The range and interpretation of subjects in different forms of devotional painting express a particular attitude to the relationship between man and God. Early Christian and Buddhist murals, for example, portrayed an all-powerful, remote, and mysterious being, painted as a flat, formalized head or figure whose stern gaze dominated the interiors of temples, churches, and sanctuaries. Christian Last Judgments and Buddhist hell paintings were intended to frighten believers, while subjects such as the Virgin enthroned, the Assumption, and Buddha descending from Paradise sustained their faith with hopes for salvation and rewards of blissful immortality. Narrative
When the autocratic ecclesiastical control over Western painting weakened under Renaissance humanism, the religious narrative picture became a window onto a terrestrial rather than a celestial world. Both emotional and physical relationships between the figures depicted were realistically expressed, and the spectator was able to identify himself with the lifelike representation of a worldly space inhabited by Christ, his disciples, and saints, wearing updated dress and moving naturally within contemporary settings. This kind of narrative interpretation persists in the modern religious paintings of Sir Stanley Spencer, where biblical environments are represented by the clipped hedgerows, the churchyards, and the front parlours of his neat, native English village of Cookham.
Peasant Dance, oil on wood by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1568; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Kunsthistoriches, Vienna, Austria/SuperStock
Bosch, Hiëronymus: Garden of Earthly DelightsGarden of Earthly Delights triptych, oil on wood by Hiëronymus Bosch, c. 1505–10; in the Prado, Madrid.Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain/Giraudon, Paris/SuperStockAllegorical narrative subjects might exalt the sensuous arts, as in the symbolic muses portrayed by Poussin and Luca Signorelli and the paradisiac gardens of 15th-century French illuminated manuscripts. But they might also carry warnings. In the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for example, combined overt and often grotesque symbols with subtle visual metaphors to point stern morals in such paintings as The Triumph of Death (alluding to the “wages of sin”), The Land of Cockaigne (attacking gluttony and sloth), and Mad Meg (ridiculing covetousness). Even Bruegel’s apparently straightforward genre subjects, such as The Peasant Dance and the festival of The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, conceal parables on human folly and sin, while Hieronymus Bosch introduced abstruse, allegorical phantasmagoria into such traditional narratives as The Temptation of St. Antony and The Prodigal Son and made his Garden of Delights an expression of disgust rather than of joy. Botticelli’s late paintings, probably produced under the influence of the 15th-century Italian monk and reformer Girolamo Savonarola, are other savagely pessimistic allegories: The Story of Virginia Romana and The Tragedy of Lucretia, representing virtue upheld only by death, and The Calumny of Apelles, in which envy, suspicion, deceit, guile, repentance, and truth are identified, like medieval mummers, by their costume, pose, and gesture. Rubens, however, found in allegorical symbolism a means of dramatizing mundane state commissions, such as The Union of Scotland and Ireland and The Bounty of James I (Triumphing over Avarice). Among famous 19th-century allegories are Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Crime Pursued by Vengeance and Justice.
Possibly the highest achievements in narrative illustrations to poetry and literature are found in Eastern miniatures and Asian scrolls, such as the Persian paintings of Ferdowsī’s 11th-century national epic poem, the Shāh-nāmeh, and the 12th-century Japanese scrolls of the Genji monogatari and the Story of Ben Dainagon. An example of modern literary painting is Sir Sidney Nolan’s narrative series portraying the Australian folklore hero Ned Kelly.
Kelly, oil painting by Sir Sidney Nolan, 1954; in a private collection.Courtesy of the owner
Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies have provided Western artists with rich sources of imagery and subject matter and with opportunities for painting the nude. Historical narrative painting includes Classical mythology and heroic legend, as well as the representation of contemporary events; examples include Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe, Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and Goya’s The 3rd of May in Madrid. Portraiture
The earliest surviving portraits of particular persons are probably the serene, idealized faces painted on the front and inside surfaces of dynastic Egyptian sarcophagi. The human individuality of the Roman mummy portraits of the 1st and 2nd century ad, however, suggests more authentic likenesses. Although portraits are among the highest achievements in painting, the subject poses special problems for the artist commissioned to paint a notable contemporary. The portraits of patrons by artists such as Raphael, Rubens, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jacques-Louis David, and Sir Thomas Lawrence were required to express nobility, grace, and authority, just as the sultans and rajahs portrayed on frontispieces to Persian and Indian illuminated books and albums had understandably to be flattered as benevolent despots. Such concessions to the sitter’s vanity and social position seem to have been disregarded, however, in the convincing likenesses by more objective realists such as Robert Campin, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Velázquez, Goya, and Gustave Courbet. Probably the finest are the self-portraits and studies of ordinary people by Rembrandt and van Gogh, where psychological insight, emotional empathy, and aesthetic values are fused. A more decorative approach to the subject is seen in the flattened portraits by Holbein, the Elizabethan and itinerant naïve U.S. limners, and the East Asian paintings of ancestors, poets, priests, and emperors. Like these paintings, the full-length portraits by Boucher, Gainsborough, Kees van Dongen, and Matisse display as much regard for the texture and form of their sitters’ dress as for their facial features.