The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

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.

Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 it was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from their polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king generously handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

Robinet Testard shows a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It’s at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, the fourteenth letter in his Heroines.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill in his Sisyphean task, the Danaïds haven’t been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, and completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, now hanging in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), now decorating the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, yet again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

Ovid ends Book 7 of his Metamorphoses with one of his best stories. It’s told by Cephalus, the envoy from Athens, to the sons of King Aeacus on the island of Aegina, following the king’s account of the Myrmidons.

Having told Cephalus of the plague and the Myrmidons that followed it, King Aeacus falls asleep, so his son Phocus takes Cephalus and his companions to their accommodation. There Phocus notices the unusual javelin carried by Cephalus, with its gold tip on a shaft of wood that he cannot identify. This leads Cephalus to tell him that the javelin killed his wife, and so to explain the circumstances.

Within two months of his marriage to the beautiful Procris, when he was laying nets to catch a deer at dawn, Aurora saw Cephalus and tried to abduct him (she has a track record of affairs with humans). Cephalus protested and told Aurora of his love for his wife, so she let him go, warning him that if she saw him again, he would regret ever marrying Procris.

Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (1630) shows the dawn scene of Cephalus trying to avoid the obviously amorous intentions of the goddess Aurora, who is seated and nearly naked. Behind Cephalus is the winged horse drawing the chariot of the dawn. A winged putto is holding up an image for him to view, presumably showing Procris, to help his resolve. At the left is a river god. Beyond the horse is another deity bearing a coronet: although difficult to see, that might be Diana, given her association with hunting and her role in this myth.

Peter Paul Rubens’ oil sketch of Aurora Abducting Cephalus was probably made in 1636-37, late in Rubens’ life, for his workshop to complete as a painting for King Philip IV of Spain’s hunting lodge at Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. In addition to showing the willing Aurora trying to persuade the reluctant Cephalus to join her in her chariot, it includes some details at odds with Ovid’s story: Diana’s hunting dog and javelin, which Procris gave to her husband after their reconciliation, later in the story. Here they may be intended as attributes to confirm his identity.

Over the following couple of centuries, there was a steady stream of paintings showing the abduction of Cephalus, but to my eye the next major work using this theme was Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s romantic Aurora and Cephalus (1810). Instead of a substantial chariot, the seductive figure of Aurora is bearing a sleeping Cephalus aloft on a bed of cloud, as dawn breaks over the mountains below.

Forty years later, Pierre Claude François Delorme uses a similar motif recomposed into his Cephalus Carried off by Aurora (c 1851). This features ingeniously interlocking arms and embraces: Aurora cradles Cephalus’ shoulder and chest, Cephalus reaches out to Cupid, and Cupid back to Cephalus.

As he went back to his wife, Cephalus started to worry whether his wife had been unfaithful to him. He became aware that Aurora had changed his appearance, and entered the city of Athens unrecognised. When he got home, his household and wife didn’t recognise him either, so Cephalus put Procris to the test: with his wife still thinking him a stranger, he offered her great riches to spend a night with him, and managed to get her to waver with uncertainty.

He then revealed himself to be her husband, and accused her of being unfaithful. She said not a word, but fled to the mountains, where she joined the followers of Diana.

Cephalus yearned for his wife, so begged her forgiveness, and admitted that he too would have given way when made such an irresistible offer. Procris returned to him, and the couple lived happily again together. She brought back with her gifts from Diana: a hunting dog who outran all other dogs, and that unusual javelin.

Then the city of Thebes was once again put into difficulty, after Oedipus had broken the siege imposed by the Sphinx. This time the problem took the form of a wild beast that ate all its livestock. All the younger men, including Cephalus, went to hunt the beast, but it eluded them and their dogs. Cephalus then unleashed Diana’s hound to chase the beast. The dog caught it, but it broke free again. Cephalus prepared to throw his javelin, then noticed that his dog and the beast had suddenly been transformed into marble statues.

Cephalus returned to his now blissfully happy marriage with Procris. He went hunting alone at dawn, always feeling safe with his javelin. As the heat of the day came on, he would call on an imaginary zephyr of the cool breeze, talking to it as if it was a real nymph. One day he must have been overheard, and word was taken back to Procris that he was meeting a woman when he was supposed to be hunting. His wife was shocked, but refused to accept the story without herself witnessing her husband’s deceit.

The following morning, Cephalus was out hunting at dawn again, and when he grew hot, he rested and spoke to his imaginary zephyr as usual. He thought that he heard a sound nearby, which he suspected was an animal. He turned and threw his javelin at that noise.

He next heard his wife’s voice, rushed towards it, and found her mortally wounded, with his javelin buried deep in her chest. He took her up into his arms and tried in vain to stop blood from pouring from the wound. Knowing that she was dying, Procris implored him not to take the zephyr as his wife. He then realised the fatal misunderstanding, that Procris believed that he had been unfaithful. As Procris died in his arms, Cephalus tried to explain to her that the zephyr was only imaginary, and that seemed to bring her some comfort in her last moments.

In the foreground of Paolo Veronese’s account from about 1580, Procris has fallen, the javelin embedded in her upper abdomen, and her life is fading fast. Cephalus isn’t embracing her, though, merely holding her hand as he tries to plead his innocence. Veronese leaves us with two small puzzles too. The first is the large hunting hound behind Cephalus’ right shoulder, remembering that Diana’s dog was turned into stone while hunting the beast of Thebes. More puzzling is another figure, and a second dog, in the distance, at the left edge of the painting. These might represent the first part of the scene, before Cephalus throws his javelin, in multiplex narrative.

Peter Paul Rubens offers another oil sketch, of Cephalus and Procris (1636-37), showing the couple just before Cephalus throws the fateful javelin, which rests at his side.

There is another painting that has been claimed to show The Death of Procris, but which is more accurately titled A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph, made by Piero di Cosimo in about 1495.

A brilliant painting, it uses the full width of a panoramic panel to show a satyr with his goat legs and distinctive ears, ministering to a dying or dead nymph, who has a severe wound in her throat. At her feet is a hunting dog, with another three in the distance. But there’s no reason to show Cephalus as a satyr; Procris was impaled in the chest by the javelin; Procris was behind cover, where she was spying on Cephalus, not out in the open; and Cephalus had only one hound, a gift from Diana, which had in any case already been turned to marble. It’s a superb painting of a different story.

Ovid ends the book with Cephalus and his audience in tears, as Aeacus arrives with his other two sons and the army which they have been raising to counter the forces of Minos, setting the scene for the start of the next book.

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 the fearsome Myrmidons who were later to fight for Achilles in the war against Troy.

The delight of King Aegeus in meeting his son at last proved short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there. When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, Aeacus its king refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.

King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague that had almost destroyed the people of Aegina. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably also named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague sent against the people of the island. Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like one of the many outbreaks of the plague that have struck Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.

Aeacus saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being transformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh. They hailed Aeacus as king, and immediately went on to labour hard on the land and to become the fearsome band of warriors known as Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex).

Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, from where Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them with him to the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.

The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.

That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, showing Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.

If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he, together with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.

Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.

Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.

Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a thoroughly radical vision.

Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.

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 this brief bridge only hints at the early life of Theseus, I here provide a more detailed account of his origins.

Aegeus had been childless, but following the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, the King of Troezen got him drunk and packed him off to bed with his daughter Aethra. She had been instructed in a dream to leave Aegeus asleep, and to go to a nearby island, where she was also impregnated by the god Poseidon. Theseus, who was presumed to have been conceived that night, was thus considered to have double paternity, by god and man, a common qualification for mythical heroes.

Aegeus returned to Athens, after burying his sword and sandals under a massive rock. He told Aethra that when his son grew up, she should tell him to move the rock as a test. If he succeeded, then he should take the sandals and sword as evidence of his paternity.

When Theseus was old enough, his mother Aethra showed him the rock, and gave him Aegeus’ instructions. Theseus moved the rock, found the sandals and sword, then undertook an epic journey overland to his father in Athens.

