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Reading visual art: 21 Footwear
Everyone looks at faces in paintings, and we all too seldom look at the feet at the other end of the body. Today and tomorrow I show paintings in which reading the feet is valuable for the additional...
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Reading visual art: 22 Feet
In yesterday’s article in this series, I looked at the reading of footwear. This sequel bares all and looks at feet. Feet, and their care, play a significant and visual part in Christian teaching, when...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 29: King John
For the leading British English writer, many of William Shakespeare’s plays are set outside the British Isles. His most British works are his histories, including King John, although in more recent...
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Painted Stories in Britain 18: Towards a history
Over the last few months, I have been looking at the development of narrative painting in Britain. This final article in the series tries to summarise its history, and provide a table of contents to...
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Reading visual art: 23 Transformation 1
There’s one book you’re likely to have found in every artist’s studio from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, a well-used copy of a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His stories have...
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Reading visual art: 24 Transformation 2
In the first of this pair of articles showing paintings of transformation, I concentrated on the more popular myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This article completes those and shows a couple of...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 30: King Richard II
William Shakespeare’s Life and Death of King Richard the Second had great contemporary relevance. Telling the story of the forced abdication of a childless English king may have been a bit near the...
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Reading visual art: 25 Dreams classical
Dreams are a common everynight experience that have come to feature in many stories. Although they’re easily contained in verbal narrative, painting a dream is a challenge for the visual artist. At the...
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Reading visual art: 26 Dreams modern
In the previous article, I looked at the depiction of dreams following the Renaissance convention for showing a composite image including what the dreamer might have seen of their dream had they looked...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 31: King Richard III
Normally considered to be one of William Shakespeare’s history plays, King Richard III may have been intended as a tragedy, and is second only to Hamlet in its length. It’s likely to have been written...
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Reading visual art: 27 Eagle and owl
Birds can appear in narrative paintings as mere staffage, decoration of the sky, or to lend a natural atmosphere, but when the artist has gone to the lengths of making the type of bird distinguishable,...
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Reading visual art: 28 Peacock and dove
In yesterday’s article I showed examples of eagles and owls with specific readings. Today it’s the turn of peacocks and doves. Peacock The bird of Zeus or Jupiter is the eagle; that of his consort Hera...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 32: Troilus and Cressida
There’s still doubt over whether William Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, set in the Trojan War, was intended to be a history or tragedy. It was most probably written in 1602, since when it has...
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Reading visual art: 29 Motion and billows
The perception of motion is crucial to many images in art. Often, paintings try to tell a story in which movement is central, but a single painting can only show a single frozen image. Depicting motion...
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Reading visual art: 30 Frozen motion and blur
In the first of these two articles looking at the depiction of motion in figures, I had diverted from motion implied by the rules we learn about the world around us, to look at billowing garments....
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When history is fiction: painted inventions of Pierre Guérin
In the many centuries before photography, history painting was the only way that people could see the past. And just like modern photography, it became a good way of delivering fictional accounts of...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays 33: Titus Andronicus
The fortunes of William Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, have changed with the times. As his most violent and bloody play, it was enormously popular at the time, then fell from favour...
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Reading visual art: 31 Two or more scenes in one image
Visual culture in the Renaissance was very different from that today. When a modern artist wants to show more than one scene from a story, they now generally split it into frames and show the scenes...
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Reading visual art: 32 Up to 23 scenes in one image
In the first of these two articles demonstrating how to identify and read multiplex narrative, where the artist has incorporated more than one scene from the story into a single integrated image, I...
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Paintings of William Shakespeare’s Plays: Contents
This article lists the contents of this series, containing paintings, and their engravings, showing scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare. Images of the paintings are set in a brief summary of...
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