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Reading visual art: 43 What’s wrong in that painting? 1
Narrative paintings can be intricate, like jigsaw puzzles, where you fit the different elements together and realise what the whole painting is telling you. Sometimes there’s a piece that looks like it...
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Reading visual art: 44 What’s wrong in that painting? 2
In the first of these two articles looking at examples of paintings in which there’s something odd and incongruous, I had reached the middle of the nineteenth century. From there on, it became...
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Trojan Epics: 4 Troy and the Greek expedition
So far, Zeus’s plan for a war between the Greeks and Trojans had been working well. He had set up the Trojan Prince Paris to abduct Helen, Queen of Sparta and wife of Menelaos, as its primary cause....
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Trojan Epics: 5 Achilles recovered and a stinky snakebite
Zeus’s planned war between the Greeks and Troy was well in motion. Possibly after a false start, the thousand ships of the Greek expeditionary force had finally sailed in fair winds from Aulis, heading...
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Reading visual art: 45 Eyes wide open
Eyes are an important means for the expression of emotions, and through their role in sight and looking, one of the central themes in much of visual art. This week I look first at eyes wide open as an...
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Reading visual art: 46 The eyes have it
In the first of these two articles looking at the reading of eyes in paintings, I focussed on eyes wide open, particularly in surprise and horror. This article starts with a favourite illusion and...
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Trojan Epics: 6 Achilles and the princess
Once the Greek expeditionary force, with its thousand ships, had landed on the coast of the Troad, Trojan territory surrounding the fortified city, battle was soon joined, and both sides took...
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Suppers, Veronese and the Inquisition
Paintings were an excellent way of brightening up the eating halls or refectories of monasteries. During the sixteenth century, religious orders commissioned many large works depicting feasts or...
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Trojan Epics: 7 Greeks in trouble
When the leading Greek warrior Achilles withdrew his support for Agamemnon over the removal of his concubine Briseis, the war against Troy was reaching a turning point. After the Greek expeditionary...
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Reading visual art: 47 Shadow play
Visual art, painting in particular, is all about light and its opposite, dark. This week’s two articles about reading visual art therefore look at two visual devices using light and darkness: this one...
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Reading visual art: 48 In the spotlight
Just as artists use the darkness in shadows in telling a visual story, as shown in yesterday’s article, so they bring light to bear its part. This sequel shows some examples of what’s now termed the...
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Painting Pandora’s story 1
Few classical myths remained almost undiscovered and untold in paintings until the nineteenth century. The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is one that was almost unknown in painting until 1850, when it...
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Painting Pandora’s story 2
In the first of these two articles, I outlined the original Greek myth of Pandora and her jar of evils, and showed paintings of her up to 1882. These underwent a change between 1834 and 1860, in which...
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Reading visual art: 49 Heaven
Heaven and Paradise are concepts rather more peculiar to Christianity, and although there are pre-Christian equivalents in earlier and different European traditions, such as Arcadia and the Elysian...
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Reading visual art: 50 Hell
Most religions have a concept or doctrine of Hell, a state or form of existence to which those who transgress during their life on earth pass when they die. Although Dante’s Inferno presents an...
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Reading visual art: 51 Hercules and changing gender
We tend to think of European attitudes to gender as being completely inflexible until the late twentieth century, with cross-dressing and trans-gender as major taboos until recently. That certainly...
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Reading visual art: 52 The capital crime of cross-dressing
In yesterday’s look at the fluidity of gender in classical mythology, and its depictions in later paintings, its centrepiece was the very masculine hero Hercules dressed in women’s clothes. More than a...
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Trojan Epics: 10 The death of Achilles
With the leading Trojan warrior Hector dead, and his body returned to his father King Priam, the Greeks and Trojans observed a truce of twelve days for the funeral and mourning. It’s here that Homer’s...
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Reading visual art: 53 Music A
If music can evoke mental images, then can paintings put music in our head, even a little earworm, perhaps? It’s a challenge that many painters have risen to. In today’s and tomorrow’s articles I’ll...
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Reading visual art: 54 Music B
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of musicians playing music, I had reached Degas’ painting of the Orchestra at the Opera from 1870. With the rise of Impressionism in France,...
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