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Reading visual art: 83 Hammers in myth and religion
Hammers, and their close relatives mallets, are among the oldest and most basic of tools, with a key role in the fabrication of most other tools. Although seldom the focus of much attention, hammers,...
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Reading visual art: 84 Hammers at work
The first of these two articles looking at the reading of hammers, mallets and their kin in paintings covered their significance in mythology and religion. This sequel looks at their depiction as...
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Arthur: 9 The quest completed
Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Perceval, together with the latter’s sister, had disembarked from their ship and freed the imprisoned Lord Hernox, then travelled on to a chapel where they were told that...
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Reading visual art: 85 Ravens and crows A
Black is, in European and some other cultures, the colour of death. So large black birds like crows and ravens are inevitably associated with death as well. As they feed on carrion, they’re not...
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Reading visual art: 86 Ravens and crows B
By the late nineteenth century, large black birds like crows and ravens were well-established in European painting as signs of death and harbingers of doom. Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), Ruin by the Sea...
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Who had John the Baptist killed? 1 Herodias
It’s unusual, perhaps unique, for paintings to have changed the accepted account of a significant event, and to have generated a popular archetype that has since become pervasive. In this and...
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Who had John the Baptist killed? 2 Salome
By the middle of the nineteenth century, some ambiguity had been developing in the biblical story of Herod’s party, Salome’s dance, and the execution of Saint John the Baptist. Although the underlying...
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Arthur: 10 Elaine of Astolat
After the the quest for the Holy Grail had been completed, the surviving knights of the Round Table returned to Camelot. Malory tells the story of Lancelot’s intensified affair with Queen Guenevere,...
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Reading visual art: 87 Rope A
Rope is one of our oldest known tools, and widely used in activities from farming and boating to climbing and exploration. Like most of our tools, it rarely makes the limelight in paintings and visual...
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Reading visual art: 88 Rope B
As such a common, everyday tool, rope seldom features prominently in paintings. In yesterday’s article I showed how it wove a thread through Tintoretto’s series of the Passion in the albergo of the...
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Arthur: 11 The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson’s poem about the Lady of Shalott was derived from a thirteenth century Italian novella Donna do Scalotta, rather than Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. This isn’t associated with events...
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Reading visual art: 89 Oil lamps A
The coming of first gas then electric light transformed the night, and replaced one of the most common household items after candles, the oil lamp. In this article and the next I look at various...
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Reading visual art: 90 Oil lamps B
Oil lamps were essential aids to painters, as they enabled them to work after dark before the advent of gas and electric lighting. They also enabled the use of chiaroscuro. Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610),...
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Celebrating 300 years since the birth of Gavin Hamilton, Scottish painter in...
When Benjamin West, the American artist who later became president of the Royal Academy, arrived in Rome in 1760 to learn how to paint history, he was mentored by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798), a Scottish...
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Arthur: 12 Division and treachery
Returning to Malory’s account of Arthur, after the tragic death of Elaine the Fair Maid of Astolat, Queen Guenevere had asked Sir Lancelot for mercy over her previous anger towards him. After...
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Rescued from the sea-monster: Paintings of Andromeda
This weekend, in my occasional series looking at women in major narrative paintings, I cover two almost identical stories of women who are rescued from the jaws of a sea-monster: Andromeda, who was...
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Rescued from the sea-monster: Paintings of Angelica
In the first of these two articles, I looked at paintings of the story of Andromeda, who in classical myth was rescued from a sea-monster by the hero Perseus, who then married her as his prize. A...
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Arthur: 13 The death of Arthur
Most puzzling of all about Malory’s book is that, despite its title of The Death of Arthur, after hundreds of pages of tales about the king and his knights, Arthur’s death is covered in just two pages....
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Reading visual art: 93 Dawn or dusk?
The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. Today and tomorrow I...
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Reading visual art: 94 Time of day
In the first of these two articles looking at how to read the time of day in paintings, I considered that trickiest question, whether it’s dusk or dawn. Here I look at telling what time of day it is...
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