Inscriptions in paintings that reveal the story, or quote from its literary source, from Rembrandt to the Pre-Raphaelites.
de Wit
Paris, Prince of Troy, is the perfect pawn in Zeus’s plan for war. He develops a taste for beautiful women, then accepts Aphrodite’s bribe in the beauty contest of the three goddesses.
Daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and mother of the nine Muses, she has seldom been painted on her own, except by Rossetti.
Under the patronage of the d’Estes, Ariosto drew on Carolingian and Arthurian legend, and classical myths, to create his epic. With superb paintings to accompany.
Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Tintoretto, William Blake, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting of Sappho each rely on words.
She gets but a single line in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and has been painted only rarely, and then usually in a supporting role.
How many in the White House know the story of the memorial fountain just opposite – of Butt and Millet, Tennyson, and Oenone?
The Eclectic Light Company 