Challenging Naturalist paintings with equally challenging readings: a beggar giving his last coin, 5 hardened gamblers in a dive, a young apprentice making a cog, and a council group portrait.
Cabanel
Passing Minos, who directs the dead to the right circle for their sins, they enter the circle for those guilty of lust. There they hear the story of Paolo and Francesca and their violent deaths.
After his divorce, his son the King of Rome. Disaster on the retreat from Moscow, and exile on the island of Saint Helena. The rapid rise of Napoleon III and his military failure against Prussia in 1870.
The deaths of Demosthenes and Themistocles, Cleopatra’s experimental toxicology, and Tristan and Isolde – was it poison or a love potion?
What happens when a mortal is turned into a heavenly body, as with Orion; or when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven.
In Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, animals charmed by Orpheus, the story of Rebecca and Eliezer, and accompanying the three Magi to the Nativity.
In an act of revenge by Aphrodite, Phaedra, wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, with tragic consequences.
Linked stories of Tiresias, the trans-gender soothsayer, Narcissus who fell in love with himself, and Echo who could only repeat what others said.
Rubens’ hunting scenes and Delacroix, the last of his shipwrecks, Sorolla’s fishing scenes, Arthurian legend, the story of Salome, and more.
Bastien-Lepage, Regnault, Pelez, Debat-Ponsan, Buland, Dagnan-Bouveret, Gervex, and Friant: best in their class, and highly successful pupils.
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