In the weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva, used by the Fates, cropped to weaken Samson, in the Annunciation, or simply for cutting.
Malczewski
The Nativity, Adoration of the Shepherds and the Magi, painted by Bastien-Lepage, Murillo, Hieronymus Bosch, Edward Burne-Jones, and others.
Innovative interpretations from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Vittorio Corcos, Oleksandr Murashko, JW Waterhouse, and Jacek Malczewski.
Curtains around 4-poster beds, revealing hidden opinions, framing a cameo landscape, showing time and place, and in a trompe l’oeil still life.
Soldiers on the front in the First World War, a young woman slaving as a seamstress, Dickens’ miserly Scrooge, and Polish ‘exiles’ in Siberia – those we should be thinking of this Christmas.
Religious paintings of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, and charitable saints, before all changed in the 19th century..
In their heyday, worked elaborately in gold leaf, but lost with the realism of the Renaissance. Revived by the Pre-Raphaelites, and rarely used for secular figures.
Perseus describes in his wedding speech how he beheaded Medusa, and how she came to have snakes in her hair.
After 1850, there was a resurgence of expressions of the emptiness and futility of earthly life, with symbols of death and transience of ephemeral objects.
How the tradition of Christmas trees is relatively recent, family scenes of celebrating the day before Christmas, and how it also became a day to remember the poor and others less fortunate.
The Eclectic Light Company 