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 pre-christian hero is elevated to the status of god or goddess;
• Catasterisation, when a mortal is changed into a celestial body such as a star or constellation;
• Assumption, when the Virgin Mary was taken up into Heaven;
• Ascension, when Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven, and sometimes available to saints on their martyrdom.

Girodet’s painting of the Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes was probably completed in 1802, and is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by the bogus Scottish poet Ossian. It’s unclear how those French war heroes became involved with Ossian, but an extraordinary mixture of myths and legends from contrasting cultures.

In Vasily Vereshchagin’s bleak Apotheosis of War (1871), ravens/crows perch on a huge pile of human skulls in a barren landscape outside the ruins of a town.

A few Christian religious paintings came close to being apotheoses.

Alexandre Cabanel’s The Death of Moses (1850) tackles one of the vaguer episodes in the life of this Old Testament prophet. When he was 120 years old, according to the book of Numbers, Moses assembled the tribes of Israel on the banks of the River Jordan, reminded them of the laws under which they must live, sang a song of praise, blessed the people, and passed his authority to Joshua. He then ascended Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, and died. Cabanel shows this as an apotheosis, with God the Father (upper left) welcoming Moses (centre right) with open arms.

Being transformed into a celestial body in catasterisation was an honour accorded those mortals who couldn’t aspire to deity, among them the giant Orion. He arrived at Chios, where he became drunk, and raped Merope, the daughter of Oenopion. As punishment for that, Oenopion blinded Orion and cast him from his land. Orion then went to Lemnos, where Hephaistos took pity on him, and lent him his servant Kedalion to sit astride his shoulders and act as his guide. An oracle advised Orion to proceed east into the rays of the rising sun, so that those rays would restore his sight. So cured, Orion then went to Crete to hunt.

There are differing accounts of Orion’s death. Some involve his love affair with Eos, which was opposed (possibly out of jealousy) by Artemis. In these, Artemis ended up killing Orion with her arrows. Other versions claim he was killed by a giant scorpion. In death, Artemis asked that Zeus catasterised him, together with the scorpion, to form the constellation Scorpio. Once there, Orion pursues the daughters known as the Pleiades, which form a prominent open star cluster nearby.

Poussin’s Landscape with Orion, or Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun was painted late in his career, in 1658, at a time when the artist’s hands were suffering a tremor that was starting to disrupt his ability to paint. It is among his finest allegorical landscapes, and one of the most intensely studied works of his career.

Set in one of Poussin’s wonderful idealised landscapes, near the coast, the giant Orion is striding purposefully towards the rising sun. He carries a huge hunting bow, and a quiver taller than a man. Standing on his shoulders is Kedalion, servant to Hephaistos, who is acting as his guide. Above and beyond Orion is a strange formation of backlit cloud, generally interpreted as being storm-cloud. Atop that is the standing figure of Artemis, with her distinctive crescent moon coronet, and an owl perched on her left shoulder. She leans nonchalantly against the cloud, her head propped against her right hand. In the far distance is the sea, with a prominent lighthouse.

There have been few other attempts to tell any part of the story of Orion on canvas. In 1685, Daniel Seiter ( –1705) painted this view of Diana by the Corpse of Orion, following in the brushstrokes of his teacher Johann Carl Loth. This shows Diana (Artemis), with her distinctive crescent moon, looking regretfully at the dead Orion, after she had killed him with her arrows.

Sidney Hall’s etching of Orion, a hand-coloured plate in a set of celestial cards from 1825, is an ingenious lesson in observational astronomy.

The Pleiades were originally the seven daughters of the titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione. When Atlas was made to carry the heavens on his shoulders, Orion started to pursue the Pleiades, so Zeus transformed them first into doves, then into stars. Their name is given to a star cluster, which appears to be chased across the night sky by the constellation of Orion.

Elihu Vedder’s painting of The Pleiades (1885) was made in association with his first illustration for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, representing Khayyam’s horoscope. Each of the sisters is connected by a thread to their corresponding star, perhaps representing the process of catasterisation.

There are a great many paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, of which I show here just a tiny sample.

Francesco Botticini’s spectacular example painted in about 1475-76 places unusual emphasis on Paradise, with its triple tiers of figures rising to those of the Virgin Mary kneeling in front of Christ at its summit.

Tintoretto painted several versions of The Assumption of The Virgin, this one for the Cappella di Santa Maria Assunta, in the Gesuiti, Venice. It’s thought that Tintoretto had promised to paint this in the style of Veronese.

Poussin’s Assumption of the Virgin from about 1650 is plainer and more orthodox.

Gaetano Previati’s Divisionist rendering of the Assumption from about 1901-03 shows a group of winged angels raising Mary’s body to Heaven.

Hermione has appeared as a character in a long succession of plays and operas, among them William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where she is the virtuous and beautiful Queen of Sicily. The latter was the inspiration for the name of the character Hermione Granger in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Played by Emma Watson in the movies made from those books, Hermione has returned to fame, although few of us can recall who the original Hermione was.

She was the daughter of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and Helen (later of Troy) who was left in the care of his predecessor Tyndareus. She was first agreed to be married to Orestes, but was then given to Pyrrhus, who had already taken Andromache as concubine. She then eloped with Orestes, who later married Erigone, his mother Clytemnestra’s daughter. Perhaps I had better explain a little more slowly.

Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, was conceived by Leda, who was the wife of the King of Sparta, Tyndareus, when Jupiter seduced her in the form of a swan. When she grew up, Helen married Menelaus, who succeeded her father as the King of Sparta, and the couple had a daughter named Hermione. Following the Judgment of Paris, Paris made off with Helen from Sparta, and took her back to Troy: an action that precipitated the war between Greece and its allies, and Troy.

