Snakes and serpents in myth, legend and religion are thoroughly sinister and bad, with one curious exception. A journey across centuries of images.
Poussin
Paul Bail left Antwerp, taught Tassi in Rome, who in turn taught Claude Lorrain. Claude-Joseph Vernet learned in Rome, then advised Valenciennes, and so French landscape painting came home.
Not just the cereal harvest, but here paintings of the fruit harvest, from Bassano and Poussin, with grapes, figs, apples, blackberries, to Berthe Morisot.
How the grand-daughters of the Duchess of Devonshire posed for the triple portrait and referred back to any orgiastic scene of bacchanalian revelry.
What is that princess doing dressed for a pageant, and what is happening to her swatch of carmine fabric? How billows express motion.
Should chiaroscuro paintings show much in the way of colour, given that in the dark only the rods in our retinas function, giving us monochrome vision?
How we got from one of the most senior gods, and a winged young man, to a chubby infant armed with a bow and arrow, let alone an unknown former saint.
How many verbal stories or movies tell dozens of different stories? Here are paintings that are not only so rich in narrative, but tell all those stories at the same time.
Does analysis of literary plots offer anything to the understanding of visual narrative in painting? A journey through some of the best painted stories in quest of the answer.
Until the 19th century, narrative paintings showed stories which the viewer already knew, ideally at the moment of change or transformation.
