Hamlet, including the first visualisation of Ophelia’s death; Christopher Columbus, Medea about to kill her sons, and shipwreck survivors in a small boat.
narrative
Normally drawn by 2-4 horses, you can sometimes identify deities by the creatures shown towing their chariot, from black horses to domestic cats.
As he continued to paint history and other narrative works, and turn his watercolours from North Africa into finished oil paintings, he started decorative painting for the State.
How the Horn of Plenty came about, who filled it, how it often appears with the four elements, and some more complex mythological associations.
A history painting of a battle in 1477 was criticised. Then he was taken as artist to a diplomatic mission to Morocco, and turned Orientalist.
Is that the god Cupid, a Cupid, a putto, an amorino, or a cherub? The differences explained and illustrated in paintings by Botticelli, Titian, Raphael and others.
A princess takes her handmaids to the coast to wash her fine robes and themselves. Out steps Odysseus, naked except for strategic leaves, and asks for their help.
After a set of 17 lithographs illustrating Goethe’s ‘Faust’, his most famous painting of ‘Liberty Leading the People’ that was only seen infrequently over the next 40 years.
The goddess Diana, Selene, the Virgin and Child, or is it just the moon in the sky of a pastoral landscape? Paintings from Bosch to van Gogh.
Odysseus is lashed to the mast as his ship passes the Sirens without being lured away. He’s the only survivor after shipwreck, then is trapped with Calypso for seven years.
