The simplest way to tell a story in visual art is over a series of images, with each in the series depicting a single instant in time, then read by the viewer in sequence. This has been used throughout the history of painting in Europe, and in this and next week’s sequel I show some of the more memorable multi-image painted stories.

The gruesome tale of Nastagio Degli Onesti told by Boccaccio in his Decameron (1348-53) became well-known and popular through the fifteenth century, sufficient for it to be depicted in four tempera panels given on the occasion of the arranged marriage of Gianozzo Pucci and Lucretia Bini in 1483. The couple were particularly fortunate in that one of those who made that arrangement, and who had this gift made for them, was Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’, who was also Botticelli’s patron at the time, and ruler of the Florentine Republic.

Nastagio degli Onesti was a young man from an old and noble family in Ravenna, who inherited a huge fortune, then fell in love with the daughter of a more noble family. His love for her wasn’t returned, though, and she was persistently cruel towards him. This caused the young Nastagio so much grief that he even contemplated suicide.

He continued to try to win her over, and in the course of that spent much of his inheritance. Friends and relatives feared for him and his future, and tried to persuade him to leave the city for a while. He was very reluctant, but finally travelled to Classe, three miles away, in May when the weather was fine.

Once there he wandered off into the local pine woods, thinking as he always did about his cruel love. As he walked in the wood, he heard the screams of a woman in distress. He then caught sight of her running naked towards him. In hot pursuit was a pair of large mastiff dogs, and behind them was a mounted knight brandishing a sword and threatening to kill her.

Nastagio took up a tree branch in her defence, but the knight ordered him by name to keep out, and let him and his dogs give the sinful woman what she deserved. Nastagio challenged the knight, who dismounted and introduced himself as Guido degli Anastagi. He then explained that he had fallen deeply in love with this woman many years ago, but she too had rejected him cruelly. As a result, Guido had killed himself, and was condemned to eternal punishment for that sin. The woman had died shortly afterwards, without repenting her cruelty, and she too was condemned to eternal punishment for her sin.

Their punishment consisted of Guido having to hunt her down in the woods, kill her using the same sword with which he had committed suicide, then cut her back open and remove her stone cold heart. That and her other organs he then has to feed to his dogs. After a short break, she is magically restored, and he has to resume hunting her as before.

Nastagio was horrified by this, stepped back, and watched the dead Guido kill the dead woman with his rapier, and go through the sequence of cutting out her heart and organs. A few moments later, after the ghostly dogs had eaten her organs, the dead woman jumped up and the hunt started all over again.

When he had recovered from the shock, Nastagio came up with a plan to deal with his own predicament. He summoned his friends and relatives, and agreed to stop trying to woo the woman that he loved on one condition, that she and her family should join him in the same place in the pine wood exactly one week later, for a magnificent breakfast banquet.

A week later all her family were present at the meal in the wood, and Nastagio carefully seated the woman he loved so she would get a grandstand view of the proceedings. No sooner had the last course been served, than they heard the dead woman’s screams, and she ran right in front of them.

Many of the guests tried to stop Guido from carrying out this punishment, so he explained to them what he had told Nastagio the week before. Eventually the ghostly couple rushed off again, and the guests talked avidly about what they had witnessed. But the person who was most affected by the spectacle was the cruel woman who Nastagio loved, who had perhaps already put herself in the position of the dead woman.

Nastagio’s plan paid off: the woman he loved soon sent him a servant to inform him that she would do anything he desired. She quickly consented to marriage, and they were wedded the following Sunday.

Although Botticelli’s series tells the story in four images, the first two also incorporate multiplex narrative to add further moments of the story.

The first panel shows the two figures of Nastagio, at the left, in the pine wood, with a naked woman running towards him, a mastiff sinking its teeth into her buttock. Behind them at the right is Guido, his sword ready to kill the woman when he catches her. In the distance is a coastal landscape intended to locate this near Ravenna, which is close to the Adriatic, although that’s idealised not representative.

Botticelli continues telling the story using multiplex narrative in his second painting. The dead Guido has now caught the dead woman, killed her with his rapier, and with her lying on her face, he is cutting her back open to remove her cold heart. His dogs are already eating her organs at the right, and Nastagio is visibly distressed at the left. Behind that composite is an earlier scene of Guido and his dogs still in pursuit of the woman, preceding the image in the first painting.

