#mythology

The story behind it, from what I can find, is a princess shut in a tower by her father and a god who gets in by turning himself into a shower of gold. It's a small canvas too — under a metre either way, which you'd never guess from a photo of it.

Milles spent a big chunk of his career teaching sculpture in Michigan, so a lot of his best-known fountains are actually in the US, not here.

One critic at the time is said to have compared her to a balloon perched on a bonbon box — all polish, no real feeling. The French state bought the painting almost immediately anyway, while a very different crowd of painters, working just blocks away, could barely get their work into the same building.

The long, low shape is the giveaway, apparently: pictures built this wide were often part of the furniture — a bench back, or the panel set above a bed — rather than something hung by itself. There are wasps up in one corner that some people read as a pun on a family's name.

This apparently isn't a finished painting on its own — it's a sketch for a mural, so somewhere there might have been meant to be a full-size version on an actual wall. The gold sky, the ruins, the goats: all of it seems to be reaching for 'ancient Greece.'

The Three Graces come out of Greek and Roman myth — three sisters standing in for charm, beauty and good cheer, and painters kept returning to them for centuries as a reason to put a trio of women together in one frame. Past that I couldn't turn up much on this particular one; even the photo of it going around is black and white.

It's Orpheus, the one whose music could raise the dead — the figures around him are supposed to be souls pulled up by the sound. It stands right outside the concert hall, so the joke, if it is one, was on purpose.

You'd come across this one in Porsgrunn, Norway — apparently one of the sculptor's best-known pieces, a steel sea goddess with a couple of birds pulling her along.

This is the myth of Leander, who used to swim across the strait most nights to visit Hero — until a storm caught him and he drowned. What you're looking at is apparently the moment after: sea nymphs pulling his body from the water, with Hero said to have thrown herself in after him.

From what I can find, this was part of a set standing in for the four seasons — the lion's a nod to Leo, marking high summer.

It's painted on canvas rather than a wooden panel, which was still an odd choice at the time, and it seems to have been made for a Medici cousin's country house rather than a church. Who exactly ordered it, and what for, nobody seems to have settled.

This is Hercules mid-shot at some monstrous man-eating birds, one of his mythical labours, though you'd never guess it without being told — no birds or arrows in sight. They say the model was a soldier friend who didn't want to be recognizable, so his face got smoothed out in later casts. He was killed at Verdun a few years after posing.

Apparently this wasn't the only time he painted his wife dressed up as a goddess - it was something he kept coming back to.

About as approved-of as painting got at the time — the emperor apparently bought it straight off the Salon wall. Two years later Manet showed a nude in a not-so-different pose and Paris was outraged, which suggests the rule was never really about bare skin, but about who was allowed to be bare.

A suffragette went at this with a small axe in 1914, in protest at Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest — it's said she was fed up with men queuing up to stare at it all day. It was patched up afterwards, and photos of the damage are apparently still floating about.

They say the pearls scattered in that shell beside her were supposed to be the tears of drowned sailors, according to old folklore around mermaids and sirens. Apparently painters elected into this particular academy had to hand over a finished painting as a kind of membership due, and this was his.

The setup is Venus taking the arrows off Cupid so he can't fire them at anyone. Painted, apparently, for the king's mistress, who bought a lot of pictures like this — mythology was the standard licence for a nude in a respectable room.

This was originally made to open one of his illustrated prophecy books, not meant to hang on its own. From what I can find, he loved this particular design enough to keep redrawing it for the rest of his life - one copy was finished only weeks before he died.

According to Wikipedia he came back to this years after finishing it and reworked large parts, including her face. It was also attacked with acid in a museum in the 1980s and took more than a decade to put right.

According to Wikipedia he spent the first half of his career working almost entirely in black — charcoal and prints, most of it pretty grim — and only came round to colour late on. The story behind the title is the usual one: a woman, a box she's told to leave shut, and everything bad in the world getting out of it.