Paintings from 1400, including Tintoretto’s masterpiece, Veronese, and three by Artemisia Gentileschi, telling this story.
Tintoretto
Jacob’s Ladder, the Crucifixion, scaling the walls of Charlemagne’s Paris, picking fruit, or just crossing a dry stone wall.
In earlier paintings, unicorns are usually intended to be real animals. They also have symbolic associations with chastity which lasted longer.
After being entertained by Demodocus’ tale of Venus and Mars, Odysseus is delivered in the dead of night, still asleep, to a hidden harbour on Ithaca.
The goddess Diana, Selene, the Virgin and Child, or is it just the moon in the sky of a pastoral landscape? Paintings from Bosch to van Gogh.
Before photography, the only opportunity to see your face, painters took advantage of the Venus Effect to break optical rules and show faces that couldn’t have been seen in the mirror.
Christian visions of Heaven or Paradise are usually less of a location than an array of figures. Examples from 1475-1916.
Unfinished paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Bonington, Bazille, Bastien-Lepage, Moreau and others.
Zeus, disguised as a gander, raped Nemesis, who laid Helen as an egg. She became step-sister of Castor and Polydeuces, and went on to be abducted by Paris as Aphrodite’s bribe.
Signatures written on scraps of paper, or in books, with comments, dedications in graffiti, and an apocalyptic vision of Botticelli.
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