One of the earliest depictions is Laurent de La Hyre’s Theseus And His Mother Aethra (1635-36). This shows the young Theseus lifting a heavy pillar to reveal a pair of shoes and a sword.

In one of his rare collaborative paintings, Nicolas Poussin worked with Jean Lemaire to show the same scene, of Theseus Recovering his Father’s Sword, in about 1638. This shows a marked contrast between the two actors: Theseus, destined to be a great hero, looks rough and brutish, while his mother Aethra wouldn’t look out of place modelling for the Madonna.

Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s more sketchy painting of Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms from 1768 adds a river god for good measure, and has Aethra giving Theseus his marching orders to go find his father.

In Antonio Balestra’s Theseus Discovering his Father’s Sword (c 1725) Theseus looks less enthusiastic to follow his mother’s directions.

Ovid’s story starts with the arrival in the court of King Aegeus of Theseus, who hasn’t yet been recognised by his father. Medea then tries to trick Aegeus to administer poisonous aconite to Theseus before his recognition, in a bid to keep Aegeus to herself. She prepares the poison in a cup which the king then offers to the young Theseus. At the last minute, just as his son is about to drink the aconite, Aegeus recognises that the sword borne by Theseus is his, knocks the cup away, and saves his son’s life.

In 1832, the theme chosen for the prestigious Prix de Rome contest was the moment that Aegeus recognised Theseus, immediately before the latter could swallow any of Medea’s poison. Two of the contenders for that great prize remain accessible today.

In Antoine-Placide Gibert’s Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), the three main actors are arranged almost linearly across the canvas. Just left of centre, Theseus stands, his head in profile, with the fateful cup in his left hand, and his father’s sword in his right. The king is just right of centre, looking Theseus in the eye, and appearing animated if not alarmed. At the far right is Medea, her face like thunder, sensing her plot to kill Theseus is about to fall apart.

It was Hippolyte Flandrin’s Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832) that won the Prix de Rome, with its more neoclassical look influenced by Jacques-Louis David. Flandrin establishes the scene as Athens, with a view of the Acropolis in the background. His timing is different from Gibert: this painting shows the moment immediately after Aegeus has recognised his son, and the cup of aconite lies spilt on the table. Theseus stands in the middle of the canvas conspicuously naked, his father’s sword held rather limply in his right hand. Aegeus stands to the left of centre, talking to his son quite emotionally. But of all the characters shown in this painting, it is Medea who is the most fascinating. Stood at the far left, she appears to be on her way out. She is po-faced, and looks as if she has come not from Greece, but from central Asia, perhaps.

Medea flees, never to be heard of again, leaving Aegeus to give thanks to the gods. Ovid then introduces Theseus with a short resumé of some of his accomplishments, including his killing of the Minotaur and of Procrustes, to be recounted later.

The myths of Theseus were at one time as popular as those of Heracles or even Aeneas or Jason. In about 1340-41, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about them in his epic poem Teseida, or The Theseid. This in turn inspired The Knight’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) painted these three scenes from Boccaccio’s epic on the front of a cassone, the visual equivalent of Ovid’s catalogue of the adventures of Theseus.

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 former. For a start, there’s no single authoritative account of the myths of Jason and Medea. The ancients had no problem in living with conflicting tales, as in their day so little in life could be proved in any rigorous way. But since the Age of Enlightenment we have looked at the world in the expectation of singular truths. In Medea’s case, there isn’t even a rough consensus.

One broad outline might be that Jason travelled to Colchis, where he underwent a series of trials imposed by King Aeëtes, culminating in Jason’s victory over the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. These were accomplished with the help of Medea, the King’s daughter, in return for Jason’s promise of marriage.

During their voyage home, Medea and Jason married, and she then bore him two sons. Ten years later, Jason divorced Medea in favour of the King of Corinth’s daughter Glauce. Divorce was too much for Medea to bear, so she sent Glauce a poisoned wedding dress to kill her and her father horribly. She then murdered her two children, fled to Athens, and had a child by King Aegeus.

The most consistent insight that we have into Medea is of the depth and complexity of her role and character, particularly in comparison with Jason, a simple pop-up action hero whose endless stream of testosterone made thought largely unnecessary. Yet Medea’s fascinating combination of conflicting roles – princess, sorceress, seductress, wife, mother, and vengeful filicide – have only brought trouble to the succession of painters who have tried to portray her.

From the Renaissance on, paintings of the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts have been frequent and popular. It fell to the obscure Dutch artist Paulus Bor to tackle The Disillusioned Medea (The Enchantress) in about 1640. Believed to have formed a pair with his painting of Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple, Bor comes closest to capturing Medea’s intriguing psychology.

She sits, her face flushed, resting her head on the heel of her right hand. In her left, she holds a wand made from bamboo or rattan, a reference to her sorcery. Her wand is poised ready for use as soon as she has worked out what to do next. Behind her is a small altar to Diana, the goddess of contradiction (the hunt and nature, chastity and childbirth) and the irrational (the moon and nature).

Paired with the story of Acontius and Cydippe, Bor can only be referring to Ovid’s fictional letter from Medea to Jason, letter twelve in his Heroides. Jason has told Medea of their divorce, but she hasn’t yet murdered their children. Medea gives a potted summary of their relationship, her crucial role in Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, and how she had turned her loyalties to him and betrayed her own family. Ovid ends it with portentous lines about Medea following her wrath, and of great forces acting on her soul.

There is another tragedy here too: although almost all of Ovid’s known works have survived to the present, one which hasn’t is his Medea, where his account of her role might have redressed the balance with accounts of Jason’s deeds.

After Bor’s painting, there is a gap of almost two centuries before the next substantial attempt to depict Medea at this troubled time.

JMW Turner’s Vision of Medea (1828) is the first in a series of more modern attempts to tell Medea’s story, and one of Turner’s few uses (perhaps his only use) of multiplex narrative. Turner had stayed in Rome with Sir Charles Eastlake during the autumn and winter of 1828, where he painted his View of Orvieto, Regulus, and this work, together with several other paintings whose identity is less certain.

He exhibited them there to the outrage of critics and the puzzlement of the public. Turner didn’t show this painting at the Royal Academy until 1831, where it was considered to be a wonderful “combination of colour”, but generally incomprehensible.

In the middle of the canvas, Medea is stood in the midst of her incantation to force Jason’s return. In the foreground are the materials she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Next was Gustave Moreau, in his Jason (1865), which bizarrely excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, a standard tool of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s future rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that isn’t borne out by the only clues that Moreau provides, in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Translated from their Latin, these read: Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing. And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil.

These imply we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, while Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was lost amid his surfeit of symbols.

A few years later, Frederick Sandys tried his Medea (1866-68), now possibly his best-known painting. He shows Medea at work preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a pair of toads copulating, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo. Despite this fine depiction and Medea’s intense stare, this painting was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1868.

While Sandys was still smarting from that blow, Anselm Feuerbach was painting Medea (1870) as a mother of two, watching as Jason and his Argonauts push their boat back into the surf to go in quest of the Golden Fleece. She is shown as an archetypal mother, a Madonna and infant plus one, not even looking at the departing boat. She is no sorceress, and the merest suggestion that she could ever kill those children in vengeance seems absurd.

Evelyn De Morgan’s Medea (1886) is visually rich but narratively thin. She has been abandoned by Jason, and now stares wistfully as she walks along the polished stone floor of her palace holding a vial of potion in her right hand: might this be the substance with which she impregnated the wedding dress she sent Glauce?

My final example comes from John William Waterhouse in his Jason and Medea (1907). Medea is depicted as a sorceress, perhaps preparing the potion Jason is to later give to the dragon. He appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge. Unlike Sandys, Waterhouse paints but a single toad, behaving itself quietly on the floor.

