How does The Golden Bough (painting) elucidate its Legacy?
James George Frazer evokes the painting in his book The Golden Bough (1890), which speculatively reconstructs a mental image which according to Frazer connects many myths and religious practices. The book would go on to influence many writers. Turner's painting serves as its frontispiece and is addressed in the opening paragraph:Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, "Diana's Mirror," as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its banks, and the equally Italian palazzo whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Dian herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
James George Frazer frontispiece lake of Nemi The Golden Bough