Top of Form

Samhain is celebrated on 31 October, a traditional festival that predates Halloween marking the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark one, as the nights draw in towards winter.It has a long history of being celebrated in Scotland, Ireland and other Celtic nations, and is almost certainly pre-Christian.

Scottish artist John Duncan (18661945) drew inspiration from ancient objects and stories to create this painting, titled Riders of the Sidhe. The Sidhe (pronounced shee) are a fairy people in old Irish myths and this painting shows them riding out on a hunt at either Samhain or Beltane. Traditionally, Samhain was a time for tales of the spooky and supernatural, when people believed it was easier for beings from the otherworld, like the Sidhe, to appear on earth. This painting mixes objects and styles from different periods. The sword held by one rider resembles blades from 3,000 years ago. Other features, such as the chalice held by another rider and the way the Sidhe are dressed, look medieval.

In 31 BC Cleopatra VII and the Roman general Mark Antony were defeated at the Battle of Actium by his rival Octavian (later the Roman emperor Augustus). Soon afterwards, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire. Among the many gods worshipped in Roman Egypt was theone God of the Jews. By the time the Romans arrived, Judaism was well established in the country and, like the Ptolemies (the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt between 305 and 30 BC), the Romans allowed Jews to continue their religious practices without interference.This pendantfeatures a menorah the Jewish symbol of the seven-branched lampstand. Egyptian workshops probably produced pendants for clients of various religious beliefs.

Under the Ptolemies, Jewish communities had generally thrived, with some adopting Greek culture and language. In the first century AD,Philo of Alexandriaclaimed that one million Jews lived in Egypt. According to tradition, Jewish scholars were commissioned to translate the Torah into Greek for the famous library at Alexandria. But this special status was challenged in the first and second centuries by a series of Jewish revolts across the Empire. Several factors sparked the violence, including a special tax imposed on Jews, and a recurring expectation among the Jewish community of the arrival of amessiah a divinely appointed (but human) leader. Retaliation was brutal and the rebels were crushed. In Egypt, especially, after the Diaspora Revolt of AD 116 to 117, surviving records contain far fewer references to Jews and Jewish communities.

The menorah, like the one onthis oil lamp, is one of the few ways of identifying Jewish material in Egypt, unless a recognisably Jewish name is given on a papyrus or stone inscription. In time, it became the most common symbol of Jewish identity. Judaism never became a state religion in Egypt with state-sponsored works of art, and the everyday objects that Jews made and used were generally the same as those used by non-Jews.The first Christians were Jews who believed that Jesus Christ was their messiah. His title christos is the Greek translation of Hebrew messiah, meaning anointed one. In Alexandria, as scholars debated early Christian thought, they were hugely influenced by the Greek world of philosophical debate and by the Judaism of Greek-speaking scholars such as Philo of Alexandria. Their discussions and disputes helped to shape the development of Christianity.

This manuscript is known as theCodex Sinaiticus, meaning the book from Sinai. Written on parchment in Greek, it contains the earliest surviving complete version of the New Testament. It is also the most complete version of many of the books of the Greek version of Hebrew scripture also used as the Christian Old Testament.The Roman authorities viewed the new religion of Christianity with suspicion. While Judaism had a long history, Christianity was a difficult, occasionally criminal sect. Because of their reluctance to sacrifice to the gods who protected the Empire, Christians were seen as a threat and were periodically persecuted.In AD 311 the emperor Galerius legalised Christianity and in AD 313 Constantine restored the rights and property of Christians. Soon after, Christianity became the privileged religion of the imperial household and wealthy and influential people throughout the empire adopted the new religion. Imperial coins began to contain Christian imagery such as the cross monogram, tucked between the trophy held by a winged Victory and an inscription on the back ofthis coin.

By the end of the fourth century, imperial legislation began to penalise adherents of traditional religion (polytheism), just as Jews and Christians had been penalised in earlier times. The balance of religious power had changed. In AD 330, the capital of the Roman Empire moved from Rome to Constantinople, and by the 6th century Egypts population had become a Christian majority. Egypt remained part of theEastern Roman (Byzantine) Empireuntil its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century.The ancient Greeks saw the Celts as warlike peoples whose strange customs set them apart from the civilised Mediterranean world. Writing around 6030 BC, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described Celtic peoples wearing horned helmets into battle.This helmet was cast into the River Thames over 2,000 years ago, perhaps as an offering to the gods. It was dredged from the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge in the early 1860s. It is the only Iron Age helmet to have ever been found in southern England, and it is the only Iron Age helmet with horns ever to have been found anywhere in Europe. Horns were often a symbol of the gods in different parts of the ancient world. This might suggest the person who wore this was a special person, or that the helmet was made for a god to wear.The helmet is made from sheet bronze pieces held together with many carefully placed bronze rivets. Its swirling decoration may have carried hidden meanings.

