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This week: more European art at the Wadsworth. For previous posts on the Wadsworth, click here.

Rubens, Return of the Holy Family from Egypt, ca. 1630

In this painting, Rubens shows his usual attention to texture: more detail where he wants you to focus (faces), less detail on the less important areas (broad strokes on the Virgin’s dress). See Innovators in Painting, chapters 27 and 28, on Rubens’s innovations. I happen to like other Rubens paintings more than this one … for example, The Flight of Lot and His Family at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota (this post), which has more vibrant colors and more excitement.

Barra, View of Naples, 1647

In the mid-seventeenth century, Naples (under Spanish rule) was not merely the place you went on your way to Pompeii. It was the second-largest city in Europe, second only to Paris, and a center of Italian Baroque art. Barra (1590-1656) was able to make a career painting canvases of Naples.

The year this painting was done, a Neapolitan fisherman named Masaniello led a revolt against oppressive Spanish taxes. The revolt and Masaniello went badly awry. The Neapolitan Republic lasted barely a year. I wonder if there’s any hint of it in this painting, or if Barra was painting for the tourist trade and keeping things calm?

That very large ship toward the right is going to be in a great deal of trouble if it doesn’t haul its sails down soon.

Richter (?), Feast of Santa Maria della Salute, ca. 1720

Johan Richter (1665-1745), born in Stockholm, emigrated to Venice, where he painted landscapes from beginning around 1717. I knew immediately that this painting wasn’t by Richter’s contemporary Canaletto, because the way the buildings loom on the left and the gray clouds sweep in are not Canaletto’s style.

Lawrence, Lady St. John as Hebe, ca. 1808

It would be heresy (literally) to paint an accurate portrait of anyone as the Virgin Mary, but since the Renaissance, when scholars began rediscovering Greek and Roman art and literature, it had become perfectly acceptable to do portraits of women as Greek or Roman goddesses. Moreover, artists found a whole new range of subjects and themes, implications and associations, which at the time, all educated people were familiar with. Hebe, goddess of youth, was cupbearer to the gods. (Here she carries a pitcher instead.) She resigned the position when she married the semi-mortal hero Hercules. By portraying Lady St. John as Hebe, the artist paid compliments to her and her husband, who isn’t in the picture.

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) went from self-taught child prodigy to renowned portrait painter, executing his first royal commission at age 20. I adore his Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (Apsley House), the Calmady Children (Metropolitan Museum), and Pinkie (Huntington Library).

Leighton, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis, ca. 1869-1871

I’ll admit that much Neoclassical art is stiff and boring, but in the right hands, classical subjects can evoke strong emotions because most Europeans after the Renaissance would have been familiar with the stories. Using subjects from Greek and Roman mythology gave visual artists the ability to evoke much more complex themes than showing nameless human beings. Michelangelo’s David is a case in point. Some of the significance would be lost if you didn’t know he was a little guy setting off to fight a giant.

This painting, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis, also has more depth because it’s based on a Greek myth. You’d think Alcestis was Hercules’s wife, wouldn’t you, if he’s fighting Death on her behalf? Nope. King Pelias promised Alcestis’s hand to the man who could yoke a lion and a boar to a chariot. Hardly a way to test suitability for marriage to one’s daughter. Admetus managed to perform the unwieldy yoking with the help of Apollo, who had been temporarily banished from Olympus. At the marriage ceremony, however, Admetus forgot to make an offering to Artemis. She condemned him to death by snakebite. Apollo, stepping in again, got the Fates drunk and persuaded them to let Admetus live if anyone volunteered to die in his stead.

Everyone refused, including Admetus’s aged parents. Newly married Alcestis then accepted. She died. Some time later, Admetus offered hospitality to Hercules, who, as thanks, fought Death for Alcestis and brought her back to life. Here Admetus is in howling grief, Alcestis lies serenely dead, and Death is a very frightening creature.

One wonders if Alcestis wanted to return to a husband who had allowed her to die in his place … It’s not like asking your spouse to do the dishes so you can watch the football game. According to the myth, Alcestis never spoke again, to her husband or anyone else. (She recently crossed my radar because she appears in Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient. I enjoyed it, but not enough to list it in the Sunday Recommendations.)

Henri Paul Motte, The Trojan Horse, 1874

We all know this story, don’t we? In literature, it can be told in a way that sympathizes with the clever Greeks or the doomed Trojans. The same is true of paintings. In this one, the Greeks are climbing out of the horse and setting out to open the gates so the other Greeks can rush inside Troy’s city walls. Looking at the details, do you sympathize with the Greeks, or with the Trojans who are about to lose a ten-year war for their home?

Legend has it that the Trojan Horse was built by the Greeks in their encampment on the shore outside Troy. If there was an actual Trojan Horse, it’s unlikely that it was this large and this elaborately decorated; but the horse’s size makes for an effective composition. It looms over everything, including the city walls.

Henri-Paul Motte (1846-1922), a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme (you might know his Pygmalion in the Metropolitan Museum), specialized in history paintings. This painting was his debut at the Paris Salon, where history paintings were still highly prized in 1874. The same year, the Impressionists (the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs) held their first show. It took place in a photographer’s gallery because their works were disdained by the Salon and the French Academy. On the changes in French art during this period, see my Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style.

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