Torquato Tasso opens the first Canto of Jerusalem Delivered with a fairly conventional dedication to the muse, and homage to his patron, Alfonso II of Este.

His narrative starts by setting events six years after the Pope’s call to crusade (actually in late 1095), and briefly mentions the capture of Nicaea and Antioch, to set the opening scene in the following winter (1098-99), with the crusaders in their quarters at ‘Tortosa’. That is now known as Tartus in Syria, a port on the Mediterranean coast well to the south of Antioch.

Tasso gives an overview of the main leaders of the First Crusade through the eyes of God:

• Godfrey of Bouillon, whom he praises as a hero;
• Baldwin, with his ‘vain ambition’;
• Tancred, who is suffering the pangs of love;
• Bohemond, who is bringing law and order to Antioch as its ruler;
• Rinaldo, the courageous and restless warrior.

Three of these figures are well-known, and appear in various paintings, but Tasso reinvents those of Tancred and Rinaldo, the heroes of his epic. Merry-Joseph Blondel’s painting of Tancred of Hauteville, Prince of Galilee from 1840 shows Tancred rather later during the Crusade, looking suitably grand.

God therefore sends down the Archangel Gabriel to spur Godfrey to lead the Crusaders onwards to free Jerusalem, which the archangel does just as Godfrey is at his morning prayers.

In this section of Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s magnificent frescoes in the Casa Massimo, in Rome, The Archangel Gabriel Appears to Godfrey of Bouillon. His companions are still asleep as Gabriel speaks to Godfrey, clutching what most would now recognise as a flag of the Cross of Saint George, in red on a white background.

Francesco Guardi shows a slightly later moment, as the archangel flies away from the scene, and Godfrey of Boulogne Summons His Chiefs to Council (c 1755).

All the leaders except Bohemond attend this meeting, at which Godfrey reminds them of their primary mission, to deliver the Holy City of Jerusalem, and the need to make haste towards it.

Peter the Hermit then speaks in support, castigating the individual leaders for their in-fighting and rivalry. The leaders agree to Godfrey being in command overall.

The following morning, the mustering troops parade as they prepare to set off to travel south along the coast. This provides Tasso with the opportunity to enumerate them:

• French, from the Île de France, formerly led by Hugh, now by Clothar, one thousand;
• Norman cavalry under Robert, one thousand;
• former priests from the Low Countries under Bishops William and Ademar, totalling eight hundred;
• forces of Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, with the Count of Chartres too, 1600 in all;
• Germans from between the Danube and the Rhine, under Guelph, less than two thousand;
• Dutch and Flemish, under another Robert, two thousand total;
• English, under William, the son of the king, slightly more than two (or one?) thousand;
• Irish, no leader or number given;
• from Campania, under Tancred, eight hundred;
• Greece, led by Tatin, just two hundred;
• ‘adventurers’, or unattached and mercenaries, led by Dudin of Contz, no number given;
• men from the Pyrenees, under Raymond of Toulouse, four thousand;
• men from Blois and Tours, under Stephen of Ambois, five thousand;
• Swiss, under Alcasto, six thousand;
• Italians, under Camillus, seven thousand.

Tasso gives a grand total of around thirty-five thousand, which is probably more than double the number of surviving crusaders at this stage.

In his remarks about Tancred, Tasso tells the story of him falling in love at first sight with a young girl clad in armour, during a battle in which Persians were put to flight. Tancred had gone to a brook to cool off afterwards, when this ‘pagan’ arrived for the same purpose. She then left, donning her helmet, without Tasso even revealing her name at this stage.

The army’s departure is made the more urgent as Godfrey has heard that the ruler of Egypt is on his way, with his army, to his fortress at Gaza, which could be used to attack the crusaders as they near Jerusalem. Godfrey then sends his trusty messenger by boat to Greece, to obtain reinforcements which had been promised by the king.

The next day they depart to the sound of trumpets and drums. Godfrey sends lightly-armoured knights to scout in advance and ensure that the main army isn’t ambushed, and field engineers to ensure that their route of march is free of obstacles. The crusaders meet little opposition as they make their way south: even the King of Tripoli capitulates and welcomes them into his well-defended city.

As they march down the coast, they receive ships with provisions from several of their supporting countries.

Word of their progress reaches Aladine, the ruler of Jerusalem, who, being newly in charge of the city, already has other concerns. He had already raised taxes on the Christian minority in Jerusalem, and harbours ideas of killing them all. He doesn’t attempt that, but burns their harvest, demolishes their huts, and poisons their wells, while strengthening the fortifications of the city.

The second Canto starts with Aladine in Jerusalem. A former Christian soothsayer, Ismen, warns the ruler to prepare for the arrival of the crusaders, but predicts that Aladine will be triumphant. Ismen then asks for a sacred icon of the Virgin Mary to be secretly stolen and hidden away to protect the ruler.

Aladine has this done, but the theft is noticed by a guard, who reports it to the ruler. The latter then claims that it must have been stolen by a Christian, and has the city searched. He decrees that the thief will die, but if no thief is found, it provides him with an excuse for killing all the Christians. He incites a mob, calling for them to “burn and kill”.

A young Christian woman named Sophronia, who is in love with the Christian Olindo, then comes forward and tells Aladine that it was she, and she alone, who stole the icon. When the ruler asks her where it is hidden she responds that she burned it. Sophronia is condemned to death by being burned at the stake.

As the crowds are gathering to watch her die, Olindo arrives, and insists that she is not the thief. Although he gives Aladine an account of how he accomplished this, the ruler of course knows that neither did. But he cannot back down, and sentences Olindo to die at the same stake, tied with his back to his love, so that they cannot see one another.

Lubin Baugin’s dramatically simple painting from about 1645 shows Olindo and Sophronia on the Pyre.

Just as Aladine’s men are about to light the kindling and kill the Christian couple, who are making their farewell speeches, a warrior rides up. This is Clorinda, a beautiful young woman, who is moved by the sight of the two lovers about to die together. When a bystander explains what is happening, she instructs the executioners to stop their preparations as she speaks to Aladine.

Clorinda introduces herself to Aladine, and offers him her services. In return, she asks that he frees Sophronia and Olindo, on the grounds that no Christian would have stolen such a holy icon. This has proved a popular scene with a succession of artists, from shortly after the publication of Tasso’s epic, up to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Antonio Tempesta’s engraved illustration from about 1597 puts Clorinda in the centre foreground, as she talks to Aladine at the left. The couple are shown at a stake to the far right, in the background.

François Perrier’s Olindo and Sophronia from about 1639 reverses this, with Clorinda and Aladine in the distance at the right, and the young couple standing as their executioners prepare the pile of wood for burning.

Mattia Preti brings them all together in Clorinda Rescues Olindo and Sophronia from 1646, with a man stood behind Aladine bearing a burning brand. In the sky is a Cupid, and Sophronia is almost unclad.

Cornelius van Poelenburgh’s undated Clorinda Saving Olindo and Sophronia from the Stake is less clearly structured, and more expansive. Clorinda is on her horse at the right, and a naked Sophronia stands at the stake in the centre. Aladine isn’t clearly distinguished, though.

Although painted almost two centuries later, Overbeck’s fresco of Sophronia and Olindo Saved by Clorinda (1819-27) is much less cluttered, and far easier to read. Unusually, Clorinda is shown riding a white steed, and with golden rather than black armour.

Eugène Delacroix’s Clorinda Rescues Olindo and Sophronia from 1856 is a minor masterpiece. Clorinda has just arrived, wearing her more conventional black armour, as one of the enemies of the crusaders, and holds up her right hand to tell the executioners to stay as they are. The stake is raised high, putting the couple in full view, although Aladine is nowhere to be seen.

Aladine cannot refuse Clorinda, nor refute her reasoning, so decrees that the couple be freed. However, he imposes the condition that they are banished from Jerusalem, and must live outside Palestine. Whilst he is about it, he banishes all the other able-bodied Christians, who could pose a threat when the crusaders arrive. They mostly find their way to the town of Emmaus, where the crusaders have just arrived.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

Some are remembered for their achievements in life, others for the injustice of their departure from it. Those who know the works of Nicolas Poussin will recognise the name of Phocion, whose death was commemorated in two of the master’s wonderful narrative landscapes. It takes Plutarch’s account of Phocion’s life to understand why artists – and everyone else, perhaps – should remember his death so often.

Plutarch’s biography of Phocion starts by explaining that he was in command of a shipwrecked state, and that in such circumstances the wrath of the people is all too often expressed quite unjustly on their leader.

When Phocion was a young man, he followed the general Chabrias closely, from whom he gained his military experience. Phocion became recognised for his skills, and he was given command in a naval engagement off Naxos, which he fought with considerable success. He then went into public service, while often being made general of the Athenian forces. Indeed, Plutarch considers that Phocion was made general more times than any other man that he has known of: forty-five times he was so elected.

Yet Phocion didn’t attempt to curry favour with the people, and spoke frankly, often opposing popular opinion. Plutarch recites a series of fables and sayings attributed to Phocion which confirm his independence of judgement and opinion.

On one occasion, Phocion called on Archibiades, who had let his beard grow to a great length, to give testimony in the council to support his case. When Archibiades opposed Phocion’s view, the latter grasped him by the beard and said, “O Archibiades, why, then, did you not shave yourself?”

Phocion proved harsh, obstinate, and inexorable only insofar as was necessary to struggle successfully against those who opposed his efforts on behalf of his country. In all other matters and times, he was well-disposed to all, accessible, humane, and even helped his adversaries when they needed it most.

Plutarch’s account of Phocion’s military career is necessarily hurried. It starts with a battle fought in Eretria, where Phocion had a small force but took possession of a commanding ridge, from where he captured an important fortress which controlled the island. After he had returned to Athens, his successor ended up being captured by the enemy.

Phocion was then ordered to take a force to the Hellespont to aid the allies of Athens; this helped save Byzantium from their enemy King Philip. He went on to provide aid to the citizens of Megara, but was excluded from command during further conflict between Athens and the Macedonian King. Phocion was in support of the proposal for peace between the states, but refused to agree until its terms were known.

Alexander once sent Phocion a gift of one hundred talents. When the bearers of this tried to give it to Phocion, he asked why he should be singled out to receive it. They replied that Alexander judged that he alone was a man of honour and worth, to which Phocion asked that he should continue to be so appreciated, so refused the gift. Phocion continued to refuse the money even when Alexander wrote to him personally.

At a time when many politicians and others in public office accepted ‘gifts’ freely, Phocion and his wife were known for refusing, and for living a frugal life. Franc Kavčič shows this in his undated painting of Phocion with his Wife and a Rich Ionian Woman: in response to her guest’s lavish and expensive jewellery, Phocion’s wife told her: “My ornament is Phocion, who is now for the twentieth year a general of Athens.”

Athens was then plunged into the Lamian war. Phocion was very critical of this, warning that the city lacked longer-term military resources. At first, the city was very successful, driving its enemy Antipater away into Lamia. The Athenian general Leosthenes was killed, but instead of sending Phocion as commander, another was chosen. Phocion then opposed making an expedition against the Boeotians, and was warned that he risked being put to death by the Athenians if he offended them further.

Phocion was responsible for negotiating a truce with Antipater, which concluded with the city of Athens having a Macedonian garrison under the command of Menyllus, who was equitable and a friend of Phocion. After Antipater’s death, Cassander staged a coup and sent Nicanor to relieve Menyllus of his command at Athens. Antipater’s general, Polysperchon, conspired to seize power by thwarting the schemes of Cassander. To assist in that, Polysperchon needed Phocion out of his way.

Phocion was denounced as a traitor, and Polysperchon ordered him to be seized, tortured, and put to death. With his friends, he was taken back to Athens ostensibly to be tried, but had already been sentenced to death. Phocion was given no opportunity to defend himself when tried in front of a rabble. He asked the crowd whether they wished to put him to death unjustly or justly. They replied “Justly”, to which he asked how they would determine that without hearing him first. He wasn’t allowed to make himself heard again, until he admitted his guilt but denied that of his friends. The crowd insisted that they too would be put to death, merely because they were his friends, and voted to put them to death.

They were then given hemlock to drink by the executioner. However, there was insufficient left for Phocion, who had to arrange for a friend to pay for more hemlock so that he too could be executed.

In 1804, The Death of Phocion was the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome competition. Charles Brocas’ unsuccessful entry shown above gives Plutarch’s account very clearly. At the right, Phocion’s friends are dying as they drink their goblets of hemlock. In the centre, Phocion is arranging for the payment of the executioner so that he too can be killed. Behind Phocion stands another man, pointing to the empty bowl into which the hemlock plant was to be put to make the infusion.

The winner that year was Joseph Denis Odevaere with this painting. Phocion stands in the middle, comforting his friends as they die. At the right, the executioner is being paid for the additional supply of hemlock.

Phocion’s enemies got a decree passed that his body had to be carried beyond the boundary of the country, and that no Athenian could light a fire for his cremation. A man was hired to carry Phocion’s body beyond Eleusis, where it was cremated. Phocion’s wife was present, and built a small memorial at the spot. She then carried his remains by night to her house, where she buried them in her hearth.

Nicolas Poussin’s painting of Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion from 1648 is thought to be the version which is now in Cardiff, Wales (above), although a later copy (below) is now in the Louvre in Paris. In the foreground, two burly men are carrying a stretcher on which Phocion’s body is being carried out of the country.

Behind that are the many little sub-stories: a horseman in red making haste with a message, a cart being guided along a rutted track, and crowds outside a strangely Graeco-Italianate building.

Poussin painted its companion in the same year, in his Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (1648). Phocion’s widow is here gathering his ashes to take back to her hearth, as her maidservant anxiously keeps watch. Although less rich in narrative vignettes, the landscape here is particularly wonderful, with the trees echoing the form of the skyline.

Not long after his execution, when the people had returned to their senses, a bronze statue of Phocion was erected in Athens, and his remains were given a public burial. Phocion’s fate reminded the Athenians of what the people had previously done to Socrates.

Reference

Phocion, whole text in English translation at Penelope.

Another, perhaps the other, great figure of classical times who is prominent for the moment of his death is Cato the Younger. Plutarch’s Lives also contains an account of his great-grandfather, referred to as Cato the Elder.

Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis was orphaned when a child, and brought up by an uncle. From childhood he was inflexible and steadfast if not stubborn, and developed great ambition. When he was educated, he proved a slow learner, but what he did learn stayed put. He followed a Stoic philosophy, being made a priest of Apollo and living a simple life. He seldom spoke in public, and when he did, he was straightforward and direct. He considered that life at the time was bad and in need of great change, so generally chose the opposite course to what was then in fashion.

He volunteered for the Third Servile War, led against Rome by Spartacus, for which he was proposed honours, but he refused them as he declared that he had not earned them. He was then appointed military tribune, and sent to Macedonia. On the journey there, he walked whilst his attending slaves, freedmen and friends rode on horseback. While there in command of a legion, he conducted himself as a soldier rather than as a general, which earned him great respect from those under his command. On completion of this tour of duty, he travelled in Asia before returning to Rome.

Before he would accept the office of quaestor, he insisted on learning all about its laws and practices. Once installed in office, he was assiduous in ensuring that his staff conducted themselves correctly too, expelling one for breach of trust, and bringing another to trial for fraud. This restored confidence in his office, and brought more honesty to the handling of public finances.

Cato was then elected a tribune, and started trying to tackle the widespread problem of bribery. He spoke in the senate against Caesar, alleging that he was trying to subvert the state. Cato was also a strong opponent of Pompey, and gave a vehement speech in which he declared that, while he lived, Pompey should not enter Rome with an armed force.

These were dangerous times in Rome: armed strangers would appear at key points in the city, and Cato once physically put himself between Caesar and Metellus to stop them from conspiring. Metellus introduced a proposed law to bring Pompey back to Rome, which Cato steadfastly opposed. When the supporters of Metellus were convinced that Cato’s opposition would succeed, Metellus fled to Asia, intending to go to Pompey there.

Pompey then returned to Rome, demanding that the consular elections be postponed. Cato persuaded the senate to refuse that, so Pompey decided to win over Cato to be his friend. Pompey sent Munatius, Cato’s companion, to Cato with the proposal that Pompey and his son marry two of Cato’s relatives (either nieces or daughters). Cato refused to be won over in this way. Unfortunately this drove Pompey to unite his power with that of Caesar, again by way of marriage, which nearly overthrew the whole Roman state.

Cato continued his opposition to the schemes of Pompey, and opposed Caesar’s request to be a candidate for the post of consul while still celebrating a triumph on his return from Spain. Caesar abandoned the triumph, was elected consul, and gave his daughter in marriage to Pompey, bringing Rome closer to the brink of constitutional collapse. Although Cato retained the support of the senate, and of many outside it, his opponents won the day by violence.

The senate therefore passed a law distributing lands, to which Cato remained strongly opposed. That law also required the whole senate to take an oath to uphold the law, something which Cato refused to do. Caesar introduced another law to divide most of Campania among the poor and needy, which only Cato opposed. Caesar had him dragged off to prison from the senate. Caesar then experienced remorse, and had Cato released, only for the latter to oppose Caesar again over the proposal to make Caesar governor of Illyria and the whole of Gaul.

