The Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary
There have been few more subtle examples of body language in art than the energy of the Angel at the Annunciation. Is he touching the ground? Has Mary noticed him? Is he a he? Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini, Titian and Tintoretto all claim to know what really happened, and Donne and Rilke find the words for it in poems.
The Magi and the Christ Child
The mystery of where the Magi came from, what they looked like, and how they were dressed appears to present no problems for Giotto, Botticelli, Gentile da Fabriano, Rubens, Rembrandt and Murillo, nor for Yeats and Sylvia Plath, while T S Eliot's discovery of the Christ Child's visitors reads like a miracle in itself.
People Changing Shape 1 – Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Is the idea only ‘for the birds’ that a human being can be transformed into someone or something else or does it have a direct bearing on our lives? Ovid’s great poem is more than mere magicking, even if it did enchant Raphael, Tiepolo, Velasquez, Caravaggio, Poussin, and almost every English poet since Chaucer. But why did it?
People Changing Shape 2 – Before Ovid And Since
From Circe turning Ulysses’s men into swine to Kafka’s Gregor waking up as a beetle, shape-shifting has variously caught the eye of the elder Jan Brueghel, Tenniel, Waterhouse, Anna Lea Merritt, Arthur Hughes and Henri Rousseau alongside Apuleius, Keats, Carroll, Stevenson, T H White and Virginia Woolf.
Facing Up to the Sea
Christ sleeping through the storm is the starting-point for this David-and-Goliath stand-off as awesome odds are faced down by faith and fearlessness. Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, Monet, Turner, Pissarro and Lowry breast the waves with Defoe, Coleridge, Melville, Stevens, Hemingway and Eliot.
Confrontations in Gethsemane
Judas and the soldiers are coming, but how exactly do you imagine them breaking upon the scene? Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Mantegna, El Greco, Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio, Blake, Gauguin and Doré seem to have been there, as do Longfellow, Kipling, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Pasternak.
Mythical Worlds
From what painters, poets and novelists tell us, the same qualities of awareness and resolve are required of us in our encounters with mythical worlds as with the world we live in. Some say we live in both. Bosch, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, William Morris and Klimt rub shoulders with Swift, Coleridge, Keats, Wells and Marquez.
Riddles and Wonders
Whether staring at a monument, wall writing, or a rumour of past wonder, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Turner, Doré, Dalì and de Chirico, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Ariosto, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Chesterton can re-visualise reality and legend with all the authority of a free imagination. But how often do they agree?
Eye to Eye With Caiaphas
How one-sided was this controversial interview and how does that dictate the positioning of the two figures? The image gauntlet is taken up by Giotto, Duccio, Donatello, Durer, van Honthorst, Caracciolo, Holbein the Younger, and the narrative challenge by Dante, Blake, Klopstock, Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde.
In the Presence of the Monarch
Can a painting’s single glance read the disposition towards us of the ruler into whose presence we are ushered? Velasquez, van Dyck, Tischbein, Veronese, Rubens, Delacroix and Ford Madox Brown hold their breath in the presence, as do Marco Polo, the Nibelungenlied, the Gawain poet, Wyatt, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Calvino.