Each of these paintings has captured some of the many facets of Medea and her complex story. None comes close to the nuances of the verbal accounts, and in their efforts to approach this subject, painters have taken risks that haven’t paid off, at least at the time. Sandys was done an injustice when his painting was rejected by the Royal Academy, and that and Bor’s appear now to be her most successful portraits.

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 provincial museum near to Nelson’s dockyard on the south coast of England. These are for the eleventh letter from Canace to Macareus, and the thirteenth from Laodamia to Protesilaus.

Canace

We start in the amazing collections of the Vatican. Known best for its most famous works like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museums also hold some more mysterious works. Among them is a series of full-length portraits in fresco found in a Classical Roman villa at Tor Marancia, now famous for its more contemporary wall-paintings.

In another stroke of luck, their unknown artist has kindly identified the women depicted as Pasiphae, Scylla, Myrrha, Phaedra, and Canace. Although these differ from the women featured in Ovid’s Heroides, the series shares the idea of gathering together women with singular stories to tell. For a long time, these frescoes were on display in the same room containing the better-known Aldobrandini Wedding, a superb and equally puzzling frieze from a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome.

Here is Canace, about whom we know very little, except what Ovid tells us in Heroides, as another tragic case of incest.

Incest is among the most ancient of human taboos. Given that we only relatively recently came to understand why incest is genetically catastrophic, this pervasive ban on mating with close relatives is biologically important, but of puzzling origin. How did our dim and distant ancestors recognise the consequences of genetics that weren’t discovered for so many millennia, and ban incestuous relationships? Although probably most common in remote and isolated communities, incest has been most prominent among ruling families, who have repeatedly tried to cheat genetics in a bid to keep power within their family, only to rediscover why the taboo developed in the first place.

Ovid’s Canace cuts a tragic figure. She was the daughter of Aeolus, he of the winds and a king in his own right. She fell in love with her own brother, Macareus, and one of her other brothers was just as unfortunate, being Sisyphus, whose deceitfulness led to him being sentenced to pushing a huge boulder uphill in the underworld, in the prototype Sisyphean task.

Not only did Canace and Macareus have an incestuous relationship, but she fell pregnant as a result. Aeolus found out about the concealed birth, and had her baby abandoned among wild animals. He also sent his daughter a sword so she could fall on it.

This moment is shown in Jean Pichore’s miniature for an illustrated edition of the Heroides from about 1510.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Canace is written shortly before she fell on her father’s sword and ended her life. The letter doesn’t even attempt to argue her case for clemency, and serves as her suicide note.

There are also alternative endings to her story. In one, she simply commits suicide as instructed; in the other, Macareus pleads clemency with Aeolus, who reluctantly agrees. But as Macareus reaches his sister, it’s already too late, so he kills himself with the same sword.

Jean Pichore illustrates this vividly, possibly employing multiplex narrative in the foreground.

Laodamia

The story of Laodamia is also tragic, but in a different sense. The daughter of Acastus and Astydameia, she had only just married Protosilaus, a king of Thessaly in Greece, when he had to leave to join the force of a thousand ships sailing to the war against Troy.

Protosilaus had been a suitor of Helen, and brought with him a force of forty ships. Despite the prophecy that the first Greek to land would be the first to die, when the fleet finally arrived in front of the city, Protosilaus was the first to land. He promptly killed four Trojans, perhaps hoping in vain that they might count in his stead, but was then killed by Hector.

Ovid artfully writes Laodamia’s letter before the landing, when she has heard that the Greek fleet is held at Aulis, awaiting better winds. It’s a letter that could have been written by any military partner during the long and awful pause between their partner’s departure and the joining of war. It has some delightful twists, as you’d expect of Ovid: at one point, Laodamia explains to the Trojans that her husband is no warrior, and makes love much more vigorously than he makes war.

The letter also makes clear the fateful prophecy about the first Greek ashore, filling it with that impending doom, and Laodamia makes clear her views on Helen’s morality. The gods looked favourably on Laodamia, at least. As she had been married so briefly, Protosilaus was given three hours with his wife before he was finally taken down to the underworld. This didn’t ease her grief, though, and she sobbed on his tomb.

It is this moment that George William Joy shows in his painting of her from 1878, which appears to be the only such depiction. It isn’t tucked away in the collections of the Vatican, but somehow has found its way into Portsmouth City Museum, just a few minutes down the road from the Royal Navy dockyard in Portsmouth, England, and a curious location for the work of an Irish painter who worked mainly in London. But Joy died at Purbrook, just to the north of Portsmouth over the chalk whaleback of Portsdown Hill.

The story of Laodamia reaches its conclusion with her making a full-size bronze statue of her late husband, which she worshipped and embraced. Caught by a servant kissing the statue one morning, it was put on a pyre and burned. That was the final straw for Laodamia, who threw herself on the pyre and joined her husband at last.

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 powers are readily abused, though, and those stories are followed by a brief account of her downfall.

Medea pretends that she and Jason have fallen out, and flees to Pelias’ court in Colchis; Pelias is Aeson’s half-brother, thus Jason’s uncle. She tells that court how she rejuvenated Aeson, prompting Pelias’s three daughters (the Peliades) to ask her to do the same for their father. To ensure their commitment to her trap, Medea first demonstrates her rejuvenation procedure on a sheep, whose throat she cuts before plunging it into a large bronze kettle and turning it into a lamb.

The daughters are hooked, and plead with Medea to do the same to their father. She sets out to gather her magic herbs and other ingredients for her potion. As she starts preparing that, Medea urges the Peliades to drain the blood from their father to prepare his body for treatment, by cutting his throat and other major blood vessels.

The daughters cannot bear to watch one another, but attack their father while he is still in bed. He tries to prop himself up and ask them what they are doing, but is cut short as Medea plunges his body into the boiling cauldron containing water, not the magic potion.

Georges Moreau de Tours’ The Murder of Pelias by His Daughters (1878) is one of the few paintings to show the Peliades committing this horrendous act. The old man is resting uncomfortably on a couch, behind which his name is inscribed in Greek. Medea shrinks into the shadows behind, her face half-covered, as the young women set about Pelias with their daggers. The daughter at the back appears to be offering Medea a knife so that she can join in, but she sits impassively in front of her boiling cauldron.

Knowing she had deceived the Peliades in her plan to get them to murder their father, Medea flees in her chariot drawn by winged dragons. Ovid takes her on a whirlwind tour of fifteen locations where mythical transformations had occurred, finally reaching the city of Corinth. This ends with brief mention of Medea’s subsequent history, and her abandonment by her husband Jason. She uses sorcery to take revenge on his new bride, and murders her two young sons as revenge against Jason, their father. She finally flees to Athens, where she marries King Aegeus.

Richard Dadd’s watercolour of Jason and Medea, or The Flight of Medea with Jason – Chief of the Argonauts, shows Medea fleeing on foot with Jason, rather than in her sky chariot, in accord with other accounts of this myth. Iolcus is shown in the distance, and Medea’s maid is watching to see if they are being pursued.

Eugène Delacroix’s first version, titled simply Medea (1838) and now in Lille, captures the scene well. The mother looks anxiously into the distance, to see if she is being followed, or there are any witnesses about. The boys seem to know what is about to happen: one is crying as Medea’s arm is holding him by his neck, and the other is hiding under her skirts.

Delacroix made at least two later copies, including Medea about to Kill her Children (1862) which is half the size, and now in the Louvre.

Henri Klagmann’s Medea (1868) shows the boys playing at mother’s feet, as Medea, grasping the handle of her knife with her left hand, wrestles with her conscience.

JMW Turner tries to bring together many of the elements in this tragedy in his ingenious Vision of Medea (1828), which he painted when staying in Rome with Sir Charles Eastlake during the autumn and winter of 1828.

Jason has abandoned Medea for his new bride Glauce (or Creusa), and Medea is now in the midst of an incantation to force his return. In the foreground are the materials which she is using to cast her spell: flowers, snakes, and other supplies of a sorceress. Seated by her are the Fates. In the upper right, Medea is shown again in a flash-forward to her fleeing Corinth in her chariot drawn by dragons, the bodies of her children thrown down after their deaths.

