When I was writing yesterday’s article about Bosch’s Passion Scenes (c 1490-95), it struck me how unusual it was to see a painting by a master in which multiple scenes from a narrative were arranged in a circle. In this particular case, Bosch uses a mixture of multi-frame and multiplex narrative modes, which again is rare, perhaps unique. This article explores some other comparable paintings, to assess how unusual Bosch’s is.

Multi-frame

Multi-frame paintings are by no means uncommon, but most usually adopt rectangular or square form. Indeed many of the more spectacular frescoes are in effect multi-framed, where there are several images on a single continuous surface. This is similar to the much more recent development of comics/BD/graphic novels, or whatever you wish to call them.

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Stories of The Life and Passion of Christ (1513) arranges twenty frames covering the life of Christ around a central frame with four times the area of the others, showing the crucifixion. The frames are still read from left to right, along the rows from top to bottom, although the crucifixion is part of the bottom row. This is a layout which is commonly used throughout graphic novels too, of course.

The four separate episodes which make up Hans Sebald Beham’s Scenes from the Life of David (1534) are arranged in a square, so that each occupies a triangular frame, clearly separated from the others, and quite different from a normal linear layout. The snag with this is that the panel is really only suitable for viewing when laid flat, on a table, otherwise only one of the frames is correctly orientated.

Beham clearly liked the symmetry afforded by this layout, and enhanced it in his composition of the two frames shown here at the top and bottom.

Frans Francken the Younger’s The Crucifixion of Christ, with Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1600s) puts the crucifixion scene at the centre of a rectangle, around which there are twelve scenes from the life painted in either normal or brown grisaille. Unfortunately those peripheral scenes are difficult to differentiate from one another, thus to identify, but they appear to be read in a clockwise direction from the upper right, rather than linearly.

The visual effect of the painting is impressive, but his use of grisaille and very similar compositions does not help those trying to read the painting.

The painting of The Virgin Mary (1700s) in the Serbian Church of Szentendre, Hungary, uses a rectangular format with the Virgin and Child at its centre. Arranged around that are smaller frames, each showing an event in the life of Jesus. These appear to be read from the upper left in an anticlockwise sense, ending at the upper right with the resurrection, although only the ten frames on either side of the central image form the narrative sequence.

This fourteenth century fresco showing the Nativity of Jesus in Kakopetria, Cyprus, puts a series of frames showing individual events in the full story, around a central image of the Virgin and Child. This avoids repetition of that central image for the adoration of the Magi, for example, which is shown at the three o’clock position, so uses the format to help tell the story.

Multi-frame and circles

Multi-frame paintings arranged in the round are inevitably more common on porcelain and china, which often come in circular or oval plan.

Georg Kordenbusch’s painted baptismal bowl shows four Scenes from the Life of Christ (1750). As these are intended for viewing from above the bowl, and normally by a group gathered round it, the layout of the scenes should not be orientated for viewing from a single position.

Some artists have used circular elements within paintings which are still rectangular in overall form. Fedor Nikitin Rozhnov’s The Passion of The Apostles (1699) arranges circular images of ‘popular’ scenes of the martyrdoms of the twelve apostles, around a central circular image of Christ’s crucifixion.

Frescoes quite commonly occupy non-rectangular spaces, and have to conform to the surface provided.

Girolamo Pellegrini’s fresco The Sick Presented to Charity by St Roch (c 1695) is painted inside a dome, and therefore is inherently circular, but does not exploit that for multi-frame narrative.

Although Tiepolo’s Discovery of the True Cross and Saint Helena (c 1743) is painted on a flat tondo (circular) canvas, it was intended for display from the ceiling of the Capuchin church in Castello.

William de Brailes’ The Wheel of Fortune (c 1240) is based on this popular folk theme, but becomes more elaborate than most other depictions. At its centre is Fortuna, Roman goddess of fortune. The outermost ring of images – each a circular frame – show four different scenarios at the three, six, nine and twelve o’clock positions.

These are connected by half roundels showing twelve stages of life from the swaddled baby (at seven o’clock) to death at five o’clock. Inside those are inner half roundels showing scenes from the life of Saint Theophilus the Penitent, which start at one o’clock, and end at twelve o’clock. Each frame within each cycle has been carefully aligned to ensure that the concentric cycles are in approximate synchrony, and the individual contents have been aligned so that the page can be read in a single orientation.

Now believed to have been painted by one of Bosch’s workshop, or a follower, The Seven Deadly Sins and The Four Last Things (c 1510-20) is a much later work, and makes the odd design choice of rotating the images within frames according to their position on the circle.

Multiplex across space

Many artists have used spatial layout for multiplex narrative, rather than separating each scene out into a frame.

Perhaps the most extensive and ingenious example is Hans Memling’s Scenes from the Passion of Christ (1470-1), in which each of the individual scenes making up the passion as a whole is located in a different part of a fictionalised aerial view of Jerusalem. Because these scenes are not placed in separate frames, they form multiplex narrative, with the same subject, Christ, appearing in each one.

Multi-frame and multiplex in a circle

Bosch’s Passion Scenes (c 1490-95) consists of an outer background which is very dark here, containing various individual figures, surrounding a circular area in which he has painted scenes from the passion. As the reverse of a panel for an altarpiece, it could only be viewed in one orientation, so the whole of this painting shares the same orientation.

The lower two-thirds of the scenes are carefully divided into frames, five in total, but the upper third merges its three scenes into a single multiplex image, in which Christ appears three times: at the left carrying his cross up to Golgotha, at the top on the cross, and at the right his body being laid in a coffin for burial. This uses a common location for those three scenes in an ingenious composition.

The central image of a pelican feeding its young from its own blood not only sets the moral theme of self-sacrifice, but also solves the problem of how to bring the peripheral scenes together in the centre.

The peculiarity resulting from this otherwise ingenious composition is that the narrative sequence begins at the five o’clock position, in order to accommodate the resurrection scene at the tomb, at the right. Bosch leaves the viewer to work that out, which should have been an easy task in this case, given the familiarity of contemporary viewers with the stories shown.

Only Bosch, in this singular painting, brings together multi-frame and multiplex narrative modes, arranged around a circular area, in this way. The modes and layout enhance the telling of the story in a way that I have not seen in any other painting. Unless you know of another?

It’s never easy to know whether senior executives of multi-national corporations tell you what they really think, or whether they tell you what they want you to think. But whichever it is, it seems that Facebook executives are intent on ignoring over five millenia of human experience.

Last week, Facebook’s Vice President of Operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Lady Nicola Mendelsohn, boldly predicted that Facebook would be video-only – no text – in five years. According to Joseph Lichterman of NiemanLab at Harvard University, she went on to say:
“The best way to tell stories in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video. It commands so much more information in a quicker period.”

Given her first degree in English and Theatre Studies of the University of Leeds, I would hope that her understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of narrative in different media tells her a very different story, and that these pronouncements are the product of her subsequent career in advertising. They may also relate to her CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reported ‘obsession’ with live video streaming.

Perhaps I am an exceptional dinosaur, but I find it far quicker to scan words and still images in postings on Facebook and other social media. When I am most pressed for time, I simply cannot wait for a video to start trying to tell even a brief story. I scroll past, and its message passes me unshown. The major disadvantage to a serial medium like video for telling a story is that the viewer has to be prepared to watch it for several seconds before they can make any sort of decision whether to watch it to completion, or to abandon it and move on.

Photographs and other images, and words, can be scanned for interest much quicker, and I suspect more accurately, allowing the viewer/reader to decide whether to spend more time looking at that posting.

It was also unfortunate that, just a few days later, Antonio Perkins was shot in the head and neck while live-streaming on Facebook, as reported by the BBC. Neither Facebook Live nor Twitter’s Periscope have worked out how to address such issues effectively. If those services were to become as popular as their parents, and replace text content entirely, the number of suicides and crimes being streamed live is likely to reach the point at which society will demand action from governments.

Let’s hope that they have a Plan B for when their commercial customers realise that video is not invariably the “best way to tell stories”, and when we all understand that live-streaming is too vulnerable to abuse.

His second surviving painting of this popular motif restages it in the local countryside, which grows ever more sinister. Probably his oldest surviving triptych, it is the greatest of his early works, and must have established his reputation.

The Artist: Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450–1516)
The Painting: The Adoration of the Magi (triptych) (catalogue raisonné no. 9)
Dates: c 1490-1500; most probably around 1495
Media: oil on oak panel
Dimensions: 138 x 138 cm overall when open
Location: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Credits: Wikimedia Commons.

This is Bosch’s second known painting depicting the adoration of the infant Christ by three wise men. His earlier single-panel painting, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is detailed in this previous article.

The painting

The exterior painting is based on a brown grisaille, and shows the Mass of Saint Gregory. Unusually it is placed inside a painted false frame just inside the physical frame.

Pope Gregory the Great (c 540-604) is seen officiating at the altar. Two men, one older and the other younger, are painted in full colour. They have been identified as the donor’s father and son. Above and behind the altar is the figure of the resurrected Christ, still showing the marks of crucifixion on his side and hands, and wearing his crown of thorns.

Around Christ is a border of angels, and around those an arched area which contains seven scenes of the passion of Christ. These are read from the bottom left (Christ praying in Gethsemane), bottom right (the arrest), through the mid-left and mid-right, to the crucifixion at the top. Outside those narrative scenes are some more unconventional elements, including a winged devil flying off with Judas’s pale body impaled on a long lance.

When opened, the almost colourless grisaille is replaced by the rich greens, browns, and reds of the Adoration scene within.

Overall, the interior is rich in colour, detail, and activity. Its three panels form a continuous view of the local Brabant countryside, with its low rolling hills, and a city in the distance: this may be based on Antwerp (the donor’s city), or possibly ‘s-Hertogenbosch. If the latter, in common with Bosch’s Calvary with Donor, this could be a view from the sandy south, with the river at the right.

The Adoration scene fills the foreground of the central panel, while the left and right panels are devoted to the donor and his wife.

In the foreground is what appears to be a generally conventional if meticulously-detailed depiction of the adoration of the Magi. The Virgin Mary is sat under the tumbledown eaves beside a small cattleshed or stable known in this area as hoekboerderij. The infant Christ is seated on her lap, steadied by her left hand.

The senior of the Magi, an elderly man, has removed his crown, which is to the right on the ground, and prays to the mother and child on his knees. His gift is an elaborate gold table decoration showing Abraham about to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Behind him a second has also removed his headgear and holds his gift of myrrh on a silver platter. To the left is the third, a bare-headed African king wearing immaculate white robes, and bearing his gift of frankincense inside a sphere, on top of which is a phoenix bird; he has a child attendant behind him.

More unusually, a fourth king, identified as an anti-Christ, is inside the shed, wearing an ornate crown, and clutching a helmet with his left hand. His appearance is bizarre because his face and neck are sunburnt, but the rest of his skin is deathly pale. He is partly undressed, and has an old wound on his right lower leg. Several other figures are seen behind this fourth king.

An ass is visible through an opening in the wall of the shed, between the Virgin and the Magi, but the traditional ox which would accompany it is not apparent.

To the right and above this traditional scene are more peculiar events. A group of shepherds are engaged in climbing a tree behind and to the right of the shed. Two, a man and a woman clutching a set of bagpipes, are leaning over the thatched roof to view the scene below, and three others are below them. One of Bosch’s signature owls is just visible too: at the same level as the face of the upper person on the roof, just by the break in the wooden frame of the gable end of the shed.

The background to this panel shows low, rolling hills with small woods and open grassland. In the middle distance is a windmill, behind which are unusual turreted buildings, a moat or river, and a city either based on Antwerp or ‘s-Hertogenbosch. This countryside contains sporadic people, and no less than three small armies, two of which appear to be approaching one another, from the left and right sides of this central panel; their headgear suggests that they come from outside this part of Europe. The third group can be seen back towards the foot of the windmill.

In the sky above, although it is full daylight, the guiding star still burns brightly.

The left panel – which is the heraldic right side, thus the senior – shows in the foreground Saint Peter presenting the donor, as his name saint. The Saint is recognised by his standard attribute of the keys to heaven, his aged appearance, and red robes, and is similar to the version in Calvary with Donor. The donor wears black robes and is kneeling in supplication; he has been identified as the wealthy Antwerp burgher Peeter Scheyfve, a very successful weaver, whose arms are shown at the left.

Behind them Joseph sits on an upturned basket, drying cloths in front of a small open fire, in the shell remains of a building. In the middle distance beyond, a small group of figures is seen on a field. In the far distance is a substantial country residence, with a distinctive spire.

The right panel shows Saint Agnes presenting the supplicant wife of the donor likewise. The donor’s wife’s name saint is recognisable by her attributes of books and red robes. The donor’s wife wears a long black dress with a long white headdress, and is kneeling. She has been identified as Agneese de Gramme, and her arms are shown to the right.

Behind them is a lamb, very similar to that seen in Bosch’s Saint John the Baptist detailed here.

Behind the lamb are the shattered remains of small trees, and low earth ramparts. Beyond them is a path running in an arc through a grassy field. Near the path, a man is being savaged by a wolf. In the far distance, the land drops down to a broad river, perhaps an estuary. There is another city on a promontory or island in that body of water, and further large buildings in the far distance, on the horizon.

Composition

Bosch’s other painting of this popular Christian scene, which we must presume was completed some years earlier, is quite different in many respects. However, it too relocated the New Testament story to northern Europe, although not perhaps as specifically as this does.

The later painting of the same scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in about 1564 has some common features, the tumbledown thatched cattleshed in particular. But where Bosch has developed a detailed landscape setting, Bruegel packs in a crowd of people. Both paintings diverge significantly from the most common approach, which concentrates on the small group of Virgin, Christ, and Magi.

In that sense, the composition of this later Adoration is a development of his earlier painting, with the surprising and unusual inclusion of an anti-Christ too.

Details

Before considering the fine detail of the interior paintings, it is worth considering the much plainer, but equally detailed, exterior. Bosch painted another Passion cycle, as the reverse to his Saint John on Patmos, which employs complex narrative techniques to great effect.

The Passion shown on the exterior of this triptych is just as sophisticated in its narrative, using multi-frame narrative in the lower four scenes, told bottom to top, and left to right, and a similar multiplex narrative at the top. Although there are differences in the individual scenes, this is strong evidence that these two paintings originated from the same hand. (Another notable link, to Saint John the Baptist, is of course the lamb on the right panel.)

Its directional sense may appear peculiar, but was necessary if he was to incorporate a similar multiplex narrative centred on the crucifixion at the top. If his Passion Scenes is as unusual as I suspect, the scenes shown here make two of a kind.

In addition to his somewhat sinister events, such as the man being savaged by a wolf, Bosch incorporates some gentle humour in the shepherds, and a sense of great forboding in the three armies in the background. At the time, Brabant was a haven of peaceful prosperity, at least from about 1210 to the start of the Reformation from 1560 onwards.

Given the foreign headgear shown, it is more likely that these armies are symbolic of the forces of good and evil, perhaps harking back to sterotypes from the Crusades even.

The Adoration itself is rich in details which add many subtle nuances to the basic story in the painting. These are considered in depth in Ilsink et al. and other full accounts of this masterpiece.

History

This painting has not apparently been the subject of any dispute as to it being an authentic work by Bosch’s hand. It remains in remarkably good condition, with Bosch’s signature very clear. There is no evidence of any significant alterations made after its completion, although Ilsink et al. trace many changes which took place during its painting.

References

Wikipedia.

Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij et al. (2016) pp 198-215 in Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné, Yale UP and Mercatorfonds. ISBN 978 0 300 22014 8.

Of all the painters of the nineteenth century, Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) has to be one of the most fascinating. At first sight, her art is not that different, perhaps, from the many paintings in Pre-Raphaelite style. It might even look at bit of a dead-end compared to the far more exciting things that were happening in France. But it repays closer examination, and a better understanding of how it was made. In this article and the next, I will try to explain this, from a narrative view.

Biography

Mary Evelyn Pickering was born into a wealthy upper-middle class family in London. Her father was friends with William Gladstone, who was to become Prime Minister, and she was introduced to art by her mother’s brother, Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, who was one of the first-generation Pre-Raphaelites. He introduced her to the Rossettis, Watts, Holman Hunt, and others.

Her family saw her learning to draw and paint as an accomplishment expected of a well-educated woman, and she was very well educated – not only in arts, but in the classics and more. However she started to see this not as a set of social skills to aid her future marriage, but as a professional career.

In 1872, at the age of only 17, she started to attend the newly-formed South Kensington National Art Training School (now the Royal College of Art) in London. But she quickly gained a place at the Slade, starting there in January 1873. Her style developed rapidly during her time studying there, until she left in 1876.

Although the dates are not clear, she started to visit Italy in 1875, and at one stage travelled alone to Rome, Perugia, and Assisi. She also stayed with her uncle, Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, in his newly-purchased villa near Florence, where she visited the Uffizi and fell in love with the work of Botticelli. She sold her first painting in 1875, and the following year her painting Catherine of Alexandria was shown in the Dudley Gallery, London.

She set up her studio in Chelsea, London, in the early 1880s, and in 1887 married the ceramicist William De Morgan. His work was largely inspired by eastern imagery, which came to influence hers too. Her husband’s father was a professor of mathematics at University College London, and close friends with many of the leading intellectuals, include critic John Ruskin, philosopher JS Mill, Lady Byron, and the social reformer Elizabeth Fry. Her husband’s parents were also ardent campaigners for new educational establishments, and instrumental in the foundation of Queen’s and Bedford Colleges for women.

