The red that lasts hundreds of years without fading, but it’s a highly toxic salt of mercury. Used in European paintings from the Romans to the late 19th century.
Rembrandt
The fall of Icarus, Calydonian boar hunt, Philemon and Baucis, the origin of the Horn of Plenty, death of Hercules, Orpheus and Eurydice, death of Hyacinthus, Pygmalion and Galatea, death of Adonis, and of Orpheus.
Used by all the masters from about 1300, including Leonardo da Vinci, Veronese, Rubens and Rembrandt, this pigment was lost in the early 18th century and wasn’t rediscovered until 1940.
He meets and becomes engaged to a young student at his art school, painting a double-portrait after Rembrandt, and a raucous collage of human emotion as Ulysses fights the beggar.
How expression of pain became stereotyped in narrative paintings from Caravaggio to Böcklin, a very early Rembrandt and the anguish of a ewe on the death of her lamb.
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.
Stairs to fall down, to sit in disgrace, or pose with your sibling? Stairs winding up and defying gravity, bearing ballet dancers, or in a Gothic prison.
Stories of the origin of the Italian pine and cypress trees, and a far more dubious account of Jupiter’s abduction that’s found in an advert for beer.
From Rembrandt to Velázquez, Goya, Courbet and Fantin-Latour, reading group portraits can be complicated and demanding.
A poor couple entertained two men as well as they could in their humble cottage. Their guests turned out to be Jupiter and Mercury, who rewarded them for their hospitality.
The Eclectic Light Company 