From the Circus Maximus with its crowd of 150,000 to those walking the tightrope under the canvas of the Big Top.
Gérôme
Hatboxes from Shakespeare to the Champs Elysées, the wig-box of hanged highwayman, Dickens’ cashboxes, and the painter’s pochade.
In classical times, they were strummed like a guitar rather than plucked. Apollo, Orpheus and lyric poets from Raphael, Rubens, Waterhouse and others.
Hyacinthus killed by a discus, a couple married as the result of a running race, funeral games, Roman spectacle, and the games of childhood.
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Gérôme’s gladiators, Émile Claus and Luminism, Boudin on the beach, and into the skies with Hans Thoma’s herons.
Rubens’ hunting scenes and Delacroix, the last of his shipwrecks, Sorolla’s fishing scenes, Arthurian legend, the story of Salome, and more.
Paintings in which he helped set the thumbs up and down sign, and painted himself making a sculpture he had previously painted in a painting as a sculpture.
From an early painting of the blind Michelangelo to that of a nude courtesan before a Greek court, vision and visual fidelity was his recurrent theme.
Shackles of the night, in a well, as a rope ladder how Romeo meets Juliet, trussing up a robber, or hanging John Brown, the abolitionist.
Split a block of rock, craft your sculpture, break stones to dress the roads, be a blacksmith, sharpen your scythe, forge iron, or operate on a leg with your hammer.
The Eclectic Light Company 