From the time of their marriage, the De Morgans were spiritualists. Although this may appear odd today, many Victorian intellectuals were fascinated by such matters. The couple practised automatic writing in the form of a long-running empirical quasi-scientific experiment, publishing a book on their experiences.

Evelyn De Morgan was also a strong feminist, and a signatory to the 1889 Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage. Like many other women artists of the time, she boycotted the Royal Academy, exhibiting instead at the Grosvenor, Dudley, and New Galleries, in London.

The couple were also pacifists, and expressed their horror at wars in South Africa (The Boer War), and particularly the First World War. William De Morgan died in 1917, Evelyn in 1919.

Her paintings have been associated with those of Edward Burne-Jones, who was quite critical of them, and Walter Crane, as a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite. However others claim them as being Symbolist, and they are also attributed to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Judge for yourself.

The Angel with the Serpent (c 1870-75)

De Morgan’s paintings are rich with angels, and this must be one of her earliest and most enigmatic winged creatures. An androgynous angel with rose red wings sits, right knee drawn up by his right arm, his left hand caressing a long green snake, whose tongue flickers out at the angel’s lips. Behind them is a low bank of dog roses (Rosa canina), and some low speedwells (Veronica spp.). This overlooks a broad river, with rugged rocks and a distant volcanic cone.

I have been unable to find any textual reference which might explain this painting, and therefore can only take it as an expression of a clearly delicate relationship between the forces of good (the angel) and those of evil (the serpent). Painted mainly during her training at the Slade, it gives a good idea of her skill, and her influence by Pre-Raphaelites and by Botticelli.

Aurora Triumphans, or Dawn (c 1876)

The Roman goddess of the dawn, Aurora, reclines at the lower right, the shackles of the night shown as roped roses. At the lower left, Night is flying away in her dark robes. Above them, three winged angels resplendent in their golden tunics sound the fanfare bringing day. Aurora is triumphant in dispelling Night.

The two key figures in this simple narrative are placed in static positions as if in a tableau, as was common in Pre-Raphaelite narrative painting. De Morgan transforms this with the addition of the angels, which dominate the scene and almost add sound.

This painting also has an interesting history. First exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, it seems to have gone into a private collection until coming onto the market in about 1922. At that time, De Morgan’s signature had been overpainted with that of Burne-Jones. It was on the strength of that that it was purchased for the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth, where it now is, unveiled as one of Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings instead.

Night and Sleep (1878)

Two figures fly through the air, from right to left. The further figure is a young woman (probably) wearing long red robes, her eyes closed, clutching a large brown cloak with her right hand. That cloak floats above the couple. Her left arm is intertwined with the right arm of what is probably a young man, who wears shorter brown robes. He also has his eyes closed. He clutches a large bunch of poppies to his chest with his left arm, while his right scatters them, so that they fall to the ground below.

Although it has been stated that this painting was inspired by the flight of Zephyr and Chloris in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c 1486), I think that may have been largely compositional. With her thorough classical education, De Morgan is very likely to have recalled one of Virgil’s most famous lines, from his Aeneid Book 4, line 486:

hinc mihi Massylae gentis monstrata sacerdos,
Hesperidum templi custos, epulasque draconi
quae dabat et sacros servabat in arbore ramos,
spargens umida mella soporiferumque papaver.
haec se carminibus promittit solvere mentes
quas velit, ast aliis duras immittere curas…

From thence is come
a witch, a priestess, a Numidian crone,
who guards the shrine of the Hesperides
and feeds the dragon; she protects the fruit
of that enchanting tree, and scatters there
her slumb’rous poppies mixed with honey-dew.
Her spells and magic promise to set free
what hearts she will, or visit cruel woes
on men afar.
(From Perseus at Tufts University)

Spargens umida mella soporiferumque papaver is conventionally translated as “scattering moist honey and sleep-inducing poppy”, and describes well the effects of the opiate drugs derived from opium poppies, which were popular – and readily obtainable – at the time.

The Angel of Death (I) (1880)

One of three similar paintings made by De Morgan, this shows the androgynous angel of death, holding in their right hand the scythe so feared by us all, comforting a seated young woman. The landscape at the left of the painting appears dry and barren, with just three daisy flowers visible. That to the right of the angel is better watered, more fertile, and has richer flowers. This has been interpreted as indicating that the woman’s past was tough, but that her imminent death will offer her a better future.

Drawmer quotes a poem written by De Morgan when she was about twelve, titled the Angel of Death:

My love lies deep
Under the ground;
The winter winds
Blow cold around

The cypress tree
Is crowned with snow
Shrouded in white
The graves lie low,

Soft thy kisses
Warm thy breath
Vision of Love –
Angel of Death!

Although this painting is not set in the same winter, it expresses the same spiritualist view that death is to be welcomed, not feared.

In the next article, I will examine a further eight of her narrative paintings, produced from 1881 onwards.

References

Wikipedia.
De Morgan Foundation and Collection.

Drawmer, LJ (2001) The impact of science and spiritualism on the works of Evelyn De Morgan 1870-1919, PhD thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available here.

The previous article detailed the life, career, and early paintings of Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919). This completes my account, covering a selection of her narrative paintings from 1881 onwards.

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881)

Phosphorus, in its original Greek Φωσφόρος, is the morning star, normally taken to mean the planet Venus when it is bright in the dawn sky. In Latin, it became Lucifer, the bringer of light, and with later associations the devil too. Hesperus, or Ἓσπερος, is the evening star, which is the planet Venus seen bright in the evening sky. In Latin, it became Vesper. Although the Greeks came to realise that they were the same celestial body, they maintained the different legendary figures.

De Morgan shows Phosphorus rising, his torch held up in the air, while the intertwined Hesperus has fallen asleep, and his torch has dropped onto the ground, its flame guttering. Today, two naked bodies with their arms and legs intertwined might easily be read in homoerotic terms, but there is no evidence that this was the artist’s intent.

Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (c 1885)

This refers to the well-known story of Hero and Leander, which I have covered in several previous articles. This classical legend tells of the hapless romance of Leander (man) and Hero (woman). She was a priestess of Aphrodite, living in a temple at Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont, who fell in love with Leander, who lived in Abydos on the opposite side of the strait.

Each night through the summer and autumn Leander swam across the dangerous waters to be with her, consummating their relationship. To guide him across, Hero lit a torch at the top of her tower. One night, a storm blew up, and extinguished the light as Leander was swimming across the rough waters. Leander lost his way, and was drowned in front of Hero. Seeing his corpse, she threw herself from the tower, to die and rejoin him.

De Morgan shows Hero alone, holding her light aloft in a position which is almost identical to that of Phosphorus’s torch, looking out for her lover. Curiously, there is a red thread, wool perhaps, which runs from her clothing, under her left hand. I have not seen this before in a painting of Hero, although there are so many different variants of the story that it may be included in one. It may (as I have suggested previously) be a reference to the thread of life, or that of time.

Hope in a Prison of Despair (1887)

Black-robed Despair is shown as a woman who is bowed at the window of a prison cell. Enter Hope, who could be male or female, and holds an oil lamp, to bring its light. Hope’s head is surrounded by a halo, suggesting their piety, and that they represent the comfort of religious faith. The miniature relief shown above Hope’s head appears interesting, but is sadly hard to read here.

Cassandra (1898)

Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam of Troy, who was granted the gift of prophecy, but the curse that no one would ever believe her, even though her prophecies were accurate. The Trojans considered her insane, and she was hidden away. She prophesied the fall of Troy as occurring as the result of Greeks being hidden inside the wooden horse which they left as a ‘parting gift’, and became incensed when she was ridiculed.

During the sacking of Troy, she sheltered in the temple of Athena, but was abducted and raped by Ajax the Lesser, in an act of great violence and sacrilege. She was subsequently taken as a concubine by Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, but was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.

De Morgan shows Cassandra lost in deep and disturbing thought, tugging at her hair, as the city of Troy burns behind her, and (at the left edge) Greek soldiers emerge from the Trojan horse. Around her feet are deep red roses, referring to the blood that had been shed. The flames have been composed so as to give the impression that it is actually Cassandra who is burning.

Although a relatively static scene, De Morgan brings together visual references to the story which heighten the drama, and her use of facial expression and body language is very skilled. This is also a moment of peripeteia, although the event marking that is shown in a small but very clear detail.

The Cadence of Autumn (1905)

Five women are shown in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes which are coloured (from the left) lilac, gold, brown, green, and black.

The landscape behind them contains a watermill and surrounding buildings. At the left, the trees are heavy with fruit and the fields either green or ripe corn. At the right, the trees are barren, and the landscape hilly and more wintry. Soft blue-white patches of mist are visible in the foreground on the right.

This painting shows the procession of time and the changes seen in autumn, reflected in the colours of robes (De Morgan used such ‘colour coding’ elsewhere), the activities, fruits and dead leaves, and the progression across the background. It is unusual for showing time across the breadth of the painting in this way.

S.O.S. (c 1914-16)

A light-robed woman stands, her head thrown back and arms outstretched as if being crucified, on a rock in the sea. Her robes are irridescent, containing faint colours of the rainbow. Around her feet is a pantheon of vicious sea monsters, some winged, others snake-like, most toothed and predatory. Above her is a bright light, with coloured halos, against a sky studded with stars.

The well-known radio call to indicate distress, consisting originally of the Morse code letters S O S, was not introduced until 1908, replacing the earlier Morse letters CQD (which were still used by the Titanic in 1912). The distress here is both personal and global, at the horrors of the First World War. Both Evelyn and William De Morgan were pacifists, and she expressed her views of the war in this and other paintings of this time. The figure doesn’t just represent the force of good, but that of redemption, from among the sea of monstrous war.

Angel Piping to the Souls in Hell (1916)

A winged angel flies above whorls of heads. The angel holds a golden pipe to their mouth, and plays it. The heads below are shown in an ethereal tube, which swirls around the mountainous background. Most of the faces are distorted in unpleasant emotion, and flames lick around the coils of the tube.

This is an unusual work which is closer to the cryptic paintings of William Blake than the legends popular among the Pre-Raphaelites. Its symbols appear to show the possibility of redemption to those in hell. Painted in the middle of the First World War, it was another expression of De Morgan’s deep spiritual distress at the time.

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund (1880-1919)

The legendary story of these two women was a popular subject for the Pre-Raphaelites, and is quite different from what is now thought to be the historical basis.

King Henry II (1133-1189, ruled 1154-1189) built a house for his mistress Rosamund Clifford at Woodstock, near Oxford. To protect her, it was inside a maze or labyrinth, and the house itself was called Labyrinthus. Henry’s wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, intended to kill Rosamund, so she traced her way through the maze using a thread, until she reached Rosamund. The Queen then gave her a choice of modes of execution: a dagger or the poison which she had brought with her. Rosamund drank the poison and died.

In reality, Eleanor abandoned Henry in the Great Revolt of 1173-4, for which he imprisoned her in Winchester until his death in 1189. Rosamund entered a nunnery at Godstow Abbey in 1174 or later, where she died in 1176.

De Morgan’s powerful painting shows Eleanor at the left, her left hand still holding the red thread with which she had negotiated the maze. In her right hand is the vial of poison which she is about to administer to Rosamund, who is sat, looking dreamily into the distance, at the right. Malevolent bats and faces are shown around Eleanor’s head and shoulders, to indicate her evil intent. Lower down they transform into flying serpents, which are chasing tiny putti adorning the floor. White doves and another putto are flying away to the right, and there are occasional miniature stars around Eleanor. A stained glass window behind shows two lovers about to kiss under a fruit tree.

This is a story of cold and calculated witch-like sorcery, similar to some of the classical legends such as that of Medea (also painted by De Morgan). It is told with sophisticated and subtle use of expressions, body language, and a rich symbolic language which refers to the occult. It is powerful narrative indeed.

Conclusion

I am amazed that Evelyn De Morgan is seldom even mentioned in accounts of women painters, and generally receives little attention (if any) in accounts of the Pre-Raphaelites. Her life, career, and works appear to me to be of great importance, and to merit further study.

References

Wikipedia.
De Morgan Foundation and Collection.

Drawmer, LJ (2001) The impact of science and spiritualism on the works of Evelyn De Morgan 1870-1919, PhD thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available here.

If you have ever visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, you will probably have noticed a huge canvas succinctly described as ‘knight in shining armour surrounded by naked young women in floral meadow’.

This is most probably your only exposure to the narrative paintings of Georges Rochegrosse, and it gives a most misleading impression of his works. This article and the next attempt a more balanced account of the paintings of one of the last formal narrative painters before modernism swept the world.

Le Chevalier aux Fleurs (The Knight of the Flowers) (1894) is not just frivolous chivalry and a bevy of Playboy bunnies, but a serious painting which was shown at the Salon in Paris in 1894 to critical acclaim. It was bought by the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg, and was later transferred to the Musée d’Orsay. Its theme is, surprisingly, chastity and resistance to temptation, and it is based on the popular opera Parsifal, which had been so successful at Bayreuth over the previous twelve years.

Wagner’s last opera (1882) was loosely based on a thirteenth-century German epic poem about the Arthurian legend of Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail. The moment chosen by Rochegrosse is the opening of Act 2, Scene 2. Parsifal, the knight and hero, is at Klingsor’s magic castle, where Klingsor summons his enchanted knights to fight Parsifal.

When Parsifal has overcome Klingsor’s knights and put them to flight, he strays into the Flowermaiden garden. Klingsor calls on the seductive sorceress Kundry to seek young Parsifal out and seduce him. Parsifal then finds himself in a beautiful garden, full of flowers, and surrounded by the beautiful and seductive Flowermaidens. They call him and entwine their bodies around him in their efforts to seduce him, but he resists their temptations and remains chaste.

Rochegrosse shows this event in a mixture of styles, with which he felt he expressed the central idea of the scene, that of Parsifal resisting temptation by being “obsessed with the ideal”. There are elements of symbolism in pictorial elements, but the whole painting is realist, with some Impressionist effects in the garden and landscape.

In terms of narrative, it is similar to the beautiful tableaux which were so characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, which Rochegrosse was here attempting to emulate. He chose a scene relatively light in action, lacking in strong narrative, and kept clear of any climax or peripeteia. But it is both comfortingly moralistic and delicately carnal.

Georges Rochegrosse (1859–1938) was brought up in a literary environment, his household being visited by the likes of Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, and Flaubert. He decided that he would paint, though, and started his training at the Académie Julian in 1871. He continued in the studios of Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger, before going to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He entered the Prix de Rome twice (in 1880 and 1881) without success.

His first painting to be accepted for the Salon was Vitellius traîné dans les rues de Rome par la populace (1882), which I will show and discuss in the next article. The following year he started to travel in Europe. In his early career he concentrated on history painting, and showed signs of developing symbolism.

His Perseus and Andromeda is a beautiful watercolour which is unusual for an established narrative painter. I have already detailed the full story here, but in any case Rochegrosse shows us a moment long after its climax: Perseus has rescued Andromeda by unchaining her from the rock, and by killing Cetus the sea monster.

Here, he rides off on Pegasus (following the later variant of the story from the Middle Ages), to marry her. It almost lacks pictorial links with the past or future, and like Le Chevalier aux Fleurs has tenuous and weak narrative. We are not even shown the head of Medusa, the sword with which Perseus killed Cetus, his winged sandals, or his magic helmet from Hades. The only clues which might suggest that Perseus has slayed Cetus are red blood in the sea, and some on the left side of Pegasus.

You can see a wide range of other narrative paintings of this story here and here, for comparison.

The year that Le Chevalier aux Fleurs was impressing the Salon, Rochegrosse travelled to Algeria for the first time, and was smitten by orientalism. This provoked a series of paintings in which narrative took a back seat to the exotic.

The Palace Entertainment is spectacular painting which could easily be mistaken as the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, his contemporary, although by this time (the period 1894-1914) Rochegrosse was often far more painterly in his style. It shows a dancer with musical group entertaining some Algerian men, her dance involving a pair of short swords. Beautifully composed and painted, it is about atmosphere and the exotic, not story.

His The Slave and the Lion travels further east, to the ancient civilisations of the Middle East. A nearly naked woman slave is seen fanning a lion which is asleep on the carpet, in front of a huge divan occupied by her bearded master. Another woman, elaborately dressed, looks on from her seat on the edge of the divan.

The nineteenth century was a period in which there were many major archaeological discoveries in Egypt and the Middle East. These fired the imagination of several artists, including both Gérôme and Rochegrosse.

It is his The Spoils of War which gives a glimpse of the other side of Rochegrosse’s paintings. One of the victors sits on top of a heap of objects robbed from the conquered, holding a cane or rod in both hands. He looks down at three women: one is almost completely enveloped in dull green and brown robes, and holds her hands to her face in grief. A second, dressed as a fine courtesan, is slumped sleeping, her hands bound in front of her. She rests against a nearly naked woman, bare to her waist, who is also asleep with her hands tied.

Around them are the remains of the sacking, with a blood-stain prominent on the wall at the far left.

In the next article I will show and discuss his narrative paintings of that other side, of gruesome death.

References

Wikipedia (English) and Wikipedia (French).
The Odyssey translated into French and illustrated by Rochegrosse (1931).

I have shown some of Georges Rochegrosse’s beautiful paintings, mostly from later in his career. His earlier work was quite different.

Although claimed to have been painted the following year, his Vitellius traîné dans les rues de Rome par la populace (Vitellius Dragged Through the Streets of Rome by the People) was his great success and medal-winner of the Paris Salon in 1882.

Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Augustus (15-69 CE), known briefly as Vitellius, was Emperor of Rome for just eight months, during a year of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors. In that time the Roman legions in the east revolted, and crushed his loyal forces in northern Italy, forcing Vitellius to prepare for abdication. Rome was not prepared to wait, nor to let him get away with abdication. The Praetorian Guard forced him to take shelter in his palace, then he was dragged out, driven to the Gemonian Steps in the city, and executed.

Rochegrosse shows Vitellius being forced down the Gemonian Steps, a long dagger held at his throat. Already his fine clothing has been torn back and is stained with his blood. Surrounded by this seething mob, his face shows naked fear, and the knowledge that in a few moments, it will all be over.

This is strong narrative, from an instant just prior to the climax, which follows Alberti’s rules completely. Rochegrosse uses facial expressions and body language to great effect. Vitellius’s torn robes and the possible presence of his well-dressed wife at his left side link to the immediate past; the blood and blade tells the future quite clearly.

The following year, Rochegrosse’s great success at the Salon was his Andromache (1883), a huge canvas nearly nine metres high. It tells the story of another downfall of the once mighty, this time with greater tragedy during the legend of the fall of Troy.

Andromache was the legendary daughter of the king of Cilician Thebe, and the wife of Hector, the great Trojan warrior. Hector was killed during the Trojan War, and when the city fell, she was warned that the Greeks intended to kill her son Astyanax. Neoptolemus seized Astyanax and hurled him from the remains of the city walls, to his death, then took Andromache as a concubine. She later became Queen of Epirus, and died of old age in Pergamum.

Rochegrosse’s painting is gruesome in the extreme. Andromache is at the centre, being restrained by four Greeks prior to her adbuction by Neoptolemus. Her left arm points further up the steps, to a Greek warrior in black armour holding the infant Astyanax, as he takes him up to the top (where another Greek is shown in silhouette) to murder him. There is death and desolation around the foot of the steps: a small pile of severed heads, a jumble of living and dead, and the debris of the sacking of Troy. All is summarised in a large splash of blood just below the centre of the canvas.

Although there is little scope for the use of facial expression here, Rochegrosse’s powerful composition and body language makes this story come horrifyingly alive. His timing, and use of past and future references, is as perfect as with Vitellius.

Later in his career, Rochegrosse’s tales of death and destruction went more awry. His The Death of Babylon (1891) has been criticised for its narrative errors; sadly the original huge canvas, this time about 7 x 9 metres, has been lost, and this small autograph copy is all that remains. It shows the arrival of the Persian army at Balthazar’s palace in Babylon in 539 BCE. Cyrus the Great’s troops had entered the city via its river, the only weakness in its otherwise impenetrable defences. They did this during a national feast.

Rochegrosse’s painting is spectacular, but baffling. As Sérié writes,
initially, we have no idea what is going on. We have to make an effort to decipher the image.

This is a vast palace. In the foreground, an orgy is slowly dissolving into exhausted sleep, with naked bodies flagrantly strewn all over the place. At the right, Balthazar sits on a modest throne, looking towards the huge arched entrance. In the middle distance, at that entrance, is a crowd, presumably of Persians about to enter the palace. Although there seems to be no barrier preventing their entry, a few have climbed part of a gate to the left of the entrance.

Even the lighting is confused. The foreground seems to be lit from some diffuse source behind the viewer. Much of the grandeur of the rest of the hall appears to be lit by unseen artificial lights. Daylight outside does not pour in, but remains outside in a grey haze. Alberti has been ignored completely: not a face is to be seen clearly enough to guess emotion, and body language is almost absent. Rochegrosse’s timing could not be more remote from any action or climax, just as the Persians are remote in the painting.

Contrast Delacroix’s earlier and similar scene showing the legendary overthrow of the last king of Assyria in his palace in Nineveh.

Rochegrosse’s Pre-Raphaelite quest, perhaps for his own Holy Grail, continued in the depths of the First World War. The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, where the Kings of France were once crowned, had been commissioned as a hospital and demilitarised. German shells hit the cathedral during opening engagements on 20 September 1914, setting alight scaffolding, and destroying some of the stonework. The fire spread through woodwork, melting the lead on the roof, and destroying the bishop’s palace. The French accused the Germans of the deliberate destruction of part of its national and cultural heritage.

Rochegrosse’s Interior of the Cathedral of Reims in Flames (1915), a much smaller canvas, casts this in a curious combination of the physical reality of the shattered masonry and fire, the ancient glory of the cathedral’s stained glass, and an Arthurian figure (possibly the Madonna herself) reaching up to seek divine intervention.

The last narrative painting that I have found by Rochegrosse is his The Death of Messalina (1916), in which he returns to more traditional techniques.

Valeria Messalina (c 17/20-48 CE) married the Roman Emperor Claudius. She was powerful, influential, and had a reputation for insatiable promiscuity, although the latter may have been invented or exaggerated for political purposes. In 48 CE, there was an unsuccessful plot against Claudius, and Messalina was, rightly or wrongly, accused of conspiracy. She was executed forthwith.

Rochegrosse chooses the instant before her death, as the climax, rather than any prior peripeteia. He shows a leader of the Praetorian Guard about to kill Messalina with his sword. She is dressed in bright scarlet, in accordance with her reputation, and tries to push him away with her left hand. At the left, her maid stands, facing away from the scene, her face buried in her hands. A couple of other women of the court are seen in the background at the left edge, looking on in horror.

Behind the imminent execution, Claudius stands, his hands on his hips, smiling wrily at the killing, with the ranks of the guard stood close behind. The immediate foreground has beautiful red flowers, echoing the bloodshed.

Rochegrosse’s effective use of facial expressions and body language, and near-perfect timing, make this powerful narrative. It is an odd contrast to many previous paintings of Messalina, which tended to play on her promiscuity rather than her untimely end. Indeed, by this stage it is interesting to speculate how many of his viewers would even know of Messalina. Far more were likely to have been more interested in Cubism.

Conclusions

These paintings epitomise the crisis which narrative painting had reached by the beginning of the twentieth century. If it stuck to the traditional, it was seen as staid, old hat, and hackneyed. If it tried to become modern, as Rochegrosse did in The Death of Babylon, it became opaque and too difficult to read. Its favourite stories from the classics were also becoming less well-known, but it struggled to find more modern stories which it could use instead.

The paintings of Rochegrosse show most of all a genre in trouble, in danger of extinction.

References

Wikipedia (English) and Wikipedia (French).
The Odyssey translated into French and illustrated by Rochegrosse (1931).

Sérié P (2016), Theatricality versus anti-theatricality: narrative techniques in French history painting (1850-1900), chapter 10 in Cooke P & Lübbren N, eds., Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 4724 4010 5.

With some notable exceptions (such as Judith and Holofernes), stories taken from the Old Testament have declined in popularity with narrative painters since the time of Rembrandt. The markedly (perhaps inevitable) Christian bias in European art, and decreasing familiarity with the Old Testament have contributed to this decline.

However, some of those stories are among the most enthralling, and present the greatest challenges to the visual artist. My example for this article is the account in the book of Exodus of the manna provided to feed the Israelites when they might otherwise have starved to death in the wilderness.

The story

Painters have relied on the account in Exodus chapter 16, supplemented sometimes by additional material in book 3 of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities.

At that time, the Israelites had left Egypt, crossed the Red Sea, and were travelling en masse across the desert: extremely hostile terrain for even a small group of fit, young people, and a disaster waiting to happen for the many families with babies and young children, and the aged and infirm. They fell into despair, and that turned to anger against Moses, their leader, and Aaron, his older brother.

They were therefore provided with water, and with quails, but the mainstay food was the fine, white manna which covered the ground like a heavy frost. Although manna was lifesaving, it was also an ordeal, because the Israelites were given strict instructions as to how they were to obtain and use it. If they failed to follow those instructions, then they would go without. The Israelites thus had to put total trust in God, and be completely obedient.

Manna fell overnight, and had to be collected from the ground the following day. Each family member was entitled to a standard volume, of about 3.6 litres, and must not try to collect any more for themselves, as any excess would vanish. Each day, they were to eat all their allotted ration; they could not carry any over to supplement the next day, as it rotted. The exception to this was on the day before the Sabbath, when they had to gather two days’ worth, and the second day’s ration did then last through the Sabbath. There was, accordingly, no fall of manna on the night before the Sabbath.

The Israelites quickly accepted these rules, the manna fell reliably, apparently sufficient to keep them alive and well for the forty years they spent in the wilderness, and they put their trust in Moses, Aaron, and of course God.

The fall of manna also has potential metaphorical interpretations. Apparently its distribution and the effort needed to collect the manna varied considerably, suggesting that it might be a symbol for the God-given ‘talents’ of individuals, and for life more generally. Thus it can be seen as an indication of the need for individuals to accept what they are given, rather than always wishing for more or better.

A summary of the key phases in this story might read:

1. the Israelites starve;
2. as a result, they become angry with their leaders;
3. manna falls and is gathered according to imposed rules;
4. the people recover their trust and are grateful.

Bernardino Luini (1485–1532): The Gathering of the Manna (1520-23)

This early Renaissance painting shows family members, young and old, collecting manna from the snow-like deposition around a permanent town. It is plain and simple, telling its basic story according to the Biblical account, of the third phase above.

Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572): The Falling of the Manna (1543-5)

Bronzino’s slightly later fresco adopts a similar approach, looking at the processes and mechanics of the collection of manna, as in the third phase again.

Francesco Bacchiacca (1495–1557): The Gathering of the Manna (c 1540-55)

At about the same time as Bronzino was painting his version, Bacchiacca was attempting something more novel and ambitious. Moses holds his staff as a pointer, at the lower left, which leads us to a menagerie of exotic animals. There are signs of manna being gathered, and a group of people are sat behind Moses apparently approving of the way that things are going. This covers the third and fourth phases above, but the relevance of the animals to the narrative is unclear.

Maerten de Vos (1532–1603): The Israelites Gathering Manna (1570-5)

This panel shows an even better-developed story. Moses, pointing again with his staff, and talking to Aaron, who wears a bishop’s mitre, is to the left of centre, in the middle of a sprawling mass of people. Those Israelites show many different activities associated with the gathering of manna, and just in front of Moses a young mother nurses her infant at the breast. But that is as far as it goes.

Tintoretto (1518–1594): Miracle of the Manna (c 1577)

This spectacular ceiling fresco is the first painting here to include the significant detail that the manna fell during the night, and the first to introduce the figure of God. All the previous paintings assumed that the viewer knew that manna came from heaven and was the gift of God: here, God is shown scattering the manna from heaven. Its coverage remains confined to the third phase enumerated above.

Guido Reni (1575–1642): The Gathering of the Manna (1614-15)

Later still, Reni has shown small groups (among his multitude) with more varied reactions. Those seated close to Moses are praying and looking up to heaven, as if they are still waiting for manna to appear. The three people to the right of those are talking to one another, and the woman in green is pointing, leading our gaze down to a young man gathering manna by Moses’ left foot. Behind them is a group of older men, their hands raised up in appreciation of the falling manna.

This is starting to become a more complex story, in which different events from the full Biblical account are being expressed in groups of figures. Although these groups are packed together on the canvas, making its reading harder, the story does now cover phases two to four.

Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665): The Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Desert (1637-9)

Unusually for Poussin’s works, we have some insight into his intent in this painting. In a letter of about 1637 (and repeated in a 1639 letter to Chantelou, who commissioned the painting), he revealed that he was showing the starved state to which the Israelites were reduced (phase 1), the joy they experienced when the manna was provided, and its effect in improving their respect for the leaders (phases 3 and 4).

He also had insight into more interpretative aspects, referring to the gathering of the manna as uniting diverse elements in the group. However, he cautioned that the viewer would need to read the painting in order to obtain that understanding, and gave clues in his use of tenses that his depiction would not show a single moment in time. These are examined in detail by Mitchell and others.

At first sight, his painting may appear as disordered as the hundred or more figures which he has included. But Poussin uses colour and light, together with signs in body language, to guide our gaze through its complexity.

Closest to us, at the left, is a group of five figures who are still battling with starvation. Among these is a woman with a toddler, who is suckling not that infant, but her aged mother, wearing the yellow robes. Recall the feeding mother in de Vos’s painting above, although Poussin may never have seen that work himself.

To the left of the child is a man who might have come from Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, propping his head against a stick. To the right is an elderly man, being helped up by a woman who is pointing to the right of the painting, although he is pointing back (towards Moses and Aaron), still asking what their leaders had done to address their predicament.

Follow the woman’s pointing arm across to the right of the painting, and there is a larger group who are brightly lit and brilliantly coloured. The foreground contains nine figures who are busy gathering the manna in the way prescribed by God. Two of them look up to heaven and express their gratitude, but two younger men (or older boys) are fighting to collect their day’s ration, and others seem to be reminding them of the rules. The woman in yellow is here pointing back at the first group to complete the link between them.

Behind and to the left, a cluster of about eight men seem to be expressing their gratitude in deliverance, and some look left and up towards the figures of Moses and Aaron.

The two leaders, brightly lit and coloured, stand slightly further back. Behind them, to the left in the painting, are some fans, their hands raised to heaven, applauding Moses and Aaron.

Deeper into the painting are other small insights into Poussin’s narrative: a figure resting on the ground, still apparently too weak from hunger; various individuals and groups engaged in the harvest of manna; a tented village appropriate to their temporary and nomadic existence. The landscape is harsh, rocky, and looks unforgiving.

There are further details which you can read, and several excellent accounts to help you do so. But it is clear that Poussin abandoned temporal unity – his painting does not depict a single moment in time – in order to tell us the complete story. In doing so, he alone has depicted the peripeteia, the dramatic improvement in the fortunes of the Israelites.

This proved controversial soon after his death. The French Académie Royale de Peinture at de Sculpture organised a series of lectures and debates on his paintings in 1667, and devoted one complete session, led by Charles le Brun, to consider this painting. Le Brun’s lecture was recorded by André Félibien, published in a book of the lectures and in Félibien’s biography of Poussin. It has been the basis for research, comment, and debate ever since.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)

The Hebrews Gathering Manna in the Wilderness (c 1740) appears to be a preparatory study for his later finished painting, The Gathering of the Manna (1738-42)

This is an ambitious work. The figures are divided into four groups: those at the top of the tree include an angel, who seems to be delivering the manna from heaven. At the foot of the tree, another group is engaged in collecting the fallen manna. Moses leads a third group, stood on a rock shelf at the left. The final group, whose role is less clear, is centred on a white horse at the lower left corner.

This detail shows various means of collecting the manna, using fine nets, holding large salvers up in the air, and scraping it up from the ground. It is rich in detail from the third phase, covers the fourth, and may hint at the second, but dodges the first.

Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot (1836–1902): The Gathering of the Manna (c 1896-1902)

One of Tissot’s hundreds of Biblical paintings in gouache, this reverts to the narrow approach of the Renaissance, with its focus on the effort and methods of harvesting manna. It therefore considers only the third phase, once again.

Conclusions

It has been popular to depict the most basic story, in which manna falls from heaven and is gathered by the Israelites. There are several, probably many, paintings which tell that story with great beauty and simplicity.

Building a bigger and more enthralling narrative, with enhanced meaning and interpretation, is a much harder problem for the painter. Only by abandoning temporal unity was Poussin able to tell the complete story with its peripeteia. That called for an ingenious and intricate composition which employs small groups of people across the canvas, with visual links between them, and astute use of light and colour.

The result is not facile, it is not an instant feelgood impression, but a painting that absorbs the eye and the mind, and brings lasting delight.

References

Wikipedia on manna.
Wikipedia on Poussin.

McTighe S (1996) Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 48214 1.
Mitchell C (2016) Units of vision and narrative structures, upon reading Poussin’s Manna, chapter 1 in Cooke P & Lübbren (eds) Paint and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gaugin, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 4724 4010 5.
Unglaub J (2006) Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 83367 7.

Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) was one of the last traditional history painters in Europe, alongside the likes of Gérôme and Rochegrosse. Like them, he continued to paint large canvases in strict Salon style until well into the twentieth century, to the continuing acclaim of the ruling classes. His narrative style was, though, quite different.

He started his training in the École Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, then gained a place at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Léon Cogniet and Alexandre Bida. A strong republican and opponent of clericism, he had a particular interest in mediaeval French history which came to dominate his choice of subjects for painting.

In the late 1800s he was commissioned to paint series of large historical works for major buildings. In 1882, he painted murals showing Saint Genevieve (c 419/422-502/512 CE), the patron saint of Paris, in the Panthéon of Paris. Between 1891 and 1896 he painted for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, then from 1892-1902 he made a series of large murals for the Capitole in Toulouse.

He taught in the Académie Julian and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

One of my contentions is that successful narrative paintings should be capable of being read by a reasonably well-educated viewer with the title of the work, any supporting quotation (verse, etc.), and the painting itself. I suggest that you try this with the following eight works by Laurens.

The Death of Tiberius (1864)

The Roman Emperor Tiberius (42 BCE – 37 CE) ruled from 14 CE until his death. Known best for his military achievements, as a ruler he was dark, reclusive, and sombre. Following the death of his son, he left Rome in the hands of two prefects known for being unscrupulous.

The histories of Tacitus claim that the Roman crowd rejoiced when they heard of his death, and again at the suggestion that he had been smothered by Caligula (who succeeded him) and one of his prefects. On his death, the Senate refused to grant him divine honours which were traditionally awarded to dead emperors, and mobs called for his body to be unceremoniously dumped in the River Tiber.