In the third painting, Botticelli shows the breakfast banquet a week later, with the dead woman being attacked by Guido’s dogs, and Guido himself about to catch and kill her, in front of Nastagio’s guests. Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women have risen in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

The fourth and final panel shows Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

The first artist to specialise in multi-image narrative was the English painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697–1764), who told a succession of moralising stories in his series, aimed primarily at the lucrative market for prints he had made of them. He is also one of relatively few visual artists to have told stories that were novel and had no established or well-known literary basis. His story of Marriage A-la-Mode, painted in about 1743, is among his best, and is told well in his series of six oil paintings, summarised as follows.

A marriage is arranged between the son of the Earl of Squander, Viscount Squanderfield, and the daughter of an Alderman. The Earl of Squander has title and nobility but is near-bankrupt; on the other hand, the Alderman has wealth but no title or nobility. Despite their marriage, both pursue their own lives, she in an affair with Silvertongue, the Alderman’s lawyer, and he in brothels and other places of ill-repute. He inevitably contracts syphilis from prostitutes. She rises in society, attending masquerade balls and engaging in liaisons there.

After a masquerade, she takes Silvertongue to a rooming house to sleep with him, but is discovered there by her husband. Silvertongue kills her husband in the ensuing sword fight, and makes his escape through the window, only to be arrested later. He is tried for the Viscount’s murder, and hanged. She returns to her father, the Alderman, where she drinks poison and dies, her infant child, born with congenital syphilis, reaching out for its mother.

The Marriage Settlement. Hogarth opens the series in the Earl of Squander’s bedroom, in his town house, where the Earl and the Alderman, and their lawyers, are agreeing a contract of marriage and settlement for the Earl’s son, Viscount Squanderfield, to marry the Alderman’s daughter.

The Earl brandishes his nobility at every opportunity. At his left hand is a spurious family pedigree tracing his ancestry back to William the Conqueror. Coronets decorate many items in the room, even his crutches. He is finely dressed in an old-fashioned court style, but suffers from gout. Outside, the builders of his new, more grandiose, house are idle as he has finally run out of money.

The Alderman is something of a social misfit, wearing plain rather than elegant clothes. He clutches the centrepiece of the painting, the document of marriage settlement, while he and the Earl continue to haggle over it. However, his money, in the form of bags of gold coins, is already spread in front of the Earl.

At the left, backs towards one another, are the bride and groom. The Viscount is dressed in the latest fashion, but is clearly a foolish fop. On the left side of his neck, he already bears the black pox-mark of syphilis. His bride is in intimate discussion with her father’s young lawyer, Silvertongue. She wears her wedding dress in anticipation of the settlement, but is sullen and disengaged.

In front of the couple, a dog and bitch are chained together, as the bride and groom soon will be. Behind them all, the paintings are ‘dark old masters’, including the ominous Medusa, martyrdoms of Saints Lawrence and Agnes, Cain Slaying Abel, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes, culminating by the window in a huge portrait of the Earl. Hogarth used similar paintings in a painting to augment the stories in his other series.

The Tête à Tête. Some months after the wedding, the Viscount has returned from a night in gaming houses and brothels. A dog sniffs at a scented cap in his jacket pocket, from one of the prostitutes, and another is wrapped around his sword, which lies broken inside its scabbard on the floor in front of him. He is the worse for wear, and his pox-mark plainly visible on his neck.

She is not bothered by the Viscount’s condition, but has a knowing smile which could indicate her early pregnancy, suggested by her posture, or her continuing affair with Silvertongue. Behind her are the cards from a whist party. In front of the couple, two violins in cases are positioned to suggest the act of copulation. The rest of the room exudes bad taste.

In the background, a slovenly footman is loafing idly. On the left, the steward has abandoned his attempt to get the Viscount to settle a thick sheaf of bills. Further cues are provided by the paintings, most notably one largely obscured by a green curtain: the little glimpse we are given suggests it shows sexual activity too explicit to be seen, and a reminder of the couple’s separate couplings.

