Fashionable hats and milliners by Georges Clairin, Edgar Degas, Jean Béraud, Pierre-Georges Jeanniot and Henri Gervex.
narrative
The origin of the conical hat worn by Jews. and that worn by dunces. Cavaliers and Roundheads, crowns and mitres, the cardinal’s red biretta, and Dante’s chaperon.
Raphael’s Disputa, Joan of Arc, the coronation of Charlemagne, a knight dedicating his service in a country church, a shockingly naked St Elizabeth, and a Last Supper painted in Norway.
Classical Greek and Roman altars, a witches’ altar from a sabbath, the altar to Bel or Baal, a mysterious sacred grove, and a Greek mathematician kidnapped and killed by a Christian mob.
Neptune hates Achilles, so gets Apollo to help Paris mortally wound Achilles with an arrow in the tendon of his ankle. And how that came to be his vulnerable point.
Curtains around 4-poster beds, revealing hidden opinions, framing a cameo landscape, showing time and place, and in a trompe l’oeil still life.
Curtains in Raphael’s remarkable trompe l’oeil, concealing a nude, opened by the peeping tom, revealing a lost lover, and as separator between players and spectators.
The start of fighting in the Trojan War, how the prettiest girl in Thessaly became its toughest warrior, and the wedding feast that became all-out war.
Giorgione’s Tempest, Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht, Delacroix, a prairie on fire, and viewing lightning safely indoors.
Jupiter’s bundle of thunderbolts that have survived into computer technology, lightning in great floods, in the destruction of Tyre, and the three witches in Macbeth.
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