Laurens shows the old man, swathed in his robes, presumably with Caligula or the Prefect Macro at his side. The younger man appears to be pressing on Tiberius’ chest, but not strangling or smothering him. Tiberius’ right hand reaches up towards the younger man, where it locks with his right hand, although it is not clear what either hand is trying to do. The younger man’s left knee is folded, resting against Tiberius’ right abdomen.

The implication seems to be that Caligula/Macro is helping Tiberius on his way, but the body language is confused. Laurens’ timing seems slightly early too, in that it does not give any clear indication of whether Caligula/Macro is about to murder Tiberius. This may, of course, have been deliberate, as a means of suggesting the possibility but not confirming it.

Pope Formosus and Stephen VI (the “Cadaver Synod”) (1870)

Pope Formosus was succeeded by Boniface VI, then by Stephen VI (or VII!). Stephen sought to annul the acts of Formosus, so in 897 had him tried posthumously before an ecclesiastical court in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome. Stephen accused Formosus of perjury and having succeeded to the papacy illegally.

Inevitably Formosus’ corpse was unable to defend the case effectively, and Pope Stephen had it pronounced guilty, then ordered that Formosus’ papacy was declared null and void, and his acts invalid. The latter was strange, as they included ordination of Stephen as a bishop. Eventually the body of Formosus, which had been propped up in his papal vestments in the court, was mutilated and dumped in the River Tiber.

The body of Formosus then apparently washed up on the bank, and promptly started to perform miracles. After a public uprising, Stephen was deposed and imprisoned, then strangled whilst in jail. At the end of the year, his successor Pope Theodore II held another synod which annulled the ‘Cadaver Synod’, and rehabilitated Formosus. Finally the successor Pope Sergius III, who had taken part in the Cadaver Synod, reversed the decision again, and reaffirmed the posthumous conviction of Formosus.

Laurens shows this bizarre trial in progress. The rotting corpse of Formosus has been dressed in his papal finery and propped up in a throne. A thurible placed in the foreground burns incense to control the smell. Pope Stephen (presumably) stands pointing at the body of Formosus as a witness is being examined, in front of the synod of bishops. Although this appears relatively static, it is probably as close to a climax as such court proceedings were likely to come.

Excommunication of Robert the Pious (1875)

Robert II (972-1031), also known as Robert the Pious or Wise, ruled the Franks from 996 until his death. Notoriously religious, he conducted a long campaign against heretics, supporting riots against the Jewish community of Orléans, and burning heretics at the stake. However, he was less successful in marriage. His first (arranged) marriage to Rozala of Italy ended in divorce around 996, following which he married Bertha of Burgundy, his cousin.

Pope Gregory V refused to sanction the marriage. Robert’s refusal to annul the marriage led to his excommunication, which was performed in full mediaeval style, ‘with bell, book, and candle’. That involved the tolling of a bell, closure of the Book of the Gospels, and snuffing out a candle, in a formal ceremony. Long negotiations with the next Pope, Sylvester II, were unsuccessful, and Robert’s marriage to Bertha was eventually annulled.

Laurens shows King Robert II sat on his throne, Bertha huddled next to him, as the procession of clerics leaves the room. The only sign providing any clue to what might have happened is a very large candle resting on the floor in front of the couple, having just been snuffed out. Otherwise the large and regal hall is deserted.

Lübbren terms this ‘inanimate narration’, in that the key narrative object, the candle, is inanimate. Although subtle, it is an effective technique for telling this story, which lacks any real climax or moment of peripeteia.

The Last Moments of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico (1882)

Maximilian became Emperor of Mexico in 1864, although he was the son of Archduke Franz Karl of Austria and Princess Sophie of Bavaria, and had served in the Austrian Navy. He installed himself as Emperor at the invitation of Napoleon III, who had invaded Mexico in 1861 as part of the War of the French Intervention.

However, he was strongly opposed by forces who remained loyal to Mexico’s deposed president, and when Napoleon withdrew French troops in 1866, Maximilian’s rule collapsed. He was captured the following year, court-martialled, and executed by firing squad with two of his generals on 19 June 1867. Appeals by the leaders of Europe for clemency were ignored, and Maximilian even turned down the offer of escape, which would have required him to remove his beard.

Laurens shows Maximilian comforting the priest who has come to his cell prior to his execution, while another man (presumably a servant) is on his knees and fervently grasping Maximilian’s left hand. The door to the cell is wide open, and on its threshold stands a Mexican officer in his finest dress, complete with a sword, bearing the orders for the execution to take place.

Although a pale shadow of any depiction of the execution itself, Laurens’ reversal of roles – where Maximilian is comforting the priest whose role is to comfort the condemned man – introduces an unusual twist.

Manet’s famous earlier paintings of this contemporary story were more direct and explicit, showing the moment of execution – the obvious climax. Apart from the wry role reversal, it is not clear why Laurens didn’t opt for such a dramatic moment.

The Agitator of Languedoc (1887)

Bernard Délicieux (c 1265-1320) was a Spiritual Franciscan friar in the Carcassone area of France. In 1299, he led a revolt against the city’s inquisitors over two alleged heretics who were sheltering in the Franciscan convent there. The following year he made an appeal against the inquisitors over another claim of heresy, and the inquisitors temporarily fled from Carcassone.

Eventually his campaign against the Inquisition caught up with him. In 1317 he was summoned to Avignon, where he was arrested, interrogated, and tortured for a year. He was taken back to Carcassone for trial in 1319, found guilty of some of the charges, and sentenced to life in solitary confinement. He died in prison the following year.

Laurens chooses another courtroom scene to show this story. Délicieux, the Agitator himself, stands in front of the five judges of the Inquisition, pointing with his right index finger, the arm stretched out, at a witness during his trial. The witness stands in a shaft of light, pouring in through the barred window above, and is reading from some sheets of paper. It is not easy to tell, or to guess, what Délicieux might be saying.

Saint John Chrysostom and Empress Eudoxia (1893)

Saint John Chrysostom (c 349-407 CE) was Archbishop of Constantinople from 397, and one of the early fathers of the Christian Church. An ascetic, his refusal to host lavish social gatherings made him very popular with the people, but unpopular with clergy and the rich. He denounced extravagance in women’s dress, which brought him into conflict with the wife of Emperor Arcadius, Aelia Eudoxia, who considered that his criticism was aimed at herself.

She organised a synod in 403, the ‘Synod of the Oak’, to charge John, and he was deposed and banished as a result. This resulted in riots, and the mob threatened to burn the royal palace. The Emperor called for John to return, and he was reinstated. However, John then denounced as pagan the dedication ceremonies which took place when a silver statue of Eudoxia was erected near his cathedral. John was banished for a second time.

Laurens shows John standing at a high lectern remote from a balcony in a huge hall. He is dressed in white robes with prominent crucifixes, and is gesticulating wildly with his left arm. He looks towards Empress Eudoxia; she is dressed in lavish gold clothing, standing at the front of the balcony, and looking impassively into the distance above him.

Although a dramatic scene which uses the distance between John and Eudoxia, Laurens’ composition results in both the actors appearing small within the enormity of the space in the hall, making it harder to read their body language and lessening its impact.

Toulouse Fortifies its Defences to Resist Simon de Montfort 1218 (1899)

Simon IV of Montfort (c 1175-1218), fifth Earl of Leicester, was a French noble who took part in the Fourth Crusade (1202-4), and held sway in much of the south of France (le Midi). In 1215, he had acquired extensive new territories in Toulouse and Narbonne, and was declared Count of Toulouse.

To secure his rule, he spent two years fighting in the area, laying siege to Beaucaire in 1216. He then partially sacked Toulouse, and returned there in the autumn of 1217 intending to capture the city. After nine months of siege, Simon was killed when his head was smashed by a rock hurled from the city’s defences.

Laurens shows the frantic work, being carried out by men and women alike, to strengthen the walls of the city, including the erection of a shelter on the top of a tower, weapons for hurling rocks at the enemy, and more. However, there is no indication as to the purpose of all those frantic activities, nor to the threat posed by the absent Simon de Montfort.

The Death of Galeswintha (1906)

Galswintha (540-568 CE), or Galeswintha, was the daughter of the Visigoth king of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), and sister of Brunhilda, Queen of Austrasia (Belgium across to Germany). She married King Chilperic I, the Merovingian ruler of Neustria (northern France), in 567.

However, marriage did not suit Chilperic’s mistress, Fredegund, who arranged for Galswintha to be strangled so that she could marry the king. Galswintha’s murder caused her sister Brunhilda to make war against Chilperic, which lasted for some forty years. In turn, Chilperic was murdered in 584, possibly by Fredegund. Galswintha was honoured in a long commemorative poem written by the late Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, which may have been Laurens’ inspiration.

Laurens shows Galswintha lying, presumably dead, in a heavy-built four-poster bed, its curtains partly drawn back. A young well-dressed woman (presumably Fredegund) views her from the foot of the bed. Fredegund is partly undressed, her right shoulder and much of her back bare, as if she too is just getting ready for bed. Just outside the room, on the other side of a drawn curtain, is a man, who looks in through a gap in that curtain. He is presumably King Chilperic waiting for his mistress to join him, now that he is a widower and free to marry her.

Although a subtle painting which requires detective work to discover its story, this is perhaps one of Laurens’ best narratives.

Conclusions

Laurens’ response to the evident crisis in history painting was as puzzling as some of his paintings. Unlike Jean-Léon Gérôme, he avoided the spectacular, and the gruesome of Georges Rochegrosse.

Of these eight paintings, only one concerns contemporary events, and six are about relatively unknown nooks of European mediaeval history (from 568 to 1319). I suspect that most of those who viewed them at the Salon did not know the stories which they depict. Yet they do not appear to have been intended to capitalise on the revanchism which followed the Franco-Prussian War, bringing recognition to Évariste Luminais.

Laurens’ narrative techniques avoided climaxes, peripeteia, or even headlong confrontation with the story. In Pope Formosus and Stephen VI one of the two actors, being a corpse, is inanimate and incapable of facial expression and body language. In Excommunication of Robert the Pious the snuffed-out candle is the main actor.

He also opted for court-room dramas, where surely the words are the most important part of the narrative, and notoriously difficult to depict in a painting, as in The Agitator of Languedoc.

By the time that he painted what was probably his most successful narrative work, The Death of Galeswintha, his painting style was so last century (even early last century), and his intellectual puzzles had been superceded by the rush towards modernism. History painting was history.

References

Wikipedia (English) (brief).
Wikipedia (French) (detailed, list of works).

Lübbren N (2016) Eloquent objects: Gérôme, Laurens and the art of inanimate narration, chapter 8 in Cooke P & Lübbren (eds) Paint and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gaugin, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 4724 4010 5.
Sérié P (2016) Theatricality versus anti-theatricality, narrative techniques in French history painting (1850-1900), chapter 10 in Cooke P & Lübbren (eds) Paint and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gaugin, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 4724 4010 5.

James Tissot (1836–1902) is not known as a narrative painter, but in looking through a lot of his works, it is clear that many tell stories.

As I recounted in my summary of his life and work, his early professional career was based in Paris, and opened with success in the Salon in 1859. Those early years, until about 1862, were dominated by the influence of the Belgian painter Baron Henri Leys (1815-1869), and by Tissot’s love of historical romanticism, particularly set in the Middle Ages.

Henri Leys’ Albrecht Dürer visiting Antwerp in 1520 (1855) gives a good idea of the paintings that Tissot admired most: realist in detail, dominated by earth colours with a wide tonal range but tending towards the dark, and showing gentle historical stories built from a multitude of figures. Like many painters of the day, Leys did not go for the climax or peripeteia of thrilling or strongly emotional stories. He also painted at least one scene derived from Goethe’s Faust.

Many of Tissot’s earliest paintings are liberally based on Goethe’s Faust, as interpreted by Gounod’s opera, which is based on Carré’s play Faust and Marguerite. Hence the character of Gretchen is named Marguerite, the focal figure in Tissot’s works.

Faust, who has sold his soul to the devil in return for everlasting youth, falls madly in love with the pure Marguerite. In Act 3 of the opera, Faust starts to seduce her with exquisite jewellery. He joins Marguerite in her garden, and she allows him to kiss her, before asking him to go away.

Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1861) shows the couple sat together on a bench, as Faust proceeds with his seduction. He succeeds, gets her pregnant, and then abandons her. Marguerite allows the baby to die, and is shunned and taunted by the locals. She resolves to go to church to repent her sins. The devil brings her visions of her previously happy life in an effort to prevent her from praying, and she faints in the struggle.

When Marguerite recovers from her faint she finally goes to pray: the scene (from Act 4) shown in Tissot’s Marguerite in Church (c 1861). She is here almost cast in the role of the penitent Magdalene, a theme which Tissot was to visit in his later paintings of the life of Christ.

Although a static tableau like Faust and Marguerite in the Garden, Tissot skilfully weaves the story into his composition. Two innocent children kneel in front of a shrine, praying in the normal and obvious manner. Marguerite’s inner turmoil cannot bring her any closer to that shrine, or even to break herself out of her posture of dejection, eyes cast down, hands apart rather than held together in prayer. Above her is a painting of the Last Judgement, which anticipates her own fate in Act 5 of the opera.

Tissot’s explorations of Faust reached a climax in about 1861, and he then painted a series of much-admired works based on the theme of the prodigal son. These are derived from the parable related by Jesus, told in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15 verses 11-32. A father has two sons, of whom the younger asks for his inheritance before the father dies.

That son then squanders his fortune, and becomes destitute to the point where he eats from the pigs’ trough. He then returns home, expecting to be put to work by his father in punishment for his profligacy. His father finds him on the road, welcomes him back, and feasts the return of his prodigal son. The older son is unhappy at this, but his father points out that he now has the entire inheritance, and that his younger brother, who had been lost, has now been found.

The Return of the Prodigal Son (1862) still shows the influence of Leys, but Tissot then launched out more on themes and motifs of his own choosing, and his style became more distinct too.

By the time that he painted A Widow in 1868, he had mastered the subtle juxtaposition of clues to narratives which were often very modern in nature. The widow of the title pauses in her embroidery for a moment and stares in thought into the vague distance. As a young and still attractive woman without a husband, she is at once a bored and listless little girl, and a contented older woman immersed in escapist reading.

At the left is a tray with the remains of drinks, either wine or a fortified wine, which were taken in company with others. Although the widow wears her sombre costume, she has bucked the convention of making herself look as unattractive as possible, and is enjoying the company of the bright flowers beside her. Tissot leaves us to speculate as to her future, rather than condemning her violations of etiquette.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in the dress of the late 1700s. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is dressed very plainly, implying that she was a governess, perhaps. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they are symbols of the parting which is taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if the floral symbols are accurate: the ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while the holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

The following year, Tissot embarked on a series of paintings and engravings which were set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping. The first to be exhibited was his An Interesting Story (c 1872), which set the pattern. It is the late 1700s, and an old soldier is telling one or more pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. Here, the story is dubbed ‘interesting’ in irony.

In The Tedious Story (c 1872), there can be no doubt that the young woman has drifted off into a world of her own, one which is far away from the veteran’s charts.

Tissot moved the exterior location further up-river for his Bad News (The Parting) (1872). The soldier is now young, and has just been recalled to duty, to leave the two young women who appear as heartbroken as he does. In the centre of the painting, a small boat full of uniformed soldiers is in transit, presumably coming to take this soldier away with them. Once again Tissot returns to his enduring theme of loss and separation.

In contrast, Too Early (1873) is an insightful social comedy: this group has arrived at the soirée on time, when the social convention is always to be late, so that you are not the first to arrive. The four guests are embarrassed, and do not know what to do, so they stand prominently in the middle of the empty floor, while the hostess prepares the musicians, and the host waits idly at the door.

Tissot never really abandoned those who wanted to read stories in his paintings, but his relationship with Kathleen Newton brought him to focus more on her beauty and their love. Towards the end of her brief life, and his stay in London, he decided to revisit the story of the prodigal son. This time, with the examples of Hogarth, Frith, and others who had painted moralist series, he set the story in the present time, and made a complete set of engravings.

The first of the four paintings in his series The Prodigal Son in Modern Life, The Departure (c 1882) is set in another of his favourite waterside haunts along the Thames. The windows are now grimy, and the light filtered through the smoke of the city. Father, an elderly man, sits giving his younger son advice, having filled that son’s wallet with his share of inheritance. Bags are already packed and ready to go, and under the table a kitten seems to be leaving its litter too. Behind the younger son, one petal has fallen from the nasturtiums which are in a vase.

To the left, the older son stares with disappointed disinterest out towards the river. A sister (or perhaps the older brother’s wife) looks up from her sewing towards the father and son. The next two paintings, or prints, take the younger son out to Japan, where there are clear allusions to immoral conduct, then to the prodigal son’s return on board a ship carrying pigs and cattle.

The final painting (or print), The Fatted Calf (c 1882), shows the prodigal son sharpening a knife with which to carve the roast joint of meat concealed under the silver platter on the table. The older brother has just climbed up from a boat on the river, where his friends remain, and is arguing with the father as to why his younger brother should be welcomed back with a ‘fatted calf’.

There are other cues carefully placed in this painting: climbing on the trellis are nasturtiums, the flowers securely clustered together again. The mother strokes a dog, a symbol of fidelity, and the prodigal son appears to have gained a pretty female partner too.