Some of the most celebrated Italian Renaissance drawings were made in metalpoint. It is the graphic technique most associated with the period. Metalpoint was used predominantly in Florence, where it was the cornerstone of a drawing-centred artistic education throughout the 15th century. Florentine artists (or those trained in the city) successfully exported the medium to other regions. Italian artists reserved metalpoint for making figure studies in the studio. Pisanello, and later Leonardo da Vinci, were exceptions to this they both drew vividly naturalistic animal studies with a stylus. Metalpoint almost ceased to be used in Italy when Raphael, its last great practitioner, died in 1520. It was ill-suited to preparing monumental figures made famous by artists such as Michelangelo.Making studies in metalpoint from posed figures in the studio was a mainstay of artistic education in Renaissance Italy, above all in Florence where the ability to draw was particularly prized. This drawing, probably sketched from two fellow apprentices, is typical of the majority of surviving Florentine metalpoint drawings it is the work of an unidentifiable young artist, in this case most likely a student of Filippino Lippi.

During the 18th century metalpoint was scarcely used. Miniaturists occasionally continued to use it to sketch out their portraits before adding colour. The technique returned to favour from the 1820s onwards as part of a renewed interest in the purity and directness of Renaissance art. The Nazarenes, a group of German artists in Rome, and later thePre-Raphaelitesin Britain, wished to revive a technique closely associated with masters such as Albrecht Drer and Raphael. The earliest drawings of the revival were directly inspired by Victorian enthusiasts for Renaissance drawings, part of a broader cultural movement in Britain as artists and public took an unprecedented interest in 15th-century art. The adoption of silverpoint was a natural extension of this phenomenon, as artists attended exhibitions of Old Master art, studied Renaissance treatises, and revived other traditional media. In the decades to follow, however, they moved away from metalpoints historic associations and began to experiment. By the end of the 19th century, silverpoint had entered the realm of popular culture and a new view of the medium had emerged, shaped by theAesthetic Movements taste for refinement.

A major figure in the silverpoint revival, the French-born Alphonse Legros (18271910) was professor at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He trained his students to use the technique and to copy Renaissance drawings. Legros mostly used metalpoint in the studio, but these five views of a mummy-case suggest that he was in front of the object, which may have been this bronze coffin containing a mummified cat acquired by the British Museum in the 1800s.

William Holman Hunt (18271910) was a strong advocate of metalpoint, and his studies go much further than emulation of Renaissance works. They are working drawings, from which he sometimes removed entire figures by scraping away the ground. In this figure study, he used graphite to create dark accents and to draw the shoe, possibly because he had scraped away so much ground that the stylus no longer made a mark.

Like most British metalpoint artists of the 1890s, Charles Haslewood Shannon (18331898) worked with a sharp stylus on very smooth paper. His particularly delicate, unbroken line has conveyed the texture of fur admirably. The whiskers have been scratched out with a needle or some other sharp instrument. Shannon was primarily a painter and printmaker. This drawing was published as a print inThe Dial, an art journal he published with his partner, Charles Ricketts.

Charles Holroyd (18611917) learnt the metalpoint technique from Legros and played a major part in the etching revival movement. This drawing is a study for an etching, in which Holroyd has used the fine lines and delicacy of metalpoint to model the figures. The completed etching shows the figures gazing towards the sea with a ship on the horizon.

This drawing by Christopher Nevinson (18891946) dates from his penultimate year as a student at the Slade School of Art in London. His choice of metalpoint points to the enduring legacy of its champion Alphonse Legros, a former professor at the school. Nevinsons style radically shifted towards Modernism when he saw an ItalianFuturistshow in 1912. He is best known for the paintings and prints inspired by the horrors he experienced as an ambulance driver in France at the beginning of the First World War.

Metalpoint was a major part of artistic practice across northern Europe by about 1400. The fame of Netherlandish artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Gerard David spread quickly, and many young German artists travelled down the Rhine to learn in their workshops. Metalpoint was used for recording facial types, figure compositions and ornament designs until the mid-16th century. Albrecht Drers delicate silverpoints, made when he travelled in the Netherlands from 1520 to 1521, are among the most sensational ever produced.The ultimate draughtsman of the German Renaissance, Drer experimented throughout his career with every type of technique. His earliest recorded drawing is in metalpoint a self-portrait made at the age of 13 (now in the Albertina, Vienna). Inspired by the Italian ideal of classical beauty from his visit to Italy between 1505 and 1507, this sheet demonstrates a highly colouristic use of the technique, achieved with white bodycolour brushed over silverpoint to emphasise the sculptural quality of the face. The strong tone of the prepared paper is reminiscent of the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi. In later life, Drer employed the sensitive restraint of metalpoint to make portrait drawings, especially of his brothers Hanns and Endres, his wife Agnes, and his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer.