article 42
Treemap view Article 1
URL attribute Article 16
User attributes Article 5, Article 6, Article 9
version 3.1 Article 20
views Article 1
visited() Article 3
Visits attribute Article 3, Article 12
web links Article 16 Article 38 Article 39 Article 40
windows, multiple Article 11 Article 35 Article 41
workflow Article 40
Xpos, Ypos attributes Article 18
zoom (view scaling) Article 31

Ovid introduced the architect and artificer Daedalus in the previous myth of the Minotaur, as the person who made the labyrinth within which the monster was confined. This provides a smooth link to the next myth, that of Daedalus and his son Icarus.

The Story

After he had built the labyrinth, Daedalus – who was not a Cretan, and was being held on the island by Minos – yearned to leave Crete and return home. With the sea barred to him, he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built himself, and his son Icarus, sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, Daedalus tested his by hovering in the air.

He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. As he did this, he shed tears, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands. But Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and the wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell, he called to his father, before entering the water in what is now known as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, the remnants of wings, on the surface of the water. Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the island nearby.

As Daedalus was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend that it was an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air:
But Pallas, goddess of ingenious men,
saving the pupil changed him to a bird,
and in the middle of the air he flew
on feathered wings; and so his active mind —
and vigor of his genius were absorbed
into his wings and feet; although the name
of Perdix was retained.
The Partridge hides
in shaded places by the leafy trees
its nested eggs among the bush’s twigs;
nor does it seek to rise in lofty flight,
for it is mindful of its former fall.

The Paintings

This is one of the most famous stories from the Metamorphoses (which Ovid also told in more detail in his Ars Amatoria), and has inspired a great many wonderful paintings. I have previously looked at many of them, and analysed their narrative in relation to Ovid’s (see links below). Here is a selection of the best.

Van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude, which proved to be the son’s downfall.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. Icarus’ mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls.

Daedalus is still flying, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks alarmed, towards the falling body of his son. They are high above a bay containing people and a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying on, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, which includes some of Ovid’s details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work much harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right.

Daedalus is not visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Between them, these superb paintings tell the whole of the myth, in almost as much detail as Ovid.

Links

The Story in Paintings: Icarus and his downfall
Analysing narrative paintings of Icarus and Daedalus

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Claims of the death of history and other narrative painting in the late nineteenth century are greatly exaggerated if not false. Among those who brought new ideas and styles to the genre was the great Spanish artist Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848–1921). In this article, I take a short look at a selection of his paintings.

Francisco Pradilla Ortiz was born in 1848 near Zaragoza, in Aragon, in north-eastern Spain. He started his artistic training locally, then moved to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, also studying there at the Academy of Watercolourists.

His first major painting as a student was his version of the popular narrative, Rape of the Sabine Women (1874), which won him a scholarship to study at the Spanish Academy in Rome – the Spanish equivalent of the French Prix de Rome.

This shows the classical Roman legend in which the early citizens of Rome, almost entirely men, carried off the women of their friends and neighbours the Sabines, as captive brides. One of the standard themes for all great narrative painters, Masters such as Poussin and Rubens filled their canvases and panels with a riot of people.

Pradilla was wisely more modest, and in the foreground the group of a Sabine mother reaching after her daughter, who is being carried off in the arms of a Roman, gives the story a strongly personal and emotional touch.

After he had completed his studies in Madrid and Rome, Pradilla submitted this painting of Doña Juana “la Loca” – Juana or Joanna the Mad – in 1877, to the National Exhibition, where it was awarded the Medal of Honour. It went on to exhibit at the Exposition Universel in Paris later that year, and in Berlin.

Queen Joanna of Castile, or Juana the Mad, brought about the union of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, forming the basis of modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome in 1496, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. He was crowned king of Castile in 1506, and was the first of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain.

He died suddenly later that year, probably from typhoid fever, and Juana became mentally ill, refusing to let Philip’s body be buried. It is this which is the basis for Pradilla’s painting, in which (I believe) Juana is shown in the nun’s habit which she would have worn when she was eventually secreted into a convent. When her father, Ferdinand II, died in 1516, Juana inherited Aragon, and Spain was ruled under the personal union of her son Charles I, who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor.

