Mythological & Allegorical Paintings
Gods, nymphs, legends and ideas: from Botticelli's Venus to Klimt's Kiss.
20 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Stories in paint
For four hundred years the highest subjects a painter could attempt were drawn from classical myth, from poetry and from allegory, the painting of ideas as figures. Botticelli's Venus and Primavera were painted for the Medici from Ovid and Poliziano; Titian's Bacchus for a duke of Ferrara; Waterhouse and Millais took Tennyson and Shakespeare; Klimt and Munch, at the end of the tradition, painted love and dread with no story at all.
The works in this collection
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Primavera; Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne; Caravaggio's Bacchus and Medusa; Bouguereau's Birth of Venus, Nymphs and Satyr and Dante and Virgil; Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott and Miranda; Millais's Ophelia; Rossetti's Proserpine and Beata Beatrix; Burne-Jones's Golden Stairs; Raphael's School of Athens; Leonardo's Vitruvian Man; Vermeer's Art of Painting; Gauguin's Where Do We Come From?; Klimt's The Kiss; Munch's The Scream.
On the wall
The Renaissance mythologies are wide and want a long wall; the Pre-Raphaelite ones are tall and intimate. The Kiss is the most-hung painting in this group and belongs in a bedroom.