G AN ALLEGORY OF VENUS AND TIME by Giambattista Tiepolo (1754-58)

Look for: An hourglass

In Tiepolo’s painting, a Venetian masquerade seems to have been transported into the sky. It is a small equivalent to the vast frescoes that the artist painted on the ceilings of churches and palaces across Europe – scenes in which airborne bodies spell out messages of triumph or prosperity or apotheosis.

Tiepolo is often considered the last great Venetian painter – maybe even the last of the Old Masters. An Allegory of Venus and Time was completed when he was around 60, a commission for the ceiling of a palazzo belonging to the Contarini family, one of the grand dynasties of Venice. The painting was probably designed to commemorate a birth: it’s a kind of pagan version of the Nativity. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, appears perched on a pink-tinted cloud. She entrusts a baby to the figure of Time – a winged, elderly man who reaches up for the child. There’s a marvellous poise about the expressions of the figures: Venus’s stern serenity, Time’s worshipful response, the oblivious face of the baby. Some art historians have suggested that the child is Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid – a character destined for immortality. Time has laid aside his scythe, the symbol of death.

But there is a mixed message. The mood of optimism is checked – undercut – by the hourglass that lurks at Time’s side, half-hidden. This reminder that time and death can never be stalled, even in a moment of celestial celebration, gives the picture an undertow of melancholy. i BATHERS AT ASNIÈRES by Georges Seurat

(1884)

Look for: The ferry

Seurat told his friend, the critic Gustave Kahn, that although one of the models for this painting had been the Parthenon frieze he didn’t want to paint ancient Greeks. Instead, he hoped to “make the moderns file past… in their essential form”. The painting shows factory workers at rest – seated, reclining and swimming, their figures and the surrounding scene simplified into shimmering masses of colour. The setting is Asnièressur-Seine, close to an industrial suburb of Paris. The glancing impression of a rural idyll – a timeless pastoral scene – is offset by the contemporary dress, and by the factory chimneys visible in the background. As in his other famous picture, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (18841886), the artist depicts people at leisure, suspended in a moment of tranquil inertia.

Seurat once wrote that “art is harmony”, a precept that was also a social ideal: art could help create a harmonious and unified society. In the painting’s mid-distance, a small ferry carries a bourgeois or upperclass couple across the water. The woman in the boat, the only female character in the picture, is shielded by her large parasol; the man wears a top hat and suit. They represent the industrialist class that employs – or exploits – the men in the foreground. A large tricolore hangs from the boat. The stretch of water separating the two groups is a social gulf – an economic divide.

Seurat’s stretch of water is a social gulf – an economic divide