Burne-Jones's Perseus Series

In my last series of posts based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, we looked at pictures of Danae. Let's turn our attention now to her son, Perseus. Ovid tells two main stories about Perseus in Book IV: Perseus and Atlas and Perseus and Andromeda, with the story of Perseus and Medusa told in flashback as a coda. Book V starts with a fight between the supporters of Perseus and the supporters of Phineus, Andromeda's former fiance. (The picture of Sir Edward Burne-Jones is a photogravure based on a portrait of him by his son Philip. It is in the public domain and comes from wikicommons.)

The story of Perseus and Andromeda in particular proved a prolific source of inspiration for artists, but we'll start with a wider look at the whole story as shown in a series of paintings by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. He was commissioned to produce a series of large paintings based on the story of Perseus for Arthur Balfour. Although the series of paintings was never finished, a series of cartoons or studies for the pictures are now in the Southampton City Art Gallery. The completed paintings in the series are now in Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie, which has the pictures online, but hasn't seen fit to provide any way of linking to them. They are currently on loan to the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Those who intend being in Stuttgart from 24 November 2009 to 7 February 2010 might wish to go to a Burne-Jones exhibition the Staatsgalerie is planning.

The completed paintings are The Call of Perseus:



Perseus and the Sea Nymphs:



Perseus and the Graiae:



The Finding of Medusa:



The Death of Medusa:



The Rock of Doom:



The Doom Fulfilled:



The Baleful Head:



Two pictures for which studies exist in Southampton but which do not have completed versions in Stuttgart are Atlas Turned to Stone and another version of The Death of Medusa.

Burne-Jones's pictures were based on William Morris's The Doom of King Acrisius. The Victorian Web has a series of pages pairing the Stuttgart pictures with the relevant parts of the poem and a series of essays and questions to ponder about the paintings (scroll down to find the index: the list may not look like links but they are).

Burne-Jones combined variations on "The Rock of Doom" and "The Doom Fulfilled" in 1876 to produce a painting called "Perseus and Andromeda", which is now in Adelaide's Art Gallery of South Australia.

Copyright, Wikis, and the National Portrait Gallery

The BBC alerts us to a legal spat between Wikimedia (the owner of Wikipedia and Wikicommons) and London's National Portrait Gallery. Wikimedia gives its arguments on its blog, but if the National Portrait Gallery is saying anything directly rather than through news media, I haven't been able to find it.

No doubt intellectual property and IT lawyers are going to have a field day. But I thought I'd just explain the policy I'm following here at Matters Arising. It's probably not totally logical and consistent, but then copyright law doesn't seem to be, either, and like the rest of us is adapting to the changing possibilities brought about by changing technology.

Basically, I use two main online collections for the art reproduced on this blog: Wikicommons and museumsyndicate. If a picture is not in either of those collections and the museum or gallery where I find the picture doesn't give permission to reproduce I simply provide a link.

Some museums and galleries are better than others. Special kudos goes to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which does allow reproduction in certain circumstances and says so clearly. Other museums and galleries may allow reproduction but wrap it up in so much legal verbiage, it really is not clear what is allowed and what is not. When in doubt I don't. BUT, some museums and galleries (mentioning no names but you know who you are) seem to go out of their way to make it difficult even to link to pictures that they are showing online. In that case, as far as I'm concerned the picture is fair game for reproduction.

Welcome

to two new followers: Julie Delvaux of Notebooks - Los Cuadernos de Julia and Mariana Pinheiro of Gatochy's Blog.

Tiberius's Villas on Capri

The emperor Tiberius left Rome in 26 AD never to return. For most of the rest of his life he stayed on the island of Capri, where he had 12 villas. Remains still exist of some of them. The best preserved of them is the Villa Jovis, or possibly Jonis, which was the largest. CapriWeb has four pages of text and some nice pics of the Villa Jovis, while Oebalus also has informative text and a floor plan. The University of Heidelberg's Archaeological Institute has German text with models of what the villa may have looked like.

The remains of another villa at Damecuta are also covered by CapriWeb and Oebalus (again with floor plan).

Thirdly, only Oebalus has information about the Palazzo a Mare. The Roman villa on the site of the Villa San Michele may have been part of this complex.

First Birthday

Today is Matters Arising's first birthday. The first post in this blog was a year ago today. And my next post will be my 100th.