Pradilla did not neglect his watercolours. Muchacho flautista coronado de hiedra, a Flute Player Crowned with Ivy (1880), shows a lightness of touch and sophistication in technique.

This small undated Portrait of a Lady in Evening Dress is even looser and more gestural.

After the success of Doña Juana “la Loca”, Pradilla was commissioned to paint La Rendición de Granada (The Surrender of Granada) by the Spanish Senate, which took the years from 1879-82 to complete.

This elaborate and heavily-populated painting shows another momentous event in the history of the Spanish nation, when Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad XII, known locally as Boabdil, the last Nasrid ruler of Granada, surrendered his emirate to Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (Juana the Mad’s parents) – the Catholic Monarchs, in 1492.

Muhammad XII is mounted on the left, holding the keys to the city, which he is about to hand over to Ferdinand II, whose hand is already reaching out to receive those keys, and Queen Isabella I on her white horse. Apparently Muhammad was spared the ignominy of having to kiss the royal hands, and was allowed to simply hand the keys over. Prominent in the background is the Alhambra.

Pradilla finished this painting when he was working in Rome, as the director of the Spanish Arts Academy there, a post which he held for two years.

Marino Faliero, Dux LV (1883) is a wonderful watercolour portrait of one of the most colourful leaders of Venice, who was elected Doge in 1354. The following year, he attempted to seize power from the ruling acristocratic elite. The plot was discovered early, and at the age of 81, Faliero pleaded guilty to all charges, and was beheaded. That execution is shown in a well-known painting by Eugène Delacroix (1827).

Pradilla also seems to have made the most marvellous oil sketches en plein air, here showing Lavanderas gallegas (Galician Washerwomen) (1887), above, and Laundry Day (c 1880-1910), below.

Following on from La Rendición de Granada, Pradilla painted El Suspiro del Moro, or The Moor’s Sigh. The two paintings seem to have been started at about the same time, in 1879, but he did not complete this until 1892, a decade after the scene of surrender.

This shows the legendary sequel to La Rendición de Granada. After Muhammad XII had surrendered Granada, he is claimed to have ridden up to a rocky viewpoint from where he could take a final view of the Alhambra and the valley of Granada: the location now known as Suspiro del Moro. For a while, Muhammad remained in exile in Las Alpujarras, but soon crossed to Fes in Morocco.

Pradilla shows the former ruler dismounted, after he had walked over to take his last look at Granada in the distance. Although this was painted in oils, the hills behind Granada appear as if they had been painted using watercolour washes – an unusual effect showing his technical skills.

In 1897, Pradilla was appointed director of the Prado in Madrid.

Bajo el árbol consagrado a Ceres, Under Ceres’ Sacred Tree, (1903) appears to be a fantastic exploration of classical myth associated with the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain, Ceres, and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The sacred tree is the hawthorn, or may, which comes into flower in the spring.

Pradilla shows a party of ecstatic young women worshippers at a shrine to Ceres on an ancient hawthorn tree – a wonderful flight of fancy perhaps inspired by his travels in Italy.

In La reina doña Juana la Loca, recluida en Tordesillas con su hija, la infanta doña Catalina, or Queen Juana the Mad Imprisoned in Tordesillas with her daughter, the Infanta Catalina, (1906) Pradilla returns to the tragic story of the first queen of Spain.

Juana is here shown during her effective imprisonment in the Convent of Santa Clara, in Tordesillas, north-west of Madrid in northern Spain. She was taken here in 1509, and despite being co-monarch of Castile and Aragon with her son Charles I, remained here until her death in 1555.

Pradilla shows her with her youngest daughter, Catherine (Catalina) of Austria (1507-1578), who married John III of Portugal and became its queen in 1525. The girl’s toys are scattered forlornly over the barren floor. One of Juana’s maids sits spinning, as a small fire burns in the huge fireplace.

Pradilla doesn’t seem to have painted many pure landscapes, but Niebla de primavera en Italia (The Fog of Spring in Italy) (1907) was probably inspired by one of his visits there. His style remains quite realist in detail, but away from the figures has become far looser and more painterly than in his earlier history paintings.

