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Paintings of Forbidden Love: Hero and Leander
On the third of May 1810, the twenty-two year-old British poet and writer Lord Byron entered the waters of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), and swam for his life, zigzagging through the strong...
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Paintings of Forbidden Love: Pyramus and Thisbe
Often billed as the greatest love story, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is but one of many derivatives of an ancient legend first recorded by Ovid as a story within his Metamorphoses. It’s told...
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Trojan Epics: 11 Paris killed and the Trojan Horse
With the lead warriors of both sides dead in the tenth year of the war, the Greeks had yet to make any impression on the city of Troy, whose walls stood as solid as they had been at the start. As was...
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Reading visual art: 55 Lions
Lions weren’t uncommon in southern Europe until their local extinction in about 100 CE, and even then they lived on in North Africa and the Middle East. As a result, they appear in literary sources...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: Introduction
Each summer I write a series covering an artist whose work we might think we know, but don’t really know well enough. This year my choice is one of the most important visual artists of the nineteenth...
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Trojan Epics: 12 Extinguishing the line
The Trojans had ignored the prophecies, turned their backs on soothsayers and their dire warnings, and towed the wooden horse inside the city, convincing themselves that they had finally beaten the...
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Reading visual art: 56 Tortoises
Sometimes we see things in paintings that are strange and appear unexplained. If you’ve come across Gustave Moreau’s painting of Orpheus (1865), you will have noticed that there are a couple of...
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Trojan Epics: 13 The Sack of Troy
The ultimate purpose of the Trojan War as far as Zeus was concerned was to reduce the number of mortal humans, something that had worked well over the ten years of the war. In its final stages the god...
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Reading visual art: 57 Tridents and bidents
Tridents are an ancient form of spear giving you three chances of striking home instead of just one. Long used for fishing, they and their relative the bident are unusual but significant symbols in...
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Folk Tales in Paintings: Robin Hood and other merry men
Folk tales are often oral stories that have some foundation in history, but embellish their heroes to make them champions of the ordinary people, more legend than fact. This weekend I show paintings of...
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Folk Tales in Paintings: Lady Godiva and Wanda
After yesterday’s stories of Robin Hood and other men, today I look at paintings of two women from legend. The first is Lady Godiva, who stars in one of the most unusual of British folk tales. There’s...
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Trojan Epics: 14 Odysseus and Polyphemus
Odysseus had played a major role in the Trojan War, having conceived the plan for the wooden horse that brought victory and the destruction of the city of Troy after ten years of bitter fighting. When...
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Reading visual art: 58 Sickles
The sickle is an example of a symbol whose meaning has been repurposed since the early twentieth century. Before 1917, when Lenin selected a design dominated by a hammer and sickle as the Soviet...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: 3 Massacre at Chios
The French proverb une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps, or its English equivalent one swallow doesn’t make a summer, applied only too well to success at the Salon. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) knew...
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Trojan Epics: 15 Escape from Circe
After escaping from Polyphemus, Odysseus’ crew released the bag of winds while he was asleep, and all apart from Odysseus’ ship were destroyed by cannibals. His remaining ship sailed on to the island...
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Reading visual art: 59 Aegis
The ancient Greek language used in Homer’s accounts of the war against Troy must have been as obscure to later classical authors as it is to modern scholars, leaving some of its terms ill-defined....
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Trojan Epics: 16 Sirens and Calypso
At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she helpfully advised him that he would have to sail past the Sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their...
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Reading visual art: 60 Crescent moon
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...
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Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: 5 Liberty
Following the scathing criticism of his large painting The Death of Sardanapalus at the Salon in 1827-28, Delacroix had been threatened with withdrawal of State commissions. Fortunately he had already...
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Trojan Epics: 17 Meeting Nausicaä
Atlas’s daughter Calypso had detained Odysseus for seven years before the gods finally released him, and he managed to escape from the island of Ogygia on a raft. He was then wrecked in a storm...
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