There are two phases of the moon commonly shown in paintings: a full or Harvest moon, most usually seen in works showing the harvest of cereals in the late summer or early autumn/fall, and a crescent moon with its more symbolic associations. This article shows a small selection of the latter.
The most frequent association with the symbol of the crescent moon is the goddess Artemis (the Roman Diana), who is often depicted with it set into a coronet, where it ambiguously resembles a pair of horns. This is an orientation very seldom seen in nature: it can’t occur during the normal lunar cycle, but only briefly during some lunar eclipses.
Giuseppe Cesari’s account of the unfortunate encounter between Diana and Actaeon (1602-03) shows this clearly. Actaeon, who has accidentally run into Diana while she’s bathing, is here in the process of being transformed into a stag, who will be killed by his own hunting dogs.
This also makes simple the identification of Diana from this group of women attending The Birth of Adonis, as painted by Marcantonio Franceschini in about 1692-1709. She’s acting in her role of the goddess of childbirth, in handing the infant over to Venus to act as wet nurse.
Jules LeFebvre’s portrait of the goddess from 1879 also shows her bow, indicating her role as the supreme huntress, and gives her a pre-Christian glow effect to indicate her divine nature.
Classical Greek myth didn’t consider Artemis to be the goddess of the moon, though, a role normally assigned to Selene, with some overlap with Hecate.
Ubaldo Gandolfi’s Selene and Endymion from about 1770 show Selene, with Eros armed beside her, gazing longingly at the sleeping Endymion, as her cloak billows behind towards the crescent moon, in its symbolic orientation.
In the nineteenth century, some artists preferred the distinctive form of a nude woman curved to form a crescent moon inside a circle, as shown in Albert Aublet’s atmospheric Selene from 1880.
Although more unusual, in paintings at least, Diana’s crescent moon transferred to Marian iconology, where it appears under the feet of the Virgin Mary in heaven.
In Hieronymus Bosch’s Saint John on Patmos from 1490-95, the saint is shown seated, writing, in the midst of a deep and extensive landscape, looking up towards a vision of the Virgin Mary and Child.
On a raised hillock deeper into the painting is an angel, whose wings bear decoration in the manner of a peacock. The angel is pointing to the heavenly vision, set in a golden disk similar to the sun, showing the Virgin Mary dressed in blue, who holds the infant Christ on her lap, over a crescent moon.
A similar symbol appears in Jacopo Tintoretto’s Archangel Michael in Combat with Lucifer from almost a century later. Beneath the Virgin Mary carrying the infant Jesus with her left foot resting on a crescent moon, and the figure of God the Father at the upper right, Michael is shown impaling the devil.
From the early nineteenth century the crescent moon became a feature in the sky of pastoral paintings.
William Blake’s opening watercolour for his series on the Old Testament figure of Job from about 1805-06 shows Job and His Family stood in prayer around an old oak tree, before he was plagued by awful events. They’re surrounded by sheep in a pastoral landscape, the sun setting at the left, and a thin crescent moon at the right. Musical instruments hang in the lower branches of the tree, and a traditional English country town is seen in the background at the left.
Between 1826-35, Samuel Palmer lived and painted in the village of Shoreham, Kent, during a formative period in his art. Moonlight, a Landscape with Sheep is taken from one of his Shoreham sketchbooks, from around 1831-33, and progresses from Blake’s Job and His Family to explore an enchanted rolling countryside which became characteristic of many of Palmer’s best paintings.
It also appears in Jules Breton’s magnificent Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) from 1859. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, this loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he too can retire for the night.
Finally, a dazzling moon is prominent in Vincent van Gogh’s Road with Cypress and Star (1890), painted just two months before his death. This is perhaps his ultimate expression of the form, texture, and colours of cypress trees in Provence, his swirling brushstrokes rising to form halos around its crescent moon and solitary star.