divine inspiration
Apocalypse, Flanders 15th century
BnF, Néerlandais 3, fol. 4r
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“The artist’s studio,” one of the earliest daguerreotypes, dating to 1837. An exhibition of early images like these caused painter Paul Delaroche to exclaim, “From today, painting is dead!”
Read more about it here:
As women began to enjoy a higher status in many societies, they began to look back to the myth of the Amazons for inspiration. Some women’s sports teams called themselves the Amazons. I love this picture of the Red Deer, Alberta Amazons hockey club from 1928.
Let’s spend a few days looking at depictions of the Amazons, the mythical race of fierce female warriors that showed up a lot in Greek literature. You don’t exactly have to be Sigmund Freud to understand why a repressively patriarchal society like Greece would have spent so much time simultaneously entranced and horrified by the question, “What if women had political and military power?”
Here’s an image from around 500 BCE of a beautiful (“kalos,” which you can see written in the upper right) Amazon:
And here’s a vase from 420 BCE on which Theseus fights the Amazons, who, it must be said, are decked out in some pretty nifty patterned clothing.
You can read the whole piece here (free friend link):
Early modern depictions of the Amazons tended to focus both on a fascination with the ancient world and with the idea of a woman-led society, but also with the civilizations that Europeans were discovering — and often subjugating.
Peter Paul Rubens, the baroque master, took a couple of stabs at an Amazonomachy. Here’s his first, painted with help from Jan Brueghel the Elder, from around 1600:
The headdress of Queen Puabi, a Mesopotamian woman who lived ca. 2500 BCE. Puabi’s burial was incredibly lavish, and the cuneiform tablets found with her body did not name her as the wife of any man, which was the way almost all women were identified. This may indicate that she held power herself.
The Romans seemed just as taken with the Amazons as the Greeks had been. They looted many Greek artworks of the Amazons and copied them; the emperor Nero was said to have been obsessed with a beautiful statue of an Amazon horsewoman that he dubbed “lovely legs.” We don’t have the original, but there were a lot of similar works, like this one, now in Naples:
OK, here’s my favorite image from a manuscript of the Alexander Romance (a series of fictional tales starring Alexander the Great). In this 16th-century Armenian manuscript, a giant crab eats Alexander’s boat.
Another popular story from the Alexander Romance (a collection of fictional stories starring Alexander the Great) was the episode in which Alexander tames his horse, Bucephalus. The horse is often portrayed as a mythical creature, and some versions of the story tell us that he had to be caged because he ate humans.
Here’s Bucephalus in a Flemish version of the story from the 1400s. He’s horned in this one, and is being fed condemned criminals in his cage (you can see their body parts around his feet):
Here he is as a unicorn with a peacock’s tail:
handeaux
