From Dürer’s groundbreaking hare to the fable of the hare and the tortoise, a hidden hare in a well-known Turner and a white rabbit for the first of the month?
Snyders
Cimon and Iphigenia, from Boccaccio’s Decameron, and others from classical tales of taking siestas outdoors.
Around 1616, Rubens painted a series of Hunts featuring lions and tigers. Delacroix love these and in 1855 painted his own Lion Hunt. But neither had ever seen anything like this.
Although unusual in paintings, tortoises can have several different readings, from love to slow and faltering political reforms.
Without a title and the story in a fable, paintings can be hard to identify, and even harder to read. Examples from 1500-1751.
From sacred symbols in a mosaic of Theodora and the Adoration of the Lamb, to roadside watering holes, and the town’s fresh water supply.
As one of the last true Renaissance men, his artistic and diplomatic careers depended on his patrons – as much as they depended on him.
The most frequently-painted of Boccaccio’s hundred stories, shown here from Rubens to Frederic, Lord Leighton. But there’s much more to the story than that.
Never previously popular except as illustrations, paintings of fables became common in the Dutch Golden Age, and again in the work of a great animal painter around 1750.
After a short story of Hercules saving Myscelus, Ovid presents the doctrines of Pythagoras, including advocacy of vegetarianism, and philosophy of change. Raphael and Rubens.
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