Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

Once Achelous had completed telling the story of how his lost horn had been transformed into the Horn of Plenty, the floods had abated, so his guests left the banquet, leaving Ovid to explain the events leading to the death of the great hero Hercules. This reverses the chronological order, as the next story after that in Metamorphoses tells of his birth.

Having won her hand by defeating Achelous, Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning with her to his native city. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate from the winter’s rains. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, but the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across.

Hercules had thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected Nessus was trying to abduct her, so shouted warning to him before loosing an arrow at the centaur’s back.

Ovid’s description of these events poses a problem for those trying to depict them, in choosing the right point of view and composition to remain faithful to that account.

Guido Reni’s masterly painting from around 1620, one of the finest of its period in the Louvre, almost fills the canvas with Nessus, who looks worryingly heroic, and Deianeira, who seems to be flying. The small figure of Hercules in the distance is well-lit, but loses the details of bow and arrow. In any case, that arrow could hardly strike Nessus in the chest.

Paolo Veronese’s painting from about 1586 also elects for this early moment, as Hercules is readying his bow and arrow, with Nessus just reaching the opposite bank. He shows the scene from Hercules’ position, but discovers the problems with that point of view: Nessus and Deianeira are now small, and Nessus is looking away with his chest concealed, and even Hercules’ face is turned from the viewer. The result makes its hero look more like a furtive stalker.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views the events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and body well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest. To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who appear superfluous apart from their role in achieving compositional balance.

Antonio del Pollaiolo’s painting from about 1475–80 tries a side-on view, requiring Nessus to be shot while still in the river, in a slight adjustment to the original story. Deianeira appears precariously balanced, and must be grateful that Nessus’ muscular arms save her from being dropped into the river below. The artist also leaves it to the viewer to know that Hercules’ poisoned arrow strikes Nessus rather than Deianeira.

Three centuries later, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée clearly understood the compositional problem, but didn’t arrive at such a good solution. Nessus, bearing a distressed Deianeira in his arms, has just reached the opposite bank, in the foreground. Hercules is on the left in the distance, and we can at least see his face, bow and arrow. There appears to be no way that Hercules’ arrow could impale Nessus’ chest, without first passing through some of the abundant Deianeira, nor his back. Lagrenée also adds a ferryman, who seems to have been knocked over in Nessus’ haste to make off with his captive.

Gustave Moreau’s final drawing of about 1860, squared up and ready to transfer to canvas for painting, alters the story to make its composition feasible. He puts Nessus in the foreground, with the attendant risk of making him appear the hero, somehow supporting the upstretched body of Deianeira. In the right distance, Hercules has already loosed the fatal arrow, which is prominently embedded not in the front of Nessus’ chest, but in his back. The centaur’s legs have collapsed under him, and his head and neck are stretched up in the agony of death.

Gustave Moreau and Jules Élie Delaunay seem to have worked on a compositional solution together, resulting in Delaunay’s brilliant painting of 1870, which is sadly not available for use here.

That single shot ran Nessus through. He tore the arrow out, and his blood spurted freely, mixed with poison from the Lernaean hydra. Determined to avenge his own death, the centaur gave Deianira his tunic soaked with that poison, telling her to keep it to “strengthen waning love.”

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Hercules, his left hand grasping Nessus’ mouth, about to club the centaur to death, while a slightly bedraggled Deianeira watches in the background. There’s no arrow in Nessus’ chest, and Hercules’ quiver is puzzlingly trapped under Nessus’ right foreleg. Three other figures of uncertain roles are at the right, and a winged putto hovers overhead, covering its eyes with its right hand.

In Arnold Böcklin’s puzzling painting from 1898, Nessus is far from part-human, and Deianeira isn’t the beauty she was claimed to be. As those two wrestle grimly, Hercules has stolen up behind them, and is busy pushing a spear into Nessus’ bulging belly. Blood pours from the wound, but Deianeira is in no position to collect it.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. Initially, she was upset, but then tried to devise a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. It was then that she recalled the blood of Nessus, and his dying words to her. She therefore impregnated a shirt with that blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, quickly growing into intense pain. Trying to tear the shirt off, he obtained no relief, and only ripped off his burnt skin from the burning flesh underneath. Hercules roamed through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt off his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea, where he was transformed into a rock pinnacle.

Hercules then cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin.