Cato sailed to Byzantium, and from there to Cyprus, where he sold off the estate of Ptolemy, the late king of Egypt, for cash. Bringing the money and two books of accounts back to Rome proved a tough challenge, and both books were lost in transit. Cato was annoyed at that, as he wanted to be able to provide full account for the great treasures which he had brought back.

By this time, Cicero had returned from exile, and promptly destroyed the records of the tribuneship of his enemy Clodius. Cato fell out with Cicero as a result. Caesar, Pompey and Crassus then joined forces to arrange for Caesar’s rule over Gaul to be renewed and funded, and to promote Pompey and Crassus as consuls. Lucius Domitius, Cato’s brother-in-law, stood against them, and he and Cato were attacked by Pompey’s men early one morning in Rome, forcing Domitius to withdraw from his candidature.

Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco of Cicero, Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger and Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica from about 1400 still stands in the Palazzo Pubblico, in Siena, Italy, showing those Romans of this time who fought for justice.

Cato wouldn’t give up the fight against Pompey, though, and put himself forward as praetor. By manoeuvring and bribery, Pompey and Crassus got another candidate elected instead of Cato. The senate then considered a proposal to assign provices to the consuls, against which Cato tried to speak. After two hours of putting his arguments, he was pulled down and ejected from the senate, which eventually led to fighting in the forum.

The following year, Cato was elected praetor, but seemed to be in decline, often attending his tribunals without shoes or a tunic. He persuaded the senate to pass a law which required magistrates to furnish accounts of their election, in an effort to end the bribery which was rife at the time. This unfortunately led to rising irritation with Cato, and made those in power hostile towards him.

With government falling more deeply into disarray, Pompey had himself made sole consul by the senate. Pompey asked Cato to meet him, and invited him to be his counsellor and associate in government. Cato replied that, while he was happy to be his counsellor, he would continue to speak his mind in public.

Caesar was using the riches which he was winning in Gaul to buy himself increasing power in Rome, which Cato drew to Pompey’s attention. The latter wouldn’t respond to this growing threat, so Cato stood for the consulship, so that he could check Caesar’s rise. He was unsuccessful, and could only oppose Caesar’s actions in the senate, whose members were too afraid of Caesar’s great popularity to do anything. Cato urged the senate to put Pompey in charge of addressing the situation with Caesar, but Pompey was without an army, so left Rome.

Cato then went in pursuit of Pompey, bearing heavily the sorrows of his country. He stopped trimming his hair and beard, and refused to wear any garlands of flowers. Cato was then despatched to Asia, where Pompey’s commanders had no need of him. By this time, Pompey had assembled a great fleet of ships and a large army. Instead of making Cato his admiral, Pompey chose Bibulus, because of Cato’s devotion to Rome. Cato was put in charge of the garrison he had assembled at Dyrrhachium.

Pompey was then defeated at Pharsalus, and fled. Cato sailed to Libya, where he learned of Pompey’s death. This left Cato in command of the forces in North Africa. Scipio then assumed overall command, and wanted to please the African king Juba by killing all the citizens of Utica, which was thought to have swung towards support for Caesar. Cato strongly opposed this, and helped Utica to defend itself.

Caesar then won a battle at Thapsus, and the defeated Scipio and Juba were among the few who had escaped. Cato advised the citizens of Utica to defend themselves against the forces of Caesar, but their senate decided instead to sue for peace.

With his world falling around him, and Caesar’s army approaching, Cato bade the citizens of Utica farewell, as if he was going to leave them. He then took a bath, after which he sat at supper with friends. He retired to his room, where he read Plato’s On the Soul. He looked up for his sword, which had been removed while he had been eating, so summoned a servant to fetch it for him.

His son and friends had by this time recognised that Cato intended to end his own life, and Cato had to insist, quite angrily, that he was of sound mind and capable of making his own decisions. His friends finally withdrew, and his sword was brought in to him. Towards dawn, Cato drew his sword and stabbed himself in the abdomen using a hand which was inflamed and weakened. This failed to kill him, but he fell from his couch and overturned a nearby abacus.

His son and friends ran in when they heard the disturbance, and found Cato covered with blood, most of his bowels protruding, but still alive. A physician went in and tried to repair this, but Cato pushed him away and tore at his wounds until he died. The citizens of Utica honoured him in death, burying his body near the sea. He was only forty-eight.

Cato’s daughter was the wife of Brutus, who two years later was one of those who killed Caesar.

Cato’s gruesome suicide has long been a favourite subject in painting. In about 1640, Gioacchino Assereto, a Genoese Caravaggist, painted The Death of Cato, showing the physician attending, and delicately avoiding gore. Cato’s right hand is clearly injured, and his left pulls at a cloth as his face contorts with pain.

A few years later, Charles Le Brun painted the Suicide of Cato the Younger (c 1646). This doesn’t appear to follow Plutarch’s account particularly well: although he appears still undisturbed, his eyes are closed and he appears to be dead, still in his bed.

Later in the seventeenth century, Antonio Molinari painted The Testament of Cato Uticensis, which must show an earlier scene when a servant has just brought him his sword.

With the Reign of Terror only past some three years earlier, I think it suprising that Cato’s suicide was chosen as the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome competition in 1797 – the first time that it was held since 1792. This was one of only three occasions in which the jury decided to award three equal first prizes, to Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet, Pierre Bouillon, and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.

Bouchet’s entry is skilfully composed, and employs a strong diagonal formed from outthrust arms bringing the gaze onto Cato’s injured abdomen. Although a powerful moment, it lacks references to preceding or successive events.

Bouillon uses Cato’s outstretched form to make another strong diagonal, but is less directive of the gaze, and less structured altogether. It’s hard to know exactly which moment in the story he is showing us, and the geometric diagrams in the lower right corner are frankly confusing.

Guérin has outstretched arms leading us not to the wound, but to Cato’s head, and he in turn fending the physician away. The two figures on the left don’t appear to contribute a great deal, and the narrative is little clearer.

It wasn’t until 1863 that the young Jean-Paul Laurens tried a different approach which I think proved most successful. In this earlier moment of the story, Cato is trying to sink his sword into his belly, when quite alone.

In these more recent depictions, the great strength of this story lies in Cato’s refusal to compromise his high values: something of great importance in France at the time of the Directory in 1797, and again under Emperor Napoleon III in 1863. It also seems a timely reminder in 2018.

Reference

Cato the Younger, whole text in English translation at Penelope.

The able-bodied Christians who have been banished from the city of Jerusalem, together with Sophronia and Olindo, are arriving at the nearby town of Emmaus, where the crusaders have also arrived, on their way to lay siege to the city.

The crusaders camp at Emmaus at dusk. As they are doing so, two ambassadors arrive from the king of Egypt: Alete, and Argante the Circassian. They are taken to meet Godfrey, and Tasso devotes the remainder of the second canto to the discussions there. Alete very courteously and diplomatically invites Godfrey to call a halt to the crusade before he attacks Jerusalem. He warns that continuing on his current course could bring the king of Egypt against him, and united with the Persian and Turkish forces, he would be heavily outnumbered. In return for stopping short of Jerusalem, Alete offers a truce and free passage to safety.

Godfrey politely rejects the offer, stressing how it is God’s hand that directs the crusaders. Argante is brief and blunt, and tells Godfrey that his rejection means war. When they leave, Alete returns to Egypt, and Argante to Jerusalem. That night, Godfrey and his army cannot sleep.

The third canto opens at dawn of the following day, as the crusaders march onward, and get their first sight of Jerusalem, the Holy City. Within its walls, a sentinel sees the approaching army, first from the cloud of dust which it throws up as it moves closer. He calls the citizens to defend their city; the old, young, and those unable to help in the defence go and shelter in its mosques.

Jerusalem’s ruler Aladine does his rounds of the defences, and calls for the company of Erminia, daughter of the dead former king of Antioch, who managed to flee to safety in Jerusalem when her father’s city fell to the crusaders.

Mattia Preti’s Erminia, Princess of Antioch, painted in the middle of the seventeenth century, shows her exuding nobility, with shoulder-length hair. She is reading an inscription on a tree, which unfortunately isn’t intelligible.

Clorinda leads the city’s troops out to attack the French crusaders, with Argante the Circassian holding himself in reserve in a secret gate in the city’s wall. Clorinda heads an attack on an advance party of the crusaders who have been sent ahead to scavenge for livestock and crops to feed the army.

The captain of the city’s defenders is quickly knocked to the ground, but Clorinda weighs in and forces the French into retreat. They regroup on a hill, just as Godfrey sends Tancred and his troops in to support them. Aladine is watching this with Erminia alongside him, and asks her to identify Prince Tancred from her experience at Antioch. Erminia cannot reply, as she chokes back tears, but finally tells Aladine of her desire to make him captive for her “sweet revenge”.

On the battlefield in front of them, Clorinda and Tancred charge at one another. Their lances strike the other’s visor and shatter, but Tancred’s blow knocks Clorinda’s helmet off, revealing her long, golden hair. Tancred is thunderstruck by this revelation.

She charges at him a second time, but he turns away and attacks others with his sword. She chases after him, brandishing her sword and calling for him to turn and fight her. He refuses to respond to the blows from her sword, but calls on her to settle the matter away from the main battle. He then asks her to agree the terms on which she fights. He proposes that she should remove his heart, drops his weapon, and bares his chest to her.

Paolo Domenico Finoglia’s painting of Tancred Faces Clorinda from 1640-45 shows this tense moment, when Tancred, his sword held low and away from Clorinda (who surprisingly has dark brown hair), makes clear his love for her. The battle rages on behind them.

Elsewhere, the crusaders are getting the better of the soldiers of Jerusalem, and the latter are starting to retreat to the city. One of the crusaders prepares to strike Clorinda from behind with his sword, but Tancred parries it away. It still strikes her neck a glancing blow, and blood from a small wound starts to colour her blonde hair. Clorinda seizes the opportunity to run back to her troops and join their retreat.

As the city troops reach the walls, they stop and wheel round to attack the rear of their pursuers. At the same time, Argante sends a small team out to attack their front. Argante leads them, and he and Clorinda start to gain victims from among the overreaching crusaders. These are from Dudon’s ‘Adventurers’, with Rinaldo in the lead. Erminia tells Aladine about Rinaldo’s great skills in battle, and then points out their leader Dudon, and Gernando, brother of the king of Norway, and a married couple, Edward and Gildippe, who always fight side by side.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s fresco of Argante, Rinaldo and Clorinda in Battle (1819-27), in the Casa Massimo in Rome, may show another scene from this battle, although here it would make more sense if the unhelmeted Clorinda were with Tancred rather than Rinaldo. Another puzzle is the white smock worn by Clorinda, which bears the red cross of a crusader.

Rinaldo and Tancred now break through, and Rinaldo strikes Argante so hard that he can barely get up again. Rinaldo’s horse is then struck, and he is forced to pause while he extracts his foot from underneath it. The remaining city troops make the safety of the walls, leaving Argante and Clorinda to guard their rear. Dudon presses on, killing four of Argante’s men and threatening Argante himself, who manages to sink the blade of his sword deep into Dudon’s body.

Argante doesn’t hang around, but gets back to the wall, as the citizens start hurling rocks and loosing arrows at the crusaders. Rinaldo, free at last from his horse, is fired by the death of Dudon, and charges at the city troops despite the hail of rocks and arrows. He and the other crusaders pull up short, and they too turn away from the fight, recovering the body of Dudon on the way.

Godfrey has taken the opportunity to study the city and its defences, and notes that its approach is difficult on three of its four sides, but easiest from the north, where it is most strongly fortified.

As he is weighing up where best to pitch camp, Erminia points him out to Aladine, who recognises him from a meeting when he was an Egyptian diplomat to the court of France. Also identified, standing next to Godfrey, is his brother Baldwin, and on his other side Raymond, William son of the king of England, and Guelph, but Bohemond (who killed Erminia’s family) is nowhere to be seen.

Godfrey decides that, as he has insufficient troops to encircle the city, he will station them at all its points of entry, and that they will dig in, using ditches to prevent surprise attacks. He then goes off to join those mourning the death of Dudon in the dark night.

Overnight, Godfrey makes further plans. Recognising the strength of the city’s walls, he tries to work out where he can acquire timber to build siege towers. At first light, he joins Dudon’s funeral. After that, he has a Syrian take him to the only woods in the area, where he sets men to work felling those trees in preparation. That ends the third canto.

The fourth canto opens with a long and florid account of pagan visions of the underworld conjured up in Aladine’s mind, and an accompanying speech by Satan to inspire the “pagans” of Jerusalem to defeat the crusaders. This leads to the introduction of Hydrotes, a “magician” who rules Damascus and its neighbouring cities, whose niece is the beautiful sorceress Armida.

Jacques Blanchard’s undated portrait of Armida, probably from around 1630, shows her like Circe, dangerously alluring.

Hydrotes sees Armida as central to his grand plan to defeat the crusaders, and directs her to the enemy camp, to win the warriors over, and make Godfrey infatuated with her. Armida rises to the challenge, and travels through the night to enter the crusaders’ camp. She quickly beguiles the men there, and can twist them around her little finger.

Armida spins the crusaders a story of how she has fallen on bad times, and calls on Godfrey to shelter her. She bumps into his brother, and in no time is speaking with Godfrey himself.

David Teniers the Younger shows this scene in this wonderful painting in oil on copper of Armida before Godfrey of Bouillon, from 1628-30. The sorceress is seen with a small lapdog and a couple of young maids, as might befit a contemporary woman of her standing. Next to the young Godfrey is Peter the Hermit, with his long white beard.

After introductory flattery, Armida proceeds to tell Godfrey a long sob story, from the death of her mother just prior to her birth, to the threat of torture and death for her and her friends because she was alleged to have conspired to poison a tyrant. All she needs are ten of Godfrey’s best knights to go and sort that king out.

Godfrey sat and thought about her request.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

In his Lives, Plutarch compares the biographies, but not their speeches, of two of the greatest of the classical orators: Demosthenes, the Athenian, and Cicero, the Roman. Their lives had many close similarities, which perhaps predisposed them to their profession.

The father of Demosthenes had a large factory employing skilled (slave) workmen, but died when Demosthenes was only seven. Unfortunately, his subsequent guardians took much of his inheritance, and didn’t leave enough to pay the boy’s teachers. His mother wouldn’t allow him to undertake any physical work, so he grew up lean and sickly.

He acquired the ambition of excelling in oratory when, as a youth, he heard the famous Callistratus in action in court, and saw the way his skills were appreciated afterwards. He therefore became a pupil of Isaeus, and when he came of age brought lawsuits against his guardians, and wrote speeches attacking them. He then learned another important early lesson: although he won his case against his guardians, he was unable to recover much of his inheritance from them.

He then turned to more public speaking. This brought him some failure, but other orators provided helpful advice, with which he steadily improved. He had an underground practice room built, into which he descended each day to train, and sometimes spent periods of two or three months there, honing his skills.

He also listened to the speeches of others, analysing their arguments in great detail. But he was a calculated and deliberate speaker, and rarely tried making a speech on the spur of the moment. He made his voice more distinct by practising with pebbles in his mouth, recited speeches and verses in a single breath and when exercising, and practised in front of a mirror.

Plutarch doesn’t mention him going through his speeches when walking along the coast, as shown in Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ’s painting of Demosthenes Practicing Oratory from 1870, although this makes for a more interesting image than showing him in his cellar.

He engaged more in public matters after the start of the Phocian War. Although he wasn’t altogether inaccessible to bribes, he seldom spoke against his beliefs. When nominated to conduct an impeachment, for example, he refused. He responded that he was prepared to serve as a counsellor, but not as a false accuser.

Louis Loeb’s Demosthenes before the Athenian Council from 1898 was engraved and used as a book illustration.

Demosthenes was also prepared to write speeches for others to use, something that he did for Apollodorus on several occasions.

He was a strong opponent of the peace with Philip of Macedon, and was one of a group of ten Athenians sent to the king as an embassy. Demosthenes continued to stir the Athenians up against the Macedonians, urging them to invade Euboea. He was then sent to other Greek states, to encourage them to help raise forces to oppose Philip. Demosthenes was brave in supporting the Athenians and Greeks, but had no bravery when it came to battle, and was among the first to run away.

For this, his opponents criticised him, but the people remained happy for him to engage in public affairs, and invited him to give the eulogy for the remains of their fallen warriors when they were repatriated later. Demosthenes urged the Greek league to make war on Alexander the Great, but when he was sent as an ambassador to Alexander, he abandoned the mission for fear of the Macedonian’s wrath.

JMW Turner’s curious composite narrative of Phryne Going to the Public Baths as Venus: Demosthenes Taunted by Aeschines from 1838 apparently combines two legends about courtesans of the day.

Phryne was a famous courtesan born in about 371 BCE, who is best-remembered for her legendary disrobing during her trial for impiety, famously painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Here she is celebrating the festival of Poseidon by going naked to bathe in the sea, as if she were the goddess Venus.