Cortejo del bautizo del príncipe don Juan, hijo de los Reyes Católicos, por las calles de Sevilla, or The Baptism of Prince John, (1910) was Pradilla’s last major history painting, and like its predecessors is packed with people and detail.

This shows the royal court attending the baptism of Prince John of Asturias, the brother of Juana the Mad, in Seville in 1478. John was the only son of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, the Catholic Monarchs who had taken Muhammad XII’s surrender of Granada. Queen Isabella is shown in the royal box to the left of centre. Prince John died at the age of eighteen in 1497, and missed his part in history.

Venta del pescado en la playa de Vigo, a Fish Market on Vigo Beach, (1916), is a wonderfully vigorous depiction of the beach of this city in the north-west of Spain, just to the north of Portugal. His style has loosened further, with many of the figures becoming sketchy and gestural. In some parts, just to the right of centre, for example, all form breaks down into incoherent patches of colour.

Francisco Pradilla Ortiz died in Madrid in 1921. His paintings have remained popular in Spain since, and are on display in the Prado and several other Spanish galleries. However they seem almost unknown outside Spain.

Later this month, we will be remembering the life and work of Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, who died a century ago. Degas is not my favourite artist of the group known as the French Impressionists, but is one of the most fascinating painters, draughtsmen, and print-makers of the nineteenth century.

Over the next three weeks or so, I will look at different areas of and themes in his art; rather than attempt a full biography and chronological account of his paintings, this article gives a concise summary, written around twelve of his key works, as an introduction to more detailed articles later.

Edgar Degas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834, into an affluent family. His father was a banker from Naples, Italy, and his mother’s family were merchants in New Orleans. In the summers of his childhood, the family visited Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, on the northern coast of France. His mother died in 1847, and Edgar passed his baccalauréat in 1853.

Degas’ father had hoped that his oldest son would study law with the intention of working in the family business, but within days of passing out of school, Edgar Degas registered as a copyist at the Louvre and the prints collection of the French National Library, intent on pursuing a training in art. By 1855, he had secured himself a place at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and shortly before starting there met JAD Ingres.

He trained under Louis Lamothe, who had in turn trained under Ingres, and copied avidly in the Louvre and elsewhere. In the summer of 1856, Degas travelled to Naples in Italy, moving on from there to Rome, where he remained until the summer of 1857, where he attended the French Academy. He continued to copy, and to paint modest landscapes and street scenes.

After a period with family in Naples, he spent the winter of 1857-8 in Rome, where he met Gustave Moreau at the French Academy. The following summer he travelled on to family in Florence, where he remained copying the masters. He visited Siena, Livorno, and Pisa, finally returning to Paris in the Spring of 1859. During this latter time in Italy, he started work on his portrait of his relatives the Bellelli family.

When back in Paris, Degas found himself a studio, and worked on his portrait of the Bellellis, and a short series of history paintings which he intended to use to launch his career as an artist.

The best-known of those history paintings is his Young Spartans Exercising (c 1860), which is an original theme probably based on the writings of Plutarch.

Four Spartan girls, on the left, are seen taunting five Spartan boys, on the right, who appear to pose but not yet to respond to the taunts of the girls. Behind, in the centre of the painting, a group of Spartan mothers are in discussion with Lycurgus, who laid down the laws and processes for Sparta, and wears a white robe with his back to the viewer. In the left distance is Mount Taygetus, where unfit Spartan babies were abandoned to see if they survived and merited life.

As with many of his works, Degas continued to work sporadically on this painting, leaving it unfinished when he died. The artist never explained his intention, nor did he provide any clues as to how this painting should be read. Modern readings often focus on gender contrasts and conflict, but all too often ignore its background, both visually and in history.

In 1861, Degas started visiting a former school friend on his country estate, and became interested in horse racing. This inspired several paintings, including his Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey which he first completed and exhibited at the Salon in 1866, then reworked in 1880-81 and around 1897.

This shows a close-cropped view of a steeplechase, in which the horses jump fences around the course. Two of the horses shown side-by-side have lost their riders, and a jockey in his racing silks is shown under them, lying on his back apparently unconscious.

In this painting, Degas declares his interest in form, and in depicting the form of people and horses when in motion. This anticipated and later benefitted from the pioneering photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey during the 1870s. Although in some of his paintings of horse racing, Degas concentrated on the horses, carts, and the whole ambience of racing, in this his concern is with the injured jockey.