This series was first exhibited as the centrepiece of his one-man exhibition in the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1882. He finally won a gold medal for it at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, when he was already busy working on his huge series showing the Life of Jesus Christ, which I will cover in another article.

References

Wikipedia.

Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

Paintings of scenes from the hagiographies of Christian saints have been enduring favourites, particularly for those churches dedicated to each saint, and for sponsors named after a saint. The lives of some saints are sufficiently complicated as to offer the artist a choice of different scenes, but in the case of Saint Anthony the Great (of Egypt, the Abbot, etc.), paintings are almost completely confined to his temptation by the devil.

Saint Anthony was born in 251 CE to wealthy parents in Lower Egypt. When he was 18, his parents died, and he became an evangelical Christian. He gave his inheritance away, and followed an ascetic life. For fifteen years he lived as a hermit. During this time the devil fought with him, afflicting him with boredom, laziness, and dreams of lustful women. Then the devil beat him unconscious.

Friends found him and brought him back to health, so he went back into the desert for another twenty years. This time the devil afflicted him with visions of wild beasts, snakes, scorpions, etc., but again he fought back. He eventually emerged serene and healthy. He went to Alexandria during the persecution of Christians there, to comfort those in prison. He returned to the desert, where he built a monastic system with his followers.

His attributes are a bell, a pig, a book, the Tau cross (like a capital T), sometimes with a bell pendant. He is commonly shown being tempted in a wilderness, often by naked women, and is associated with fire (“Saint Anthony’s Fire”).

The visionary nature of his temptation, and the temptations offered him, give a painter a wonderful opportunity to exercise their imagination, and to include content which would otherwise be excluded from places of worship. I have just given a detailed account of Bosch’s masterwork, his triptych showing The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c 1500-10), which is to my mind the wildest, most fascinating, and greatest painting of this saint.

This pair of articles looks at other notable paintings of the same motif, to see in particular what influence Bosch’s paintings had on others, and how his Lisbon triptych stands in comparison. This article covers paintings before 1560, and the next will cover the period from 1570 to the start of the twentieth century.

Painted in 1430-32, Stefano di Giovanni’s St Antony Beaten by the Devils identifies the saint by his Tau crucifix. Three devils, clearly fallen angels by their wings, are beating him with clubs. Those devils are fairly conventional figures, part animal and part man, with horns.

The Master of the Osservanza’s painting from about the same time, around 1435, has a similar simple landscape, but here Saint Anthony is being tempted by a woman. She is angelic, by her wings, pretty, but fully clad, and modestly so too.

The miniature Saint Anthony and the Lobster Devil illustrates the source of many hagiographies, Jacobus de Voragine’s La Légende Dorée (Legenda aurea, Golden Legend), which was often used as a reference by artists. The devils shown tormenting the saint have become much more imaginative in form. One is based on a lobster, two have accessory faces in their abdomens, and they are starting to depart from nature.

Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony (c 1487–88) continues that trend. Saint Anthony is now being held aloft by ten or so devils, including a weird fish with many spines and a trunk-like snout. The devil at the lower left of the group has breasts and a face in its perineum, which almost makes it double-ended.

The left wing of Bosch’s Hermit Saints triptych of around 1500 is a significant departure from its predecessors. The invented creatures are not simple devils tormenting the saint directly, but populate the visionary world. Those creatures and others in his panel are much more originally inventive too: the head with feet attached at the bottom left is like nothing which has preceded it. Bosch makes more specific visual references to details in the Golden Legend, such as being tempted by a naked woman. He also manipulates scale in a highly innovative way.

His probably slightly later triptych of The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Lisbon) develops this even further, with his own pantheon of rearranged humans and composite creatures.

Grünewald’s slightly later diptych provides useful contrast between the conventional Visit of St Anthony to St Paul on the left, and his Temptation of St Anthony (c 1515) on the right. These daemons are quite different from Bosch’s, but are nevertheless highly imaginative in their appearance.

This painting in the Chrysler is one of several now attributed to followers of Bosch. Similar in tone, and using common elements such as the burning buildings, most of its figures, creatures, and inanimate objects are conventional and come from the real world, even though they may here be behaving rather differently from normal.

Another painting now attributed to a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, in the Prado, features weird creatures, some incorporating Bosch’s portmanteau constructions. Saint Anthony also has a pig resting beside him, to help identify him. However, these are small devices inside a much more conventional view, and lack the pervasive otherworldliness of Bosch’s triptych.

The outside of the left panel of Niklaus Manuel’s Antonius altar shows Demons Tormenting St. Anthony (1520). Its daemons, and the wooden clubs with which they attack the saint, are inventive, but still rooted in Stefano di Giovanni’s of a century before.

Jan Wellens de Cock’s painting of about 1520 is fundamentally still based on real figures and objects, including the slightly oddly-proportioned nude women and their jewels. But tucked away in some of its recesses are composites resembling some of those invented by Bosch. A town is also alight up in the top right corner, and in a high fork in the prominent tree, there is an owl. I wonder whether these embellishments were intended at its outset.

Lucas van Leyden’s painting of about 1530 appears to have been directly influenced by Bosch. Leading its small procession of strange creatures is a man with a bird’s head, and a long bill, who wears ice-skates, clearly derived from the creature bearing a note in the foreground of the left wing of Bosch’s triptych. There are several other familiar features in those creatures, but the rest of the painting is far more conventional.

By about 1540, Cornelis Massijs was still content to paint an almost completely realist image, showing Saint Anthony with two naked women, and another who may be their procuress. But once again there are some small decorations – a pot-bellied man, a creature with an inverted funnel on its head, and a little group at the right – which seem to have invaded from the mind of Bosch.

When we reach Pieter Coecke van Aelst in 1543-1550, the emphasis has changed completely. There are still three normal human figures, of the saint, a tempting nude, and her procuress behind, but the rest of the painting is filled with Bosch derivatives, such as the nun with wings biting someone’s leg, in the foreground. The burning town also makes an appearance in the left distance.

Most of those paintings were made in northern Europe. Looking back at the south, in 1552-3 Paolo Veronese had a profoundly different conception. Saint Anthony is not the bearded and bald old man of the north, but almost a parody of the well-muscled, grappling with a pretty young woman whose left breast seems to have become accidentally bared. Clearly Veronese had not encountered the works of Bosch.

The previous article told the story behind the many paintings of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, and I showed examples from 1430 to 1560. These demonstrated the influence of Bosch’s highly individualistic paintings, particularly his triptych now in Lisbon, at least in northern European painting.

Although the artist who painted this work in about 1575 is not known, it appears to have originated in northern Europe, and has fantastic creatures which are still rooted in the real world. There are some indications of potential influence from Bosch, such as the red creature with a trumpet-like snout, but most remain more traditional.

Pieter Huys’s painting of 1577 is more obviously a derivative from Bosch. Saint Anthony could almost have been copied from one of the earlier paintings, and most of the strange figures and creatures have been borrowed and re-interpreted. Musical instruments such as the lute and harp make an appearance, but many of the symbols have been changed. For example, where Bosch’s triptych features round tables with a white cloth, Huys opts for a rectangular table. And the background has a town burning even more violently.

Maerten de Vos’s vision of 1591-4 follows a more traditional line again, although it contains some strange elements which appear more personal. He shows one Saint Antony apparently carrying another, unconscious Saint Anthony in his arms, rather than the saint supported by friends. There is a third version of the saint flying in the air, surrounded by daemons, too.

That unconscious saint points to a pig, a recognised attribute, but nearby is a pair of lions. One of the more Bosch-like creatures in the right foreground is a portmanteau of human and bird, wears an inverted funnel on its head, and is reading sheet music.

Just a century after Bosch painted his triptych, Jan Brueghel the Elder combines a cavalcade of more traditional figures with a foreground of more bizarre ones derived from Bosch, including an old person’s head with four human legs, and a bird with two heads, one of a cockerel and the other a duck with a clarinet-like bill. A second image of the saint appears in the sky, surrounded by daemons, and a church is on fire in the background.

Roelandt Savery’s Landscape with the Temptation of Saint Anthony (1617) is an unusual painting in which the religious content is hidden away in the bottom left corner; the daemons and other creatures there appear to have had a little influence from Bosch, but the great majority of the work is a landscape, and not that of a wilderness either.

By about 1650, Joos van Craesbeeck was using some of Bosch’s iconography with his own developments. The use of a human head as a container is probably derived from Bosch’s tree-man and similar devices, but here has become even more realistic. To the right of that, a naked man sits facing backwards on a duck-horse: he is playing a stringed musical instrument, and wearing an inverted funnel on his head. Van Craesbeeck’s humans seem to have grown small red tails too.

Oddly, van Craesbeeck does not place the Greek letter Tau on the saint’s robes, but the Roman letter A, perhaps monogrammed with the Tau. That appears to be unique to this painting.

The prolific David Teniers the Younger painted several versions of the Temptation of Saint Anthony after about 1650. Most, like this painting now in Lille, show an ordinary landscape with the saint, with the addition of his own species of daemons. Some of these re-use ideas first seen in Bosch’s triptych, such as that of a single figure on the back of a flying narwhal; that figure is wearing an inverted funnel on its head.

Another of Teniers’ paintings, currently in the Prado, shows three fairly normal humans in a menagerie of daemons, some of which clearly have their origins in Bosch’s work. The figure flying on a fish has changed from the previous painting, but still wears its distinctive inverted funnel.

This third version, now in Tokyo, repeats many of the same daemons in a different setting, retaining the figure wearing the inverted funnel in close aerial combat.

Almost two centuries after Bosch’s triptych, more radically different and inventive approaches appear, here in Domenicus van Wijnen’s painting of about 1685. Its daemons are much more human in form, and have proliferated in a way more common in the ‘fairie paintings’ seen around 1840, including some by Richard Dadd.

Southern European painters were much more likely to keep to more traditional figurative compositions, as used by Tiepolo in about 1740. This is surprising, given the presence of Bosch’s paintings in major collections in both Madrid and Venice.

Depictions of the Temptation of Saint Anthony remained popular even through the 1800s, although by this time Bosch’s triptych seems to have become long forgotten, and painters seemed no longer to need such excuses to exercise their imagination and inventiveness. The long-awaited publication of Gustave Flaubert’s book The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written as a script for a play, in 1874 brought renewed interest, and a succession of paintings from Henri Fantin-Latour (c 1875, above), Paul Cézanne (c 1875, below), Gustave Moreau (a watercolour), and Fernand Khnopff (1883).

Cézanne shows the shadowy figure of Saint Anthony slumped against a bush at the left, his arms held out to shield himself from the temptations. The devil is shown, in stereotypical form, wearing red robes, with an animal head and horns, behind Saint Anthony. In front of them is the naked Queen of Sheba, her right arm held high to accentuate her form. Around her are naked (but not black) children. In front of Saint Anthony is a black bag presumably containing money, and a book.

The influential Neapolitan realist Domenico Morelli painted this stark work in 1878, perhaps the exact antithesis of the rich imagery which had developed since the Renaissance.

That same year, Félicien Rops painted his satirical and irreverent version, which has more subtle details. Bound to the cross in Saint Anthony’s tempting vision is a visibly voluptuous woman, the word EROS replacing the normal initialism of INRI (Iēsūs/Iēsus Nazarēnus, Rēx Iūdaeōrum, meaning Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews) shown above Christ’s head. Christ himself, with full stigmata, has been knocked sideways to accommodate the woman’s naked body. Behind the cross the horned devil wears scarlet robes and pulls faces. Behind him is a pig, Anthony’s attribute. The two daemonic putti are decidedly not references to Bosch.

Lovis Corinth painted two versions of the Temptation. The earlier, in 1897, shows Anthony surrounded by beautiful and naked women, offering him fruit, other food, and their bodies. The daemons have faded into the background, and are caricatures based on humans.

His later painting, explicitly painted after Gustave Flaubert, in 1908, brings in the Queen of Sheba, an elephant and monkey, but is also notable for depicting Anthony as a young man. Even Salvador Dalí’s 1946 painting of the Temptation steers clear of Bosch’s imagery, although it does at least return to the concept of an individualistic and inventive vision.

Conclusions

I have surveyed four paintings from the 1400s, before Bosch’s triptych was painted, Bosch’s two paintings (the left wing of the Hermit Saints triptych, and the triptych now in Lisbon), eleven subsequent paintings from the 1500s, seven from the 1600s, one from the 1700s, seven from the 1800s, and two from the 1900s: a total of 34 paintings over a period of just over 500 years.

Bosch’s triptych had a clear visual influence on many of the paintings produced in northern Europe during the 1500s and 1600s. This was reflected in many of the daemons shown in them, particularly the peculiar use of the inverted funnel as a hat, a symbol which had previously been used to indicate Jews in miniatures in the late 1100s. It has also commonly led to a background in which buildings were burning. This may have arisen with the use of common source material, but is more likely the result of later artists having seen Bosch’s paintings.

Prior to Bosch, and after 1700, daemons shown were more obviously derivatives of human figures, with classical features such as tails and horns, which remained characteristic of paintings made in southern Europe throughout the period. It is not clear why Bosch’s influence should have vanished after 1700, though.

Many of the stories shown in paintings are complex if not rambling, and choosing the best scene is often tricky. The Old Testament story of the Judgement of Solomon is different: although it involves subtleties of human character and (in modern terms) Game Theory, there is only one moment which merits depiction, which is a coincidence of action, climax, and a form of peripeteia. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, this story was a very popular motif for paintings until about 1700, and has seldom appeared since.

The story

This is drawn from the Old Testament, the First book of Kings, chapter 3.

King Solomon was known for his wisdom and sense of justice. Like many kings, he sat in judgement over disputes, assuming the role of the ultimate court of appeal. One day, two young women (often interpreted as being prostitutes) who lived in the same house came to him seeking his judgement. Both had recently given birth to sons, but one of the sons had died, leaving the mothers in dispute over the surviving infant.

Mother A claimed that mother B had accidentally smothered B’s own baby when she was asleep, so had taken A’s baby instead. B claimed that no such thing had happened, but that A’s baby had died, and the surviving baby was her own. So both mothers claimed the one living child as their own.

After some thought, Solomon called for a sword, and declared that the only fair solution was to cut the live child in two, so that each mother could receive half of him. The true mother then implored Solomon to give the whole baby to the other mother if that would spare his life, but the liar called on Solomon to go ahead and divide the infant as he had proposed. From this Solomon deduced the identity of the true mother, and entrusted her with the infant’s care.

The obvious moment to show in a painting is the threat to cut the live child in two. The preceding history can then be portrayed by showing both women and their infants, one alive and about to be cut in two, the other still dead. The resolution can be shown by the true mother’s reaction to try to spare the baby’s life, contrasting with the false mother’s obvious acceptance.

I consider the pictorial solutions according to the compositional arrangement: the scene viewed facing Solomon’s throne, from the side with the throne at one side of the painting, and diagonally.

Head on, throne in the centre

Raphael’s fresco of 1518-19 avoids excessive symmetry by putting the courtier who is about to cut the live infant in two, that baby, and the true mother on the left, the dead baby in the middle in front of Solomon, and the false mother and a group of other courtiers at the right. The three key faces (Solomon, the two mothers) are shown in profile, which limits our ability to read their expressions. He has chosen the peak moment of climax, the sword held aloft and the real mother intervening to save her baby.

Only slightly later, in about 1537, the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder produced a very different version on a panel. Much of the painting is taken up by the members and trappings of Solomon’s court, and the King himself is distant, appearing quite disengaged. This puts the mothers, their babies, and the sword-bearing courtier in the foreground, but there their roles are unclear. The moment is slightly earlier – before the sword is raised ready to strike – and this means that the true mother has not raised her protest.

Antoon Claeissens panel of 1605-13 is clearer, but still not as brilliant as Raphael’s. The live baby is now held by a soldier, as another brandishes his sword in readiness. The true mother is presumably on the right, kneeling and imploring Solomon that the baby’s life is spared. But the timing is still a little premature, the reaction of the other mother ambivalent, and the true climax has been missed. He has the same problems as Raphael with showing emotion in the mothers’ faces in profile, too.

Valentin de Boulogne’s painting of about 1625 is closer and more intimate, shutting extraneous objects out in the dark, including the all-important sword. Here the sword has yet to be raised; although he suggests that the mother on the left is trying to prevent the baby from being cut in two, she is facing away, and both her facial expression and body language are harder to read as a result. The mother on the right clutches her chest and looks in earnest too, confounding the story.

Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting of 1649 uses similar composition to Raphael’s, the mothers and their actions preventing it from becoming too symmetrical. Although timed slightly before the sword is raised, he depicts the body language extremely clearly. Solomon’s hands indicate his role as the arbiter, in showing a fair balance between the two sides.

The true mother, on the left, holds her left hand up to tell the soldier to stop following the King’s instructions and spare the infant. Her right hand is extended towards the false mother, indicating that she has asked for the baby to go to her rather than die. The false mother points accusingly at the child, her expression full of hatred. Hands are also raised in the group at the right, perhaps indicating their reactions to Solomon’s judgement.

William Blake’s painting from 1799-1800 emphasises its symmetry behind the two mothers, which in turn lays emphasis on the asymmetry of the four actors. The sword is brandished rather than poised to sweep down on the baby, and both mothers are reaching for the infant. This leaves their roles unresolved, but the King’s left hand is held out to stay execution, the right pointing to the mother on the left, who is thus presumably the true mother, intervening to save the child.

