A staple product of many pro painters in western Europe for over half a millennium, and required by every church and chapel.
Rubens
Completes this tour of the painter’s palette, with well-known greens, then the essential blacks and whites. Examples from Michelangelo to Vincent van Gogh.
A trip round the painter’s palette, with outstanding examples of well-known colours in use. Starts with yellow, then to red and finally to blue.
Introduced to Europe from the New World in the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I loved them, and Jan Brueghel the elder and his son included them in many of their paintings.
Painting time as a concept is very difficult. Once solution is to show the Fates, as depicted by Rubens, Goya, Burne-Jones, Jacek Malczewski and others.
It’s a good story that the first month of the year is named January after the two-faced god of transitions, Janus. It’s a shame that isn’t exactly true.
The fourth ‘basic plot’ is the story of voyage and return, for which we turn to Ovid’s account of this couple, and a dozen superb paintings. But does the model fit?
A banquet with a river god, a pitched battle at his friend’s wedding which turned into a full-scale war, a relationship involving incest, suicide and violent death, and the abduction of Helen – quite the career of a Greek hero.
Rubens as a landscape painter influenced by the Brueghels, and the changing horizons seen in Dutch Golden Age paintings.
From his battle with the sea monster to the deadly fight at his wedding to Andromeda, paintings by Titian, Veronese, Burne-Jones, Vallotton and others.
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