Thank you to those who have registered as followers:

Shadows of shadows in stone
Donna Farley of HALIWERFOLC
William Hone Jr. of symbolpond
Irene Hahn of Roman History Books and More
beag_beran
and отминал прах, a Bulgarian who has the linguistic advantage of me because I can't read Cyrillic.

Thanks also to David Derrick of The Toynbee Convector, Judith Weingarten of Zenobia: Empress of the East, and N. S. Gill of About Ancient History for reading along and posting their comments.

Alex Munthe on Capri

Axel Munthe's The Story of San Michele is briefly mentioned in the introduction to Allan Massie's "Tiberius: The Memoirs of the Emperor", the Roman History Reading Group's current read. Munthe was a Swedish doctor who built a villa on Capri, on what was allegedly the site of one of Tiberius's villas, in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. He left the house and his collection of antiquities to the Swedish state on his death in 1949, by which time it had become famous due to Munthe's 1929 book. It is one of Capri's major tourist sites, attracting fans of the book, and those wanting to see the collection, and the famous gardens and views. (photo of Alex Munthe from wikipedia is in the public domain)







The villa has its own website and is naturally featured on Capri tourism websites (for example capri.net and capri.com) as well. (photos of Villa San Michele are from wikicommons and are used courtesy of a Creative Commons licence.)

A long rambling review of Munthe's book, with copious quotations.

John William Waterhouse

Caroline Lawrence of the Roman Mysteries blog and associated novels draws our attention to the Royal Academy's J. W. Waterhouse exhibition, running until 13th September (so no chance of my seeing it, alas). In honour of the occasion she is blogging a series of posts on Waterhouse's work.



Others who won't be in London over the summer can see his paintings on two online galleries devoted to his works, here and here. The Victorian Web also has a section on Waterhouse (although they don't look like it, the list is actually a list of links to the paintings and discussions of his work). (public domain image of John William Waterhouse's Ophelia is from museumsyndicate)

Tall Poppies

This picture by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was painted in 1867 and is now in a private collection. It illustrates the story in Livy which led to the expression "tall poppy syndrome" for the delight some people take in enforcing mediocrity by cutting those who excel down to size. (image from museumsyndicate is in the public domain)

According to the story, when Sextus Tarquinius, who we've met before in the story of Lucretia, took the town of Gabii and sent a messenger to his father, Tarquinius Superbus, asking for further instructions, Tarquinius Superbus just lopped the heads off the tallest poppies in a field without saying anything. When the messenger returned and told Sextus what he'd seen, Sextus correctly interpreted his father's actions as meaning he should execute the most outstanding citizens of Gabii. Westminster Wisdom comments on the similarities between this story and a story in Herodotus.

Although I have written about him before, any excuse will do for a bit of Alma-Tadema. This site claims to have his complete works (218 paintings).

Danae: the 19th Century and after

These two pictures from the 19th century do not show the naked Danae and shower of gold we have seen in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The picture on the left shows Danae watching the construction of the brazen tower where her father was to imprison her and was painted by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in 1888. It is now in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, but not on their website. The image (below) is of a photograph of an 1892 painting by John William Waterhouse showing the rescue of Danae and her baby son, Perseus. The painting was stolen in 1947 and has never been recovered. (the picture on the left is from museumsyndicate, all other pictures in this post are from wikicommons, and are in the public domain.)







The above 1907 painting by Gustav Klimt is now in a private collection.

In 1947, Richard Strauss wrote an opera, Die Liebe der Danae. (correction from David Derrick of The Toynbee Convector: Strauss completed the opera in 1940) YouTube has two extracts, one of which is embedded below (discussed in the comments to my post on Danae in the 16th century).

Danae: the 18th Century

As we move on from the 16th and 17th centuries, our first painting of Danae is by Antonio Bellucci.



It was painted from 1700-1705 and is now in the Italian Chamber of Deputies in Rome. (Image taken from the Chamber of Deputies website as it does not appear to be possible to link directly to the picture. The link will take you to the website's home page.)



At the same time Paolo de' Matteis was painting the above picture, which is in the Detroit Institute of Arts, but not on their website.



The above picture was painted by Tiepolo around 1736 and is now in Stockholm's Universitet Konsthistoriska Institutionen, which does not seem to have a website.

Halfway through the century, Andrea Casali painted a picture of Danae which is now in Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery.




Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson painted the above portait of the actress Mlle Lange as Danae in 1799. It is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (Except where otherwise stated, the above images come from wikicommons and are in the public domain.)