At her trial, Phryne was defended by the orator Hypereides rather than Demosthenes, who lived between 384-322 BCE, so was a contemporary. Somewhere among the crowd, Demosthenes is supposed to be taunting his rival Aeschines (389-314 BCE) for being the son of a courtesan (but not Phryne), which would seem an unwarranted ad hominem, and is not mentioned by Plutarch.

As Alexander made his way conquering through Asia, Harpalus had to return; Demosthenes accepted a large bribe from Harpalus, which quickly became public knowledge. He was fined fifty talents for this crime, in lieu of which he would have to go to prison. Demosthenes therefore fled Athens and went into exile.

When Alexander died, Demosthenes applied himself to persuading other Greek states to join another league to expel the Macedonians from their lands. He was therefore given permission to return from exile. Shortly afterwards, the Greeks were soundly defeated, and a Macedonian garrison installed. Demosthenes had no alternative but to return to exile, and in his absence he was sentenced to death.

Demosthenes took refuge in the temple of Poseidon at Calauria, where he was confronted by Archias, sent to arrest him. Demosthenes retired into the temple as if to write; he there bit his pen, which he had loaded with poison (there are also claims that the poison had been concealed in a bracelet). As that took effect, he trembled and became unsteady, went past the altar, and there fell dead.

The Death of Demosthenes has been the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome on at least two occasions. The first was in 1805, when Felix Boisselier won it with this work. He won the Prix a second time the following year, only to die in 1811.

Demosthenes looks up at the statue of Poseidon, clinging onto the altar as he weakens. His pen has fallen to the ground, and his left arm is outstretched towards Archias as he approaches to arrest him.

This was set again as the subject for the Prix in 1879, and Camille-Félix Bellanger’s unsuccessful entry shows the body of Demosthenes laid out on the ground, his pen now out of his reach at the far right. Archias is visibly frustrated by his rapid suicide. Behind them a young woman kneels at the altar to Poseidon.

Émile-Jules Pichot was also unsuccessful that year, showing Demosthenes fading away at the foot of the altar, writing tablets visible, and a suggestion that the pen is by his right hand.

The winner was Alfred-Henri Bramtot, who shows Demosthenes’ limp body being supported from falling in front of the altar, with Archias angry and frustrated at the far right. The altar tripod is at the left edge, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it.

The Athenians erected a statue in honour of the orator Demosthenes.

Reference

Demosthenes, whole text in English translation at Penelope.

The seductive ‘pagan’ sorceress Armida has just told Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade’s siege on the city of Jerusalem, a long sob story, leading to her request for ten of his best knights to go and sort her problems out.

Godfrey predictably turns her down, in view of his mission to deliver the city. Armida plays on emotion, and weeps. She has won over the young knight Eustace, who asserts that helping all ladies is chief among the duties of a knight. The others around Godfrey concur, and their leader is forced to acquiesce. Armida then plays the field with great skill and success, winning over the hearts of all the knights, in her bid to take away more than just the ten that she asked for.

Canto five continues in the camp of the crusaders, with Armida’s influence eating away at their resolve to fight. Godfrey’s next problem is to select a knight to replace the dead Dudon, who in turn can choose the ten to go with Armida. This sows dissent, with Prince Gernando wanting to lead the army of ‘Adventurers’. This brings him into direct conflict with Rinaldo, who accuses Gernando of being a liar.

The two knights must settle this immediately in combat, and Rinaldo quickly kills Gernando. Godfrey goes straight there, and on hearing what happened, condemns Rinaldo to death for breaking the crusaders’ laws.

Tancred speaks in favour of Rinaldo, then Raymond too. Tancred rides off to Rinaldo’s tent, and the latter makes clear that he has no intention of staying around in prison awaiting his trial. Rinaldo dons his armour, and rides off.

Guelph goes to Godfrey to plead Rinaldo’s case, but the leader stands firm. Next, Godfrey has to face Armida, who goes to him with two of her ladies and two knights in attendance. With Godfrey’s single-minded determination in his mission, she finds him much less malleable than his knights. Armida finally gets her way, and is allowed to take her ten knights.

With dozens of knights clamouring to accompany Armida, it is decided to draw names from an urn. Tasso lists: Count of Pembroke Artemidorus, Gerard, Wenceslaus, Guasco, Rudolph, Olderic, William of Roncillon, Bavarian Eberard, French Henri, and Rambaldo. Those who were unsuccessful are left seething in envy, and many leave the following night to follow Armida as she leads her squad of ten knights away. This further divides the force of crusaders.

Back in camp, Godfrey hears that an Egyptian navy is at sea to prevent supply ships reaching the coast, and that a convoy of supplies en route to the crusaders from one of the ports has been ambushed and lost. The leader has to comfort his men by affirming that God will look after them, but inwardly worries how he will feed the army.

The sixth canto starts inside the besieged city of Jerusalem, where its occupants are better-fed than those laying siege to it, because they have been able to bring in supplies by night. Work had been undertaken to strengthen its fortifications, particularly on the north, where there were war machines stationed too.

Argante urges Aladine to fight the enemy rather than sit waiting for starvation, but the ruler reveals that Soliman of Nicaea, who seeks vengeance for his own loss earlier in the Crusade, is gathering a force to attack by night. This angers Argante, who is an old rival of Soliman, and he asks permission to go out to meet a crusader in combat. Aladine gives his consent.

Argante then issues a challenge to Godfrey for one-to-one combat, which the latter cannot refuse.

Inside the city, Aladine instructs Clorinda to take a force of a thousand to ensure Argante’s safe passage. Godfrey feels unable to choose Argante’s opponent, but the consensus calls on Tancred, who is approved by Godfrey.

As Tancred makes his way to the field where they will fight, he sees Clorinda, who sits on her horse with her visor raised. This delays him, and Otto has already rushed forward to take on the Circassian in the arena. Otto is in full charge before Tancred realises what is happening. Otto and Argante make contact: although Otto strikes the Circassian’s helmet, the latter knocks Otto from his horse, cleaving his shield and breastplate.

Argante tells Otto to concede, but the crusader refuses. Argante charges at Otto, who manages to wound his enemy and draw blood, but insufficient to do anything more than anger him further. Argante then turns his horse, fells Otto, and his horse tramples him, in a cowardly act which breaches the code of chivalry.

At this, Tancred calls out Argante’s cowardice and the two charge at one another. Their lances shatter, making their horses collapse from under them. They draw their swords to fight on foot. Tancred is the first to draw blood, and Argante is so stunned that he is too slow to return the strike, and takes another heavy blow to his shoulder.

Argante’s rage then overcomes his injuries, and he rains blows on Tancred. Both are now wounded, their armour pierced in many places. At this point, heralds are put in to bring the vicious fight to a halt for the night.

Erminia, in Jerusalem behind them, has suffered this battle badly. When Antioch fell, it was Prince Tancred who had protected her, and honoured her as a queen. For this, she had fallen in love with him. As she watched Tancred in combat, she had felt every blow which Argante had laid on him. With her skills in preparing healing potions, she is torn between using them to nurse her love, or Argante who would surely then be able to finish the crusader off.

She had spent long hours with Clorinda, and decides to dress up in her armour so that she can leave the city and give aid to Tancred in the crusaders’ camp. She engages the help of a trusty squire and her maid, although she doesn’t tell them where she is going to. Erminia then plays the part of Clorinda, commanding that the city gate is opened on the authority of its king.

Once near the camp, she realises that her plan has one problem: being recognised as Clorinda, woman warrior of Aladine’s forces, probably won’t give her a good reception among those laying siege to the city. She therefore sends her squire on to locate the injured Tancred. As she waits for his return, she is spotted by a platoon who are there to intercept attempts to smuggle supplies into the city. The father of one of its leaders, Polyphernes, had been killed by Clorinda, so throws his spear at her, and misses.

Erminia flees in panic, with her maid, and later the squire. When Tancred hears of this, he rides off in pursuit of the woman warrior identified to him as Clorinda.

At the start of the seventh canto, Erminia enters dark woods – this is also still night – and continues her flight, even though those pursuing her have now given up and returned to camp. The following day, she continues to wander, lost until she reaches the River Jordan, where she lies down to sleep, completely exhausted.

When she wakes at the next dawn, she sees that there is a small shepherds’ hut, and weeps, only to hear the sound of shepherds singing and playing their pipes. She gets up and walks towards the group, which consists of a grey-bearded man and three youths. As she is still wearing Clorinda’s armour, they are fearful of her at first, but she explains what is going on nearby, asking how they can remain there in peace.

The old man explains that he had been the keeper of the grounds and member of the royal court at Memphis, but had left for the peaceful life with his three sons in the country. He consoles her, and takes her to his elderly wife, who dresses her in country clothes.

Domenichino appears to have been one of the earliest major painters to capture this scene, in his Erminia and the Shepherds, painted between 1622-25. He recasts the story in classical times, with Erminia appearing more Roman than Syrian, and the shepherds are straight out of an Ovidian myth. This is all set in a wonderfully imaginative riparian landscape.

This sub-plot remained popular through the eighteenth century, when Giovanni Antonio Guardi painted his interpretation of Erminia and the Shepherds (1750-55). Erminia has by now changed out of Clorinda’s armour into the fetching outfit of an Alpine shepherdess. She stands holding the reins of her white horse, and Clorinda’s helmet.

Joseph-Benoît Suvée’s Erminia and the Shepherds from 1776 is more basic and a little less literal. Her horse is nowhere to be seen, and the semi-naked young woman sat next to the old shepherd is something of a surprise. The setting is a bit more Palestinian, though, with some palm trees.

It is perhaps Eugène Delacroix who renders this most faithfully, in his Erminia and the Shepherds of 1859. Erminia is still dressed as the warrior Clorinda, and her charger is convincing too. The farming family are taken aback, and their dog has rushed out to bark at the visitor. In the distance, behind the small farmhouse, is a figure who might be pursuing Erminia.

Although Tancred had also strayed, he is still in pursuit of the warrior who he thinks is Clorinda.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

Narrative painting of classical myths has quite a few conventions, although these days they’re not easy to find described. One which often confuses the unwary is the symbolism of river gods and their attendant nymphs. As a preface to tomorrow’s look at paintings of Ondine (or Undine), here’s a short survey of some classical river deities.

In Greek, and subsequently Roman, mythology, the river gods or Potamoi (the Greek for rivers) were three thousand sons of Oceanus, the great river which encircled the earth, and Tethys, his Titan sister and wife. A river god was both that river and a distinct deity: Achelous was the god of the River Achelous, the largest in Greece, who wrestled unsuccessfully with Hercules for the right to marry Deianira.

Associated with sources and bodies of fresh water were also water nymphs, Naiads or Potamides, often stated to be the daughters of the river gods. In ancient times, there was a weaker distinction between fresh and salt waters, so although nymphs associated with the sea are usually Nereids (Mediterranean) or Oceanids, Naiads can also be encountered in what we would view as the sea.

The standard depiction for any river god in a painting of a classical story is of an older bearded man lounging by a large earthenware pot from which water pours forth into the river. This is shown well in Santi di Tito’s fresco of The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars, from about 1570. Although this story tells how the sisters of Phaeton grieve for him after his death, and are transformed into poplar trees, as it shows a river, there must be a river god.

Rubens’ delightful painting of Romulus and Remus being discovered by Faustulus, from 1615-16, shows both a river god, in this case Tiberinus, and his daughter nymph, at the left with the god’s pot.

In Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora from 1630, the river god is again at the left, and looks tired of the whole business, with barely a trickle of water emerging from his pot.

This beautiful painting attributed to Luigi Garzi, of Alpheus and Arethusa from around 1690, shows one river god and two nymphs. The god leans on his pot, and in his left hand holds a small spade, another attribute sometimes associated with them.

Antoine Coypel’s version of the same Ovidian myth, Alpheus Chasing Arethusa from about 1710, places the river god at the lower left, and two naiads separately on the right.

So far, the river deities have enjoyed a rather passive life in paintings, but this wasn’t a requirement. In François Boucher’s Pan and Syrinx from 1743, the nymph Syrinx is seeking the help of the river god and Naiad, as she attempts to evade Pan’s attentions. The god’s pot is almost hidden beneath luxuriant red fabric, under his right hand.

In Tiepolo’s Apollo and Daphne (c 1744-45), the river god is given much of the foreground and lower section of the painting, and holds an oar or paddle, a more unusual but quite distinctive attribute.

Sometimes, artists conceal the river god as if challenging the viewer to locate him. This is the case in Anton Raphael Mengs’ fresco of Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses (1761), in which the god’s bearded and hoary figure is tucked away behind Apollo’s legs. There is also an Orphic tradition in which the River Mnemosyne is the source of water to bring inspiration, and this is perhaps an allusion to that obscure sub-narrative.

In some paintings, river gods seem to be included even though their river is nowhere to be seen. Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s painting of Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms (1768) tucks this extra at the lower left corner again.

Martin Johann Schmidt’s Labour of the Danaides (1785) informs us that the Danaïds were also water-nymphs by placing a river god at the left. They were condemned to keep trying to fill this leaky container with water as their penance in the underworld.

Walter Crane shows the association between Naiads and other nymphs in his watercolour of Nyads and Dryads, probably painted between 1880-1900. He melds the Dryads in with their trees, puts the ‘Nyads’ or Naiads in the water, and has a river god watching from the reeds in the distance.

By the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for the tradition of showing river gods was waning, and nude, cavorting Naiads came to the fore. One of their greatest exponents was John William Waterhouse, who led with this first tentative retelling of the myth of Hylas in 1893, in A Naiad, or Hylas with a Nymph.

Hylas was companion and servant to Heracles (Hercules), who accompanied the hero on Jason’s ship Argo. When the Argonauts were ashore in modern Turkey, Hylas approached the spring of Pegae, where the Naiads fell in love with and kidnapped him. He vanished without trace, driving Heracles and Polyphemus to search for him at length. They were delayed in this so long that the Argo sailed without them.

This first version shows one of the Naiads discovering the sleeping Hylas by a small river. There is no sign of any river god, but there are some goats on the right side of the painting.

Three years later, Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) stays much closer to the myth. Hylas holds an earthenware pot, almost as if he were about to become the river god.

In January 2018, this well-known painting was removed from exhibition in Manchester, England, and replaced by a notice which explained that a temporary space had been left “to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection”. The painting soon returned after protests. It is surprising that, more than a century after it was first exhibited, it was still capable of causing such controversy.

Waterhouse is not the only artist to have courted controversy with this story. Henrietta Rae’s Hylas and the Water Nymphs from about 1909 was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1910, and is no less fleshly than Waterhouse’s version. Rae was a pioneer in her painting of nudes, at a time when most of society still considered that women shouldn’t be allowed in life classes.

Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs (1903) might appear to be still more exploitative of the male appeal of the female nude, but there is a more complex narrative behind this scene.

Its literary reference is most probably to the Naiads of Homer’s Odyssey, book 13, who live in a sea cave, updated to encompass more contemporary references to Wreckers, who lured ships onto the rocks in order to steal their precious cargos – sirens without the socially unacceptable habit of cannibalism.

Tomorrow, I will look at Undines, a more modern alchemical manifestation of water nymphs, and an inspiration for tales, music, and some fine paintings.

Plutarch’s biography of Cicero, the Roman orator and statesman, is the last of his Lives which has been extensively depicted in paint. After some fairly inconsequential discussion over his ancestry and birth, we are told that Cicero was a precocious scholar who established himself as the finest orator and poet of his day.

Cicero continued to learn from Philon the Academic, kept company with Mucius Scaevola when he was leader of the senate, and did military service under Sulla in the war against the Marsians. The Roman state then underwent a traumatic period, during which the young Cicero kept his head down, but once matters became more settled under the leadership of Sulla, Cicero prepared for public life.

He defended the son and heir of a man who had been put to death, and who had been indicted by Sulla for the murder of his father under trumped-up evidence. Although Cicero won his case, he remained in fear of Sulla, and perhaps wisely took the opportunity to visit Greece, ostensibly to aid his health.

When Sulla was dead, Cicero’s friends at home urged him to return, but he travelled on to visit some noted orators in Asia Minor and on the island of Rhodes. Before going back to Rome, he consulted the oracle at Delphi, who advised him to make his own nature his guide in life, and not to be swayed by the opinion of the multitude.

Cicero then worked as an advocate, and remained cautious. He was appointed quaestor during a period of grain shortage, and allocated the island of Sicily, where farmers were upset at being forced to send all their grain to supply Rome. He established his reputation there for defending many young men who were sent for trial on grounds of lack of discipline and courage in war. As was usual with him, he would not accept fees or gifts for his legal work, and continued to live a modest lifestyle, unlike many others.

Although Plutarch doesn’t describe the story, when Cicero was in Sicily he claimed to have discovered the location of Archimedes’ tomb. Francesco Zuccarelli’s painting of Cicero Discovers the Tomb of Archimedes from 1747 shows this event, with the city of Syracuse behind.

