Telling Tales: How to Craft a Story in a Single Image

Fun online lecture from the National Gallery looking at how artists tell stories in paintings.

Ed Dickenson used example from the gallery to analyse different ways to tell a story in a painting. We started with artists who chose to paint a moment in time, hinting at what had gone before and was to come. We spent most time on Ruben’s “Judgement of Paris” from the 1630s and he made us look at it afresh and define where and when it was set, why the people were and what was happening. He showed us how to decode the people and the narrative then to think about the moment in the story the artist had chosen to show.

We then looked at two types of picture which tried to show a tale over time. Using Ugolino di Nerio’s “The Betrayal of Christ” from the 1320s to think about how an artist could use the predella at the bottom of an altarpiece to tell as story over a series of pictures like a cartoon. We then looked at Pontormo’s “Joseph with Jacob in Egypt” from 1518 as an example of a continuous narrative in one picture with recurring figures.

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