Side view

This panel attributed to Giorgione and dated around 1505 mirrors the composition of his Trial of Moses (c 1496-9), to which it might have been a pendant. Solomon is shown in advanced age, commanding the courtier who has raised his short sword ready. The two mothers straddle the midline of the panel, their body language not clear enough to indicate which is the true.

José de Ribera’s powerful painting of 1609-10 is far more eloquent of emotion. The courtier still has his sword in its scabbard, though, and the imminent threat to the baby he holds in his left hand is concealed as a result. The true mother stands right up against Solomon, almost but not quite touching him, her left hand reaching out to stop the sword from being drawn, the right poised over Solomon’s right hand, which is directing the courtier.

The false mother kneels, less engaged, but looking up at Solomon with a degree of scorn. A few men at the right are debating the wisdom of Solomon’s judgement already, and there are two mysterious faces behind Solomon’s head.

In about 1630, Didier Barra lost the story in his exuberant and elaborate depiction of the setting. Although the actors are each apparently playing their roles well – the soldier preparing to cut the baby in two, the mothers reacting, and Solomon directing – they seem a side-show to his architectural study.

Francisco Gutiérrez Cabello’s slightly later painting of 1650 almost falls into the same trap. Squeezed into the lower left sixth of its surface, it still manages to show the action, but working out which is the true mother is difficult. Putting both mothers and the living baby so close together makes it much harder to use body language to tell the story too.

William Dyce uses the linear arrangement much more effectively. The two mothers intervene between Solomon, high on his throne at the left directing the courtier at the right, who brandishes his sword ready to take the baby and hack it in two. Despite the awkward angle, he gives us sufficient view of the mothers’ faces to make it clear which is which, and the true mother’s protective hold of the child confirms that.

Diagonal

Peter Paul Rubens’ version of about 1617 has a more complex and sophisticated composition, the two mothers appearing on either side of the courtier rather than the King. By putting the true mother’s back to the viewer, so that we cannot see her face, we have to place complete reliance on our reading of her body language. We get a much better view of the false mother’s face, which is left surprisingly neutral in expression, and her body language is also not particularly helpful. In the end sufficient clues are given to enable reading of the painting, but its story could have been rather more plain.

Antonio Molinari and his workshop in around 1690 preferred an even closer and tighter view of just the principal actors. For once the King seems detached and not in control, which significantly weakens the story. Both mothers are together at the right, one bent forward apparently pleading for the baby’s life, the other seemingly disinterested in events. The courtier armed with his sword takes the left, where he is put in the spotlight, ready to cut the infant in two. I think this works rather well in the end.

Tiepolo faced a tougher task when he painted this story on a ceiling in 1726-9. The consequent limitations to reading facial expressions force him to make body language even clearer, and bear the weight of telling the story. The true mother reaches up to prevent the courtier from cutting the child in two, while the false mother sits passively watching behind the baby. That cluster of figures – both mothers, the courtier, and the bay – turns out to be both powerful and effective, although it may perhaps have been even more effective if he had come in closer to crop out other irrelevant detail, and heighten the viewer’s engagement.

Conclusions

Despite the limited choices in timing and content needed to tell this story, its composition has proved an interesting challenge. As in many confrontational situations, putting the main actors in positions where their faces and body language can be read is often difficult. A head on view gives an excellent opportunity to show King Solomon, but readily obscures the faces of the mothers. A side view may simplify the actors into a more linear arrangement, but also makes it hard to follow Alberti’s rules.

Key to telling this story clearly is making obvious contrast between the two mothers, to establish which is the true, and which the false. I think that Raphael, Poussin, de Ribera, and Tiepolo achieved that very well by placement and body language, as you might expect from those Masters.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Most narrative painters make their mark by their paintings, but a few are both brilliant in painting stories, and highly influential teachers. Léon Cogniet (1794–1880) is probably the best example of the latter.

He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1812, when he was just eighteen years old. Within three years, he was producing major history paintings. He competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1816, but the following year won it, with Achille Michallon and Antoine Garnaud. He remained at the French Academy in Rome until 1822, by which time he had already established his reputation at the Salon in Paris.

From 1840, he concentrated more on teaching, including at a popular painting workshop for women, which was run by his sister. In 1851 he was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and soon stopped painting altogether. Among his more famous students were Rosa Bonheur, Jean-Paul Laurens, Jules Lefebvre, and Meissonier. He retired in 1863, and died a forgotten recluse.

Briseis Restored to Achilles in his Tent Discovers the Body of Patroculus (1815) is among Cogniet’s earliest surviving paintings. It tells the story of Briseis, a legendary and beautiful queen of Lyrnessus at the time of the Trojan War. When Achilles led an attack on her city, which was near Troy, she was captured and the rest of her family were killed by Achilles. Briseis was made concubine to Achilles as a reward. Achilles’ great friend Patroclus comforted her, and promised to have Achilles make her his wife when the war ended.

In the first book of Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon demanded Briseis in compensation for giving up his own concubine. Agamemnon and Achilles quarrelled, Briseis was given to Agamemnon, and Achilles withdrew from battle, with disastrous results for the Greeks. When Patroclus was killed in battle, Briseis was restored to Achilles, and he returned to the fight, to avenge the death of Patroclus.

The young Cogniet – only 20 at the time – shows the beautiful Briseis grieving on Patroclus’ corpse. Achilles has been galvanised into action, a fearsome stare in his eyes. This dramatic effect is heightened by Cogniet’s depiction of the red light reflected from the robes at the left.

Oenone Refuses to Rescue Paris at the Siege of Troy (1816) was probably Cogniet’s first and unsuccessful submission for the coveted Prix de Rome. Oenone was the first wife of Paris of Troy, the son of King Priam. Paris abandoned her when he went off to kidnap Helen from Sparta, leading Oenone to predict the Trojan War. She also sent their son, Corythus, to assist the Greeks to Troy.

Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, which supplements and elaborates the Homeric account of the Trojan War, tells that Paris returned to Oenone when he was wounded by Philoctetes’ poisoned arrow, to beg her to heal him using her herbal arts. Oenone refused, leaving Paris to return to Helen, and die. Oenone was then overcome with remorse, throwing herself onto his funeral pyre.

Cogniet shows the dying Paris, surrounded by warrior colleagues and looking imploringly towards Oenone, her back turned on him as she walks away. At the right edge, wearing a golden crown, is her successor, Queen Helen.

It was Cogniet’s Helen Delivered by Castor and Pollux (1817) which secured him the Prix de Rome.

Castor and Pollux, together known as the Dioskuri, were mythical twin brothers, whose mother was Leda. Castor was the mortal son of the King of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus, conceived following his seduction of Leda, when he assumed the form of a swan (depicted extensively in paintings of Leda and the Swan). Also resulting from Zeus’ seduction of Leda (through obscure biological mechanisms!) was Castor and Pollux’s sister Helen of Sparta, then Helen of Troy.

When Helen was abducted by Theseus, Castor and Pollux invaded his kingdom of Attica and rescued Helen from him. To avenge that abduction, they took Theseus’s mother, Aethra, who was made a slave to Helen back in Sparta, until she was released after the fall of Troy.

Cogniet paints this rather simpler story in plain terms. Castor and Pollux are shown either side of Helen, celebrating their success. The twin on the left wears a red cloak similar to that of Achilles in Briseis Restored to Achilles…, and the scabbard of his sword is used for the same pictorial purpose.

Once in Rome, Cogniet painted the insightful Self-portrait in his Room at the Villa Medici (1817). Small within the empty space of that room, he leans against the bed, next to what amounts to a painting within the painting, showing the Roman campagna outside.

The Battle of Heliopolis (date not known) is a scene during the second battle of Heliopolis in 1800. One of the battles in the French Revolutionary Wars, it resulted from negotiations by the French General Kléber to withdraw the remains of his forces from Egypt so that they could take part in the war in Europe. These produced a convention, of El Arich, which would have allowed such a withdrawal, but the other parties, Ottoman and British, were too divided to bide by it.

General Kléber started fighting again. Because the Ottomans considered the French too weak to put up any effective resistance, they marched on Cairo. However, outnumbered as he was, General Kléber attacked the Ottoman army at Heliopolis, achieved a decisive victory on 20 March 1800 with few casualties, and re-entered Cairo to suppress its revolt. Heliopolis is now an inner suburb of Cairo.

Cogniet interestingly shows the French tricolore flag, adopted in its current form in 1794, flying at the far left, close to a column. At the right side is the most prominent ancient monument in Heliopolis, the Al-Masalla Obelisk.

Often claimed to be Cogniet’s greatest painting, The Massacre of the Innocents (1824) is based on the account in the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 2) of the execution of all young male children born near Bethlehem, ordered by Herod the Great in his bid to eliminate any future pretender to be the King of the Jews.

As mothers clutching infants under their arms flee from Herod’s troops, Cogniet makes their terror very personal in the close-up of one mother, whose arms are wrapped around her baby son, the fingers of her left hand stifling any cries he might make. She looks straight at the viewer, her face frozen in abject fear, as she tries to hide in an obscure corner.

However I think that Cogniet’s July 1830, or The Flags (study) (1830) ranks as one of the less known gems of the century. The current tricolore had been officially adopted as the French national flag in 1794, but then fell into disuse. Cogniet’s rough brushstrokes here show the transformation of the white flag of the French monarchy into the tricolore, in its violent restoration of the July Revolution of 1830 by King Louis-Philippe.

Cogniet was also called to document Napoleon’s empire, painting his Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian Expedition (1835) on a ceiling in the Louvre Palace, as an explanation of how so many Egyptian artefacts come to be in Paris – ironically now on display in that same building.

Among these later narrative paintings, his The Paris National Guard on its way to the Army, September 1792 (1836) is an elaborate visualisation of momentous events of the French Revolutionary Wars. France had declared war on Austria in April 1792, following which Prussia joined Austria, and its army invaded France. Thanks to augmentation from the National Guard, the French were able to defeat the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy, and forced their withdrawal.

Two different versions of the tricolore are shown: that held aloft from the group of soldiers in the foreground has the prevailing order used during the First Republic, and the reverse of that adopted in 1794 and still used today. The flag flying in the centre of this painting appears anachronistic, adopting the later reversed order.

The Abduction of Rebecca, Ivanhoe, and Delacroix

Cogniet greatly enjoyed reading Sir Walter Scott’s romantic mediaeval novel Ivanhoe, which was first published in English in 1820, and appeared in French translation soon afterwards. Ivanhoe is a swashbuckling story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families in the predominantly Norman court of 1194, after the failure of the Third Crusade. Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the hero, is opposed by Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, one of the Norman Knights Templar. Isaac of York is a Jewish moneylender with a beautiful daughter, Rebecca.

At the siege of Torquilstone Castle by the Black Knight (King Richard), Robin of Locksley (Robin Hood), and their Saxon forces, Rebecca is abducted by Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Meanwhile Ulrica, an old Saxon woman, sets fire to the castle, and revels in her vengeance on top of its tower.

The Abduction of Rebecca by Brian de Bois-Guilbert (c 1828) is a slightly smaller late watercolour study for Cogniet’s finished oil painting. Set in daylight, it shows Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Rebecca, and Bois-Guilbert’s Saracen slave in the foreground. As their horses gallop away, the castle behind them is consumed by fire, with Ulrica’s figure seen on the top of the tallest tower.

Cogniet then painted a finished oil version, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1831, and is now in the Wallace Collection in London. This reduced size version, The Abduction of Rebecca by a Knight Templar (c 1828), was almost certainly a copy made by Cogniet himself. There are small differences between the two oil paintings, this version not showing Ulrica on the tower, for example.

Cogniet was not the only prominent French painter who had fallen under the romantic influence of Ivanhoe. Just four years younger than him, Eugène Delacroix was already courting controversy in the Salon when Cogniet painted The Abduction of Rebecca. Delacroix made lithographs illustrating the works of Scott, and in 1846 turned this same scene from Ivanhoe into one of his greatest paintings.

Eugène Delacroix’s The Abduction of Rebecca was shown at the Salon of 1846 under the extended title of Rebecca Abducted at the Order of the Templar Bois-Guilbert during the Sack of the Castle of Front-de-Boeuf, but did not get a good critical reception. In 1858, Delacroix attempted an entirely different composition, which was shown in his final Salon the following year, and is now in the Louvre.

Reference

Wikipedia.

There was a great deal more to Italian painting in the 1800s than just the Macchiaioli. As with most European art outside Impressionism, we have lost sight of the history of painting in that century if it didn’t happen in Paris (or London, perhaps).

One of its major influences was Domenico Morelli (1823–1901), whose precocious talent took him from his poor family in Naples to enroll in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts there in 1836. He started to win prizes in 1845, largely for his history and religious paintings. He went on to study in Rome in 1847-8, and on his return to Naples he joined the protestors of the 1848 insurrections in the city. When on the barricades, he was wounded, escaped death, and ended up in prison for a brief time.

He returned to Rome, and was particularly successful at the Florentine Exposition and the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. He then engaged in discussions with the members of the Macchiaioli concerning realism. In 1868, he was appointed professor at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Naples. He became interested in more religious and mystical themes, which embraced not only Christianity, but Jewish and Islamic traditions too.

Very few of his paintings seem to be accessible now, so I apologise for the poor quality and small size of some of their images.

Christian Martyrs (1851) shows two presumably early Christians leaning against one another, their wrists chained together. In the background are hints of more graphic death: others are being rounded up and threatened with a spear, and a crucifix is seen from amid palls of smoke. But this couple could be asleep, or dead; Morelli leaves us to speculate over their fate.

The Ship of Life (1859) refers to an enduring and popular Christian metaphor, in which God or Jesus Christ are asked to steer the person’s life away from sin and towards more peaceful times. Morelli may have had a specific poem in mind – there has been a very wide choice available. Jesus Christ is seen in white, standing in the bows of a boat crowded with people of all ages. At the stern, another figure (possibly John the Baptist) stands directing with his hands.

Morelli had particular interests in mediaeval and classical history. The Pompeian Bath (1861) is an exquisitely painted recreation of a scene from one of the baths of Pompeii, which was buried under tons of volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. The ruins had been progressively excavated from their rediscovery in 1748; like Gérôme later in the 1800s, Morelli’s imagination was fired by archaeological discoveries. He also leaves us to speculate as to what the miniature sculpture on top of the cupboards at the right might show.

Tasso Reads his Poem to Eleonora d’Este (1865) is steeped in Italian literary and artistic history. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) is now best-known for his epic poem La Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581), which was a great influence on the paintings of Nicholas Poussin and others.

As a young man, Tasso entered the service of the d’Este family in Ferrara, where he fell in love with one of Eleanora d’Este’s ladies-in-waiting. Tasso addressed his first series of love sonnets to her in 1562, only to fall in love with another of her retinue the following year. Eleonora d’Este (1537-1581) and her sister took Tasso under their protection, and he must have frequently read his poems to them, as shown in Morelli’s painting.

His The Conversion of Saint Paul (1876) tackles a much better-known story. According to chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul – then known as Saul – was a zealous Pharisee who was engaged in the intense persecution of early followers of Jesus Christ. In around 33-36 CE, when he was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus in Syria, on a mission of persecution, he experienced a blinding light and the voice of Jesus, asking why he persecuted him. Saul then converted, becoming Saint Paul, one of the founding fathers of the early Christian church.

This dramatic conversion has been a popular theme in painting, with versions known by Michelangelo, Bellini, Fra Bartolomeo, Caravaggio, and Rubens, for example. Morelli’s detailed realist version follows in their tradition, with the saint struck to the ground in a shaft of blinding light, although he is shown facing away from its heavenly source.

That was Morelli’s solution to the compositional problem of showing the heavenly origin of the light, but at the same time showing the emotional impact in Paul’s facial expression, and giving clues to his subsequent temporary blindness. A topic for a future article, perhaps, Morelli seems to have arrived at a superior composition to the Masters of the past.

A couple of years later, Morelli painted this even starker version of another popular story from the lives of the saints, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1878). He strips away the daemons and devils which had been embellishing earlier works, tucking Anthony’s temptresses under his sleeping mat.

One of Morelli’s most colourful and impressionistic paintings, his splendid The Sultan’s Wife Returns from her Bath (1877-83) is also one of the more secular of his ‘oriental’ works. Accompanied by an attendant holding a parasol, the Sultan’s wife swaggers barefoot over the palace tiles, the city enveloped in a sandy haze behind her. At an appropriate distance behind her, her retinue of women is making its way up the steps.

In front her, by way of contrast, are four tiny colourful birds, one bathing in a shallow pond: these recall comparisons between human finery and the natural splendor of birds in the teachings of Jesus Christ and his followers.

The Sermon of Mohammed (c 1895) is a very unusual painting in Western art, in depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Not only has this been culturally alien to the great majority of European painters, but making images of the Prophet is usually considered to be against religious law. Morelli tries to work around this by not showing the Prophet’s face. Indeed, in spite of the painting showing a host of followers, not a single face is shown.

It is not clear whether Morelli intended this to be a specific sermon (khutbah), such as the most famous of them all, the Farewell Sermon, which was delivered on the ninth of Dhul Hijjah, ten years after the Hijrah, migration from Makkah to the Madinah, i.e. 6 March 632. That is accepted as having taken place during the Hajj in the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat, which is a plausible interpretation of the location of this painting, although it would be more conventional perhaps to have pictured the Prophet on the mountain slopes.