In 1797, the American history painter Benjamin West painted his Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes. He painted it again in 1804 (the almost identical version shown above), which was also the year that Napoleon became Emperor of the French.

Cicero wrote in his Tusculan Disputations (book 5, sections 64-66) that the tomb was neglected and buried in undergrowth, near the Agrigentine Gate of Syracuse. Cicero described the cylindrical column with a sphere mounted on top, which is shown partly obscured in West’s painting, and was a symbol of Archimedes’ mathematical achievements.

West shows Cicero wearing a white toga, speaking in front of the tomb, as workers with sickles clear the undergrowth from it. In the distance is the city of Syracuse on its coastal plain, and beyond it the smoking cone of the active volcano, Mount Etna.

Paul Barbotti’s Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes from 1853 at least shows Cicero as a young man, although there is no sign of the cylindrical column with a sphere on its top.

Plutarch tells us that Cicero had some modest properties, including a country house at Arpinum, to the south-east of Rome, and two farms, one near Naples and the other near Pompeii. His health was always a bit delicate, but was managed by careful diet and exercise.

In about 1771, Richard Wilson painted this marvellous historic landscape of Cicero with his Friend Atticus and Brother Quintus, at his Villa at Arpinum. Wilson was a pioneer British landscape artist, the father of Welsh painting, and this work seems to have influenced Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes in his later painting of Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes from 1787; sadly I have been unable to locate a suitable image of that to show here.

When he served as a praetor, Cicero established a reputation for integrity and fairness. He then stood for the consulship, supported by both the aristocrats and common people. Leading forces of revolution in the city was Lucius Catiline, a man with a dreadful reputation. Catiline had corrupted many of the young men by funding their debauched behaviour, stood against Cicero, and lost.

Early during his period as consul, Cicero had many problems to face. There was a marked reaction against the unjust laws of Sulla, and new moves to sell public lands. Cicero acted with great acumen, and vehemently opposed the new laws in the senate. His skill as an orator won the day. Catiline, though, grew in his influence, thanks largely to the support that he got from soldiers who had served Sulla.

When the time came for the next consular elections, Cicero postponed them, and summoned Catiline to the senate. The latter was uncowed and brazen in his criticism of the senate, so Cicero rallied popular support, ensuring that Catiline was once again unsuccessful in his quest to be made consul.

One night after Crassus had dined, he was brought letters warning that Catiline would cause much bloodshed, and advising him to flee from Rome. Crassus went at midnight to Cicero, seeking his intervention. Cicero summoned the senate to assemble at dawn, and there instructed those who had written to Crassus to read their letters out loud in front of the senate. Each told of Catiline’s plot. The senate put the matter into the hands of the consuls to address.

Cicero trusted matters outside Rome to Quintus Metellus, but took charge of the city himself, with the support of a large bodyguard. Catiline ordered two of his men to go to Cicero at his house at dawn and murder him, but Fulvia informed Cicero of the plan, and the attack was blocked. Cicero then went and summoned the senate to the temple of Jupiter Stator, on the slopes of the Palatine hill.

When Catiline arrived, no one would sit near him; as he tried to speak in his defence, he was constantly interrupted, following which Cicero rose and told Catiline to leave the city.

His denouncement of Catiline in the senate has also been a popular motif. Cesare Maccari’s Cicero Denounces Catiline from 1889 shows the latter conspicuously sat alone at the right as Cicero lambasts him from the floor.

In John Leech’s satirical version of Cicero Denouncing Catiline from about 1850, Cicero is intended to be a caricature of Disraeli, and Catiline is Disraeli’s longstanding opponent in the British House of Commons, W E Gladstone, who is sat at the far right.

Taking three hundred armed followers with him, Catiline left to join his forces which had been raised by Manlius, now amounting to some twenty thousand. Together, they toured other cities trying to persuade them to revolt against Rome.

Catiline’s cause in Rome was left with his supporter, Cornelius Lentulus Sura, who had been expelled from the senate but was now working his way back as a praetor. He intended to kill all the senators, burn the city down, and only spare Pompey’s children, who would be held as hostages until their father’s return. Cicero had Lentulus’ men ambushed, and obtained from them secret letters concerning an alliance with the Allobroges.

Cicero read those letters aloud and examined the men in front of the senate the following day. This destroyed the conspiracy, and Lentulus resigned from office. That evening, Cicero addressed the people and told them what had happened. Later, when he was on his own, he tried to decide what should be done with the conspirators.

The following day, the senate considered the problem, and all spoke in favour of the conspirators being subjected to the “most extreme punishment”, which others assumed meant death, until it came to Caius Caesar’s turn to speak: he proposed that their property should be confiscated, and they should be imprisoned outside Rome until Catiline was defeated.

Cicero spoke supporting Caesar’s proposal, but eventually the senate agreed that the conspirators should be put to death.

By this time, Cicero was falling from favour with the people, and his many books seemed to be full of self-praise. As such a skilled orator, his speeches often included biting jests against his opponents, and these encouraged people to hate him. Cicero became embroiled in the scandal of Clodius, who was found in one of the maid’s quarters in Pompeia’s section of Caesar’s house, causing Caesar to divorce Pompeia on grounds of the suspicion to which it gave rise.

Cicero was then attacked by Clodius, forcing Cicero to ally himself with Caesar, who came out in support of Clodius instead. Cicero was then denounced, and in fear of prosecution; he supplicated himself before the people, dressing down and leaving his hair uncut. Cicero was forced to seek aid from Pompey, who was keeping well out of things in his country house in the Alban hills. Pompey evaded him, and Cicero fled for refuge to the consuls, and to take counsel from his friends.

Cicero chose to go into exile, and headed by night for Sicily. He was then banished from Rome, and Clodius issued an edict to prevent anyone from giving him aid.

With former friends declining to shelter or help him, and his personal properties being burned down and sold, Cicero was on his own. Over the following year, increasing disorder in Rome turned the tide in his favour, and Cicero was welcomed back after less than sixteen months.

When Clodius was absent from Rome, Cicero went up to the capitol and destroyed the records of Clodius’ administration. Cato spoke against Cicero, and Clodius was then killed by Milo. Cicero was made an augur among the priests, and was given command of an army of nearly fifteen thousand to control the province of Cilicia. He was successful there, and returned to find Rome falling into civil war. The senate, though, awarded him a triumph.

One of the more modest if not humble triumphs of Rome, it is shown in this fresco originally by Franciabigio, with additional work by Alessandro Allori largely in the right side of The Triumph of Cicero (c 1520).

When Caesar went to Spain, Cicero sailed to join Pompey, which didn’t work out well. Cicero missed the battle of Pharsalus as he was unwell, and refused Cato’s request for him to take command of the large army and fleet at Dyrrhachium. Pompey would have put him to death for that, had Cato not intervened. Cicero then joined Caesar.

When Caesar assumed power, Cicero withdrew from public life, living mainly in the country, where he taught philosophy. He divorced his wife Terentia, and despite his age married a wealthy young woman. He kept out of the plot to assassinate Caesar, only speaking in the senate afterwards to propose an amnesty for those involved.

Cicero and Antony were sworn enemies, and the two had several close calls after Caesar’s murder. As Cicero’s power rose again in Rome, he raised a faction against Antony and had him driven from the city. Cicero was then led on and cheated by the young Caesar, for the latter to become consul. Once the young Caesar was successful, he allied himself with Antony, and Cicero’s name was put on a list of two hundred to be put to death.

When Cicero learned of this, he was staying in the country, and fled. He got to Astura, where he couldn’t decide whether to go any further, or to return to Caesar in Rome. He went on to Caieta, where he had a summer retreat. He was being carried in a litter through the woods towards the sea when his assassins caught up with him. Cicero ordered the litter to be put down, stretched out his neck, and he was beheaded.

Cicero’s head and hands were taken back to Rome, where Antony, who was conducting an election there, ordered them to be put on public display. But the Romans didn’t see there the face of Cicero – rather they saw into the dark soul of Antony.

Plutarch makes no mention of a popular alternative version of the death of Cicero, which claims that his head was presented on a platter to Fulvia, who would have had every reason to want it, as the widow of Clodius and wife of Antony. Pavel Svedomsky’s undated Fulvia With the Head of Cicero from the late nineteenth century shows Fulvia sticking hairpins in Cicero’s tongue in return for the orator’s many critical speeches about Antony.

Francisco Maura y Montaner’s Fulvia and Mark Antony, or the Vengeance of Fulvia from 1888 shows Fulvia smiling with glee at Cicero’s head, in a manner reminiscent of another femme fatale of the end of the nineteenth century, Salome, with the head of John the Baptist. Fulvia is here poised with her hairpin, and encouraged by those around her, including Antony.

Reference

Cicero, whole text in English translation at Penelope.

With Armida causing havoc among the crusader camp, and leading ten and more of their best warriors out on a fool’s errand, Erminia had dressed in Clorinda’s armour, tried to help the wounded Tancred, then become lost among woods and pastures by the River Jordan. Tancred had left in pursuit of her, thinking that she was his love Clorinda, but he also strayed and lost her tracks in a wood.

By the time that Tancred emerges from the wood, it is already dusk, and mindful of his battle to complete with Argante in the morning, he turns for home. As he does, a messenger come galloping along towards him, claiming to come from Bohemond. Tancred follows the messenger to a moated castle, where the messenger blows his horn for the drawbridge to be lowered.

Tancred is wary, but as he approaches the castle, a familiar figure appears: Gascon Rambald, who is one of the ten knights who set off with Armida. But the knight tells Tancred to disarm, and admits to having been ‘turned’ to a ‘pagan’ by Armida. Tasso tells us what Tancred cannot see: Armida is watching and listening to all this from a throne high above them in her castle.

Tancred’s only option is to kill Gascon Rambald, who runs out onto the drawbridge. Once Tancred is there with him, the castle with its burning brands vanishes into the darkness of the night. Tancred walks on into the black night, steps through a gate, and is sealed in a trap. Behind the bars of this dungeon, he recalls his duty to face Argante at dawn.

Argante is getting himself ready before dawn of the following day. Godfrey is woken by Argante’s herald blowing fiercely on his horn, only to discover that Tancred and many of his best fighters are missing. His first task is to find a substitute for Tancred to resume the battle with Argante. He draws lots in the end, and pulls out the name of Raymond of Toulouse. He at least has the advantage of a guardian angel.

The contest between Argante and Raymond starts with the former missing the crusader altogether, thanks to the intervention of the angel. With his great experience in combat, Raymond proves a match for the Circassian, but is repeatedly saved by angelic force. However, Argante has already made a pact with the devil, and his guardian intervenes by asking an archer nearby to shoot Raymond in the eye.

The arrow is loosed and strikes Raymond by the belt, its force attenuated by his angel. This breach of the code of chivalry provokes the watching armies into immediate battle: the soldiers from the city are forced to defend Argante, and the crusaders rush in to kill as many as they can. When the enemy forces are forced to flee, only Argante remains.

Then the hand of God intervenes, with the sky turning black and a terrific storm – violent wind, torrential rain, thunder and lightning.

The storm has abated at the start of the eighth canto, but there is bad news again for Godfrey. Reinforcements led by Sven, son of the King of Denmark, have been slaughtered by King Soliman’s much larger army before they could reach the main force. Only one hundred survive out of the original two thousand.

Then a foraging party returns and reports that they found the headless corpse of Rinaldo, whose armour had been shattered and cut through in battle. Although Godfrey isn’t entirely convinced by their story, it is enough to keep him awake for much of the night. He is disturbed by sudden insurrection within the camp, led by Argillan, who is driven by one of the Furies. The riot is settled, but Godfrey now realises that he must attack Jerusalem soon.

The ninth canto opens with a night attack by Arab forces on the crusaders’ camp, which is initially very successful, and puts French troops to flight. But Godfrey soon responds and leads the main army into a counter-attack. Jerusalem then becomes aware of the battle, and Clorinda and Argante bring their army out to join in.

Godfrey rallies his men as some turn to run, and leads them into the mêlée. The archangel Michael arrives, and commands the devil’s forces to disengage, as God has ordained that they may not intervene directly. Argante and Clorinda continue to fight, though, claiming many of the crusaders’ lives. Argillan, freed from prison, joins in, only to be killed by Soliman himself. The tide turns in favour of the crusaders, and the Arab army is put to rout when fifty knights who had followed Armida return unexpectedly.

The crusaders pursue the Arabs, slaughtering all they can catch, and Soliman withdraws.

In the tenth canto, Soliman is saved by the sorceror Ismen, who inspires him with the promise of success, and carries him in a magic chariot. They pass over the crusaders, who are now salvaging weapons and armour from the battlefield. They land on a hill, from where they walk, hidden in a cloud, to Mount Sion. There, they enter a cave, and Ismen leads them, invisible, to a meeting of Aladine’s council in the city of Jerusalem. Soliman and Ismen then reveal themselves to the meeting.

Godfrey has paid his fallen warriors their last respects, and then turns his attention to debriefing his knights who had returned from Armida, with the help of Peter the Hermit.

They tell him of their journey to Armida’s castle near Sodom, its surrounding swamp into which nothing can sink [possibly a reference to the Dead Sea], and the bewitching meal that Armida served them. She changed some of them into creatures, like fish, to demonstrate her evil powers, and demanded that they became ‘pagans’. They refused, but saw her take Tancred prisoner too.

Armida then despatched them to Egypt, but Rinaldo killed their guards and rescued them. In the process, his armour became too damaged to wear, so he discarded it. Peter the Hermit then has a vision of the future, in which he declares that Rinaldo is still alive, and will survive.

The eleventh canto opens with the crusaders celebrating mass on Mount Olivet, as the citizens of Jerusalem first watch in silence, then break into jeers and blasphemous shouts. Afterwards, Godfrey briefs his commanders to prepare to attack at first light the next day.

As the crusaders ready themselves first thing in the morning, Aladine moves his troops to defend the city’s most vulnerable western wall, where Argante and Clorinda position themselves. She is ready with her bow and a full load of arrows. The crusaders then array themselves, the infantry being covered in the rear by cavalry, with mobile units all around. The siege engines are moved in, and towers made of oak.

Argante, Clorinda, and the city’s defenders rain boulders and arrows on the crusaders, who batter the defences with a ram and climb the towers, to shoot arrows and spears at those on the city’s walls. Some of the leaders – Guelph and Raymond – fall, to the dismay of the crusaders. Argante proclaims “This is not Antioch!” Even Godfrey finds himself impaled with an arrow, but that is soon removed and his wound dressed.

As night starts to fall, the towers are drawn back for protection, and battle comes to a halt for the day, under the code of chivalry. Godfrey’s engineers work through the night repairing the damage to their siege engines and towers. At the same time, those inside the walls are shoring them up from the damage which they have suffered.

Canto twelve starts with Clorinda walking with Argante, asking him to take care of her dearest in the event that she doesn’t survive. The Circassian is taken aback at this, but agrees. The two then put a proposal to Aladine to set fire to the siege towers when everyone has gone to sleep. Ismen offers then incendiary materials to help.

Clorinda’s eunuch then tells of her origins and birth in Ethiopia, the white daughter of the black Christian queen, and how she was never baptised but raised a ‘pagan’. The eunuch pleads with his mistress to lay down her arms.

Argante and Clorinda then sneak out of the city and set the siege towers alight. They are burned to the ground. The pair retreat to the city, where Aladine has the Golden Gate thrown open to receive them. But only Argante makes his way in: Clorinda wandered off, and by the time she returns the gate is shut with her outside, in the midst of the enemy.

Tancred then appears, and assuming that Clorinda is a man, challenges her to fight. She tries to escape, to find another way back into the city, but can’t refuse his challenge of “war and death”. They fight one another in the darkness of the night, close and hand-to-hand so that they can’t even swing their swords.

Tancred finally asks who she is. She refuses to tell, and they fight on, to the inevitable moment when Tancred sinks his sword deep into her chest. Her legs collapse from under her. In a frail voice she tells him that she forgives him, and asks that he baptises her. Tancred runs over to a nearby stream and fills his helmet with water. When he gets back to her, he removes her helmet and sees that it is his love, Clorinda, who is now dying in his arms.

He baptises her, and in her last breath she says that she goes in peace.

One of the most moving moments in the whole of Tasso’s epic, this has proved a great challenge to paint: it is still night, perhaps with the faintest light of dawn to the east, and there is a complex sequence of events and details.

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s Tancred and Clorinda from 1761 shows this in daylight, and without any visual reference to Clorinda’s baptism. Tancred’s helmet and bloodied sword lie at the left, and the only slightly bloodied Clorinda swoons away against his left knee. Above them is Cupid, in a pose which suggests his bow and arrow but actually wiping a tear from his eye. Oddly, Lagrenée balances him against the hindquarters of Tancred’s horse, which is a very unfortunate compositional choice.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s son Domenico must have painted his Tancred Baptizing Clorinda just a few years after the epic’s first publication, in about 1585. Although Domenico is generally rated far below his father, this painting is rather special. It captures the light well, and Tancred’s rushed baptism under the watchful eye of the white dove of the Holy Spirit and two cherubic angels.

