The star of Bethlehem from Giotto to Blake, a solar eclipse seen in Spain in 1905, Donati’s comet, and two impossible events with the sun and moon together in the sky.
Bosch
In Gérôme’s early success The Cock Fight, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds, and many farmyard paintings.
Guards throwing dice in the Crucifixion, gambling in Bosch’s vision of Hell, in a dingy tavern, losing an entire estate, and being played by young street urchins.
Once widespread across Europe and many other lands, they used to grind all the grain into flour, provide power to sawmills, make paper and more.
Three panels, hinged together, first for an altarpiece, later for secular narratives. Examples from 1420, through those of Bosch, to the Eve of St Agnes by Arthur Hughes.
From Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, through the Last Supper, to his trials and crowning with thorns.
From Dürer’s groundbreaking hare to the fable of the hare and the tortoise, a hidden hare in a well-known Turner and a white rabbit for the first of the month?
The origin of the conical hat worn by Jews. and that worn by dunces. Cavaliers and Roundheads, crowns and mitres, the cardinal’s red biretta, and Dante’s chaperon.
Curtains around 4-poster beds, revealing hidden opinions, framing a cameo landscape, showing time and place, and in a trompe l’oeil still life.
Son of Pieter the Elder, brother of Pieter the Younger, and father of Jan the Younger, collaborator with Rubens and others in some of the finest paintings of the 16th-17th centuries.
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