Turner didn’t show this painting at the Royal Academy until 1831, where it was considered to be a wonderful “combination of colour”, but generally incomprehensible.

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 Jason and his Argonauts had returned to their homes, there was much celebratory feasting, but one person was unable to take part: Jason’s father Aeson, who was too old and nearing death. Jason therefore asks his new wife Medea if she can transfer some of his own youth to extend his father’s years.

Medea initially chides Jason for suggesting such an act forbidden by Hecate as the goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, but then tells him that she will go one better, and try to rejuvenate Aeson without using any of Jason’s future life.

For three nights Medea engages in rituals to seek Hecate’s help, and the goddess sends down her chariot to help her prepare for the task. The sorceress then takes that chariot in her quest for the ingredients required for her magic potion. For nine days and nights, Medea flies around gathering herbs and other arcane substances from all over the world.

She then builds two turf altars and slaughters a sheep before starting to prepare the potion. She calls for Aeson to be brought out to her, and uses a spell to put him to sleep on a bed of magic herbs before dismissing Jason and others. She purges Aeson’s body with water, sulphur, and fire, while her potion is brewing in a cauldron. Where it bubbles over the side, luxuriant plants and flowers sprout up immediately.

Medea finally cuts Aeson’s throat to let all his old blood out and replaces it with her potion. The old man is immediately transformed back to his youth, his thinning white hair replaced by a rich growth of dark locks from someone forty years younger. Bacchus, who has been watching from heaven, asks for the recipe so he can rejuvenate his own nurses.

This monochrome image is the only one available of Pellegrino Tibaldi’s fresco of Medea Rejuvenates Aeson, which he painted in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Medea, naked as became traditional in depictions of witchcraft, is shown purging Aeson’s body with water. Pellegrino relocates the event from outdoor turf altars to a more substantial indoor stone trough, around which are scattered jugs and other remnants from Medea’s sorcery. At Aeson’s feet are statues, the most prominent of which shows Hecate.

About a century later, Domenicus van Wijnen painted his Medea Rejuvenating Aeson (late seventeenth century), invoking alchemy as well as witchcraft. Medea, naked again and reclining in Hecate’s golden chariot, points her wand at the body of Aeson lying on the ground as she casts a spell. A glass sphere above her contains a small devil and shoots a trail of flame and sparks like a rocket. Medea is assisted by four putti and has what appears to be Hecate herself behind her, and a full moon is seen rising above the horizon. Scattered around the scene are objects associated with witchcraft, including a glass cauldron, a jar of brown liquid, a sacrificial knife, old books, and a burning candle.

Bartolomeo Guidobono’s Medea Rejuvenates Aeson from about 1700 is more of a puzzle to read, as Medea, dressed in an unkempt and wild manner, is here accompanied by two men. The near-lifeless and pale body of Aeson rests behind her, but a younger man, possibly the rejuvenated Aeson, is materialising under a table.

There’s a panoply of symbols associated with magic, including a snake and toad, large tomes of spells on top of which is a lizard, an open fire on a small stand, and an assortment of more normal animals including a dog, fox, and deer. The table in the background has further magic equipment, such as an orrery, and a bat is flying to the right of Medea’s head.

Corrado Giaquinto’s splendid Medea Rejuvenating Aeson from 1760 is more theatrical. Set outdoors by the arches of a large stone structure, three gods watch Medea work her spells. At the front of the trio is Diana, wearing a crescent moon as a diadem. To the right is Neptune with his spiked crown and trident, and to the left is (probably) Hecate.

Medea stands in the midst of casting a spell, her wand held over the inert body of Aeson, which rests on a bed of flowers and leaves. Behind that is a more Christian-looking altar, with candles burning at its sides. There is a cauldron heating over an open fire at the bottom right, and the body of a black sheep on a more classical altar to the left.

Sorcery and witchcraft became increasingly popular in the late eighteenth century as themes for painting and other arts, with some innovative works by Fuseli and others. Although those painters would have been well aware of this myth, the rejuvenation of Aeson doesn’t seem to have made its way onto canvas. Popular interest in ‘gothic’ stories of revivification was inspired by the publication in 1818 of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, but by this time narrative painting was in crisis, and Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t seem to have been depicted in painting until the twentieth century. By then Shelley’s story had already appeared in plays and movies.

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 half-brother, from her mother’s extraordinary bestial relationship, was the Minotaur. Her father blamed the Greeks for the death of her full brother Androgeus, so demanded they provided the Minotaur’s annual diet of seven young men and seven young women. The Minotaur was kept concealed inside the Labyrinth, an ingenious maze designed and built by the master artificer Daedalus.

Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and decided to put an end to this attrition of young Greeks by killing the Minotaur. The only way he could gain access to it was by including himself in that year’s batch of sacrificial victims. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne fell desperately in love with him.

Ariadne came up with an ingenious plan to enable Theseus to make his way back out of the Labyrinth once he had killed the Minotaur: she provided him with a ball of thread, which he used to mark his route of entry. He could then retrace his steps along the line of thread and escape. In return for this assistance, Theseus agreed that, once he had killed the Minotaur and escaped, he would marry her.

When it was Theseus’ turn to enter the Labyrinth, Ariadne held the end of the thread, he went in, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back to her. They wasted no time, and sailed immediately from Crete, stopping off overnight on the island of Dia (Naxos), where they consummated their marriage. The following morning, Theseus and his crew set sail before Ariadne had awoken, abandoning her on the island, as she watched Theseus’ ship heading towards the horizon and Athens beyond.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Bacchus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

By the moment shown in Angelica Kauffman’s Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774), she has seen Theseus’ ship heading back to Athens, and is now swooning in the realisation that she has been jilted.

The painting that perhaps captures best Ariadne ready to write her letter to Theseus, is Paulus Bor’s Ariadne (1630-35). She looks desolated, is still undressed from bed, and clutches the thread with which she had saved his life, the thread that she thought held them together as a couple, only now there is no one at the other end.

Evelyn De Morgan envisages her alone on the beach, in her painting of Ariadne in Naxos (1877). It’s possible that Ariadne had slept there, in the large brown blanket still wrapped around her legs, but there’s now no trace of her former husband, not even a sail on the horizon.

The other painting that’s truly Ovidian is Herbert James Draper’s Ariadne (c 1905). Still half-naked, kneeling on a rock by the sea, she beats her breast in the grief of Theseus’ betrayal. This is a direct reference to Ovid’s lines in Ariadne’s hypothetical letter.

Ovid’s letter also contains some subtle allusions as to what happened next, but is written in ignorance of that. In a remarkable turn of fortune, who should turn up on the island of Dia/Naxos but the god Bacchus, who promptly marries Ariadne, and carries her off to Olympus with him. Maybe Bacchus’ lifestyle didn’t make him an ideal husband, but this was far better than the fate of Ovid’s other heroines.

Eugène Delacroix’s Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63) shows the moment of his arrival, as he helps the despondent Ariadne back up from her gloom. Behind is his chariot, here drawn by lionesses.

Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos (1725) is the ideal romantic ending, the couple staring longingly at one another as putti cavort with fruit. But look carefully at what’s going on down at the beach, in the background.

Maurice Denis’ Bacchus and Ariadne from 1907 is a radically modern treatment of the story of Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos, which could be mistaken for a recreational beach scene at a coastal resort. Buried in there are some more traditional references.

Just to the right of centre, Dionysus stands behind Ariadne, helping to hold a red and white striped cloak or sheet on her left shoulder. Ariadne’s three attendant nymphs are resting on the rocks at the left. Various bacchantes and other figures are riding black horses down in the water at the right, one of them clutching the thyrsus (staff). There is no sign of Silenius, a chariot, or big cats, and a yacht at the right edge may not have anything to do with the narrative.

