Ghosts, the visible semblances of dead people, are surprisingly mostly literary devices, and are very unusual in paintings that aren’t retelling a written original. This is in spite of their being visual devices. In today’s and tomorrow’s articles in this series on reading paintings, I show some of the better-known examples of ghosts in paintings.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian painter Victor Borisov-Musatov took to depicting fictions of grand country estates, some of which explored darker themes. Phantoms, from 1903, shows the ghosts of young women drifting serenely in front of the steps of an elegant country house. This work became popular with some of the major Russian Symbolist authors of the time.

Literary accounts of ghosts extend back to Homer, including the Odyssey.

After Odysseus had spent a year with Circe, he summoned the ghost of the blind seer Tiresias. This hasn’t been a popular scene in painting, and I’m aware of only Henry Fuseli’s Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85) that depicts it.

It’s a moot point whether the shades of people in Dante’s Divine Comedy should be considered to be ghosts, but one couple perhaps qualifies better than most, Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, her husband’s brother, who were both murdered when caught in bed together by Francesca’s husband.

Ary Scheffer’s Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo in the Underworld from 1855 is a famous depiction.

By the time of Boccaccio’s Decameron, ghosts were becoming more common in fiction.

The third of Botticelli’s magnificent paintings of The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti from 1482-83 depicts the breakfast scene in Boccaccio’s gruesome and thoroughly secular story. I have written a fuller account of this, accompanied by images of the whole series of paintings, in this article.

This is a full-on breakfast banquet attended by members of two noble families of Ravenna, Italy. In the midst of this al fresco meal, the naked ghost of a dead woman appears, being chased by the ghost of a man on horseback. She is then attacked by ghostly dogs and murdered by the man – all in front of the guests as they’re tucking into the meal. Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women are rising in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

Ghosts became almost commonplace in the plays of William Shakespeare, and probably the richest source in paintings.

In Richard III, the king is visited by the ghosts of those he has had murdered: King Henry VI, Prince Edward, Clarence, Elizabeth’s brother and son, the two young princes in the Tower, Lady Anne, Buckingham, and others. They each curse him and wish victory to his rival Richmond. The King wakes with a start in the morning, realising that he is about to die.

In this engraving after Henry Fuseli’s painting of The Ghosts Vanish from 1805, Richard is awakening as the ghosts of his nightmare are dispersing.

That may have inspired William Blake to paint Richard III and the Ghosts the following year. The two princes in the Tower float at the King’s feet, pointing up at him accusingly.

In Julius Caesar, following the emperor’s assassination, Caesar’s ghost visits Brutus and promises to meet him at Philippi.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an extra-illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made early in his career.

Alexandre Bida’s undated painting of Brutus Sees Caesar’s Ghost has Brutus rising from his desk on the right, as Caesar’s ghost, wearing a laurel crown, points towards Philippi and Brutus’ fate there.

Edwin Austin Abbey, in his painting Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar from 1905, spatters the white robe of the ghost with the blood from multiple stab wounds.

Banquo’s ghost, who appears in Macbeth, seems to have been painted little.

Banquo suspects Macbeth of murdering Duncan; when he goes out with his son for an afternoon ride, Macbeth hires a couple of killers to murder his friend, but Banquo’s son manages to escape. At a banquet that night, to which Banquo had been invited, Macbeth is horrified to see his friend’s ghost sat in his seat. Théodore Chassériau painted Banquo’s Ghost in 1854-55.