January is named after the Roman god of transitions, Janus, and is the first month of the New Year. Or is it? Classical civilisations more usually started their year in Spring, and what’s this about Juno?
Rubens
Cimon is a problem child until he sees Iphigenia. He reforms, but her parents refuse his proposal. When he abducts her as she is being taken to be married off, everything goes wrong.
Drawing the chariot of Bacchus/Dionysus, fighting with Christian martyrs, in a Paris zoo, or torrential rain in a tropical storm, or being hunted to be turned into a skin.
Lycaon transformed into a wolf, the origin of later werewolves, the she-wolf who fed Romulus and Remus, a shepherd defending his flock, the wolf of Agubbio, the fable of the wolf and the lamb, and others.
Gates opened in time of war, entered by Christ in triumph, those of hell in Dante and Milton, separating lovers, and marking the start of an elopement.
Every painter should have a suit of armour hanging in their studio, and those of German Romantics, Pre-Raphaelites and others, of Don Quixote.
Worn by Mars, Athena/Minerva and Bellona, it also featured in the war against Troy. It was worn by Joan of Arc, and by Lovis Corinth too.
While other uncouth figures fought with their clubs, animal skins appealed to a different group, as John Godward’s beauties draped their bodies on them.
First imported through Venice by 1300, it became more precious than gold until it could be made synthetically from 1830. The queen of pigments.
Painting captions give information you’d never get from looking at an image, and that in turn tells you even more. This series looks beyond mere images at the media behind them.
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