This is illustrated in another miniature, The Death of Hercules (c 1470), this time for Raoul Le Fèvre’s Histoires de Troyes.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful Death of Hercules (1634) uses chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio’s to show a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

Jupiter came to the aid of the dying hero, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and his immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

Tiepolo’s wonderful Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765) portrays this as a saintly ascension, which seems inappropriate.

As a visual art, painting is all about looking and seeing, and one of its more discomforting themes is that of the voyeur, the eyes that shouldn’t be there, looking at something they really shouldn’t. In these two articles, I first show examples of paintings that explore this in classical myths and Biblical stories, then tomorrow will take that on to more modern subjects.

When Acis, son of the river nymph Symaethis, was only sixteen, Galatea fell in love with him, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The latter did his best to smarten his appearance for her, but remained deeply and murderously jealous of Acis. Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye. This upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there, playing his reed pipes.

Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach. Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, Polyphemus grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was crushed to death by the boulder that Polyphemus lobbed at him.

Gustave Moreau’s Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked in the countryside with her eyes closed, and the cyclops playing sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be appropriate to a sea-nymph. Polyphemus is shown with two ‘normal’ eyesockets and lids, his single seeing eye staring out disconcertingly from the middle of his forehead.

Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops (c 1914) is one of the masterpieces of Symbolism, and follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of the voyeurism of Polyphemus. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis nowhere to be seen.

Van der Werff’s modern reputation includes painting the erotic, and his Amorous Couple in a Park Spied upon by Children, or Paris and Oenone, from 1694, is one of his earlier works exploring the intense relationship of this legendary couple. When he was still a shepherd, Paris of Troy married the nymph Oenone, whom he later abandoned to marry Helen.

The Biblical story of King David and Bathsheba is all about voyeurism and sinister power.

Miniatures, such as Jean Bourdichon’s Bathsheba Bathing from 1498-99, led more private lives and could be considerably more explicit. Here is the most frequently painted moment of the story, with a nude Bathsheba bathing in the foreground, and David in his crown and regal robes watching her from a window in the distance.

In 1714, Adriaen van der Werff painted his traditional version of Bathsheba, who is combing her hair under the distant gaze of King David.

The Scottish artist David Wilkie’s Bathsheba from 1815 is set in the countryside. She is now beside a small stream where she has been bathing, and is just donning a stocking. King David is again shown as a sinister voyeur.

As you might expect, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bathsheba (1889) is a literal interpretation of the story. Watching Bathsheba washing in her small roof-garden is the figure of David, leaning forward to get as close a look as he can.

The other related Biblical narrative is that of Susanna and the elders, which opens with the two men watching her bathing in the privacy of her own garden.

In Jacopo Tintoretto’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Susanna is blissfully unaware of being watched by the evil elders. This puts the viewer in the uncomfortable predicament of knowing what’s going on, but also knowing what she doesn’t know.

Susanna herself is caught as she is drying her leg after bathing in the small pool beside her, looking at herself in a rectangular mirror propped up against a rosy trellis in a secluded part of her garden. Scattered in front of her are the tools of grooming, her personal jewellery, and a fine gold-encrusted girdle, behind which appear to be her outer garments.

Peering round each end of the trellis are the two old elders dressed in orange robes, who have entered the garden and crept right up to get a better view of Susanna’s body. To the right are trees, against whose foot Susanna’s back rests. Immediately above her head is a magpie, a bird associated in fables with mischief and theft. In the centre distance, the secluded area opens out to another pond, on which there are ducks and their ducklings, then there is a covered walk beside which is a Herm. In the left distance is a larger pond, at which a stag and a hind are drinking. On the far side are some trees and another Herm.

Unlike other paintings of nudes, where mirrors are often used to extend the view of the figure on display, neither the image seen in the mirror nor the reflection on the water show anything more of Susanna.

Lovis Corinth started painting this story in 1890, when he made two slightly different versions of what was fundamentally the same work. Their only reference to the garden is now a single rose, the flower chosen by Tintoretto for the trellis in front of Susanna, on the floor. The two elders have followed Susanna back inside after her bathing, and are now spying on her from behind a curtain, where only one of them is prominent. In common with Tintoretto, Corinth chooses a moment before Susanna is aware that she is being watched, and long before the elders force themselves on her. Both paintings emphasise her nakedness by including her clothes, and add the jewellery of more traditional depictions.

Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.