The Angel of Death (1897) is a much more typical painting of the late 1800s, showing a winged female angel tenderly drawing a white sheet over the body of a young woman who has just died.

Among Morelli’s last paintings was Noah’s Thanksgiving after Leaving the Ark (1901). This shows Noah from the Old Testament, with his family, giving thanks for their deliverance back to dry land after the flood abated. A double rainbow crosses the sky, and the pairs of animals which were saved on board the Ark are disembarking, as birds fly off into the distance.

Dante and Virgil entering Purgatory (date not known) shows a scene from the less well-known second part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Purgatory, written in the early 1300s. Purgatory is described as a mountain with seven levels of suffering and spiritual growth, by which the souls of the dead can attain the Earthly Paradise.

Christian souls reach Purgatory by boat, crossing from a location near Ostia, at the mouth of the river Tiber, through the Pillars of Hercules, to the Mountain of Purgatory. Escorting them in the boat is an angel boatman, a marked contrast to Charon’s ferry across the Acheron to Hell. Dante and Virgil make this journey in Canto II of the book, as shown in Morelli’s painting.

Sicilian Vespers (date not known) refers to a rebellion which took place on Sicily at Easter, 1282, leading to the slaughter of French residents, loss of power by the government, and the start of the War of the Sicilian Vespers. At the time, Sicily was being ruled by King Charles I of Anjou. The King had little interest in Sicily, seeing it mainly as a base from which to launch attacks to seize the riches of Constantinople.

The rebellion began at the start of Vespers sunset prayers on Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, at a church just outside Palermo. This seems to have started in an altercation over a woman, resulting in one of the occupying French soldiers being killed. This escalated rapidly, and within six weeks three thousand French men and women were killed.

Morelli shows the other side of the story. Three women are seen, holding one another for safety, as they flee from the opening blows between French soldiers and Sicilians. Hitching their skirts up so that they can walk at speed, these three look anxious, as if they have just noticed that they are walking towards more French soldiers.

Conclusions

From the limited range of his paintings now accessible, Domenico Morelli was highly skilled in telling stories, and his compositional solution to the problems of The Conversion of Saint Paul stand out as a remarkable achievement.

However the historical narratives which he chose were obscure, subtle, or both. His interest in religions beyond Christianity was exciting, but at the time was probably unpopular. We are in dire need of good information about Morelli’s paintings, and more images of them.

Reference

Wikipedia.

As I recounted in my biography of James Tissot (1836–1902), within days of his lover’s death in late 1882, he returned to Paris, and soon embarked on painting a series of large canvases on The Woman of Paris. By 1885, though, he had changed direction again, and for most of the remaining years of his career he painted – almost obsessively – scenes from the Bible, starting with more than 350 gouache paintings of the life of Jesus Christ.

This may seem an extraordinary choice for a fashionable painter who had spent much of his career amid what Judith Dolkart has called “the champagne intrigues and innuendo of his usual worldly fare”. I think that is perhaps a rather narrow view of his previous work, as I reviewed in my account of his early narrative paintings, but it certainly was a big change, and unforeseen.

Origins

Tissot had already shown signs of returning to more moralistic narrative paintings in 1882, before Kathleen Newton’s death. Most obvious was revisiting the parable of the prodigal son – which he had previously painted in 1862 – in a series of four major oil paintings, which he then put at the centre of a one-man exhibition.

Even clearer signs came towards the end of his new series, The Woman of Paris. The earlier paintings had lived up to his London reputation, but as he reached the final canvas, the greasepaint and grins vanished.

Dolkart writes that Tissot was researching for the last painting in that series, Inward Voices (The Ruins) (1884-5), in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, which has some superb murals painted in 1855-61 by Eugène Delacroix. Tissot found himself drawn into taking part in a service being held at the time, and reportedly experienced a religious vision.

Inward Voices (The Ruins) is Tissot’s painting of that vision, a destitute couple sat amid ruins, the crucified Christ with them. The painting, although usually dated to the following year, was shown at the 1894 Salon (or Exposition) du Champ-de-Mars of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which opened a fortnight after the official Paris Salon (of the Société des artistes français).

Methods

From the outset, Tissot saw his mission as educational as well as spiritual. He went to great lengths to try to ascertain the actual lay of the land of the main holy sites, which he was to paint, and to compile drawings of ‘representative’ facial appearance and dress. It may seem absurd today for an artist to visit locations almost two millenia later and expect them to have changed little, but Tissot was not the only painter to do this – William Holman Hunt, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and others, had done just the same earlier.

He therefore visited Egypt, Syria, and what was then Palestine in 1886-7, and again in 1889, sketching, drawing, making extensive notes, and taking photographs. In some respects this fieldwork was valuable, but it also lured him to believe in the authenticity of what he saw. Many of his pen and ink drawings were used to illustrate his books, and must have been a great relief to the publishers, at a time when colour printing was difficult and costly.

He did at one time think seriously of setting up a proper studio out in Palestine, but probably realised that it would only have created more problems.

When he was back in his family mansion, the Château de Buillon, in France, he apparently led a pious life, praying at a local convent first thing each day, then drawing and painting through the day, before spending the evening alone, reading and in contemplation. Some attempted to catch him out, ogling women for instance, but by the prevailing standards of Paris life at the time, his conduct was monastic.

Narrative art or illustrations?

For me, the greatest uncertainty is whether Tissot saw himself illustrating textual narrative, or creating narrative paintings. Without a clear statement of his intent, the evidence is ambivalent.

What he produced was a set of more than 350 paintings showing scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, as recounted in the Gospels. What they were turned into was two volumes of parallel Latin (Vulgate) and French/English quotations from the Gospels, together with reproductions of his paintings and drawings. There are also various informative passages explaining Tissot’s drawings, experiences, and providing additional detail about locations, buildings, and events in the written narrative.

This spread from an English version of Tissot’s The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1899) gives a good idea as to how his drawings and paintings were used, alongside the text.

The medium which he chose, opaque watercolour or gouache, is more usually associated with illustration, although it has been used extensively in paintings intended to be fine art, and to stand alone without any supporting text. Given his workload, it was probably the only medium in which he was likely to have achieved his goal.

His painting style is not obviously that of book illustration. For example, figures and objects are not drawn in outline using a dark colour, then painted in using flatter colour, leaving the outline. His technique, of sketching in with graphite first, then painting on top without dark outlines, is more painterly.

Looking at his paintings, though, some have no narrative traits at all, suggesting that they were either tableaux within the overall series, or that the accompanying text told their story.

The Lord’s Prayer is a very challenging theme for any narrative painting, and Tissot chose an almost generic image of Christ teaching his disciples. He shows a moment in the story, with no clues as to preceding events, and none to the future. Neither can we gain any idea of what Christ is saying, except by reading the text.

The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes is a wonderful, but entirely non-narrative, painting. The story of this miracle is not alluded to in any way, for which you must read the text.

Angels Holding a Dial Indicating the Different Hours of the Acts of the Passion is probably reliant not on the Biblical text even, but on Tissot’s explanatory notes. Its modern equivalent might be the ‘infographic’, perhaps.

Other paintings, while not being narrative in themselves, do not appear to relate to any text narrative either.

Jesus Looking through a Lattice appears to have been intended as some form of frontispiece, and was used as that in the book.

But there are also many paintings which – to my mind, at least – succeed as works of art, and in many cases are inherently narrative too.

Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray is one of the most successful in the series, with its dramatic composition and lighting.

What Our Lord Saw from the Cross is a uniquely innovative and narrative depiction of the crucifixion.

The more that I look at this remarkable series of paintings (and Tissot’s subsequent paintings of Old Testament stories), the more varied they appear. However, put together as a series, the whole is inevitably narrative art.

In the next article I will look more at some of Tissot’s paintings from this series.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’ book, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

In the previous article, I explained how James Tissot’s (1836–1902) extraordinary series of paintings of Biblical stories came about, how he created them, and considered whether they are ‘mere’ illustrations or narrative paintings. Here I will provide examples of some of my favourites, both from his original series on the life of Jesus, and his final works showing stories from the Old Testament.

His paintings of the early life of Jesus are not particularly special, and most show motifs which have already featured extensively in paintings. However, Jesus Found in the Temple, showing the story from Luke 2:41-52, is rather different. When only twelve, Jesus was taken to the Temple in Jerusalem by his extended family at Passover. When the time came to return, he lingered there, and his absence was not noticed by the party during their return. Mary and Joseph went back to the Temple to find him in discussion with the elders, which was precocious, and resulted in his first claim that he was the son of God.

Throughout this series, Tissot portrays Jesus Christ not as some superhero, but with his aim of educating and clarifying, shows him in keeping with his teaching. Here the young Jesus reveals his ultimate fate of crucifixion too, a good narrative device.

After his paintings of the birth and early life of Christ, Tissot shows many episodes from his ministry. Although as I have shown some of these are less narrative than others, some of his paintings of parables, in particular, succeed well. The Foolish Virgins is one of a pair showing the parable of the Ten Virgins, told in Matthew 25:1-13. Five of the virgins, probably bridesmaids, are wise and have brought oil for the lamps which they carry, but five have only brought the lamps, so by the time the bridegroom arrives at midnight, their lamps have run out of oil and gone out.

You can almost hear the young women chattering and laughing here, although this painting is not self-contained in its narrative.

Another scene set in a synagogue, Jesus Chases a Possessed Man from the Synagogue is based on the story in Luke 4:33-35, in which he casts out a daemon possessing a man in the synagogue. Tissot complies with Alberti’s rules with some wonderful facial expressions, and clear body language, to tell this story well.

With Tissot’s maritime origins and years painting waterside scenes on the River Thames in London, paintings such as Jesus Preaches in a Ship have a strong air of authenticity, within the knowledge of the time. This may well refer to Matthew 13:1-9 or its equivalents in the other Gospels, although it is more of a tableau than narrative.

Having already created two oil paintings of this scene transposed to more modern times, The Return of the Prodigal Son is Tissot’s third and final version, telling part of the story in Luke 15:11-32. As in the previous paintings, he opts not to show this literally – the Gospel account setting this moment out on the road, where the prodigal son’s father finds him – but in one of his carefully sketched and drawn urban settings. Despite the faces of father and son being almost obscured, Tissot carries this off well.

One of his most moving and spectacular paintings in the series is Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, based on Matthew 14:23. It is almost non-narrative, though.

The Transfiguration shows the episode reported in Matthew 17:1–9 (and its equivalents), in which Jesus went to a mountain with three of his apostles, Peter, James, and John. There Jesus appears in bright rays of light, and the Old Testament prophets Moses and Elijah appear beside him. God’s voice then identifies Jesus as his son. A popular scene among those painting religious works, Tissot’s painting is both accurate and successful, although it too has been criticised for its ‘weak’ depiction of Jesus.

Following his paintings of Christ’s ministry, Tissot moves on to show the Passion in great, and sometimes graphic, detail. Here are some of his most successful and most narrative works in the series. Jesus Before Pilate, First Interview shows the episode from Luke 23:1-4 and John 18:33-38 in which Pilate, the Roman governor at the time, questions Jesus and concludes that there is no basis for any charge against him.

Technically one of the most brilliant paintings of the series, it is easy to mistake this for being painted in oils, and this is probably his most convincing depiction of Jesus. As narrative it is not particularly strong, though, lacking reference to the immediate or eventual outcome.

Jesus Bearing the Cross shows a generally popular scene during the Passion, referring for example to John 19:17. Compare the detailed accounts given in my articles about Bosch’s paintings here and here.

What Our Lord Saw from the Cross is one of the most remarkable paintings from the series, which features many views of Christ on the cross from the ground. Although a very different view, it is as unconventional and innovative as Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), and in pursuit of Tissot’s aim to educate by giving the viewer what appears to be first-hand experience of these scenes.

During the crucifixion, various portentous events happened throughout Jerusalem, including an earthquake and The Dead Appear in the Temple, described in Matthew 27:52-53 and shown very clearly here. Tissot’s book contains extensive drawings and notes detailing his concepts of the Temple, as part of his aim to educate and inform.

My final choice from this series is his The Descent from the Cross or The Deposition, for centuries a very popular motif for paintings, in which Christ’s body is taken down from the cross after his death, and removed for burial. With so many Masters before him, Tissot was spoilt for choice as to how he depicted this, and seems to have been inspired mainly by Rubens’ version from 1617-18, arguably the most famous of all.

Unlike Rubens, he ensures that most of the faces are not visible, which ingeniously dodges arguments about who actually was present at the time: John 19:38-42, for instance, only identifies Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, and the Gospel accounts mention an undefined number of women, including Mary Salome, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

Once he had completed the 350 or so paintings of the life of Jesus, Tissot moved on to paint scenes from the Old Testament, intending to repeat his success. Sadly he died suddenly when he was only around halfway through that task. By that time, I think that the flashes of genius seen in some of the paintings in the first series were becoming even less frequent, and many of the Old Testament paintings seem more mechanical, even tired.

Adam and Eve Driven From Paradise is another very popular scene for paintings, and one of the better in Tissot’s series, although his depictions of Adam and Eve are far from conventional.

Rebecca Meets Isaac by the Way is a wonderful depiction of the story in Genesis 24:63-65. Rebecca has been chosen to be Isaac’s bride, and is here travelling to join him. Isaac has been out in the fields meditating in the evening when he sees camels approaching, so rides over to greet them, meeting his bride for the first time.

Thankfully, Tissot’s Biblical series have not gone the way of so many series in the past, and been scattered to the four corners of the globe. The complete series of the life of Jesus Christ was bought, following public subscription, by the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the completed paintings of the Old Testament series have made their way into the Jewish Museum, also in New York.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’ book, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

In the nineteenth century, the revolution in painting brought by the Impressionists targeted the Salon, the annual state-run and heavily-juried exhibition. As the bastion of conservatism and often hackneyed taste, Manet, Monet, and others riled against it, although in their day most of them enjoyed some success – or at least notoriety! – there.

They seemed less concerned with two other organs of the French art establishment: the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and its highest prize for aspiring painters, the Prix de Rome.

At this time, the Prix de Rome had separate categories for architecture, sculture, engraving, and even musical composition. As the most coveted award for a young painter, it had been established in 1663, and its reward was a bursary of 3-5 years at the French Academy in Rome. For many, including Ingres, it was formative and almost guaranteed professional success. It was also even more conservative than the École des Beaux-Arts or the Salon.

The contest for the Prix de Rome in 1797 was very important, as no award had been made over the three previous years because of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. As usual, its jury had set the subject of the final painting, as the death of Cato the Younger, also known as Cato of Utica, a particularly grim episode which reflected the times.

Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (95-46 BCE) was a politician and statesman in the Republic of Rome, a noted Stoic and orator. In an era when corruption in public office was rife, he was one of the few with moral integrity, and championed it openly. When appointed a quaestor (public auditor), one of his first tasks was to prosecute his predecessors for their dishonesty and misappropriation of public funds.

A longstanding critic and opponent of Julius Caesar, he was among those defeated by Caesar in the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE and the Battle of Thapsus in 46 BCE, but escaped to Utica in Africa. Unwilling to live in a Rome led by Caesar, Cato committed suicide in April 46 BCE. He attempted to disembowel himself with his sword, but because of a hand injury, failed to inflict a fatal wound. He struggled, fell off the bed, which woke the servants.

As a result, his son, friends, and servants entered the room, and stood in horror at the sight. A physician wished to repair his wounds, but Cato thrust him aside, and tore his abdomen open, dying immediately. This act was seen as a great victory over Caesar’s tyranny, and a symbol for those trying to defend the Republic.

Given the appalling events of the Reign of Terror, the Prix de Rome jury might have thought this story only mildly gruesome, but I suspect it was Cato’s moral high ground which appealed most to them, and the challenge of referring to Cato’s reasons without letting the scene resemble a charnel house. It has also – not unsurprisingly – not been a popular theme for previous painters. Even Caravaggio had probably thought that Judith and Holofernes would get a better reception.

Back in about 1640, Gioacchino Assereto, a Genoese Caravaggist, had 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. Although powerful, it dips only gently into the story and tells us little.

Because this was the first Prix de Rome for several years, the jury awarded 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, and is no better in terms of its narrative.

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 took the young Jean-Paul Laurens to try a different approach in 1863, which had probably not been permitted in the Prix de Rome in any case. Laurens uses an earlier moment in the story, as Cato first tries to sink his sword into his belly, when he is quite alone.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) had been taught by Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and the Prix de Rome was the start of a highly successful career as a history painter and a teacher himself.

Guérin’s The Return of Marcus Sextus (1799) had originally been intended to show the blind Belisarius returning to find his wife dead, but that had recently been painted by others. Marcus Sextus was a fictional hero (created by Guérin) who had been a victim of civil war in Rome, banished by Sulla. Returning from his banishment, he finds the body of his wife, and his grieving daughter – a scene which resonated with French citizens who were then returning after the revolutionary terror had subsided.

This painting was shown, to huge acclaim, at the 1799 Salon, and Guérin was publicly crowned as a result. In 1802, JMW Turner made a drawing of it.

As a narrative painting, it follows Alberti’s rules throughout; Marcus Sextus’ face is a superb example of the expression of emotion, and its role in pictorial storytelling.

Sadly Guérin’s studies in Rome were cut short by his health, so he moved on to Naples.

In 1806, Napoleon himself commissioned him to paint for the Gallery of Diana in the Tuileries Palace. Guérin produced Napoleon Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels at Cairo, 23rd October 1798 (1808).