My favourite painting of this scene has to be Lovis Corinth’s vivacious and complex Ariadne on Naxos (1913). He uses multiplex narrative to tell the whole story, from Theseus’ betrayal at the left, to the arrival of Bacchus at the right.

None, though, shows Ariadne’s revenge on Theseus.

Theseus had made an elaborate arrangement with his father, the king of Athens, to signal to him the outcome of his mission. When Theseus had sailed from Greece, his ship had black sails. The agreement was that he would change those sails to normal white or, more probably, tan ones in the event that he had successfully killed the Minotaur.

In his rush to abandon Ariadne, Theseus forgot to change the black sails. As the ship approached the Greek mainland, his father noticed this. Knowing that meant that they would have to continue sending young Greeks to their death on Crete, King Aegeus threw himself to his death from a cliff. Theseus was broken by grief when he realised that his carelessness had caused the suicide of his father. I wonder if Bacchus and Ariadne ever visited Theseus to remind him of how his treachery backfired.

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 mystery. We see a classically-dressed woman, walking slowly in a non-descript landscape. Both her hands rest on the top of her bowed head, as if she’s wrestling with inner turmoil. She stares down at the ground just in front of her feet. The wind has blown loose robes high over the top of her.

Even when we know the title, which is just her name, Deianira, we are little the wiser. The only well-known story involving her is of her attempted abduction by the Centaur Nessus. With neither Nessus nor her husband, Hercules/Heracles, shown, the painting is no less cryptic.

Evelyn Pickering, as she was then, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in University College, London, between 1873-76; the Slade’s first professor was Sir Edward Poynter, who taught there from 1871-75, and painted several unusual if not obscure classical motifs.

Looking at a short and incomplete list of Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings, there are five showing Ovid’s Heroines, characters for whom he wrote fictional letters in his Heroides:

• Ariadne in Naxos (1877) – letter 10,
• Deianira (1878) – letter 9,
• Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (1885) – letters 18, 19,
• Medea (1886 or 1889) – letter 12,
• Helen of Troy (1898) – letters 16, 17.

With Poynter her inspiration, Evelyn De Morgan seems to have dipped into Ovid’s unique collection of stories about women. So why should Deianira appear so troubled?

Considering how frequently Hercules is reported to have had relationships with women and men, his marriage to Deianira was one of his most enduring. For some artists, it was very physical: Jan Gossaert’s Hercules and Deianira (1517) spares little to the imagination.

Some of Hercules’ relationships were unusual, to say the least. One episode which Ovid’s letter alludes to is a period spent as a cross-dressed slave to Queen Omphale.

As Lucas Cranach the Elder’s bizarre Hercules and Omphale (1537) shows, this paragon of manly attainment, most notably in his twelve labours, was dressed as a woman, and performed womanly tasks such as spinning.

To make sense of Deianira’s story, we must return to the incident involving her attempted abduction by the Centaur Nessus when he was carrying her across the river Euenos, in western Greece.

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 where Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and chest 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 marvellously 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.

In about 1706, Sebastiano Ricci embroidered this story further, showing Heracles, 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 Heracles’ 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.

The attempted abduction by Nessus set a trap which was later to bring about the deaths of both Hercules and Deianira. As he lay dying, Nessus gave Deianira a vial of his blood, advising her that it ‘would ensure that Hercules was true to her forever’. Well-versed readers at the time of Ovid would have recognised this immediately, knowing how toxic the blood of a Centaur is, but Deianira was too naïve to know that, and took the Centaur’s words at face value.

Years later, when she heard that Hercules was having an affair with Iole, Deianira decided to try Nessus’ parting gift on her errant husband. When he called for a tunic (or shirt, or similar), she impregnated the garment with some of the blood, and sent it to Hercules. This is shown in this beautiful miniature accompanying Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides from about 1510. It is at this stage that Ovid’s fictional letter from her to Hercules starts.

As soon as Hercules donned the impregnated tunic, he suffered intense pain from the poison, and he was unable to remove the garment from his skin. The pain wasn’t so severe as to stop him from murdering Lichas, the herald who had brought him the tunic, by throwing him into the sea. But Hercules was unable to find any relief, and resolved to burn himself on his own funeral pyre in desperation.

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

Its most famous depiction, though, is in Francisco de Zurbarán’s powerful The Death of Hercules (1634). Using chiaroscuro as stark as any of Caravaggio, Zurbarán shows what can only be a Christian martyrdom, with its victim staring up to heaven, commending his soul to God.

What happened to Hercules on his pyre has resulted in even more confused imagery, such as Tiepolo’s wonderful The Apotheosis of Hercules (c 1765). Because Hercules was the son of Jupiter/Zeus, as his body was burning, Jupiter decreed that only his mortal ‘half’ would be consumed by fire. His divine part was then conveyed in a chariot in an apotheosis to the gods on Olympus, often portrayed as a saintly ascension to Heaven. Once there, Hercules reconciled previous quarrels with Juno/Hera, and, as a god in his own right, married Hebe (the Roman Juventas), his half-sister.

The Deianira of Ovid’s Heroides and Evelyn De Morgan’s painting was then left in deep trouble. Hearing the news of Hercules’ death in the midst of writing her letter, she had but one option: suicide. With Hercules a god, and even Iole being cared for by Hercules’ son, Deianira was left alone, to die by her own hand. No wonder she looks troubled.

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 stories told more fully elsewhere. They also present a problem in consistency of theme. For the Metamorphoses to provide reasonably comprehensive coverage of all the major contemporary myths, they’re essential, but lack the transformations promised by the title.

The book drops us into the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece just as Jason has learned of the three tasks he must complete to obtain the prize. Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, considers that her father’s demands are too harsh, and is torn between desire and reason. She recognises that she has fallen in love with Jason, and is already considering wild thoughts of marriage to him.

She thus resolves to provide him with every aid that she can to assist his mission, in the hope that this will ensure their marriage and secure her future glory. Medea therefore goes to an old shrine to Hecate, where she meets Jason and teaches him how to use magic herbs to accomplish the tasks.

Several artists, notably those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have explored Medea’s role, and her relationship with Jason at this stage of the story. In John William Waterhouse’s Jason and Medea (1907), she’s depicted as a sorceress, preparing the potions Jason was about to use to accomplish his tasks. He appears anxious, ready to go and tackle his challenge.

Frederick Sandys shows Medea (1866-68) at work, preparing a magic potion for one of Jason’s missions. In front of her is a toad, and other ingredients. Behind her, in a gilt frieze, is Jason’s ship the Argo.

The following day, watched by the king, Jason succeeds in his first task of yoking a team of fire-breathing bulls, and using them to plough a field which had never been ploughed before, enabled by a herbal ointment provided by Medea.

As he is ploughing, Jason sows the teeth of a dragon, required for his second task. As with those sown by Cadmus before he founded the city of Thebes, those teeth instantly grow into an army who point their spears at Jason. Medea tells him to throw a large rock into their midst, to draw their attention so they kill one another instead of Jason.

Jason moves on to his final task, to provide him with the Golden Fleece, but first has to get past the dragon guarding it. He sprinkles another of Medea’s herbal preparations on the guardian and recites a magic spell three times to put the dragon to sleep.

The frescoes of the Palazzo Ghisilardi Fava in Bologna give a superb account through eighteen separate images. Although directed by Annibale Carracci, it’s thought that his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico also made significant contributions during the painting between about 1583-84.

This uses elaborate multiplex narrative to summarise much of Ovid’s account: at the left, two of the fire-breathing bulls are still yoked, in front of King Aeëtes. The army sprung up from the dragon’s teeth appear behind the wall, armed still with spears but no longer fighting. In the foreground, Jason has put the dragon to sleep using Medea’s magic concoction, and is unhitching the Golden Fleece while he can. At the right, two of the Argonauts offer to help Jason (shown a second time) carry the fleece away.

