The story of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ has become something of a modern legend. Here are some of the paintings made of its story, before it obsessed early filmmakers.
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A prolific period in which he painted the life of Christ for the Scuola di San Rocco, the Gonzaga Cycle, and a smaller series of Venetian histories.
Danaë, raped by Jupiter in the form of a shower of gold; Lucretia, whose rape resulted in the Republic of Rome; Leda, raped by Jupiter in the form of a swan. And a portrait of a Venetian senator.
Why did the Countess of Mercia ride naked through the streets of an Anglo-Saxon town? And who was Peeping Tom?
The first of two looking at the telling of English legends in paintings: Robin Hood and his ‘Merry Men’, popular for the last 500 years.
Six mythological works, which culminate in what is probably his finest of all: the Origin of the Milky Way, analysed in detail here.
The story of a Renaissance city-state on Sardinia, a good mother, and the state funeral of a great Greek general on Sicily – some of the paintings shown.
Major works for the ceiling of the Sala superiore in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, centred on ‘The Brazen Serpent’, ‘Moses Striking the Rock’, and ‘Gathering of the Manna’.
In the nineteenth century, with the decline of patronage and changed art markets, fables become more popular among painter, at least before they gained patrons.
Never previously popular except as illustrations, paintings of fables became common in the Dutch Golden Age, and again in the work of a great animal painter around 1750.
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