Napoleon had taken the French army into Egypt in 1798, and conquered Alexandria and Cairo. On 21 October, the citizens of Cairo organised an uprising, and murdered the French commander and Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. The French fought back with artillery, then the cavalry fought their way back into the city, forcing the rebels out into the desert, or into the Great Mosque. Napoleon brought his artillery to bear on the mosque, following which his troops stormed the building, killing or wounding over 5,000.

With control restored over Cairo, the leaders of the revolt were hunted down and executed. Following this, the city was taxed heavily in punishment, and put under military rule.

Guérin’s painting appears to show a quite different event, in which Napoleon is engaged in open discourse with the rebels. However the presence of French cavalry behind the Egyptians, and the action taking place at the far right, suggests the truth behind the ‘pardon’. Not for the first time, history painting has become blatant propaganda.

In Greek mythology, there are different accounts of Cephalus, among which is a story that he was an Aeolian who was kidnapped by the goddess of the dawn, Eos (or, in the Roman pantheon, Aurora), when he was out hunting. In spite of his apparent resistance, Eos/Aurora conceived a son by him. Eventually she released Cephalus to return to his earthly family.

Guérin’s fleshy romance Aurora and Cephalus (1810) shows that seduction in remarkably erotic terms. His depiction of Aurora’s arms pushing up the fabric of the heavens, almost like a bridal veil, is innovative.

Oddly, Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824), a former pupil of Jacques-Louis David and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1789, painted the same motif in the same year; Girodet had also produced a more accurate depiction of Napoleon’s battle to regain Cairo, in about the same year.

He painted another even more explicit erotic romance the following year, showing Narcissus, Morpheus and Iris (1811). Iris, the Greek personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods, sits at the upper right on a bench of clouds, her ethereal wrap forming her short wings. Morpheus (from whose name is derived morphine), the god of dreams, is the smaller winged figure in the middle, looking up at Iris.

Often omitted from the title of this painting, the sleeping male is Narcissus, whose beauty was so great that he fell in love with his own reflected image. I have been unable to find any mythological accounts which link Narcissus with Iris, although both are flowers.

Guérin returned to more conventional history painting with the likes of Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy (c 1815), taken from Virgil’s Aeneid book 4. The hero Aeneas arrives in Carthage on his epic journey following the fall of Troy. Dido, legendary founder and first monarch of Carthage, falls in love with Aeneas. After an intense romance, Aeneas is told by the gods that he must not stay in Carthage, so he leaves with his small fleet of ships. Abandoned, Dido kills herself on her own funeral pyre.

This painting shows the beginnings of the romance, and does not provide clues – such as the presence of Aeneas’ ships – of its tragic outcome. The diminutive beauty being embraced by Dido is probably not intended to be human, although it is unlikely to be Juno or Venus who acted together to make the love affair happen. Jeanne Huet was apparently the model for Dido: she may have been the older sister of painter Paul Huet, later one of Guérin’s pupils.

Phaedra and Hippolytus (1815) tells the story of another ill-fated love affair. Although unusually well composed and executed, in accordance with Alberti’s rules, and almost neo-Classical in its crispness, its narrative founders because there are so many different versions of the story.

Theseus was the mythical founder-hero-king of Athens, who married Phaedra, but earlier had a son, Hippolytus, either by the queen of the Amazons or her sister. Hippolytus was, in some versions, sworn to live a chaste life, scorning Aphrodite for Artemis. Phaedra, his stepmother, fell in love with Hippolytus, and (according to Euripides’ version) sent her nurse to tell Hippolytus of that love.

Hippolytus rejected Phaedra’s advances, so she then wrote a note to Theseus claiming that Hippolytus had raped her, and (in some versions) committed suicide. Theseus believed Phaedra’s claim, and cursed Hippolytus, causing his death.

By this time, this story had been told in several different variants, by Euripides, Seneca the Younger, and Jean Racine in plays, and in two operas, as well as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Guérin’s painting shows an angry Theseus sat beside an alarmed Phaedra, on whose lap is a sword. Whispering secrets into Phaedra’s ear is her old nurse. At the left is Artemis/Diana, who holds up her left hand as if to stop Theseus’ thoughts.

Unravelling the story is a complicated task. Clearly Theseus must be angry because of Phaedra’s lie about her rape by Hippolytus, and Artemis must be trying to tell him of Hippolytus’ chastity. Phaedra and her nurse must be discussing the situation, perhaps that Hippolytus has vowed not to reveal who told him of Phaedra’s love for him; the sword on Phaedra’s lap could perhaps be ready for her intended suicide.

The story in Guérin’s next painting of doomed relationships, Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon (1817), is thankfully taken in part from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and much clearer. Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae (Argos), and Clytemnestra his wife. She was one of the famous clutch of children produced by Leda, queen of Sparta, when she was impregnated by both Zeus (in the form of a swan) and her husband Tyndareus, who was Clytemnestra’s father.

When Agamemnon was away fighting the Trojan War, Clytemnestra had a love affair with his cousin, Aegisthus. On her husband’s return with Cassandra as his concubine, Aegisthus urged Clytemnestra to murder first Agamemnon, then Cassandra. Although accounts vary of their deaths, in this painting Guérin shows Clytemnestra about to kill her husband while he is asleep in bed, with a short sword. After those murders, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra ruled as king and queen of Mycenae, until Agamemnon’s son Orestes murdered her in turn.

Guérin heightens the drama here with his use of red throughout the canvas, and uses classical narrative devices to great effect.

The Greek poet Sappho is now known for a tiny fraction of the 10,000 or so lines of poetry she is believed to have written, and controversial interpretations of her sexuality. Guérin addresses neither in his Sappho on the Leucadian Cliff, but shows an almost certainly fictional account of her death, by throwing herself from the Leucadian Cliffs (on the Ionian Isles, on the west coast of Greece), apparently for the unrequited love of Phaon, a ferryman.

Guérin paints a portrait of her looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references to the past (her love, or poetry), or her imminent suicide.

In 1822, Guérin became the Director of the French Academy in Rome, and did not return to Paris until 1828, when he was made a Baron. His health then broke down, so he returned to Rome with Horace Vernet, only to die shortly afterwards in 1833. He was buried next to Claude Lorrain, as a mark of the respect which he had earned. Among his many pupils were Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Ary Scheffer, and Léon Cogniet.

During the remainder of the century, the Prix de Rome remained stultified in its own past. Once an excellent way to spot and develop talent, it helped prevent narrative painting from addressing its problems, and tried to stifle change in art. It was finally pushed over its Leucadian Cliffs in 1968, a century after it had ceased to have any useful function.

Reference

Wikipedia.

I recently praised Domenico Morelli’s superior composition in his The Conversion of Saint Paul (1876). This article explores earlier paintings of this popular story from the New Testament, to see how the previous Masters had tackled it, and whether my claim is justifiable.

I regret that there is one important painting of this story which I am unable to show here: one of the several versions painted by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), such as that in the Courtauld Gallery, London. This is because non-commercial use of images of that work, and at least one other Rubens in Austria, is not permitted under a standard CC or similar licence. Images of that work are therefore omitted from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, etc.

The story

According to chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul – then known as Saul – was a zealous Pharisee who was engaged in the intense persecution of early followers of Jesus Christ. In around 33-36 CE, when he was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus in Syria, on a mission of persecution, he experienced a blinding light and the voice of Jesus, asking why he persecuted him.

Saul first fell to the ground, then converted, becoming Saint Paul, one of the founding fathers of the early Christian church. For three days after he saw the blinding light, he remained blind, and did not eat or drink, but his sight was restored when he visited Ananias of Damascus.

As with the story of the judgement of Solomon, there would only appear to be one moment which can be depicted in a single narrative painting: the climax and peripeteia, in which Saul/Paul sees the blinding light and hears the heavenly voice.

A few paintings do not show that moment, but the rather weaker narrative of Paul’s sight being restored by Ananias in Damascus.

There are three key elements which a narrative painting should aim to include:

• Saul/Paul’s face and its expression,
• the heavenly light,
• the road to Damascus.

The compositional problem is that for Paul’s face to be clearly visible, it must be turned towards the viewer. However, for it to be illuminated by the heavenly light at that moment, that light would have to fall from behind the viewer, which makes it very difficult to show as a heavenly light, as its origin will be virtual. Solving that appears to be one of the important problems posed of the painter.

The paintings

Parmigianino’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (1525-7) shows Paul on the ground, having been thrown from his horse, looking up to the top of the painting, and holding his left arm and hand out as if he can no longer see. His facial expression shows surprise, but the only heavenly light seen is that at the upper left of the painting, which does not match the shadows either.

Parmigianino fills much of the image with the rearing horse, which heightens the moment of drama. Although there are clearly issues with his depiction of the heavenly light, and Paul’s companions are nowhere to be seen, this is a powerful account of the story. References to the past are essentially absent, and the even more difficult task of making reference to Paul’s future is also avoided.

Michelangelo’s The Conversion of Saul (c 1542-5) has a confusion of figures, from which Paul only gradually becomes clear, on the ground in the centre of the lower edge of the fresco. Here, Paul is an old bearded man, clearly blinded by the heavenly light, and has also fallen off his horse, which is still rearing just below the centre. The snag is that the heavenly light – shown particularly clearly – comes from the figure of Jesus at the top.

In the Biblical account, Paul’s companions can neither see the blinding light nor hear the voice which Paul can; Michelangelo departs from that, with many in the party looking up to the heavens, and a couple even holding their arms up as if to shield themselves, in the way that Paul does with his left arm. The role of the other figures shown in the heavens is also a mystery to me.

Lucas Cranach the Younger sets his The Conversion of Saul (1549) in mediaeval northern Europe, with Paul and his party riding knightly chargers in their armour. Paul’s horse has fallen to the ground, with Paul still in the saddle – and not prostrate on the ground. Paul holds his hands up and looks to the heavens, where the figure of Christ is seen in a break in the clouds at the top left corner. It is possible that the overpainted shaft of light from there has faded over the centuries.

Adam Elsheimer’s small The Conversion of Saint Paul (c 1598) painted, as usual, on copper, is an original composition which shows the outcome of a mediaeval skirmish, with all the horses in trouble, and Paul’s mount stretched out on its back in severe distress. Although he does line Paul’s face up with the heavenly light at the top of the painting, that occludes his face almost completely, and it is hard to guess which of the figures is Paul.

Although this is the first attempt to align the light and Paul’s eyes in accordance with physics, it demonstrates the problems that arise in doing so.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder takes the setting of his The Conversion of Paul (1567) to an Alpine pass, with spectacular scenery for a seriously challenging road to Damascus. Unfortunately Paul is lost in the dense column of soldiers, knights, and other travellers who are struggling up the vertiginous route. He may be just to the right and above the centre of the painting, but is harder to make out than the shaft of light which falls from the heavens.

Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (1600) heads in the opposite direction: here is a small, intertwined group struggling in impenetrable blackness. Paul reclines on the ground at the front, both hands covering his face, his body language more than making up for the absence of facial expression. Behind him horses have become spooked, and arms are held out to help Paul back up to his feet. The light from which Paul is shielding his eyes is clearly coming from the sky, but we are not shown its heavenly origin.

Caravaggio’s second version uses a similarly-dressed figure for Paul, but otherwise is very different. In his Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1600-01), Paul lies back, eyes closed, arms held up to the heavens. His horse stands more peacefully, its bridle held by another in the party. Although fine and detailed studies of the figures, both his paintings neglect the narrative.

Guido Reni’s The Conversion of Saul (c 1615-1620) refers to Parmigianino’s painting of almost a century earlier, although it employs a different composition. Paul has just been thrown from his horse, who remains in distress with its head raised towards the bright light in a break in the clouds. Paul is in clear disarray, but gives not a clue that he is in blinding light, and with his face turned partly towards the apparent source, it isn’t even possible to see whether his eyes are closed. His arms do not shield his eyes, though.

David Teniers the Elder puts the figures and action in the lower quarter of a finely-painted landscape with trees. His The Conversion of Saint Paul still manages to tell much of the story, though. Paul, dressed in blue, rests on his back, his right leg still up on the saddle of his fallen horse. He stares at the shaft of light falling from Jesus Christ in the top left corner. One of the party is trying to help Paul back up, while others attend from the left of his horse.

As Elsheimer did, Teniers shows more general disarray among the horses, with three others (one of which is being ridden by a passing soldier) affected. However there are no clear references to the past or future in the painting.

Teniers has solved the compositional problem, but at the cost of making the figures smaller and more distant, which loses some of the drama and impact which could have been achieved from closer in.

Luca Giordano’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (c 1690) shows total mayhem. A truly blinding light falls from heaven as Paul’s horse rears and falls violently. Paul holds his left hand up to shield his eyes, but his face is barely visible. Around him, the other horses and their riders are either on the ground already, or their mounts are bolting. That brilliant light sets all in sharp relief against the black shadows.

Another powerful painting, it works around the problem of not showing Paul’s face with its strong body language and lighting, and succeeds in telling the story, although as with the other works it lacks a past or future.

Jérôme Cartellier’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (1859) is almost as full of action. Paul’s horse has fallen, and the rider lies on the ground, staring up at the brilliant light. The rest of the party is trying to regain control of their own mounts, and reach Paul to help him.

Although Cartellier’s composition almost finds the right compromise, Paul is clearly looking up at a light which is on the viewer’s side of the picture plane, and the shafts shown at the top left corner do not quite coincide.

Domenico Morelli’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (1876) tries a novel solution, which I think works best of all. Accepting the contradictory requirements, he puts Paul in the brilliant light, showing its origin in the heavens, but has him face away from it. Now blinded by that light, Paul looks – with clearly unseeing eyes – towards the viewer, his right arm and hand outstretched.

Another impressive detail is that the rest of the party are looking in different directions, making it clear that they are unable to identify the origins of Paul’s distress.

Then there is the matter of clues to the past and future. Morelli even accounts for those in the scroll at the bottom left corner, which might contain details of the Christians who he seeks to persecute in Damascus, and is a reference to his future epistles and other writings for the Christian Church. All without the complications, and potential controversy, of any horses.

Reference

Wikipedia.

There are many different ways of creating dynamic text in notes (writing spaces) in Storyspace and Tinderbox. This short tutorial is aimed at those who already know the basics, and can for example create text links, and who want to make use of the new text substitution features in the latest versions. If you are still using an older version of Storyspace or Tinderbox, you will almost certainly need to update to the current release in order to be able to complete this.

When Storyspace (which will include Tinderbox, where appropriate) displays text in a writing space (note) in Read mode – the only mode available in Storyspace Reader – that text is processed to perform any substitutions, which are marked by inline commands prefaced by a carat mark ^. You can use these to display dynamic content, which can be determined by attributes, or by reader actions such as clicking on blue text links.

Create a new Storyspace document. Using the Inspector, create two user attributes:

• theName, a string with a default value of “Me”,
• theBoolean, a Boolean with a default value of true.

Select the start writing space, and expose those two attributes.

Simple text substitution using ^value

Replace the text in the start writing space with
This document has been personalised for ^value($theName).

This simply looks up the value of the attribute $theName, and inserts it in the text. Edit the value of $theName to your real name, and you will see it appear in the text when it is viewed in Read mode.

Including text from another writing space (unconditional)

Add a writing space named note1, containing the following text:
This text has been included from the writing space named “note1”, and will always be so included.

Then append the following to the text in start:
^include(/note1)

When you switch to Read mode, the text from note1 is inserted in the text of start.

Conditional inclusion of text

Add a writing space named note2, containing the following text:
This text has been included from the writing space named “note2” because theBoolean attribute is true.

Then append the following to the text in start:
^if($theBoolean) ^include(/note2) ^else theBoolean is set to false. ^endif

Observe that, in Read mode, the text which appears in start now varies according to whether $theBoolean is true or false. If true, then the text from note2 is included; if false, then the text given (“theBoolean is set to false.“) appears instead.

Stretchtext

Begin by creating three additional writing spaces, and using text links to them to answer a simple three-way question. In the writing space start, enter the text
The next major version of macOS is named:
Copper
Yosemite
Sierra
(click on the correct answer).

Then create a writing space named copperanswer, containing the response to be shown if the reader selects that, something like:
Incorrect: there has not been any version of macOS named Copper.

Create a writing space named yosemiteanswer, containing:
Incorrect: Yosemite was the name of the previous version to El Capitan, OS X 10.10.

Create a writing space named sierraanswer, containing:
Correct: macOS 10.12 is named Sierra.

Click on start again, and create text links from each of the three answers to the appropriate writing space containing the response to that answer. This is very simple to do: double-click the answer in start, e.g. Copper, to park the link text, than drag from that parked text down to copperanswer. Repeat for the other two reponses.

Now when you switch to Read mode, clicking on a blue answer will take you to the respective writing space for that answer. Check that this works for each of the three.

Switch back to Edit mode, and click on start. Now edit the three answers without altering the blue text (to preserve those text links). For each, paste
^stretch(
before the blue text, and type in
, copperanswer)
immediately after the blue text for the first answer, and similarly for
, yosemiteanswer)
and
, sierraanswer)

Save your document, switch to Read mode and click on start, and you should now be able to click on each answer and see the linked text substituted. This is stretchtext at work.

Now that we have Storyspace Reader, you should also open your document using that app, and confirm that it works properly there too. Of course in Reader you cannot directly alter the user attributes, so the values of $theName and $theBoolean are fixed. As an exercise you can extend the document so that the reader can edit their name, and change the value of $theBoolean.

My example document is here: TextSub1

Happy hypertexting!