In Jean François de Troy’s The Capture of the Golden Fleece from 1742, Jason reaches up to take the Golden Fleece from a branch of an oak tree. The artist has interpreted this prize as a lamb of rather modest size. However, the hero’s left foot rests on the body of the dragon, whose nostrils emit steam. To the left of Jason is Medea, dressed as an eastern princess, and surrounding them are the Argonauts, whose ship is seen at the far left, preparing to set sail.

Gustave Moreau’s Jason (1865) oddly excludes Medea from its title. She stands almost naked behind Jason, holding a vial in her right hand, and her body is swathed with the poisonous hellebore plant, a standard tool of witchcraft. It has been suggested that these allude to Jason’s later rejection of Medea and her poisoning of Glauce, but that’s not borne out by the only clues provided by Moreau in the almost illegible inscriptions on the two phylacteries wound around the column.

Cooke has deciphered their Latin as reading:
nempe tenens quod amo gremioque in Iasonis haerens
per freta longa ferar; nihil illum amplexa timebo
(Nay, holding that which I love, and resting in Jason’s arms, I shall travel over the long reaches of the sea; in his safe embrace I will fear nothing)
et auro heros Aesonius potitur spolioque superbus
muneris auctorem secum spolia altera portans
(And the heroic son of Aeson [i.e. Jason] gained the Golden Fleece. Proud of this spoil and bearing with him the giver of his prize, another spoil)

These imply we should read the painting in terms of the conflict between Jason and Medea: Medea expresses her subjugate trust in him, while Jason considers her to be just another spoil won alongside the Golden Fleece. When exhibited at the Salon in 1865, the critics were unsure of what they were supposed to be looking at, and Moreau’s narrative was irretrievable amid his surfeit of symbols.

This is the sort of narrative you might have expect Rubens to have painted, and he did prepare some sketches of the motif. It was his pupil and collaborator Erasmus Quellinus the Younger (1607–1678), though, who produced this finished painting of Jason and the Golden Fleece in 1630, probably within Rubens’ workshop.

Once the dragon is slumbering deeply, Jason seizes the Golden Fleece, and sails with Medea and his prize to his home port of Iolcus.

Herbert James Draper shows one account of the tactics employed in The Golden Fleece from 1904: as Jason and his Argonauts are sailing away, Medea throws her brother into the sea, forcing her father to stop to recover him, so allowing the Argo to escape from the pursuit.

Following Ovid’s long account of the grim story of the rape and mutilation of Philomela, he brings Book 6 of his Metamorphoses to its end on a lighter note, forming a bridge to the opening theme for the next book, Jason and the Argonauts.

Ovid’s tenuous link to introduce the north wind Boreas is that Philomela and Procne were the daughters of Pandion, who died prematurely as a result of the events of the last myth. He was succeeded by Erechtheus, who had four sons and four daughters. Of his daughters, two were egregiously beautiful: Procris, who married Cephalus, and Orithyia, who was betrothed to Boreas.

After the disgrace of Tereus King of Thrace, Boreas, another Thracian, was rejected by Erechtheus. This was despite Boreas’ attempts to reform his habits that normally made him bitterly cold, stormy, and damaging. Boreas decided to take matters into his own hands, unfurled his wings, flew down and abducted Orithyia, who was pledged to be his wife and to bear him twins.

Ovid gives only a brief summary of this vivid story which was popular in classical times, to the point of being the subject of a play that has since been lost. The myth has remained popular in paintings since, and makes an interesting theme with which to trace the history of painting, at least from the Renaissance to the dawn of the twentieth century.

Rubens painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia in about 1620, when he was at the peak of his career. Boreas is shown in his classical guise, as a roughly bearded old man with wings. He is sweeping Orithyia up in his arms, while a cluster of Cupids are engaged in a snowball fight, a lovely touch of humour, and a subtle reference to winter.

A few years later, probably in about 1640, Giovanni Francesco Romanelli painted Boreas Abducting Orithyia. Here Boreas has made his getaway with Orithyia, and is flying over a wintry landscape with a Cupid escort.

Sebastiano Conca’s Boreas Abducting Orithyia from about 1720 shows Boreas taking off with Orithyia from a riverbank and her friends, some of whom are decorating a herm statue at the right.

Francesco Solimena seems to have been the first painter to depict Boreas as a much younger man, in his Boreas Abducting Orithyia, Daughter of Erechtheus from 1729. He has also elaborated the scene considerably, with Orithyia’s friends tugging at Boreas’ cloak to try to restrain him, Cupid preparing to shoot one of his arrows at Orithyia, and general panic ensuing.

François Boucher delivers a full Rococo interpretation in Boreas Abducting Orithyia (1769). The lead actors are less engaged, with Boreas devoting his efforts to blowing his wind at Orithyia’s friends, and the ground to the right bears witness to his destructive force.

In 1822, Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon’s romantic interpretation of Boreas Abducting Orithyia strips out all the other figures, and shows just the couple. Boreas is now quite youthful, and Orithyia’s eyes are closed as if swooning.

Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 returns to a fuller and more classical account. Although not as old as in earlier paintings, Boreas is no longer a stripling. Orithyia is trying to push his head away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne. Around them the spring flowers and trees are being blasted by his north wind.

My final selection is Evelyn De Morgan’s Boreas and Orithyia from about 1896. Boreas is now bearing Orithyia aloft, above rugged hills and water. He is younger again, and looks decidedly miserable. In addition to a pair of magnificent wings on his back, he has accessory wings on each heel, and long white and blue sheets wind calligraphically around the couple.

Ovid then closes the book by telling us that their twin sons, Calais and Zeto, grew up to join Jason’s Argonauts.

Ovid’s last substantial story in Book 6 of his Metamorphoses continues the gory trend of the slaughter of the Niobids and the flaying of Marsyas, in one of his grimmest stories of rape and its vengeance.

Ovid links from the story of Pelops with a short iteration of kings, bringing him to King Tereus of Thrace, who was descended from Mars. He married Procne, daughter of King Pandion of Athens, but from the outset their marriage seemed ill-fated. Juno, Hymen and the Graces were absent from the ceremony, but the Furies held their wedding torches instead, and a screech-owl sat on the palace roof, an ill omen indeed.

Tereus and Procne had a son, Itys, and the whole of Thrace celebrated. Five years later, Procne pleaded with her husband to let her visit her sister in Athens, or even better, for her sister to come to visit her in Thrace. Tereus agreed, and set off without her to put this request to Pandion himself. However, when Tereus met his sister-in-law Philomela, he was beguiled by her beauty and immediately lusted after her.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Philomela (1861) is a delightful Salon-style portrait of Tereus’ sister-in-law, who is shown clutching a lyre and wearing a laurel wreath. I cannot see any reference in this painting to Ovid’s story, nor any trace of narrative.

In the same year, on another tondo, Bouguereau painted a double portrait of the sisters, Philomela and Procne (1861). This time they at least appear to be involved in some sort of Bacchantic festivity, with Procne holding a tambourine. This painting was even copied and slightly elaborated by Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1837–1922), although again its relationship with Ovid’s story appears tenuous to say the least.

Tereus was therefore delighted when it was agreed that Philomela should return to Thrace to visit Procne. Pandion trusted Tereus with his unmarried daughter, and the two set off to return to Thrace by sea. Once they arrived there, Tereus dragged Philomela off to a cabin in the forest, where he raped her. Philomela was understandably horrified, shocked, and immediately told Tereus that she would shout out the truth of what he had done to her, when her father had trusted his son-in-law to take care of her.

Tereus drew his sword and grasped Philomela by the hair. She hoped that he was going to kill her, and offered him her throat. Instead of cutting her throat, he grasped her tongue with tongs, cut it out, and raped her again. Tereus then returned to Procne, who immediately asked about her sister; her husband then lied, and told her that her sister had died. Procne went into mourning for her.

A year later, still kept captive in the cabin in the forest, Philomela wove her story in red lettering on white cloth, using an old loom. She persuaded a woman to take it to the queen, who then read the truth as to what had happened to her sister.