With Helen already in Troy, Hermione’s father Menelaus left Sparta for the war against Troy, leaving their daughter in the care of Helen’s father, Tyndareus. He agreed for Hermione to marry Orestes, who was her cousin, being the son of Agamemnon, Menelaus’ brother. It seems likely that by the end of the Trojan War, Hermione and Orestes were living together as a couple.

While Menelaus was away fighting against Troy, he agreed that his daughter Hermione should marry Pyrrhus, who was also known as Neoptolemos, and was the son of the great Greek warrior Achilles (killed by Paris towards the end of the war). When Menelaus and Pyrrhus returned from the war, Menelaus implemented that marriage by taking Hermione away from Orestes, and giving her to Pyrrhus.

However, Pyrrhus hadn’t returned alone from Troy; he had brought with him a concubine, Andromache, who had been the wife of Hector and mother of Astyanax. Achilles had killed Hector in the war, and Pyrrhus had probably thrown young Astyanax to his death from the walls of Troy during its sacking.

The arrival of Andromache and the enforced marriage to Pyrrhus were understandably very distressing to Hermione, who quickly developed a dislike of Andromache, which was mutual. Hermione accused Andromache of using sorcery to prevent her from conceiving a child by Pyrrhus, which might have strengthened her position, in return for which Andromache taunted Hermione for remaining childless. As a result, Hermione started to plot the murder of her bitter rival Andromache.

Orestes visited Hermione, and the couple seized the opportunity to elope. Orestes then started to plot the murder of Pyrrhus, which would release Hermione from her enforced marriage. Although some accounts claim that it was Orestes who killed Pyrrhus, others claim that he was killed when he visited the oracle at Delphi, because he desecrated the temple there; either way, Pyrrhus was dead and Hermione was then free to marry Orestes.

Orestes’ father, Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, had commanded the Greek forces during the Trojan War. When he returned to his kingdom of Mycenae, he found that his wife, Clytemnestra, who was Helen’s (half-)sister, had made Aegisthus (who was Agamemnon’s cousin) her lover. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus then plotted the murder of Agamemnon, and although there’s disagreement about which of them actually did the deed, the hero Agamemnon was then killed, and Aegisthus and Clytemnestra ruled Mycenae.

Back in Sparta, Orestes and Hermione had a son, Tisamenos. Eventually, after Aegisthus and Clytemnestra had had children of their own, Orestes returned to Mycenae, where he murdered Clytemnestra (his mother), Aegisthus, and their daughter (confusingly named Helen), in vengeance for the death of his father. Orestes returned to Sparta, and Hermione disappeared, presumably dead. When Aletes, the surviving son of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, came of age, Orestes returned to Mycenae, killed Aletes (his half-brother), married Erigone, his half-sister, and assumed the throne.

For his matricide, an unusual crime even for the murderous mythical Greeks, Orestes was pursued by the Furies, and driven mad.

Hermione’s part in all this may seem minor, but she suffered a raw deal when she was forcibly taken from Orestes and given to Pyrrhus, who already had a concubine. Real history has also done her a disservice: Sophocles’ play Hermione has been lost, but Euripides’ play Andromache survived, and has spawned operas and plays, including Racine’s tragedy Andromaque (1667), which has remained fairly popular.

The one account sympathetic to Hermione’s plight is letter 8 of Ovid’s Heroines. This fictional letter in Latin verse is a plea by Hermione to Orestes, written when Hermione is in her enforced marriage to Pyrrhus, while Andromache is his concubine. Of Ovid’s fictional letters, it is one of the few whose pleading is satisfied, and Hermione is thus one of the few such heroines who achieves the happiness she craves.

This fresco from Pompeii shows a scene from Euripides’ play Andromache, in which Pyrrhus is about to be murdered by Orestes, with Hermione in attendance. Pyrrhus part-kneels on the altar of Apollo at Delphi, in the centre, as Orestes, on the right, is about to kill him with the sword held in his right hand.

There don’t appear to have been any further paintings of Hermione until about 1800, when two great French history painters tackled this labyrinthine story.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid.

This drawing is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties that you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury (which might have foretold Orestes’ fate), but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her.

Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

Just a decade later, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin made two paintings exploring this story. In Andromache and Pyrrhus (1810), the central figures of Pyrrhus, seated on the throne, and Andromache, kneeling at his side and clutching her young son, are in conflict with two other women. It’s most likely that the figure at the right is Hermione, who is being displaced from her enforced role as Pyrrhus’ wife by Andromache.

The child is almost certainly Astyanax. Although some accounts report that Pyrrhus threw the boy to his death from the walls of Troy, others, including Euripides, claim that Astyanax survived the sack of Troy, and accompanied his mother when she was taken as Pyrrhus’ concubine. When Hermione plotted the murder of Andromache, she included the killing of Astyanax.

Guérin’s Orestes Announces the Death of Pyrrhus to Hermione (c 1810) shows a scene described later in Euripides’ and Racine’s plays, in which Orestes has just murdered Pyrrhus at Delphi, and here tells Hermione of that death, by flourishing the sword that he used. Hermione is shocked, as is her maid standing behind her.

Guérin painted at least three other stories that form the basis of letters in Heroines: Phaedra and Hippolytus (1802), Dido and Aeneas (c 1815), and Sappho (date not known). In this case he chose not to follow Ovid’s heroine, but Euripides.

It seems to have taken around three millennia and a modern novelist to have got the better deal that poor Hermione deserved.