This anonymous painting of The Baptism of Clorinda thought to be from about 1625 tells the story fairly faithfully, and provides a source of water in the distance too.

Another painting by an unidentified artist, Tancred Baptises Clorinda from about 1650, is more faithful to the time of day. The strange red arc at the left is the edging of a circular shield resting on the ground.

Andrey Ivanovich Ivanov’s Tancred and Clorinda from about 1798 again sets this in daylight, and avoids any trace of blood.

By far the most fascinating depiction, though, is that of Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s fresco in the Casa Massimo, Rome, which he painted between 1819-27. The section showing The Death of Clorinda features her baptism in the centre, and places the city of Jerusalem in the distance. It also includes two other scenes involving other characters from the epic, which I have yet to identify, and the unmistakable figure of Christ watching from heaven above.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

Over the last six months, I have been summarising some of the biographies in Plutarch’s Lives (or Parallel Lives, if you prefer) and showing some of the great paintings which have been made in response. In this and next week’s articles to close this series, I include excerpts which tell some of the more memorable stories, with the very best of the paintings. I hope that you enjoy this small selection.

Theseus, founding father of Athens

Theseus was a swashbuckling hero who went through life with the aid of a series of murders and more than a couple of rapes too. He became a close friend of Peirithoüs, and when the latter married Deidameia, he invited Theseus to the wedding in the country of the Lapiths.

Unfortunately, Peirithoüs also invited some centaurs to the feast, and when they had too much to drink, they started to carry off Lapith women that they fancied. The Lapiths killed many of the centaurs on the spot; others died in the subsequent war between the Lapiths and centaurs. Theseus fought alongside the Lapiths both at the wedding and afterwards.

Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38) shows an early part of the action at the wedding. At the right, Eurytus the centaur is trying to carry off Hippodame (Deidameia), the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a Lapith woman.

Theseus’ bravery was marred by wholly unacceptable acts, though. When he was fifty, he became involved in the abduction and rape of Helen, the daughter of King Tyndareüs, and later best-known as Helen of Troy. She “was not of marriageable age” at the time.

Romulus and Remus the founders of Rome

The former King Numitor’s daughter, a Vestal Virgin, was discovered to be pregnant. Although this traditionally would have led to her death, Amulius’ daughter interceded, and she was merely kept in solitary confinement. She gave birth to twin boys, who were superhuman in their size and beauty. Amulius ordered one of his servants to take the twins away and drown them in the river, but they were put first into a trough which served them as a boat. As a result they were washed ashore downstream still alive.

A she-wolf then fed the babies, and a woodpecker watched over them; both were later considered to be sacred to the god Mars.

Peter Paul Rubens shows Romulus and Remus being discovered by the shepherd Faustulus in his painting of 1615-16. Not only is the she-wolf taking care of the twins, but a family of woodpeckers are bringing worms and grubs to feed them, and there are empty shells and a small crab on the little beach as additional tasty tidbits. Rubens also provides a river god and water nymph as guardians.

After killing his brother, Romulus went on to build the city of Rome, and to lead it in its early years. Desperately short of women, Romulus engaged in subterfuge and force to abduct wives and daughters from the neighbouring Sabine tribe. Their remaining men threatened war against Rome in retaliation, and to take back those abducted women.

The Sabine king and general Tatius then led them against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets which Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.

As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, the spot becoming known as the Tarpeian Rock. It was the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their death.

With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.

That is the remarkable scene depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), which is sometimes mistakenly assumed to show an event immediately following their abduction.

Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the traitorous Tarpeia had just been buried. Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus had married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

Publicola, the rape of Lucretia, and the birth of the Republic

The last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, had been tyrannical. Matters came to a head when his son, Sextus Tarquinius, raped a noblewoman, Lucretia. Although Plutarch does not tell this story, he refers to it leading into Publicola’s involvement in the subsequent revolution.

Many masters painted Lucretia’s suicide, most notably Rembrandt, whose later painting of 1666 is one of the most moving images in the canon of Western art. Lucretia has already pierced her chest with her blade. Her fine clothing has been pulled back to reveal her simple white shift, which has a broad streak of fresh, bright red blood running down from the point at which the dagger was inserted.

Her arms are outstretched: her right hand still clutches the dagger, which has dropped to waist level already. Her left hand is dragging a beaded bell-pull, presumably to summon her family to witness her final moments on earth. It is her face, though, which makes this painting. Her eyes, moistened by welling tears, are looking away to the right of the painting, in an absent-minded stare. Her brow is tensed with subtle anxiety. She knows that she is about to die, and is preparing herself for that moment.

Lucius Brutus and Publicola were among the leaders who drove out and overthrew the king, and with popular support instituted a republic under two consuls. However, Publicola’s hopes of being elected to the office were dashed when Lucretia’s husband, Tarquinius Collatinus, was chosen instead.

Aristides and the Battle of Marathon

Aristides first made his reputation as a general at the Battle of Marathon (in 490 BCE), in which the Athenians defeated King Darius the First’s Persian army even though the Greeks had less than half the number of men. The commander there was Miltiades, but it was the forces under the immediate command of Themistocles and Aristides who saw the most and hardest action.

According to the account of Herodotus, there were two singular athletic achievements associated with the Battle of Marathon: in one, an Athenian named Pheidippides ran more than 225 km (140 miles) from Athens to Sparta to ask for assistance before the battle started. In the other, the Athenian forces marched at great speed from the battlefield back to Athens, a distance of 40 kilometres (25 miles), to counter a Persian force which was travelling by sea to the city.

Plutarch is one source who conflates these, and elsewhere claimed that a runner named Erchius or Eucles ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory. As shown in Luc-Olivier Merson’s painting of The Soldier of Marathon (1869), on telling of victory, the athlete – now named Pheidippides or Philippides – collapsed and died.

Merson’s painting won him the Prix de Rome, and became a significant part of the growing Olympic movement, which culminated in the running of the first modern Marathon in the renewed games of 1896.

Aristides was made Archon, ruler over Athens, in return for his accomplishments at Marathon, and quickly became known as the Just, on account of his passion for justice. Inevitably, this gave rise to jealousy, and Themistocles claimed that Aristides had abolished the courts of law, and was judging cases in private instead. This led to Aristides being ostracised, and banished from Athens for ten years.

Titus Flaminius – Greece protected by Rome

Titus was the Roman who was responsible for negotiating peace with Philip of Macedonia, but the latter refused to withdraw his garrisons from Greek cities. Even when the Romans had won over the support of much of the rest of Greece, Philip remained obdurate, and tried to negotiate a better deal by sending ambassadors direct to Rome. Titus was supported by the senate, who agreed that he should continue his campaign against the Macedonians. Their large armies, of over 26,000 each, engaged near Scotussa.

The Romans got the upper hand in the battle, killing eight thousand Macedonians and taking five thousand prisoners, but Philip himself managed to escape. Eventually, Titus achieved peace by returning the kingdom of Macedon to Philip, but requiring him to keep away from Greece. The senate provided Titus with ten commissioners, who were to supervise the freedom of Greece, with three Roman garrisons.

At the Isthmian games, Titus was formally proclaimed proconsular general, and Greece made free within Roman supervision. This slowly brought a huge roar of approval from the spectators.

Giuseppe Sciuti’s Titus Quinctius Offers Liberty to the Greeks from 1879 is a grand and brilliant depiction of this milestone in the history of Greece as a nation.

Caius Marius – Triumph from Africa

Caius Marius had just served in Spain, where his hard work and simple life won him popular support, and he then married Julia, Julius Caesar’s aunt. He went on to Africa as legate, where his fame grew considerably, but he made an enemy in Metellus. Marius returned to Rome, where he was elected consul. In that high post he proved unpopular because of his bold and arrogant speeches against the patricians, and he became enemies with Sulla, as both men wanting the glory for the successful outcome of their campaign in Africa.

As Rome came under threat from the Teutones and Cimbri, Marius was again made consul. He returned from Africa to celebrate his triumph, and to prepare to lead the army against the Cimbri.

Tiepolo’s painting of The Triumph of Marius from 1729 shows the general in a chariot drawn not by four but three horses, with the defeated and captured barbarian leader Jugurtha in front wearing chains.

In the middle of the night following the crusaders’ first major assault on the city of Jerusalem, Clorinda burned their siege towers down. Unrecognised by Tancred, he then mortally wounded her in a fight before realising who she was, then baptised her just before she died.

The wounded Tancred feels disgust at his killing of Clorinda, and the two are carried back to his tent. Despite his injuries, he makes his farewell to her corpse. She appears to him in a dream and his emotions are reconciled following her burial.

Canto thirteen returns to the siege, and the crusaders’ need to replace their wooden towers. Ismen visits the ancient wood which is the nearest source of timber, and casts a spell to prevent any more trees from being felled there. He then reassures Aladine that he is safe, particularly as he forecasts that the weather is set to turn very hot and dry, and that Aladine should sit tight in the city rather than try to force an end to the siege as Argante wants.

Godfrey now wants to rebuild his siege towers quickly, before Jerusalem has had time to repair the damage made to its defences. He despatches men to the woods to cut down the timber which the new towers require, but they are now repelled by the bewitching of the trees. Godfrey sends troops in on three successive days, but each time they are driven out by the dire effects of Ismen’s spell.

Finally, Tancred, now recuperated from his wounds, plucks up his courage and enters the enchanted wood. He feels no ill-effects, and makes his way to its centre, where there is a cryptic inscription written on an ancient tree. The trees then speak to him, claiming to be the spirit of Clorinda and others, and warning him not to try cutting any of them down. Tancred reports this to Godfrey, who turns to other plans.

As Ismen had forecast, the weather becomes unrelentingly hot and dry. Even the nights remain hot, and crusaders are dying as a result. The nearby stream of Siloa, which had been a major supply of water, dries up, and there are deaths from dehydration. Morale collapses, with many of the crusaders questioning Godfrey’s inaction. The remaining Greeks desert and start their journey home.

Godfrey then prays for divine assistance. This brings a torrential rainstorm and the return to more comfortable conditions at last.

Canto fourteen opens with nightfall, when at last with the cooler conditions all were able to sleep properly. For Godfrey there is a vision, in which he is told to recall Rinaldo from his self-imposed exile, and to absolve him from his error. No sooner does Godfrey awake the following morning than Guelph asks him for Rinaldo’s pardon, in the hope that the knight will be brave enough to overcome Ismen’s spell, and cut wood to build their siege towers.

Godfrey agrees, leaving Guelph and a team of volunteers to find and recover the missing knight. As the group are discussing where to look, Peter the Hermit interrupts and advises them to travel to Ascalon, and there to ask the man that they meet.

When they reach Ascalon, a wizard with a white beard, beech crown, and wand tells them to follow him as their guide. He takes them into hidden caves beneath a stream, where they see the sources of the great rivers of the world, set in a huge cavern whose walls are speckled with jewels. The wizard says that this is the womb of the earth.

The wizard then tells them what happened to Rinaldo after he had freed the other knights who had been made captive by Armida, and how Rinaldo’s armour came to be made to look as if the knight had been killed.

Armida then waited at the ford on the river Orontes for Rinaldo. When he arrived, he found a column with an inscription which enticed him to go further, leaving his esquires behind him as he boarded a boat. He then came to an island which appeared quite deserted, so he decided to rest there, and put his helmet down beside him.

A little later, he heard a sound from the river, and spied a beautiful woman emerging from the water, naked. She sang a song which lulled Rinaldo to sleep, then came across intending to kill him. But when she saw him, breathing gently in his sleep, her anger melted away and she fell in love with him instead. She then put garlands of flowers around his neck, arms and feet which she had bewitched to act as bonds, had him lifted into her chariot, and abducted him.

This remarkable turn of events has been a great favourite among painters, and a particular challenge to depict in a single image. As a classical example of what Aristotle in his Poetics refers to as peripeteia, it has led to some superb narrative paintings.

In Anthony van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida of 1629, the key elements of the couple and attendant symbolic amorino are enriched by a second woman with non-human legs still immersed in the river and clutching a sheet of paper, and several additional amorini. Armida appears unarmed but starting to bind him with garlands, and it is possible that the letter represents her mission to murder him, which the woman in the water, perhaps a nymph, is reminding her about.

Although beautifully executed, its narrative is considerably more elaborate than Tasso’s marvellously concise description.

The most brilliant account to date is Nicolas Poussin’s justly famous Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630.

There are two quite distinctive, almost formulaic, elements within Poussin’s depiction: Armida’s facial expression, and the ‘body language’ of her posture, particularly the conflict between her arms.

Facial expressions have long been associated with different emotions, in paintings and other narrative media such as the theatre. Even late into the nineteenth century, there were collections of prints and books which showed a range of stereotypical expressions intended to help artists and illustrators who were engaged in producing narrative works. Although Poussin appears to have avoided such stereotypes, Armida’s expression is a key graphical element in understanding the narrative: she is perplexed, in a quandary, unsure whether to kill or kiss the young knight.

In the Renaissance, emphasis was also placed on the disposition of all parts of the body, and their role in conveying action and emotion. Leon Battista Alberti’s cardinal work On Painting (1435-6) devotes much of its second book, The Picture, (paragraphs 38 onwards) to instructions about the positioning of body parts in the construction of Historia, narrative painting.

Armida’s right hand represents her original intent, to murder him with her dagger, an action which the amorino is trying to stop. Her left hand, though, reaches down to touch his hand in a loving caress. Poussin manages to tell us what she had intended to do (the past), and what she is going to do next (the future): three moments in time conveyed in a single image.

Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida (c 1635) is a later and more explicit version of this same narrative episode, in which Armida is falling in love with Rinaldo. There is a multiplicity of amorini who seem less engaged in the action. The river appears more symbolically as being poured from a pitcher. In the background, Armida’s chariot is already prepared for Rinaldo’s abduction.

Sebastiano Conca’s Rinaldo and Armida from about 1725 is a return to simpler composition, based on a central triangle, and content. Armida is drawing her sword, and looking pensive, as the sole amorino reaches from above to intervene.

Tiepolo’s Rinaldo Enchanted by Armida (1742-45) presents another permutation of the elements in Tasso’s story. Armida has already brought her enchanted flying chariot, in which there is another woman, perhaps Venus herself, with an accompanying amorino. Armida is almost undressed and unarmed, and her facial expression is more of unhappy pleading than internal conflict, while her female companion appears cold and unaffected.

Fragonard’s Rinaldo and Armida from 1760-65 is another elaborate painting with an abundance of amorini. Armida’s right hand clutches a dagger, and is restrained by two of the amorini, although it is hard to determine whether she has much facial expression.

With Guelph’s party searching for Rinaldo, Armida now whisks him away in her chariot – still fast asleep, and ignorant of what is in store for him.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

In my second and final look at the greatest stories and paintings from Plutarch’s Lives, I consider two of his longest and best biographies, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, together with one which became a favourite with Nicolas Poussin.

Alexander the Great

Although never intended to be an accurate historical account, Plutarch’s life of Alexander remains a valuable source and a good read. Much of it relates his long and difficult campaign against the Persian forces of Dareius (Darius), whose army totalled 600,000 at its peak.

Their final confrontation was delayed when Alexander fell ill in Cilicia, and Alexander was warned in a letter that Philip the Arcanian intended to kill him. When Philip came in bearing him a cup of medicine, Alexander took the cup and passed Philip the letter to read. As Alexander drank his medicine, the two men stared at one another wondering who to trust.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s painting of Alexander the Great Putting Trust in his Physician Philip of 1870 tells this episode wonderfully. Philip, with black hair and beard, stands reading the letter which the king had received to warn him of Philip’s intention to kill him. Alexander lies on his sickbed, the cup of medicine in his right hand, deciding whether to drink it, or to believe that warning. The old man behind Alexander leans forward, as if to reinforce the warning in the letter, and advise his monarch not to touch the medicine in the cup.

Eventually, with the Persian forces destroyed, Alexander continued in pursuit of the king. This took him across desert where many of his troops had to turn back because of the shortage of water. When he approached Dareius’ camp, he was left with just sixty of his soldiers. It transpired that the once-great Persian king had been captured by Bessus, who had left him amid great riches, lying in a waggon, pierced by javelins and on the brink of death. Alexander gave him water, and when he died covered his body with his cloak.

This scene is shown in Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini’s painting of Alexander at the Corpse of the Dead Darius from 1708: the conqueror looks tenderly at the conquered. The body of Dareius was then handed over to his mother, and laid in state for his funeral.

One painting which perhaps expresses Alexander’s achievements best is Gustave Moreau’s Triumph of Alexander the Great, which he painted over the period 1873-90. Alexander is shown dressed in white and sitting high on his throne in the foreground. Around him is an extraordinary imagined landscape with imposing buildings forming a gorge, and a stack of grand buildings, towers, and other monumental structures further back. These are set at the foot of a massive rock pinnacle.

Moreau drew on a wide variety of sources for this most elaborate of Indian fantasy cityscapes: miniature paintings of south India, photographs by English travellers, several illustrated books, and Le Magasin Pittoresque, a contemporary illustrated magazine.