In 1867, Degas completed his paintings of the Bellelli family and exhibited them at the Salon. The following Spring, he started attending gatherings of Édouard Manet (whom he had first met when copying in the Louvre in 1862 or 1864) and his circle at the Café Guerbois. This led to his involvement in the inception of the Impressionist movement.

It was about this time that Degas painted one of his most enigmatic works: Interior (1868-9), which has become popularly known as ‘The Rape’, but has defied all attempts to produce a sustainable reading.

A man and a woman are in a bedroom together. The woman is at the left, partly kneeling down, and facing to the left. Her hair is cropped short, she wears a white shift which has dropped off her left shoulder, and her face is obscured in the dark. Her left forearm rests on a small stool or chair, over which is draped a dark brown cloak or coat. Her right hand rests on a wooden cabinet which is in front of her. She appears to be staring down towards the floor, off the left of the canvas.

The man stands at the far right, leaning on the inside of the bedroom door, and staring at the woman. He is quite well-dressed, with a black jacket, black waistcoat and mid-brown trousers. Both his hands are thrust into his trouser pockets, and his feet are apart. His top hat rests, upside down, on top of the cabinet in front of the woman.

Between them, just behind the woman, is a small occasional table, on which there is a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a small pair of scissors and other items which appear to be from a small clothes repair kit (‘housewife’).

The single bed is made up, and its cover is not ruffled, but it may possibly bear a bloodstain at the foot. At the foot of the bed, on its large arched frame, another item apparently of the woman’s clothing (perhaps a coat) is loosely hung. On that end of the bed is a woman’s dark hat with ribbons, and her corset has been dropped on the floor by the foot of the bed.

It may be that Interior is a problem picture, intended to stimulate speculation as to its narrative, but not to resolve it.

Degas travelled quite a bit in 1869, first to Brussels where he sold some of his paintings, then in the summer to the north coast of France, where he visited Manet and painted some landscapes in pastels, on the Normandy coast. Among those is Beach at Low Tide (c 1869-70), which emphasises the flatness and emptiness. These are a stark contrast to all his previous work, with their very vague forms – hardly work for such a keen draughtsman.

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 spurred Degas to volunteer for the National Guard in Paris. His first service was in an artillery unit commanded by Henri Rouart, who became a lifelong friend. In the summer of the following year, Degas started to become worried about his eyesight, in particular his developing photophobia. Nevertheless, with life in Paris slowly returning to normal after the Commune, Degas visited James Tissot in London, and probably first came into contact with the dealer Durand-Ruel, who bought three works from Degas in early 1872.

Degas first seems to have become enthusiastic about ballet when he saw the Paris Opera production of La Source in 1866. Initial paintings of ballet concentrated on static scenes and the orchestra, but around 1870 he started to become more involved in the ballet at the Paris Opera, and to paint it almost obsessively.

The Dance Class (c 1873) is an early and elaborately-composed example of the works which were to make up half his total output. It shows well his meticulous draughtsmanship, and the strange effect of ballet dress in apparently dismembering the dancers, who become head, arms and legs with the white blur of chiffon between. This is most intense in the tangle of legs making their way down the spiral staircase at the upper left, and in the group of dancers just to the right of those stairs.

In the 1870s, Degas changed the course of his work, from history painting to the depicting of ‘modern life’, which was a part of the agenda of the developing Impressionist movement. He spent the winter of 1872-73 visiting his mother’s family in New Orleans, in the USA, where he painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873). Following his return to Paris, he, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Cézanne formed the group which was to mount the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, shortly after the death of his father.

Degas’ works shown at the First Impressionist Exhibition were among the few singled out for praise by the critics.

Among the motifs which Degas identified as being part of ‘modern life’ was the work of the army of laundresses who kept Parisians looking smart. Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) is one of a series of works which he made showing these women at work, as they did from early in the morning until very late each night. This painting was started in about 1876, and Degas continued to develop and rework it for the next decade.

In late 1876, as his father’s estate was being settled, it became clear that Degas was in dire financial straits and close to bankruptcy.