Edward Burne-Jones made this pencil and watercolour study of Philomela in 1864, which appears to have been abandoned. The subject is holding a weaving showing not her account in words, as stated by Ovid, but a cartoon-like sequence of images, which refer to her imprisonment, but not to her rape. Philomela’s left index finger points to her mouth, to indicate that she is mute.

It wasn’t until the last few years of his life that Burne-Jones seems to have fully realised an image of Philomela (1896). This wood engraving was an illustration of The Legend of Goode Wimmen in the Kelmscott Chaucer. Philomela is shown at work on her weaving, which this time does bear some text, labelling the figures in its multiplex narrative. As in his earlier study, the story shown stops short before her rape, but shows Tereus and Philomela standing outside the entrance to a cave.

It was just coming up to the three-yearly festival of Bacchus, so Procne’s overpowering desire for revenge against her husband was channeled into that occasion. Procne found the cabin, broke into it, dressed Philomela up as a Bacchante, and took her back with her to the palace. In her rage Procne proposed to cut Tereus’ tongue out, gouge his eyes out, and castrate him.

Just then, her small son Itys came up to Procne. Mother noticed how closely her son resembled his father, and a new plan was quickly hatched. Procne pounced on her son like a tigress and stabbed him; Philomela finished the job by cutting the boy’s throat. They then cooked parts of him ready to serve.

That night, Procne dismissed the servants, and convinced Tereus that he should dine alone on his ancestral throne. Procne there served him with the flesh of his own son, which he unwittingly ate. Tereus then called for Itys, and Procne revealed that he had just eaten him. Philomela, still spattered with the boy’s blood, rushed in and threw the boy’s severed head at his father, also her rapist.

Artemisia Gentileschi painted her Procne and Philomela Showing Tereus the Head of his Son Itys in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows the climax of Ovid’s story, when the sisters’ revenge is revealed to Tereus. One of the sisters, presumably Philomela, thrusts Itys’ severed head into the face of Tereus, who shields his eyes with his forearm. Sadly the quality of this image is too poor to read the details around them, but in front of the king’s left foot is a large platter on which are some of the cooked remains of his son.

Rubens uses a similar composition for his Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636-38). The two sisters are still dressed as Bacchantes, with one carrying her thyrsus with her left arm, and their breasts are bared. Tereus is just reaching for his sword with his right hand, and his eyes are wide open in shock and rage. In the background, a door is open, and one of the court watches the horrific scene.

Tereus was beside himself with grief and anger, and chased the sisters with his sword, but they were changed into swallows, who still bear red feathers on their breast because of the murder. Tereus was turned into a hoopoe.

One contemporary insight provided by Ovid is the importance of oral testimony in a largely illiterate society. As Philomela was unable to communicate once Tereus took her power of speech away, she was driven to use the same medium as had formed Arachne’s downfall earlier in this book: that of weaving her story into tapestry, although this time using words rather than images.

Following the relatively light relief of the tale of Lycian peasants turned into frogs, Ovid’s Metamorphoses briefly covers the horrific story of Marsyas, adding an odd intercalation about Pelops. Ovid links to this story through Latona: the twins born to her in Lycia were Diana and Apollo, and this is about the divine retribution of the latter.

Marsyas was a satyr who became an outstanding player of the aulos, a double-piped reed instrument termed here Minerva’s flute, although not a flute at all. This refers to the myth of Minerva’s ‘invention’ and pioneering of the instrument.

In 1877, Elihu Vedder had been thinking about the myth of Marsyas. Rather than show the contest with Apollo or its grim consequence, Vedder reasoned that Marsyas must have proved his skill with the aulos before the challenge arose. His conclusion was that the satyr might have been charming hares, leading him to paint Young Marsyas or Marsyas Enchanting the Hares (1878). Vedder shows a young Marsyas in the snows of the New England winter, surrounded by the enchanted hares.

Marsyas and Apollo took part in a contest against one another to determine who was the better player. Judged by the Muses, Apollo inevitably won, his prize being to treat the loser in any way that he wished. Apollo chose to flay Marsyas alive, inflicting the most gruesome, painful, and horrific death that he could have devised. Ovid provides a short but graphic description of the satyr’s body becoming one huge wound, and the tears of all around, particularly other satyrs and fauns, whose weeping created a new river in Phrygia, named after Marsyas.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Apollo and Marsyas from 1541-42 shows the contest, but leaves its outcome to the viewer’s imagination. Apollo is on the left, holding an anachronistic violin, as Marsyas on the right plays his pipe.

From that simple motif, Tintoretto developed his later Contest of Apollo and Marsyas in 1544-45. This reiterates his previous motif at the left, with the addition of a small audience consisting of a token Grace, as judge, and three men. This was commissioned in 1544 by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), a major literary figure of the time and close friend of Tintoretto’s rival Titian. Aretino was a successful satirist and early writer of pornography, who later became a successful blackmailer.

Cornelius van Poelenburgh takes us into the myth itself, showing The Musical Contest between Apollo and Marsyas (1630). Marsyas is to the right of centre, with two other satyrs behind him. Apollo, wearing a crown of laurels both as his attribute and possibly an indication of his victory in the contest, is holding forth from a rocky throne to the right. At the left are the Muses, the jury for the contest, with another couple of satyrs. There’s also a mystery couple, seen walking away in the distance to the left of Marsyas’ right leg.

Tiepolo’s Apollo and Marsyas (1720-22) also takes the contest as its theme. It’s easy here to mistake the figure sat on the rock throne as being Apollo, but he’s actually the youth at the left, bearing his lyre, wearing a wreath of laurel, and given a gentle divine halo. Thus the figure apparently wearing a gold crown sat in a dominant position must be Marsyas, clutching a flute of sorts in his right hand. To the right are some of the Muses, one of whom covers her eyes in despair. She knows what Apollo’s pointing arm is about to inflict on the usurper Marsyas.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is Hans Thoma’s depiction of the contest, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably more appreciated by contemporary viewers.

By far the most famous painting of the flaying itself is one of Titian’s last great works: The Flaying of Marsyas from about 1570-1576. The satyr has been strung up by his legs from a tree, his arms also bound, and is now having his skin and hide cut off, Apollo kneeling at the left with his blade at Marsyas’ chest. Standing above the god is one of the Muses, playing her string instrument and gazing upwards. Near her left hand are Pan pipes rather than an aulos, strung from the tree next to the satyr’s body. At the right, another satyr has brought a pail of water. Others gaze on in dismay at the grisly scene.

Bronzino’s The Flaying of Marsyas (1531-32) summarises the tragedy in its multiplex narrative. At the right, the contest is taking place, with a very human Marsyas playing a wind instrument resembling a clarinet, which is at least a reed instrument like the aulos.

In the left distance, Apollo subdues the defeated Marsyas and binds him. Supervising this is a goddess, who appears to be Minerva, with a shield and spear, who first ‘invented’ and played the aulos. In the centre, Apollo is flaying the satyr, who is here neither bound nor suspended from a tree. The figure in the left foreground may be Olympus, who is expressing his grief.

The subject of mourning leads Ovid back to mention Amphion and his wife Niobe, who was mourned by Pelops. The latter was subject of a well-known myth in which Tantalus, his father, killed him and dismembered the body, then served it up to the gods to test their omniscience. Ceres, still distracted by the rape of Proserpine, ate Pelops’ shoulder. When the gods reconstituted Pelops and brought him back to life, a piece of ivory was fashioned into a replacement shoulder for him. Mercifully, I’m not aware of any painting by a major artist that attempts to depict this story.

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.

For the last couple of millennia, the extra-marital affair of Dido Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Trojan refugee and patriarch of the Roman Empire, must have been among the most famous. First told in explicit detail in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, it has inspired at least a dozen operas, is referred to in seven of Shakespeare’s plays, and even pops up in two of the Civilization games.