Julius Caesar in Gaul

Julius Caesar is Plutarch’s best demonstration of the dangers of absolute power. Although Caesar wrote his own account of his wars in Gaul, which anyone who has learned Latin will recall with faint terror, Plutarch does justice to his military accomplishments there.

After Caesar had heard of the death of his daughter Julia in childbirth at Pompey’s house, and was preparing for winter, there was a major uprising in Gaul. This was led by Vergentorix, who attempted a co-ordinated rebellion against the Romans, aiming to rouse the whole of the country and exploit growing opposition to Caesar back in Rome.

Caesar returned to tackle this rebellion, which culminated in the rebels congregating in the city of Alesia, where Caesar put them under siege. The Romans crushed the rebels outside the city, and forced Vergentorix to surrender. The latter donned his best armour and decorated his horse, then rode out through the gates and made a circuit around Caesar.

Lionel Royer’s painting of Vercingetorix Throwing down His Weapons at the feet of Julius Caesar from 1899 shows the moment of surrender. Vergentorix is about to dismount, strip off his armour, and kneel at Caesar’s feet.

The plot to assassinate Julius Caesar is one of the great climaxes within the Lives. Driven by Caesar’s passion for royal powers, the plot grew from open and deadly hatred even among his former allies. Plutarch describes a series of portents, including lights in the sky and birds of omen being seen in the Forum. One seer advised Caesar to be particularly wary of the Ides of March, when he would be in great peril.

Decimus Brutus, who was so close to Caesar that he was designated his second heir in his will, joined a conspiracy with Marcus Brutus and Cassius to kill Julius Caesar on the Ides of March – 15 March 44 BCE.

The senate had assembled. Antony, a friend of Caesar, was held outside in a long conversation by Brutus Albinus. Caesar entered the meeting, and the senate rose in his honour. Friends of the conspirators took places around the back of Caesar’s chair, and Tullius Cimber presented Caesar with a petition on behalf of his exiled brother.

Caesar pushed the petition away, and started to grow angry. Tullius then gave the sign for the start of the attack, by seizing the tyrant’s toga and pulled it down from his neck. Casca struck the first blow with his dagger in Caesar’s neck. Caesar grasped the knife and asked Casca what he was doing.

Those watching who were not part of the plot dared not run away, nor go to Caesar’s aid. The conspirators then drew their daggers, hemmed Caesar in, and stabbed him repeatedly. Caesar pulled his toga over his head as he sank down against the pedestal of a statue of Pompey, which was covered by his blood. He was stabbed a total of twenty-three times.

The conspirators burst out of the doors and fled, some into hiding, but Brutus and the leaders went out of the senate-house still brandishing their daggers, and marched proudly to the Capitol. Caesar was dead.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s brilliant The Death of Caesar from 1859-67 shows Caesar’s corpse abandoned on the floor, as his assassins storm out from the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

Phocion, the fate of a good man

Another common theme in Plutarch’s Lives is the way in which the just and the good were so often destroyed or killed by their enemies, regardless of the intended protections of the state. For example, Phocion was denounced as a traitor, and the order given for him to be seized, tortured, and put to death. With his friends, he was taken back to Athens ostensibly to be tried, but his sentence had already been determined.

He was given no opportunity to defend himself when tried in front of a rabble. He asked the crowd whether they wished to put him to death unjustly or justly. They replied “Justly”, to which he asked how they would determine that without hearing him first. He wasn’t allowed to make himself heard again, until he admitted his guilt but denied that of his friends. The crowd insisted that they too would be put to death, merely because they were his friends, and voted to put them to death.

They were then given hemlock to drink by the executioner. However, there was insufficient left for Phocion, who had to arrange for a friend to pay for more poison so that he too could be executed.

Phocion’s enemies even got a decree passed that his body had to be carried beyond the boundary of Athens, and that no Athenian could light a fire for his cremation. A man was hired to carry Phocion’s body beyond Eleusis, where it was cremated. Phocion’s wife was present, and built a small memorial at the spot. She then carried his remains by night to her house, where she buried them in her hearth.

Poussin painted Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion in 1648. Phocion’s widow is here gathering his ashes to take back to her hearth, as her maidservant anxiously keeps watch. The landscape here is particularly wonderful, with the trees echoing the form of the skyline.

Not long after his execution, when the people had returned to their senses, Phocion’s achievements for Athens were marked by a bronze statue, and his remains were given a public burial. Phocion’s fate reminded the Athenians of what the people had previously done to Socrates.

Cato the Younger, the tongue is mightier than the sword

Cato the Younger was another great Roman who came to a premature end, although in his case this was largely the result of the seizure of power by Julius Caesar, and Cato’s incisive powers as an orator. Over the years, his speeches had attacked many influential people, something which caught up with him when his previous allegiances were collapsing around him.

With Caesar’s army approaching, Cato bade the citizens of Utica farewell, as if he was going to leave them. He then took a bath, after which he sat at supper with friends. He retired to his room, where he read Plato’s On the Soul. He looked up for his sword, which had been removed while he had been eating, so summoned a servant to return it.

His son and friends had by this time recognised that Cato intended to end his own life, and Cato had to insist, quite angrily, that he was of sound mind and capable of making his own decisions. His friends finally withdrew, and his sword was brought in to him. Towards dawn, Cato drew his sword and stabbed himself in the abdomen using a hand which was inflamed and weakened. This failed to kill him, but he fell from his couch and overturned a nearby abacus.

His son and friends ran in when they heard the disturbance, and found Cato covered with blood, with most of his bowels protruding, but still alive. A physician went in and tried to repair this, but Cato pushed him away and tore at his wounds until he was overcome by death. The citizens of Utica honoured him, burying his body near the sea. He was only forty-eight.

Cato’s daughter was the wife of Brutus, who two years later was one of those who killed Caesar.

This was not an easy scene to depict in a painting, and it wasn’t until 1863 that the young Jean-Paul Laurens tried a novel approach which I think proved successful. In this earlier moment of the story, Cato is trying to sink his sword into his belly, when quite alone.

In these more recent depictions, the great strength of this story lies in Cato’s refusal to compromise his high values: something of great importance in France at the time of the Directory in 1797, and again under Emperor Napoleon III in 1863. It also seems a timely reminder in 2018.

Plutarch’s Lives remains a collection of biographies which should be read by all, particularly those who aspire to power. It repeatedly demonstrates the corruption of power, the ease with which voters can be swayed to ostracise some of the best statesmen, and how often people have killed or destroyed those who were of greatest benefit to society. And it inspired many truly wonderful paintings.

The crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon desperately need Rinaldo back if they are to resume their assault on Jerusalem. Guelph’s party, notably the knights Charles (Carlo) and Ubaldo, have gone off in his quest. But Rinaldo has been lured into a trap by the sorceress Armida, who intends to kill him. At the last moment, though, she changes her mind and abducts him in her chariot.

Armida’s chariot takes the couple to the distant, deserted and enchanted Fortunate Isles, where she lives in her garden which is perpetually in Spring. The wizard explains this to Charles and Ubaldo, to aid them in their mission to rescue the knight.

David Teniers the Younger’s The Magician Shows Carlos and Ubaldo the Whereabouts of Rinaldo (The search for Rinaldo) from 1628-30 is a small oil on copper painting in his series telling this section of Tasso’s epic. Here the wizard despatches the two knights to the Fortunate Isles.

Charles and Ubaldo set off at the start of canto fifteen, retracing their steps with the wizard as their guide. The river then takes them gently down to the sea, where a ship awaits. They board, and sail at miraculous speed past Ascalon and the mouths of the River Nile, westward through the Mediterranean, and through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic Ocean. They eventually approach the Fortunate Isles, pull into a harbour, and the two knights disembark.

They spend the night at the foot of the mountain which they have to climb to reach Armida’s garden and its captive Rinaldo. They set off again at dawn, only to encounter their first obstacle: a fearsome dragon which blocks their passage up the mountain. Charles draws his sword ready to slay the dragon, but Ubaldo waves a golden wand – a gift of the wizard – which drives it away.

Poussin’s The Companions of Rinaldo (c 1633-4) shows the two knights confronting this dragon. Charles stands in the centre with his sword ready to tackle it, but Ubaldo behind him leaves his weapon in its scabbard and brandishes a golden wand instead. In the background at the left is the magic ship in which they sailed, and standing in its prow is the maiden who steered it.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s fresco of Ubaldo and Carlo free Rinaldo from Armida’s Castle from 1819-27, in the Casa Massimo, Rome, shows an interesting composite scene. To the right of centre, Charles and Ubaldo wield their sword and wand, but in the distance are Armida and Rinaldo in the garden at the summit of the island. The amorini are playing with Rinaldo’s weapons, and his empty suit of armour has been cast in the undergrowth.

Next, the two have to face a lion, which is similarly sent away with a wave of the wand. After that comes an army of animals, which disperse readily, and Charles and Ubaldo are on the ascent towards a stretch of snow and ice which they must cross before attaining Armida’s eternal Spring.

Once up at the top, the two knights pause from their strenuous climb, slaking their thirst in a mountain stream. The grassy banks either side of the stream have a fine banquet laid out on them, and there are two naked young women frolicking in the water.

David Teniers the Younger’s Carlos and Ubaldo in The Fortunate Isles (1628-30) shows this moment, the banquet having been placed on a clean white tablecloth rather than the grass. Surrounded by trees and standing proud on the skyline is their destination, Armida’s palace.

I regret that I only have this monochrome image of Charles-Alexandre Coëssin de la Fosse’s painting of Danish Warriors in the Garden of Armida from 1848. The two knights are clearly dallying rather longer than their mission had intended.

Once Charles and Ubaldo could tear themselves away from these nymphs, they pressed on to the circular outer wall of the palace, which opens the sixteenth canto. For it is here that they enter Armida’s garden.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Armida’s garden appeared on all manner of products. This wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller in 1854 is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other smaller images appeared on coffee cups and much else.

Tasso gives a brief description of the garden, with its figs, apples and grape vines. Birds sing, and the wind murmurs softly. One bird speaks to the two knights, telling of the chaste and modest rose flower which springs virgin from its green leaves.

This passage about the rose was the inspiration for Marie Spartali Stillman’s exquisite watercolour of A Rose in Armida’s Garden from 1894. The artist gave this work to a family friend as a wedding gift.

Charles and Ubaldo then peer through the leaves and spot a loving couple, who they presume to be Rinaldo and Armida. The knight’s head rests in Armida’s lap. He then stands up and takes a crystal glass which hangs at his side. Armida uses this as a mirror to adjust her hair, telling Rinaldo to keep looking into her eyes.

Tiepolo paints this clearly in his Rinaldo and Armida in Her Garden from 1742-45, now in The Art Institute of Chicago. It was originally hung in a special room dedicated to Tasso’s epic in the Palazzo Corner a San Polo in Venice, where it belonged to the noble Serbelloni family.

In Angelica Kauffman’s Rinaldo and Armida from 1771, the crystal glass is ready at Armida’s feet, and she is busy distracting him by sprinkling flowers over his head.

Francesco Hayez shows a slight variation in his Rinaldo and Armida from 1812-13. Anticipating the next part of Tasso’s narrative, instead of Rinaldo wearing a crystal glass at his side, his circular shield rests on the ground next to Armida. Charles and Ubaldo are shown peering from behind a tree trunk, safely in the distance.

Armida then kisses Rinaldo goodbye and leaves. Charles and Ubaldo see their opportunity and step out from the bushes, dressed in their full armour. Ubaldo holds a highly polished shield up so that Rinaldo can see himself for what he has become – a woman’s dandy, not a warrior knight.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

As we’re told everywhere, history and other forms of narrative painting died in the nineteenth century. To examine how true that might be, in this look at some of the great paintings of 1918, I start with narrative works, then look at figurative paintings.

Perhaps the greatest narrative painter still prolific at the end of the First World War was Lovis Corinth, who had painted classical and more modern stories throughout his career. By this stage, he had suffered (in 1911) and recovered from a major stroke, and his brushwork was often very loose and sketchy in appearance. My choice of his narrative art, though, is one of his many fine lithographs.

Odysseus and Nausicaä mixes moments from the story in book six of Homer’s Odyssey: Odysseus has just been shipwrecked and appears at the right, still naked and clearly neither bathed nor oiled. He pleads with Nausicaä, daughter of the local king, in the centre, who has one handmaid with her. Behind them is a mule wagon, mules in harness, with further handmaids on board, representing the group of women from the palace who have come to the shore to do their washing.

I cannot make out any evidence of their washing clothes, nor playing ball, and the handmaids look surprised but have not run away in shock at Odysseus’ appearance. Corinth does, though, show a town in the far background – insufficient to confirm the improvement in Odysseus’ fortunes, but getting closer.

The first version of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Daniel in the Lions’ Den became lost some time before 1907, so between about 1907 and the end of the First World War, he painted another version which appears to be rather looser in its brushstrokes, and is cropped slightly differently.

Tanner had a fondness for painting lions since his student days in Philadelphia, and had at first considered specialising in the painting of animals. Some have suggested that this might be through a tenuous personal connection with Androcles and the Lion, Androcles being a slave who gained freedom and success.

This version is another example of his very tightly constrained colour, and his skilled use of light, which were probably key in the original’s very successful reception.

Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif, in A Faun and a Mermaid. This has survived in two very similar versions, the other of which is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fishtail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Helen Hyde is known best for her print-making, which includes this etching and aquatint of Little Miss Muffet. This is a strange account of this well-known nursery rhyme: I can see no sign of any spider, but there’s a rather large white chicken where I would have expected the spider to have been. Hyde tragically died a year later, in 1919, at the age of only 51.

When he died unexpectedly in 1918, Klimt had almost completed this painting of Adam and Eve, one of his few works showing biblical figures. Although he hadn’t painted Eve’s right hand or the passage behind it, there is no sign of the traditional references to the Fall of Man, such as an apple or serpent. Instead, the figures are shown as a happy, loving couple, their heads leaning gently to one side, with flowers at Eve’s feet.

This leads me on to look at a selection of figurative works, starting again with Lovis Corinth.

Throughout Corinth’s career, he painted superb figures, particularly nude women, including his wife and muse Charlotte Berend. She was crucial in the recovery from his stroke, and it must have been encouraging to both of them how he could still paint flesh as well as in his Girl in Front of a Mirror.

Corinth himself was showing his age, grown gaunt with the war and his hard road back to painting. In his Self-Portrait in a White Coat he is seen painting with his left hand, using an open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

As with Corinth earlier, the American artist Charles Demuth enjoyed the night-life in clubs, where he painted In Vaudeville (Dancer with Chorus) in watercolour and pencil.

In Vienna, Gustav Klimt remained one of the most innovative figurative artists, but at this time was embroiled in a very difficult commission, to produce a posthumous portrait of a young woman from an affluent family. Maria Munk, known as Ria, had been engaged to the actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers; when he called off their engagement, she committed suicide just after Christmas in 1911, by shooting herself in the chest. Klimt’s commission was for Ria’s grief-stricken family.

Klimt first thought that he had completed Ria Munk on her Deathbed in 1912, but seems to have returned to it in 1917-18. She is manifestly dead, and surrounded by floral tributes. The family rejected the work, which they found too distressing, and asked Klimt to paint her when she was still alive, from photographs.

A second portrait, which Klimt completed in 1916, was also rejected, although there is doubt about the identity of the painting, and the reason for its rejection.

Klimt started his third Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk in 1917, and was still working on it shortly before his death. It was clearly going to be another richly-decorated painting, with abundant colourful flowers in the background, and brilliant peppers and other vegetables.

Of all the figurative artists in Europe, it was surely the young Egon Schiele who was the most radical and innovative.

In the Spring of 1918, his wife Edith became pregnant, which may have been the stimulus for Schiele to revisit the theme of The Family. His three figures seem full of longing and aspiration: the father, surely a self-portrait, looks straight at the viewer; his wife, who doesn’t resemble Edith in the slightest, stares sadly down to the right; their young child peers out from mother’s legs, as if looking up at an object to the right.

My final choice is, I must admit, my favourite figurative painting of the year, by the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

Munch’s dazzlingly vibrant Bathing Man is set on the coast of Norway. The figure and its landscape are fashioned from bold strokes of pure colour, which he modulates skilfully to show the bather’s lower legs under the water.

Next week, I will complete this survey with a look at some of the landscape paintings from 1918 – and some of the most sublime of the century.

The ‘Saracen’ sorceress Armida had abducted the crusader knight Rinaldo to her enchanted garden far to the west, on the Fortunate Isles.

A rescue team of the knights Charles and Ubaldo sailed out in a magic ship piloted by a fair woman. After they had overcome a series of obstacles, Charles and Ubaldo found Rinaldo dressed and behaving as a woman’s dandy, and then had the task of restoring his senses as a warrior knight, so that they can take him back to rejoin the siege of Jerusalem.

By showing Rinaldo his own image in a highly polished shield, the knight realises what he has become, and is put to shame. Ubaldo bids him rejoin the forces of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the holy war. They hasten away, leaving Armida weeping and choking with grief. She runs after them, calling him back. Rinaldo and his two companions wait for her, and the couple stare at one another in silence.