The Inspection. Hogarth next takes us to a doctor’s consulting room where the Viscount, who appears familiar with the room, is in company with a young girl and an older woman most probably her mother, both of them prostitutes. They’re seeking the aid of a doctor who is thoroughly foul in appearance, and himself suffering from severe congenital syphilis.

A crucial detail which may be hard to see in this image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the young woman holds one closed box; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair in front of the Viscount’s crotch; the third is open in the Viscount’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the pox-marks on the Viscount and the mother, indicating they’re mercuric salts used to treat syphilis. The implication is that the Viscount is questioning their effectiveness with the doctor.

A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis. All around the group are various troubling items of medical equipment and specimens. More worrying still, the mother, whose sleeves are made of the same patterned fabric as the girl’s gown, is caressing a cutthroat surgical knife.

The Toilette. Some time later, the couple have inherited the late Earl’s title, now being the Earl and Countess Squander. She is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. By her right arm hangs a teething coral, indicating that she’s now the mother of an unseen infant, who is being raised by a nurse.

To the right of the Countess, Silvertongue rests at ease, his feet uncouthly laid on the sofa, and clearly intimate with her. He offers her a ticket to a masquerade ball, where he will no doubt meet her. His left hand gestures towards a painted screen showing such a masquerade.

At the left an Italian castrato is singing to the accompaniment of a flute. The others are disinterested, apart from a woman in white, who is swooning at the singer. Beneath him are invitation cards scattered on the floor. Servants are in attendance, including a French hairdresser, who is curling the Countess’s hair.

Hogarth’s selection of paintings for this scene is revealing and satirical. Above the castrato is the Rape of Ganymede, and above that a portrait of Silvertongue. Above the Countess is Io in ecstatic embrace with Jupiter, and Lot’s daughters making their father drunk so that he can inseminate them both.

The Bagnio. The climax of Hogarth’s story is set in a bagnio, a room in a rooming house intended for illicit liaisons and gambling. The Earl stands, with the posture of a dying man, possibly a visual reference to the deposition of Christ, mortally wounded in the chest, his sword impaled in the floor in front of him.

The Countess, dressed in bedclothes with a small cap, is on bended knee in front of him, apparently praying for forgiveness. Her clothes are scattered around the floor, as if removed in haste, her stays having fallen on a bundle of faggots, then a common reference to prostitutes. Silvertongue, also in night dress, is making his escape through an open window, having fought the Earl, leaving his sword in the foreground, covered in the Earl’s blood.

At the far right, a night watchman and constable force their way in, the watchman’s lantern casting the shadow of a cross on the door.

The implicit narrative is that the Countess and Silvertongue met as arranged at the masquerade, and adjourned to the bagnio to consummate their lust. The Earl had tracked them down, and entered the room. Silvertongue fought and killed him, but his attempt to escape will prove unsuccessful now that the police are involved. He will therefore be tried, sentenced to death, and hanged.

For this, Hogarth chose a tapestry of the Judgement of Solomon, and paintings showing Saint Luke, and a parody best described as a portrait of a harlot.

The Lady’s Death. The final scene takes place in the Alderman’s house, where the Countess has fled in the aftermath of her husband’s murder and her lover’s execution. Its composition matches that of the first painting, but contrasts with it in its frugal appearance. Its furnishings are minimal and functional, and the floorboards bare.

The Countess is in the throes of death on an armchair, an empty vial of laudanum (tincture of opium) by her feet. Between her fashionable shoes and the vial is a printed broadsheet containing the dying speech of Silvertongue prior to his execution. Her father, wearing the same clothes as he did in the first painting, is removing her rings, as at that time someone who committed suicide couldn’t retain any property.

A nurse holds the Countess’s infant for one last embrace. The infant bears the tragic marks and deformities of severe congenital syphilis. In the middle of the canvas, an apothecary is berating a servant for obtaining the laudanum. A doctor skulks in the background, powerless to save the dying Countess. A poor breakfast is laid up on the table, with a dog stealing the pig’s head from it.

Although each of these six paintings includes extensive references to other moments in the story, they are each instantaneous and don’t use multiplex narrative, which had fallen into disuse following its popularity in the Renaissance.