After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular literary source for paintings before 1900, yet hardly anyone knows this epic today. The introduction to a new series.
Stillman
Six from the hundred stories told by the 7 women and 3 men who fled from the Black Death in Florence. With a bonus story, the most famous, at the end.
A faithful wife is being pestered by another man. She sets him an impossible task, of creating an enchanted Spring garden in the January snow.
Written by Giovanni Boccaccio by 1352 and revised in 1370-71, it consists of a hundred stories told by 7 women and 3 men who fled Florence during the Black Death. Some of those tales have been extensively painted.
Huge paintings using opaque watercolour paint, layered combinations of transparent and opaque, scratching out, wax resist and even grains of salt.
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.
If there’s one book every head of state and leader should read, it’s Dante’s Inferno. Introduction to a new series showing paintings of this first part of his Divine Comedy.
Significant paintings based on The Sleeping Beauty, Mariana and Mariana in the South, and Break, Break, Break.
Waiting the knight’s end, watching a sorceress, flying over a wheat field, or in front of a sleigh. Wherever they go they seem sinister.
Paintings by Marie Spartali Stillman, Philip Wilson Steer, Paul Helleu, and William Dyce, and photography by Julia Margaret Cameron.
The Eclectic Light Company 