The scene of Armida and Rinaldo separating has proved another of Tasso’s great images for art. Its greatest exponents were the Tiepolos, father and son, who during the eighteenth century painted a succession of works showing this parting. I show here four examples, each of which uses the compositional device of collapsing Armida’s garden on one side, with the beach and ship on the other, and using that spatial and temporal merging to tell the whole sequence, from Rinaldo’s awakening to their departure by sea.

In this version for the Tasso Room in the palace of the Cormaro Family in Venice, painted in 1742-45, Charles and Ubaldo are stood in full armour, pointing to their ship which is waiting to take Rinaldo away. Armida lies back exposing a great deal of leg, trying to persuade Rinaldo to stay with her.

In Tiepolo’s Rinaldo’s Departure from Armida from 1755-60, Rinaldo is still being woken from his enchantment, and Armida bares her breast as she is trying to lure him back to her.

His son, Giovanni Domenico, squeezed the three knights in tighter, and omitted Armida, in his Rinaldo Leaving the Garden of Armida from about 1770. Rinaldo’s separation from Armida is marked by the hold he has over the blindfolded Cupid in his right arm. This was painted in a fresco in Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, Italy.

The father Tiepolo had painted Rinaldo Abandoning Armida, another variation of the figures, in 1757, as a fresco in the Villa Valmarana ai Nani, in Vicenza, Italy. In this, the composition is reversed, with the ship at the left, and Armida at the right, pleading with Rinaldo. This is perhaps Tiepolo’s most complete account, as it includes both Armida’s crystal mirror at the right, and the polished shield into which Rinaldo looked, at the feet of Charles and Ubaldo.

Tasso’s narrative, developed in this painting, may have a sub-text about looking and its power: for Armida looking in her crystal was a means of strengthening her allure over Rinaldo, but for him looking into the polished shield was a means of restoring his power by showing what he had become in her clutches.

The Tiepolos were by no means the first to merge Armida’s garden with the sea and ship. Nicolas Colombel’s undated painting from the late 1600s showing Rinaldo Abandoning Armida has done much the same.

Armida then launches into a speech, asking him to let her follow him back, and offering to be his shield. His love has been replaced by compassion for her, and he asks her to remain there in peace. The three knights then sail away on the magic ship, leaving Armida behind on the beach. Her grief now changes to anger at this loss, so she casts evil spells and conjures up her chariot. On that she departs in vengeance for the battlefield.

David Teniers the Younger shows this section of the story in two of his small paintings on copper: in his Armida and Rinaldo Separated of 1628-30, Armida is weeping and being comforted by Charles and Ubaldo, as the woman pilot of their ship waits for them to board by its stern.

Teniers’ sequel, Rinaldo Flees from the Fortunate Isles, shows the group returning to war, with Armida still looking disconsolate in her chariot above them.

Canto seventeen opens in Gaza, between Egypt and Jerusalem, where the King of Egypt is mustering his army ready to advance towards Godfrey’s forces. He sits on his throne to review his forces, which Tasso lists in procession much as he had done when the crusaders were setting out for Jerusalem at the start of the epic.

These start with Egyptians, and progress through those from the coast of Asia, citizens of Cairo, those from the land to the south, men of Barca, those from the coast of Arabia, from the Persian Gulf, and the Indes. At the end, Armida appears riding in her chariot with her own forces who had been mustered in Syria by Hydrotes, together with Circassians and more.

The king then retires to a banquet, where Armida offers her forces in support of the king, and tells of her wish for vengeance against Rinaldo. Adrastus, a ‘Saracen’ leader of Indian troops, offers to rip Rinaldo’s heart out, and make a present of his head to Armida.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

As you will have gathered, I love a good story, and most of all I love it painted well, preferably by some masters spanning the period from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. We looked at some wonderful examples for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and in many of Plutarch’s Lives. I’m still working my way through Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, but there’s another book which was hugely popular as a source for narrative painting over this long period: Boccaccio’s Decameron.

This article introduces a new series, in which I am going to look at some of the best paintings of stories selected from the hundred told there by Boccaccio.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s life has been studied extensively by scholars over the last seven hundred years or so, but much of it remains very vague. He was either born in Florence, or perhaps near the village of Certaldo, to the south-west of the city. His father worked for the Bardi bank, but he is thought to have been illegitimate and his mother has never been identified. There have been rumours that she may have lived in Paris, but those now appear unlikely.

We do know that he was born on 16 June 1313, and while still a child his father married a woman from a rich family, before they moved to Naples. At the time, Naples was a major cultural centre, and as a young man Boccaccio immersed himself in that. His father expected him to become a banker, and Giovanni started work as an apprentice in his father’s bank in the city, which must have brought him into contact with many colourful characters.

Boccaccio had no interest in banking though, and persuaded his father to let him study canon (ecclesiastical) law at the city’s university. When he was in his twenties, his father introduced him to the Neapolitan court and cultural circles around the King of Naples, Robert the Wise. Among Boccaccio’s most important influences at this time was the scholar Paolo da Perugia, who had amassed a great deal of information about classical myths. Boccaccio himself became a scholar, particularly of the classical world, a writer rather than an ecclesiastical lawyer, and his future started to crystallise when he wrote his first poetry.

His early works became the sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Troilus and Cressida), and the Knight’s Tale.

Boccaccio left Naples in 1341, as tensions were growing between its king and the city-state of Florence, and returned to live mainly in Florence, although he also spent time in Ravenna. He developed great admiration for the work of Dante Alighieri, who had died in Ravenna in 1321, and the great poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304-1374), whom he regarded as his teacher.

Giorgio Vasari is most famous for writing biographies of many of the important painters of the Renaissance and earlier, but was also a very accomplished artist himself. His tribute to some of the greatest writers of the period is Six Tuscan Poets from 1544. From left to right, I believe these to be Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Guido Cavalcanti, Giovanni Boccaccio, Cino da Pistoia, and Guittone d’Arezzo.

Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio remain three of the greatest European writers of all time.

William Bell Scott’s undated painting of Boccaccio’s Visit to Dante’s Daughter shows the writer paying indirect homage to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio wrote the first biography of Dante, at about the time that he was writing the Decameron.

During the 1340s, Boccaccio seems to have been developing the idea of a book in which seven characters take it in turns to tell stories. When the Black Death struck Florence in 1348, even killing Boccaccio’s stepmother, this provided him with the framing story. He was already building his collection of tales which would form the bulk of the book, and it is thought that he started writing it shortly after the Black Death.

What is more doubtful is whether Boccaccio was living in Florence when the Black Death struck. However, as it raged through the whole of Tuscany in that year, hardly sparing a village, it is most unlikely that he didn’t observe its effects somewhere, possibly in Ravenna.

In 1349, Boccaccio’s father died, leaving Giovanni as the head of the household. In spite of that, he pressed on and had largely completed the first version in 1352. He revised it in 1370-71, and from then on it has been widely read, translated into all major languages, and its stories have inspired many other works of art.

Egide Charles Gustave Wappers painted Boccaccio Reading from the Decameron to Queen Johanna of Naples in 1849. It shows Queen Joanna I of Naples (1328-1382), whose reputation at the time was controversial to say the least. However, Boccaccio was her supporter, and wrote a complementary account in his collection of biographies of famous women, De Mulieribus Claris (On Famous Women). Whether he ever read to her from his Decameron is more speculative.

This miniature by the Master of 1482 and Follower conflates Boccaccio, the Black Death in Florence, and the framing story of the Decameron: Giovanni Boccaccio and Florentines who have Fled from the Plague was painted in about 1485 on vellum, in what must have been one of the first illustrated versions of The Decameron.

The Decameron opens with a description of the horrific conditions and events which overwhelmed Florence when the Black Death struck, then takes us to a group of seven young women who are taking shelter in one of its great churches. They decide to leave the city, rather than waiting amidst its rising pile of corpses, to spend some time in the country nearby. To accompany them, they take a few servants, and three young men.

Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decide that one of the means by which they will pass their self-imposed exile is by telling one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each tells one story on every weekday, providing a total of one hundred in all.

Raffaello Sorbi show the group of ten during one of the story-telling sessions in The Decameron from 1876. The city of Florence is in the distance.

Salvatore Postiglione’s undated, ornate and almost illustrative Scene of the Narration of the Decameron is unusual for omitting one of the seven young women, but links visually to their other musical and craft activities.

Relatively few of the hundred tales in the Decameron have been committed to paint. Some are little more than brief fables, or what used to be known as shaggy dog stories. Others are more lengthy novellas with intricate twisting plots. But many have been painted, from the Renaissance until well into the twentieth century. They were particularly popular sources of motifs among the Pre-Raphaelites and other nineteenth century artists.

The tale of Griselda has cropped up in folk stories across Europe before it was told as the final tale (Day 10, Story 10) of the Decameron. It was then taken up by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and by Charles Perrault. Francesco Pesellino depicted it in this Scene from the Life of the Griseldis painted around 1450.

One of the most significant series of paintings of the Decameron is Sandro Botticelli’s The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti, of which this is the first. Boccaccio includes this horrific tale as the eighth story on Day 5, which Botticelli shows in four panels which were commissioned as a wedding gift for a couple whose marriage was partly arranged by Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo de’ Medici), ruler of the Florentine Republic in the late fifteenth century, and Botticelli’s patron. They were completed during 1482-83.

Some paintings of stories from the Decameron aren’t as clearly associated with Boccaccio’s words: I am going to try to associate George Frederic Watts’ A Story from Boccaccio from 1844–47 with the tale that it tells.

One of the earliest and greatest examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it was accompanied by lines from John Keats’ poem Isabella or the Pot of Basil, which refers to the story of the ill-fated love of Lisabetta for Lorenzo, the fifth told on Day 4.

Later in the nineteenth century, Marie Spartali Stillman painted The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889), showing a scene from the fifth story of Day Ten. This was also painted by John William Waterhouse in 1916-17.

Perhaps the most popular of all the stories in the Decameron with visual artists has been the romance of Cymon and Iphigenia, here shown in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s luscious and languid painting from 1884.

I hope that you will join me in looking at many more wonderful paintings exploring Boccaccio’s stories from the Decameron in the coming weeks.

Towards the end of his life, Nicolas Poussin’s hands developed a severe tremor which made painting fine details very hard for him. Despite that, his final years saw some of his greatest landscape paintings, and standing head and shoulders above those is his series of the Seasons, believed to have been painted between 1660-64.

Each of these is not just a fine painting of an idealised landscape, but includes narrative referring to a Biblical story. They not only move through the seasons of the year, but through the times of the day, starting in the early morning of Spring, and ending at night for winter – a device used by later artists such as William Hogarth.

In the Louvre, known for its many great treasures of art, they are among the most sublime and important of all its riches.

Spring starts with the beginning of the Bible, with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve is persuading Adam to join her in an apple, the opening step of the Fall.

For Summer, Poussin chose the story of Boaz discovering Ruth gleaning after the wheat had been cut in his fields, as told in the Book of Ruth. In its contrasting Italian coastal setting, this overlaps with the earlier paintings of the Brueghels and others.

Poussin refers to a story from the Book of Numbers for Autumn, in which Israelite spies visited the Promised Land, and brought back grapes as evidence of what lay ahead.

Winter returns to the Book of Genesis, to show the great flood, with lightning crackling through the sky, and a few survivors trying to escape the rising waters. This also shows Poussin’s lifelong dread of snakes: one is slithering up the rocks on the left, and from memory I think that there is another in the water, although I can’t see it in this image.

Early in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s career, in 1854, he was commissioned to paint a series showing The Four Seasons (1854-55) for the music pavilion in the garden of the Monlun banking family in La Rochelle. In keeping with their opulent surrounds, these were painted on gold grounds, a layer of gold leaf into which the artist embossed a geometric pattern to result in this unusual appearance.

Bouguereau painted a series of young women with seasonal attributes. These include the flowers of Spring, with their reference to Flora, sheaves of ripened corn (Ceres), a bacchante with her goblet of wine and thyrsus, and wrapped up for winter with snow on her clothing.

But the greatest series of mythological allegories of the seasons is that painted – as with Poussin – in the final few years of Eugène Delacroix’s life. These were commissioned by the Alsacian industrialist Frederick Hartmann, and completed just before the artist’s death in 1863. Although considered to be allegories, in that they don’t directly show each season, they are unconventional in using stories from classical myths which are tied into the seasons.

For Spring, Delacroix chose Eurydice Bitten by a Serpent while Picking Flowers (Eurydice’s Death), in which the bride Eurydice is bitten on the foot (or ankle) by a snake shortly after her wedding, and dies. I’m not aware of any deeper connection between Eurydice or Orpheus and this season.

For summer, the story is another tragic myth of Diana Surprised by Actaeon, which is again set in the season shown. Actaeon stumbled across the goddess bathing when he was out hunting; as a result of his unintentional glimpse of her naked body, he is turned into a stag and killed by his own hunting dogs. Already here he can be seen in transition, with antlers growing from his head.

Delacroix’s choice for autumn draws on the common association between that season and wine, in Bacchus and Ariadne. After being abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, who had promised to marry her, Ariadne is discovered by the young Bacchus. Here, Bacchus has just arrived and is helping the gloomy and despondent Ariadne to her feet. They fall in love and marry.

For the final season of winter, the artist chose Juno Beseeches Aeolus to Destroy Ulysses’ Fleet, which has suffered a slight conflation between the stories of Ulysses and Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Juno offers Aeolus a nymph as a wife if he will let loose his winds on the fleet of Aeneas. That he does, and the fleet is driven onto the coast of North Africa – in what was surely a winter storm.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Mucha made several series of prints showing the four seasons. Among these is The Four Seasons, probably from around 1897-1900. These make interesting comparison with the more traditional paintings of Bouguereau above.

The seasons are an important and pervasive feature of much of the art of East Asia. I have chosen one relatively modern example which is straightforward to read.

Araki Jippo 荒木 十畝 painted Birds and Flowers of Four Seasons 四季花鳥 on silk in 1917, a fascinating comparison with the landscapes of de Momper.

Armida, abandoned by Rinaldo so he could return to the siege of Jerusalem, has joined the massed army of the King of Egypt. One of his leaders, Adrastus, has promised to rip Rinaldo’s heart out, and present his head to Armida, to satisfy her lust for vengeance.

Rinaldo, Charles and Ubaldo return in their magic ship, and land on Judea’s shore. Waiting nearby is an old man guarding a new suit of armour for Rinaldo, which has been specially forged and crafted to protect him. The shield bears figures demonstrating its heroic roots, and Rinaldo is presented with the predestined sword which had been owned by Sven, the late Prince of Denmark.

The three are then whisked through the night sky in the old man’s chariot to rejoin the crusaders in their camp near Jerusalem.

At the start of Canto eighteen, Rinaldo and Godfrey of Bouillon are re-united: the knight says that he is ready to redeem himself, and Godfrey throws his arms around him. The leader then explains to Rinaldo the problem that they have with the enchanted wood, which is stopping them from felling trees to replace their siege engines and towers to resume their assault on the city.

Rinaldo accepts Godfrey’s challenge and, with the encouragement of Peter the Hermit, he sets off alone for the wood. When he enters it, all is still and calm. He seeks a place to cross the river, and a bridge of gold appears, sees him across, then vanishes again. In front of him, the trunk of an oak splits open to give birth to a fully-grown nymph, who resembles Armida.

Rinaldo ignores the overtures of the nymph, draws his sword, and goes to cut down some myrtle. The nymph intervenes, and transforms into a monster with many arms bearing swords. Then there is lightning and thunder, and heavy rain, but Rinaldo persists and cuts through a black walnut tree. This suddenly dispels the enchantment, and the wood returns to normal.

Rinaldo returns to the camp and tells of his success. Crusaders and their expert engineers swarm out to the woods to fell trees and build new siege machines. In no time, they build three great towers to place against the city’s walls, replacing those which had been burnt to the ground by Clorinda before her death.

In Jerusalem, there is frantic work to repair and reinforce the city’s walls, build their own towers, and make inflammable weapons using sulphur and bitumen.

Some French crusaders then spot a messenger pigeon, which is attacked by a hawk. The pigeon lands on Godfrey, who discovers the message it is carrying. This is from the Egyptian forces who are approaching, and expect to arrive at Jerusalem in four or five days. Godfrey knows how little time he has left to capture the city, and calls on his commanders to prepare to assault the city walls.

In their meeting, Raymond nominates his polyglot valet Vafrine to be a spy on the approaching army from Egypt. The valet agrees, and promises to bring back full details of their forces and disposition.

The day before their intended assault they spend in prayer, confession, and celebrating Mass. The crusaders then move their siege towers to a well-armed gate, to mislead the enemy. Overnight they shift them again to where they intend to use them, catching the defenders of the city by surprise.

Soon after dawn, with their host of smaller engines brought into play, the crusaders start their massed assault. The air is filled with arrows tipped with poison, then stones hurled from the walls. The knights and soldiers approach under cover, and Rinaldo has a high ladder placed against the wall so that he can lead many others also scaling its heights.