His ballet paintings progressed to smaller groups, focussing more on their form and movement, as in Danseuse basculant (Danseuse verte) (Swaying Dancer, Dancer in Green) (1877-79). This is painted not in oils, but the combination of pastel and gouache. Degas had experimented technically in three main areas: the use of peinture à l’essence, oil paint with the oil largely removed, a rich variety of wet and dry techniques in pastels, and print-making, in particular the re-introduction of the monotype.

In 1878, A Cotton Office in New Orleans became his first work to enter a public collection, when it was purchased by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau for 2000 francs. Degas also exhibited work in the USA for the first time.

Degas continued to pursue his interest in form and movement, when in early 1879 he made studies for what was to become Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879) – another theme in his ‘modern life’ portfolio. This entertainer impressed large audiences with her ability to support herself by her teeth.

Another aspect of ‘modern life’ which inspired a series of paintings was the flourishing craft of women’s hat-making, shown in The Millinery Shop, a work which he first completed in 1879 and then reworked until 1886.

In 1879, following further praise of his work shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition, Degas proposed making an edition of prints, including work by Mary Cassatt, Pissarro, and himself, in a journal named Le Jour et la Nuit, but upset his collaborators when he changed his mind and dropped the idea.

The 1880s was a period of increasing success for Degas, as Durand-Ruel and other dealers showed and sold more of his work, eventually easing his financial situation. Degas’ paintings of the ballet remained in strong demand, and most continued his themes of form and movement.

However, Waiting, a pastel painting from about 1882, leaves the viewer speculating as to its narrative – why the dancer is clutching her ankle, what they are waiting for, and whether there is any relationship between the two women. As ever, Degas provided no assistance beyond this image.

This later period of his work also brought an increasing number of paintings of women bathing and dressing, culminating in pastel paintings formed from vigorous vertical or diagonal strokes, such as Woman Sponging Her Back (c 1888-92). There is speculation as to linkage with a series of monotypes which he made of brothels, which were kept private and not exhibited during his lifetime, and a wealth of readings and interpretations of these extremely intimate images. However, seen in the context of his work as a whole, they pursue his enduring interest in form and movement.

The eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1886, where some of these paintings resulted in uproar because of their perceived ugliness and squalor.

In 1888, Degas started ‘taking the waters’ for a ‘cure’ for his eye problems, at Cauterets to the north of the Pyrenees, which became an annual event. The following winter he wrote his first poetry, and started to withdraw from some activities, visiting the ballet less often, and declining invitations to exhibit. He still maintained some of his friendships, though, and after his summer ‘cure’ at Cauterets visited Spain with Giovanni Boldini.

In 1890, apparently out of the blue, Degas started to make landscape images again. Some of these were monotypes, others painted in pastel, such as Steep Coast (c 1892). Some were clearly made from real landscapes which he saw during his travels at this time; others, like this one, are at least flights of fancy inspired by real views, and may be complete fantasy. They were brought together in his first solo exhibition in November 1892, at Durand-Ruel’s gallery.

The last twenty years of Degas’ life was marked by his increasing withdrawal, the loss of friends through their death or his anti-Semitic views on the Dreyfus Affair, and worsening eye problems. He did not stop painting until towards 1910, although his productivity declined well before then. He was undoubtedly a thorough curmudgeon in his last years, but also worked hard organising retrospectives for the likes of Berthe Morisot, and promoting the work and memory of other contemporaries.

By 1915, he was in a poor physical state, virtually blind, walking with great difficulty, and refusing visitors. Renoir and Mary Cassatt were among those who tried to bring comfort to him in his final years. On 27 September 1917, he died, and was buried the next day in the family vault in the Montmartre cemetery.

References

Wikipedia.

Carol Armstrong (1991, 2003) Odd Man Out, Readings on the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Getty. ISBN 978 0 8923 6728 3.
Ann Dumas, Richard Kendall, Flemming Friborg & Line Clausen Pedersen (2006) Edgar Degas, the Last Landscapes, Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4343 5.
Richard Kendall & Jill DeVonyar (2011) Degas and the Ballet, Picturing Movement, Royal Academy of Arts. ISBN 978 1 9057 1169 7.
Christopher Lloyd (2014) Edgar Degas, Drawings and Pastels, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978 0 5000 9381 8.