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Changing Paintings: 30 Jason, Medea and the Golden Fleece
Ovid starts the seventh book of his Metamorphoses with myths concerning Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece. Although these take up the first half of this book, he only summarises long and complex...
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Reading visual art: 144 Human flight
It seems that humans have always wanted to fly like the birds, although it’s clear that few birds have ever wanted to walk far on two legs. As is often the case, our aspiration has been transformed...
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Reading visual art: 145 Divine flight
Just as humans have always wanted to fly, the ability has commonly been ascribed to those elevated to the status of god or goddess. While some systems of belief have been happy to award all their...
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Heroines 9: Blood of a centaur and the troubled woman
Paintings only too easily become separated from their original titles. Devoid of that crucial clue, Evelyn De Morgan’s full-length portrait of an overtly troubled woman, above, becomes an insoluble...
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Heroines 10: Ariadne’s revenge
Among Ovid’s Heroines, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one who not only survives, but emerges from her crisis rather well in the end. The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her...
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Changing Paintings: 31 Rejuvenating Aeson
Following Ovid’s brief summary of the adventure of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Book 7 of Metamorphoses continues his account of Jason and Medea with an unusual myth about human rejuvenation. Once...
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Reading visual art: 146 Swimmers in narrative
Painters have often used collections of nude women in or near water to appeal to their male patrons, but relatively few have depicted people actually swimming. In this and tomorrow’s articles I examine...
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Edward Poynter’s classical stories: 1 to 1880
In his day, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was one of the most eminent and influential British artists, but like so many in the later years of the nineteenth century, his work was soon reviled with the...
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Changing Paintings: 32 Medea’s murder by proxy
Up to this point in his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s account of the sorceress Medea has told of her better achievements, in enabling Jason to win the Golden Fleece, and to rejuvenate his father Aeson. Such...
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Reading visual art: 148 The horse in myth and legend
Since its domestication somewhere on the steppe of Ukraine and south-western Russia around five millennia ago, humans have been dependent on the horse as a means of transport and drawing wheeled...
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Reading visual art: 149 The horse in later narrative
In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the horse in narrative, I showed examples from classical myths and legends, culminating in that of Saint George and the dragon. This leads to the...
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Edward Poynter’s classical stories: 2 from 1880
By 1880, Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) was well-established as one of the leading artists of the day. Although he had painted some spectacular panoramas and some scenes from popular classical...
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Heroines 11 & 13: Canace and Laodamia in secret
Two of Ovid’s fictional letters from heroines have become so obscure that their paintings have all but disappeared. To discover them we have to look in the collections of the Vatican, and in a...
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Heroines 12: The many faces of Medea
There are some mythological subjects that artists would do best to avoid, while others almost guarantee success. Medea, sorceress and jilted wife of Jason of Golden Fleece fame, is clearly one of the...
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Changing Paintings: 33 The origins of Theseus
Ovid tells one final story about the downfall of Medea after she has married King Aegeus in Athens, linking back to the saga of Jason, and forward to his next thread telling the story of Theseus. As...
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Reading visual art: 150 Camels in narrative
Camels are very large ungulates adapted to life in the desert, famous for their ability to survive for long periods without eating or drinking, their unpleasant smell, and a notoriously bad temper. I...
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Reading visual art: 151 Camels in life
Camels have continued to feature in paintings showing more recent times, from events at the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon was in Egypt. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), General Bonaparte...
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Changing Paintings: 34 Minos and the Myrmidons
With Medea finally consigned to oblivion and Theseus united with his father, King Aegeus of Athens, Ovid’s Metamorphoses rushes on to a little-known group of myths explaining the origins of Minos and...
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Reading visual art: 152 Apotheosis
There are three events that have been widely depicted in European art that can readily be confused, and a fourth that doesn’t often appear in paintings. Each involves the elevation of a heroic figure...
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Reading visual art: 153 Catasterisation and assumption
In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of apotheoses. Following a couple of even more liberal interpretations, this article moves on to the second and third items in this list: Apotheosis, when a...
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