From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Goethe’s Faust, here are eight classic works of literature accompanied by superb paintings and illustrations. All free.
Boccaccio
Reading many European paintings depends on identifying classical deities shown. This new series helps you do that, and understand what’s going on.
The seven painted stories, with paintings by Mei, Millais, Leighton, Botticelli, Stillman, and Lancret, and links to each article.
The last story of the last day tells of a bride and mother who undergoes the senseless brutality of her husband, and three superb narrative panels telling the story.
Buried in the introduction to day 4, this became La Fontaine’s fable of Brother Philippe’s Geese, was painted by Boucher and others, entered French idiom, and was alluded to by a vanished painting by Gauguin.
Review of paintings and related articles published here in the second half of 2018, starring Tintoretto, Gérôme. Bonnard, Schiele, and Poussin.
The story of Ghismonda and her lover Guiscardo is not well-known in paintings, but has been well covered, most recently by Hogarth.
Three brothers murder their sister’s lover. A grisly story turned into a poem by John Keats, and a formative painting for the Pre-Raphaelites, and others.
One rich gent falls in love with another rich gent’s wife, but she isn’t interested in him. She comes up with a ploy to be rid of his attentions, which backfires, but ends up in two glorious paintings.
The most frequently-painted of Boccaccio’s hundred stories, shown here from Rubens to Frederic, Lord Leighton. But there’s much more to the story than that.
The Eclectic Light Company 