Its outline is simple, and a prototype for uncountable literary works: girl meets boy on a mission; boy cannot deviate from mission; boy leaves girl; girl dies heartbroken. Ovid’s summary in his Metamorphoses is a little longer than that, and far more eloquent and poetic. Ovid also wrote a second and fuller account in his collection of fictional letters by famous women, Heroines, and it’s that examined here.

Dido and her brother Pygmalion (not the better-known Pygmalion who fell in love with his statue) were of royal blood, probably being the children and heirs of the King of Tyre. Dido married Sychaeus, but Pygmalion wanted their riches too, so had her husband murdered when he was at the altar in their own home.

Dido took her riches and fled to North Africa, seeking sanctuary on a plot of land she acquired from the Berber king Iarbas, whom she rejected as a suitor. He gave her as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide, so Dido ingeniously cut the oxhide up into thin strips, which she fastened end-to-end to enable her to circumscribe an entire hill.

There, Dido built the city of Carthage, into which she drew those who had fled with her, local Berbers and many others. The city grew to be wealthy and powerful, as she remained its queen.

JMW Turner depicts this in one of his works inspired by Claude Lorrain: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Dido is on the left bank, dressed in blue, and opposite her is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.

Although a simple reading of this painting follows its title, it could equally show Aeneas as the man to the left of Dido, in which case the masts behind them would be those of Aeneas’ ships, and the painting would show their first meeting.

Aeneas was a refugee from the city of Troy, who had fled the city with his father Anchises, wife Creusa, and son Ascanius, as the city was burning and being sacked by the Greeks. Together with other refugees, Aeneas, his father and son had sailed away, then undertook a protracted journey across the Mediterranean in search of his destiny.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is starting to fall slightly behind, and becoming distressed.

Aeneas’ mother was Venus, making him Cupid’s brother. Also interested in Aeneas was Juno, the senior goddess, who wanted to thwart his reaching Italy, and her husband Jupiter, who wanted Aeneas to reach his destination, where his descendants Romulus and Remus would ultimately found Rome. When Aeneas and his men left the island of Sicily heading north towards the Italian mainland, Juno intervened by bringing a northerly gale driving them south to the coast of North Africa, and the city of Carthage.

Once ashore in Carthage, Aeneas met Dido, as shown in Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815. He told her the story of his escape from the ruins of Troy, and of his guilty secret: his wife Creusa had become separated from the rest of the family. Aeneas claimed that he had gone back to look for her, and she then appeared to him in ghostly form, telling him to leave without her, which he did.

It’s Paul Cézanne, in his watercolour sketch of Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, painted in about 1875, who expresses this situation most clearly. Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Creusa.

Dido had sworn to her late husband that she would love no other, but as she and Aeneas got to know one another, both Juno and Venus (through her other son, Cupid) conspired to develop that into love. Venus wanted Dido to provide her son with a safe haven, and Juno wanted to halt his progress. This came to a head when the couple went out with a hunting party, and took shelter in a cave from a torrential rainstorm, brought by Juno. Both Virgil and Ovid make it explicit that they made love in that cave.

As so often happens, Dido and Aeneas made love under different assumptions. For Dido, given her commitment to her husband, she consented on the basis that this was also the act of union in marriage. For Aeneas, who had made no such commitment to his wife, who had disappeared in dubious circumstances anyway, there was no such agreement, and he remained free to pursue his destiny.

The next external influence on the couple’s relationship then came into play: Jupiter, wanting to chivvy Aeneas on his journey to start the founding of Rome and to appease Dido’s rejected suitor, sent Mercury his messenger to tell Aeneas that he must not delay with Dido, but must prepare to sail, leaving her behind. In complete secrecy, Aeneas instructed his crew to get their ship ready to resume its journey. He then went to Dido to break the news to her, only to find that she already knew of his intention to desert her and abandon her just as he had previously abandoned Creusa.

Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Dido and Aeneas (1747) draws on ambiguity in an ingenious way. It could be read as showing the couple after their lovemaking in the cave, with Dido still partly undressed, and Aeneas adjusting his clothes.

However, the presence of Aeneas’ ship in the left background implies that this is the moment that Aeneas has returned to break the news to Dido that he must sail shortly. Behind the couple is Dido’s sister Anna. In Virgil’s account, she goes to Aeneas to plead Dido’s case before the queen’s suicide; in Ovid’s version in his Heroines, Anna takes Aeneas the letter written for her by Ovid.

Dido’s letter, as supposed by Ovid, is a tour de force, and truly elegiac. It expresses her side of the story and her view of their relationship brilliantly. She points out that she could well be pregnant with a brother for Aeneas’ son Ascanius. She appeals to the emotions in a calculating and crafted way. And most of all, she raises questions about Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa, which should have had greatest impact on his heart. No matter what Mercury might say, how could Aeneas abandon a second wife too?

But Mercury intervened again, and Aeneas was driven to sail immediately. When Dido saw this, her only option was to fall on her sword, taking her own life.

Here I show two of the most vivid paintings of the climax of this story. In Joseph Stallaert’s The Death of Dido (1872), the queen has fallen on the sword given by Aeneas, and now lies dying on the couch on which the couple had previously made love, pointing at his ship leaving harbour by the light of the early dawn.

Resting her hand on Dido’s chest wound, her sister Anna comforts the queen in her dying moments, as the queen’s nurse and a maidservant are in attendance. There’s no sign of a funeral pyre, but suggestive smoke is made by the small altar at the extreme left.

Henry Fuseli’s Dido (1781) has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, confirming to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and history moves to the founding of Rome.

Was it Dido? Aeneas? Or the pair of them? Ovid implies, but dares not state, that it was all down to the play of the gods. Given the conflicting interests of Venus, Juno, and Jupiter, their relationship was surely doomed from the start.

For Ovid’s next myth about the lesser-known goddess Latona, he steps back in time to when her twins, Apollo and Diana, were born, in a story about divine retribution of a less savage kind.

Long ago in Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey, country people scorned the worship of Latona. The unnamed narrator of this myth was taken by his father to see an old altar dedicated to the goddess, located among reeds, and marking the birth of her twins. Latona had fled here to give birth in the heat, where she could avoid Juno.

When the twins had drunk her milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, Latona saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Latona told them that drinking the water was a common right, and she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults, before stirring up the mud at the bottom of the lake, to literally muddy the water. Latona’s thirst was replaced by anger, and she cursed them to remain in that pool forever by turning them into frogs, who foolishly muddy their own pools.

Tintoretto’s simple panel of Lycian Peasants Changed Into Frogs from 1541-42 tells this story in just five figures. This was one of a series of which fourteen have survived, telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They were the artist’s first substantial commission, and decorated a room in a palace near San Marco in Venice.

Tintoretto’s lovely panel of Latona Changing the Lycian Peasants into Frogs from 1545-48 is one of the earliest of modern accounts of Ovid’s story. Latona rests a baby on each hip as she tries to enlist the co-operation of the Lycians, who are becoming more froglike but haven’t yet been transformed.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is truly masterly. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is set in a dense forest, probably quite inappropriate for Lycia, where the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Latona, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the infants.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 tells the story well, showing the Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

Francesco Trevisani’s Latona and the Frogs from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century is, like Tenier’s, painted in oil on copper. Even as his peasants are turning into frogs, they’re still refusing to let Latona drink from their lake.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis, or any frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

Johann Georg Platzer’s Latona Turning the Lycian Peasants into Frogs (c 1730) is another fine work on copper showing the key elements of the story, including the macabre appearance of the peasants as they are transformed.

The artist who painted this Italian Landscape with Latona and the Lycian Peasants sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century hasn’t been identified. However, it depicts the story well, with the heads of two peasants already assuming the form of frogs.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Latona and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, which minimises her divinity. The peasants are here engaged in muddying the waters.

Guay was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, and went on to become a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first painting was accepted for the Paris Salon in 1873, making this one of his earlier works. Despite winning silver medals at the Universal Expositions in Paris in 1889 and 1900, and sustained success at the Salon, his work is now almost entirely forgotten.