Are they part of a narrative, or staffage? Do they provide scale, or enhance the effect? Are the figures part of the landscape, or even the landscape itself?
Poussin
Like Poussin, most of his works are strongly narrative in intent. Did he paint any pure landscapes, or are all his figures actors in his stories?
Would such a great narrative painter really paint landscapes which lack a story?
Wherever you are on earth, you should be able to see the constellation of Orion, when clouds permit. What was his story? Only one painting helps.
What are accessories or ‘staffage’, what narrative, and what intrinsic to the reading and style of a landscape?
Who was Ovid, and how did he come to write so much on mythology? Illustrated with some fine paintings of his life by Poussin, Delacroix, and Turner.
Not a Greek myth, this tragic love story is the ultimate ancestor to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and other major works. Here are the best paintings.
A challenge to painters: a story of a gender-changing seer, a nymph who becomes no more than an acoustic effect, and a young man who dies of self-love.
One of the most dramatic and vivid myths, causing a ‘Great Fire’ which matches the Flood. Superb paintings from Rubens, Poussin, Moreau.
Who or what exactly is Cupid? How did a mischievous and rather obese infant come to represent love?
The Eclectic Light Company 