The crusaders swarm up using ladders and the three towers, taking casualties from missiles and heavy objects dropped upon them. Then balls of fire start to rain upon them, as if from hell. As the soldiers try to control fires burning in their wooden towers, the wind suddenly changes and blows the flames back at those defending the walls. This sets alight woollen materials which they had been using as protection, and the defenders are scorched away.

Ismen takes two of his neophytes out to try to cast spells, but a stone flung from one of the towers kills all three in a single shot.

As Soliman takes to leading the defence, the Archangel Michael appears to Godfrey, and reveals a whole army of angels who are in his support. This inspires Godfrey to challenge Soliman. Rinaldo makes a way for his leader to plant a holy Cross on the top of the city’s wall, bringing cheers from the crusaders, who push onward and upward. Tancred too storms over the wall, raising his banner of the Cross in victory over Argante’s men.

Finally, the nearby gate is opened, and the whole crusader army enters Jerusalem. The wrath of their victory is immediate, and the city’s streets are soon awash with blood and piled with corpses.

Canto nineteen opens within the conquered city, where only Argante the Circassian fights on. He is met by Tancred, and the two agree to conclude their previous combat outside the city, alone. Argante has no shield, and stands higher by his head against his opponent. They swing their swords at one another, inflicting wounds, but fighting on. Taunting one another, they grapple and wrestle so forcefully that they both fall to the ground.

Argante is the slower to get up, and they continue slashing through their armour into flesh. But Argante is now bleeding badly from his arm, and Tancred offers to call a halt. The Circassian responds by wounding Tancred viciously in the shoulder and ribs. Argante then falls to the ground, opening up his wounds. Still he won’t give up, and Tancred has to drive his blade into Argante’s skull to finish him off.

Tancred may be the victor, but he is himself quite badly wounded, and has to struggle to walk. He sits down, trembling, and as night falls he lapses into unconsciousness.

While Argante and Tancred have been engaged in their duel to the death, slaughter has continued in the captured city of Jerusalem. Rinaldo will only kill those who remain armed. Many of the citizens are packed into the shelter of the Temple of Solomon, whose doors are quickly battered in, leading to mass murder of the occupants.

Aladine and Soliman find their way to the Tower of David, where they barricade themselves in, armed with a steel mace. When Count Raymond of Toulouse tries to break into them, he is knocked senseless and dragged in as a hostage. Rinaldo is just about to enter when Godfrey sounds the retreat for the night, leaving the storming of the tower for the following morning.

Vafrine, meanwhile, has been sizing up the Egyptian forces during the day. He has spoken freely within their camp, gleaned details of strengths and plans, even learning of the soldier who has been designated to kill Godfrey. He found Armida, and her suitors who have vowed to kill Rinaldo for her hand. There he bumps into a beautiful woman who recognises him: it is Erminia, who asks him to take her back with him.

Erminia tells Vafrine how the death of Godfrey has been planned using subterfuge. His killers will be dressed as crusaders, bearing the red cross on white to ensure that they can get close to him, with just a small sign on their helmets to distinguish them as ‘pagans’.

By dusk, Erminia and Vafrine are nearing the crusader camp, when they spot Argante’s corpse, and a little beyond it the unconscious Tancred, who at first they think is dead. When Erminia (who is in love with Tancred) recognises his faint voice, she leaps from her horse and weeps over him. Vafrine tells her that there is still time to cure his wounds and save his life, and removes Tancred’s armour.

Erminia has nothing to use as bandages to bind Tancred’s wounds, so cuts her hair off and uses that. Tancred regains consciousness, and recognises Vafrine. Others who have been searching for Tancred arrive, and start to carry him back to camp. Tancred insists on two things, though: that Argante is given a proper burial, and that he is carried into the city of Jerusalem to rest.

It is this last section which has been painted often, and by great masters.

Giovanni Antonio Guardi’s Herminia and Vafrine Find the Wounded Tancred from about 1750-55 shows the start of the sequence, just after Erminia has leapt from her horse. The corpse of Argante is in the lower left corner, Tancred’s sword still impaling its head.

Guercino’s Erminia Finding the Wounded Tancred from about 1650 shows the scene slightly later, as Erminia rushes over to minister to the ailing Tancred, still a little uncertain whether he is alive or dead. This painting was originally commissioned by the Papal Legate of Bologna, but he let the Duke and Duchess of Mantua buy it from its creator in 1652.

Much earlier in his career, Guercino had painted a few moments further into the story, in Erminia Finds the Wounded Tancred from 1618-19. Vafrine has now removed Tancred’s armour, and they are trying to work out how to bandage his wounds.

Pier Francesco Mola’s Erminia and Vafrine Tending the Wounded Tancred After the Battle with Argante from about 1650-60 shows a similar scene, with Vafrine cradling the knight’s head and upper body, and the body of Argante at the far left.

There are three great paintings which show the strange climax, in which Erminia cuts her tresses to form bandages.

Alessandro Turchi’s Erminia Finds the Wounded Tancred is thought to have been painted in about 1630. Erminia is using Tancred’s sword to cut her hair, a detail omitted from Tasso’s text. Argante’s body is behind them.

At about the same time, Nicolas Poussin was painting this first version of Tancred and Erminia (c 1631) which is now in the Hermitage. It contains the same elements, even back to Argante’s body, but in a more open composition which is dominated by Erminia and her white horse.

This slightly later version by Poussin is thought to date from about 1634, and has a more powerful close-in composition. Erminia’s arms are in a similar position, also using Tancred’s sword, but she is now kneeling at Tancred’s side. The love between Erminia and Tancred is also made clear in the pair of cupids, and the two horses are anticipating the arrival of other crusaders to carry Tancred away.

It is now night, and Vafrine has a lot to brief Godfrey about, as the crusaders prepare to complete their conquest of Jerusalem then defend it from the approaching Egyptian army.

References

Wikipedia on Jerusalem Delivered.
Wikipedia on Torquato Tasso.
Wikpedia on the First Crusade.

Project Gutenberg (free) English translation (Fairfax 1600).

Librivox audiobook of the Fairfax (1600) English translation (free).

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
Anthony M Esolen, translator (2000) Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme Liberata, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 863233. A superb modern translation into English verse.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.
Johathan Unglaub (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 833677.

The stories told each day in Boccaccio’s Decameron follow a theme appointed by the ‘ruler’ of that day, as they decree when they are crowned with laurels at the end of the previous day’s storytelling. The theme chosen by the queen of the fifth day, Fiammetta, was the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness.

The eighth such story concerns the misfortunes of Nastagio degli Onesti, as told by Filomena. This appears to have been instantly successful, and by the early sixteenth century had been painted by both Botticelli and Ghirlandaio.

Nastagio degli Onesti was a young man from an old and noble family in Ravenna, who inherited a huge fortune, then fell in love with the daughter of a more noble family. His love for her was not returned, though, and she was persistently cruel towards him. This caused the young Nastagio so much grief that he even contemplated suicide.

He continued to try to win her over, and in the course of that expended much of his inheritance. Friends and relatives feared for him and his future, and tried to persuade him to leave the city for a while. He was very reluctant, but finally travelled to Classe, which is just three miles away, in May when the weather was fine.

Once there, he wandered off into the local pine woods, thinking as he always did about his cruel love. As he walked in the wood, he heard the screams of a woman in distress. He then caught sight of her running naked towards him. In hot pursuit was a pair of large mastiff dogs, and behind them was a mounted knight brandishing a sword and threatening to kill her.

Nastagio took up a tree branch in her defence, but the knight told him by name to keep out, and let him and his dogs give the sinful woman what she deserved. Nastagio challenged the knight, who dismounted and introduced himself as Guido degli Anastagi. He then explained that he had fallen deeply in love with this woman many years ago, but she too had rejected him cruelly. As a result, Guido had killed himself, and was condemned to eternal punishment for that sin.

The woman had died shortly afterwards, without repenting her cruelty, and she too was condemned to eternal punishment for her sin.

The punishment consisted of Guido having to hunt her down in the woods, kill her with the same sword with which he had committed suicide, then cut her back open and remove her stone cold heart. That and her other organs he then has to feed to his dogs. After a short break, she is magically restored, and his hunt of her has to resume.

Nastagio was horrified by this, stepped back, and watched the dead Guido kill the dead woman with his rapier, and go through the sequence of cutting out her heart and organs. A few moments later, after the ghostly dogs had eaten her organs, the dead woman jumped up and the hunt started again.

When he had recovered from the shock, Nastagio came up with a plan to deal with his own predicament. He summoned his friends and relatives, and agreed to stop trying to woo the woman that he loved on one condition. That was that she and her family should join him in the same place in the pine wood exactly one week later, for a magnificent breakfast banquet.

A week later, all her family were present at the meal in the wood, and Nastagio carefully seated the woman he loved so that she would get a grandstand view of the proceedings. No sooner had the last course been served, than they heard the dead woman’s screams, and she ran right in front of them.

Many of the guests tried to stop Guido from carrying out this punishment, so he explained to them what he had told Nastagio the week before. Eventually the ghostly couple rushed off again, and the guests talked avidly about what they had witnessed. But the person who was most affected by the spectacle was the cruel woman who Nastagio loved, who had perhaps already put herself in the position of the dead woman.

Nastagio’s plan paid off: the woman he loved soon sent him a servant to inform him that she would do anything he desired. She quickly consented to marriage, and they were wedded the following Sunday.

One perhaps unintended consequence of Nastagio’s breakfast demonstration was that, for some time to come, the women of Ravenna were so frightened of what could happen to them, that they were much more favourably responsive to the approaches of men.

The title page of this story in this illustrated manuscript copy of the Decameron from the fifteenth century features a small reminder of the grim human hunt scene at its head.

This gruesome story and ingenious reversal of conventional Christian values became popular and well-known through the fifteenth century, sufficient for it to be depicted in four tempera panels given on the occasion of the arranged marriage of Gianozzo Pucci and Lucretia Bini in 1483. The couple were particularly fortunate, in that one of those who made the arrangement, and who had this gift made for them, was Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’, who was also Botticelli’s patron at the time, and the ruler of the Florentine Republic.

The first panel shows two figures of Nastagio, at the left, in the pine wood, with the naked woman running towards him, a mastiff ainking its teeth into her buttock. Behind them, at the right, is Guido, his sword in hand ready to kill the woman when he catches her. In the distance is a coastal landscape intended to locate this near Ravenna, which is close to the Adriatic, although I think that this is idealised rather than representative.

Botticelli continues to tell the story using multiplex (‘continuous’) narrative in the second painting. The dead Guido has now caught the dead woman, killed her with his rapier, and with her lying on her face, he is cutting her back open to remove her cold heart. His dogs are already eating her organs at the right, and Nastagio is visibly distressed at the left.

Behind that composite scene is an earlier scene of Guido and his dogs still in pursuit of the woman, which precedes the image of the first painting in the series.

In the third painting, Botticelli shows the breakfast banquet a week later, with the dead woman being attacked by Guido’s dogs, and Guido himself about to catch and kill her, in front of Nastagio’s guests.

Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women are rising in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

The fourth and final panel shows Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Botticelli’s series seems to have been quite celebrated, and not too long afterwards, Ghirlandaio, another Florentine master, was asked to paint not copies, but in the manner of Botticelli’s series. Two have survived, and are now both in the US.

Ghirlandaio’s first panel, now in the Brooklyn Museum, is based on Botticelli’s first, with the addition of an extra scene to its multiplex narrative. Up in the right, he adds the scene from Botticelli’s second panel, showing Guido cutting out the dead woman’s heart through her back.

Ghirlandaio’s second panel shows an almost identical breakfast banquet to that in Botticelli’s third panel. This is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I don’t know whether Ghirlandaio’s series extended to a third, completing the story with the marriage feast of Nastagio.

Boccaccio’s strange tale, twisted from source material by Dante, resulted in even more curious paintings. Today we might be only to happy to watch it in a horror movie, but seeing it come to life in a series of panels as a wedding gift? That has to be late Middle Ages.

There have been plenty of hoaxes in painting, almost invariably over the identity of the artist (or forger) who painted a specific work. It’s unusual for most of a generation of painters to be caught up in someone else’s forgery, but around 1800 that is exactly what happened. This article explains how masters including the great French narrative painter Ingres were duped.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were times of great discovery, but relatively limited critical examination of new ‘discoveries’. The sciences and technologies used to examine the origins of works of art were not well developed, and there was a tendency to trust ‘gentleman’ scholars of the day.

In 1760, the Scottish poet James Macpherson published a cycle of epic poems translated into English from their original Scottish Gaelic. He claimed to have collected these from oral sources, then rendered them into modern Gaelic – a process similar to that used about fifty years later by Elias Lönnrot to compile the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

The central character in Macpherson’s epic is Ossian, who was based on a pre-existing legendary Irish Gaelic bard Oisin. Macpherson’s new and exciting extensions to the corpus of Celtic/Gaelic folklore and myth came from Ossian’s retelling of endless battles and unhappy loves from his earlier days.

By the time that Macpherson published his collected edition of the poems in 1765, several characters had emerged from their rather fragmented narrative. Ossian’s father Fingal appeared based loosely on an existing hero from Irish Gaelic tradition, Fionn mac Cumhaill (‘Finn McCool’), and there were Ossian’s dead son Oscar, and Oscar’s lover Malvina. The first names Fiona and Malvina first appeared in Macpherson’s Ossian writings.

These had initially been translated into English and then, taking Europe by storm, into the other major languages of Europe. Their French translation was completed by 1777. When Macpherson died in 1796, so great was his fame that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Yet today Ossian and Macpherson’s momentous discovery have been all but forgotten, and are generally excluded from accepted Celtic/Gaelic tradition.

The prolific narrative painter Nicolai Abildgaard wasted no time in reading Ossian and retelling the stories in paint. His Fingal Sees the Ghosts of His Ancestors in the Moonlight was completed in 1778, and a suitably Romantic expression.

Abildgaard went on to assemble a whole series of works painted from the lines in Ossian. Later came Ossian’s Swansong from about 1782.

In about 1794, Abildgaard added Culmin’s Ghost Appears to his Mother.

Between 1790-1815, Europe and North America reached peak Ossian. In France, Napoleon and Diderot were fans, and Voltaire wrote parodies. Thomas Jefferson intended to learn the Scottish Gaelic language to read them in their original form, and some compared Ossian with giants such as Homer.

Among the painters who told stories from Ossian in their work were JMW Turner and JAD Ingres.

In France, it was the now-forgotten narrative painter Paul Duqueylar who stole the limelight at the 1800 Salon in Paris, with his Ossian Reciting His Songs (1800).

The following year, François Gérard painted Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp (1801). Later, after Napoleon had fallen from power, Gérard’s original was sold to the King of Sweden and was lost in a shipwreck during delivery. Gérard painted several replicas, including that above which is now in the Châteaux de Malmaison, Paris, and that below which is in the Kunsthalle Hamburg.

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, known simply as Girodet, decided to conflate Ossian with a politically-motivated list of ‘French heroes’. His study for this, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes is claimed to be from 1805, but might more realistically be dated to 1801.

Girodet’s finished painting was given the dual title of Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes and was probably completed in 1802. It is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by Ossian.

Later paintings focussed their attention on the young and beautiful Malvina, who was caring for the old and blind Ossian. Johann Peter Krafft’s Ossian and Malvina from 1810 shows the two together.

Originally attributed to Girodet, it is now though that Ary Scheffer painted The Death of Malvina, or Ossian Receiving the Last Breath of Malvina between about 1802 and 1811, although this looks suspiciously as if its canvas has been cut down.

The young JAD Ingres made his first drawing of an Ossianic motif when he was still a student in Rome, in 1809. Shortly after his return to Paris, he was commissioned to paint two works for the bedroom to be used by Napoleon when he visited Rome. The Songs of Ossian (1811-13) is his ink and watercolour study for the painting that was to be drawn from Ossian.

Ingres completed the finished work in 1813, and it is probably the best-known painting based on Ossianic stories. It shows an episode from Ossian’s epic, with the aged Ossian asleep on his harp, dreaming in monochrome of past wars and loves.

In a sense, it should not have mattered whether the original Ossianic myths were genuine or not. These paintings depict stories which, at the time, had general currency among those likely to view them. However, when Ossian fell from favour later in the nineteenth century, their literary references were forgotten, and their narrative lost.

Macpherson’s claims were disputed from the moment of their first publication. Among their greatest sceptics was Samuel Johnson, at the time one of the authorities on the English language and its culture. A committee was set up by the Highland Society which attempted to establish the authenticity of Macpherson’s sources. While that was deliberating, an Irish manuscript came to light which conflicted with the claimed myths of Ossian.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, although Macpherson wasn’t regarded as a complete fraud, there was sufficient doubt over his claims that Ossian lost its previous popularity. If Macpherson didn’t engineer a hoax, he doesn’t seem to have represented the origin of the Ossianic writings entirely accurately. Their bubble had burst, and all those fine paintings were victims.

Reference

Wikipedia.