Charles and Ubaldo fly across the Mediterranean in a ship, reach the island where Armida is holding Rinaldo captive in her garden, and ascend its mountain to rescue him.
Overbeck
Tancred loses Erminia’s trail in a wood, and is tricked into stepping into a dungeon. Battle rages outside Jerusalem, and Godfrey is forced to try to take the city, putting Clorinda at risk.
The crusaders first sight of the Holy City, and an initial skirmish claiming the life of Dudon. Tancred falls in love with the Saracen knight Clorinda, and Armida the sorceress is sent to damage the crusaders from within.
The crusaders start their march on the Holy City of Jerusalem, going from Tartus to reach Emmaus, just as all able-bodied Christians are banished from the city by its ruler Aladine.
After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular literary source for paintings before 1900, yet hardly anyone knows this epic today. The introduction to a new series.
Painting onto dry plaster using ‘secco’ isn’t durable, so ‘buon fresco’ was devised to apply paint to wet plaster instead. The technique is complex, painstaking, and resulted in the death of some of its exponents.
Indian Yellow was allegedly made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves, dried into balls, but was outlawed as it cruel to the cattle. Chrome Yellow was widely used by the Impressionists.
Paintings of fields of buckwheat (not a cereal at all), sainfoin (ideal for horses), flax (oil paints and linen), and clover. And how the Dutch Golden Age changed its agriculture.
Turner’s Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, banners in Raphael’s and Tintoretto’s paintings of the Passion, and Friedrich’s Swedish flag.
Landscape paintings by Daubigny, Sisley, Berkos, Astrup, Pissarro, Julian Onderdonk, Granville Redmond, Théo van Rysselberghe and others.
The Eclectic Light Company 