The monstrous old master: how Succession’s Rubens lays bare the Roy family’s brutality

Photograph: HBO

From old masters to contemporary scenes, artworks are often embedded in our favourite TV shows. They can foreshadow a narrative, give an insight into a character’s storyline, or influence the aesthetics of the whole series. Yet we might not decipher this at first glance.

It was when I heard the name Artemisia Gentileschi, and her painting Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting, being discussed by Prince Philip and art historian (and spy) Anthony Blunt on season three of The Crown, that I realised that art on TV is often much more than just set dressing. The conversation about Gentileschi spoke to the history of the royal collection – the painting was a commission by King Charles I who personally invited the artist to England in 1638 – and pointed to the prominence Gentileschi had in her lifetime. Although clearly this was not to last, as Blunt had to correct Philip’s assumption that the female painter was a “he”.

Television can also be a place to discover contemporary art. I first learned about Marilyn Minter, the New York-based painter who constructs close-up images of body parts to explore the contradictions of beauty and desire, after seeing her work on the walls of the penthouse belonging to Gossip Girl’s Serena van der Woodsen – one depicting the back of a dirty ankle and high heel, the other showing a glittering silver eye. The same apartment housed a work from Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa series, when the two artists placed a fake Prada store in the middle of the Texas desert – an installation that also made its way on to The Simpsons.

The pilot show of HBO’s Industry saw overachiever Hari Dhar look up to a painting of a distorted face directly inspired by the American artist, George Condo. Setting the mood for the series, the ghoulish face reflected not only the cutthroat personalities of the young graduates vying for places in Pierpoint bank, but also the toxicity of the trading floor they were to work in.

Yet one of the most powerful artworks on TV is perhaps the painting looming behind the Roy family in the promotional poster for the first seasons of Succession: Peter Paul Rubens’s The Tiger Hunt. It’s viscerally chaotic, depicting a never-ending cycle of animals battling humans – biting, punching, ripping, and killing. The poster suggests that the Roys are live embodiments of the figures grappling behind them, and speaks to the many power dynamics that underpin the series. By picturing them in front of this possession, a museum-standard old master – which was seized by the French from the Germans during the Napoleonic wars – Succession presents the Roys’ great wealth, and their bullish, ruthless characters. But, as the painting warns, this is not a story of victory.

Succession’s second season was promoted with a picture featuring additional cast members sitting in front of an equally aggressive work. In Dante and Virgil in Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the two protagonists look out from the shadows on to a scene of violence: the fraudster Gianni Schicchi biting the neck of an alchemist called Capocchio. The torment, however, is overshadowed by the formality and beauty of Dante and Virgil’s stance, as if, like us viewers, they were calmly surveying the scene’s depravity. The painting is set in the eighth circle of hell, and also features a dead man on the floor; naked bodies falling; and a man-bat who gazes wickedly at Dante and Virgil – begging the question about which Roys will become analogous to Bouguereau’s tortured souls.

Awards season is under way, and a lot of us are watching and discussing the most celebrated TV shows and films of the moment. The paintings they contain show that art is more far-reaching than we might imagine. Stretching into unexpected domains, art has the power to speak to a multitude of stories, places and characters, from across different worlds and centuries, and if done well can cannily create a drama within a drama itself.