How many verbal stories or movies tell dozens of different stories? Here are paintings that are not only so rich in narrative, but tell all those stories at the same time.
Brueghel
Introduced to Europe from the New World in the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I loved them, and Jan Brueghel the elder and his son included them in many of their paintings.
The fourth ‘basic plot’ is the story of voyage and return, for which we turn to Ovid’s account of this couple, and a dozen superb paintings. But does the model fit?
After Dido’s suicide, Aeneas takes a trip to the underworld, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl. He goes on to found the city of Lavinium, a precursor to Rome.
Paintings conveying the atmosphere of autumn, from Joos de Momper in the early 17th century, to Hawkins in about 1890,
A banquet with a river god, a pitched battle at his friend’s wedding which turned into a full-scale war, a relationship involving incest, suicide and violent death, and the abduction of Helen – quite the career of a Greek hero.
Rubens as a landscape painter influenced by the Brueghels, and the changing horizons seen in Dutch Golden Age paintings.
A series to examine visual development of figures within narrative paintings, according to their type of plot. The fall of Icarus used as an example.
Although it was Leon Battista Alberti, in the southern Renaissance, who first developed the subject of composition in […]
Miniature landscape views embedded in more conventional paintings were not uncommon during the Renaissance, before landscape was established as a genre.
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