There are three events that have been widely depicted in European art that can readily be confused, and a fourth that doesn’t often appear in paintings. Each involves the elevation of a heroic figure from this earthly world into the heavens:

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

This article considers the first of those, and its sequel tomorrow tackles the second and third. The last has seldom appeared explicitly in paint, except as the final scene in a series depicting the Passion and Crucifixion.

Strictly speaking, apotheosis was only open to demi-gods and -goddesses, one of whose parents were divine and the other mortal. However, it later became open to anyone whose achievements were sufficiently heroic that they merited promotion to deity.

What happened to Hercules at the end of his life, when he threw himself on his pyre, has resulted in 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. 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, as classical deities were wont to do.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god. Aeneas qualified on the grounds that he was the son of Aphrodite/Venus by his mortal father Anchises.

Charles Le Brun painted The Deification of Aeneas in about 1642-44. This is a faithful depiction from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the river god Numicus sat in the front, and Venus anointing Aeneas with ambrosia and nectar to make him immortal as the god Jupiter Indiges. At the right is Venus’ mischievous son Cupid, trying on Aeneas’s armour, and the chariot towed by white doves is ready to take the hero up to join the gods.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus. Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

Jean-Baptiste Nattier is perhaps the only artist to have painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him. Romulus qualified by virtue of his father being Mars, while his mortal mother was Rhea Silvia.

In post-classical history and legend, apotheosis was opened up more, and became an opportunity to fill a painting with an array of memorable figures in what’s more of a tribute than an elevation to heaven.

JAD Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer from 1827 gathers together all those figures for whom Ingres had greatest respect, and were major influences. Although its own narrative is very simple, it invokes and pays tribute to those who Ingres saw as the great masters of narrative.

The group is posed on the steps in front of a classical Greek theatre, in formal symmetric composition. Homer sits at its centre, being crowned with laurels by the winged figure of the Universe.

Among those standing at the left are Dante, Virgil, Raphael, Sappho, Apelles, Euripides, Sophocles (holding a scroll), and the personification of the Iliad (seated, in red); in the lower file are Shakespeare, Tasso, Poussin, and Mozart.

From the right are, among others, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Hesiod, Aesop (under the lyre), and the personification of the Odyssey (seated, in green, with an oar); in the lower file are Gluck, Molière, and others less known today.

Henry de Bourbon, King Henry IV of France, was the son of Jeanne III of Navarre and her husband Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, neither of whom had any claim to deity. When Peter Paul Rubens was painting his vast cycle for Marie de’ Medici, he started its second half with Henry’s apotheosis or assumption, following the king’s assassination on the day after Marie’s coronation ceremony.

This is shown more clearly in this oil study (above) now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Below is the finished painting now in the Louvre’s dedicated gallery.

As in the rest of the cycle, Rubens doesn’t depict a real scene from history, but shows it in allegorical terms, using figures from classical mythology mixed with those from real history. Instead of painting a scene of Henry’s assassination, he made The Apotheosis of Henry IV and Homage to Marie de’ Medici, one of three landscape-format canvases in the series.

The left side of the painting shows the assassinated king being welcomed into heaven as a victor by the gods Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, as king of the Olympian gods, is Henry’s divine counterpart; Saturn, holding a sickle in his right hand, marks the end of Henry’s earthly existence. Below them is Bellona, an ancient Roman goddess of war, who is stripped of her armour and appears tormented.

On the right side, Marie is seated on her throne as Regent, wearing black widow’s weeds, as the personification of France kneels in homage and presents her with an orb of office. Behind the Regent, at the far right, is Minerva bearing her Aegis, the shield emblazoned with the image of Medusa’s head. Also present are Prudence and Divine Providence, and her court are paying tribute from below.

Since its domestication somewhere on the steppe of Ukraine and south-western Russia around five millennia ago, humans have been dependent on the horse as a means of transport and drawing wheeled vehicles of many kinds. By the late eighteenth century the work they’re capable of was used as the basis for the measurement of power, in the horsepower, that became most popular when they were being replaced first by steam engines, and then the noisy and smelly motor vehicles of the twentieth century.

These two articles look at horses of conventional design; those with wings have been covered here, and the story of the unicorn in this article.

In Greek and Roman myth, the sun is drawn across the heavens by Phoebus’ chariot, with four horses, usually named Eous, Aethon, Pyrois, and Phlegon, in harness.

They are shown in Gustave Moreau’s Chariot of Apollo, or Phoebus Apollo from about 1880, in a prelude to the myth of Phaethon, who lost control of it and set the world on fire when his adventure went wrong.

While several deities are drawn in their chariots by unusual creatures, Pluto opts for a pair of suitably black horses.

Walter Crane’s account of The Fate of Persephone (1878) shows her at the moment of her abduction, still holding her posy. Pluto has pulled up in his chariot, and is gripping her right arm, ready to make off with her into the dark cavern to the right, taking the couple down to Hades.

Chariots of mortals were conventionally drawn by a pair of horses. Franz von Matsch’s The Triumph of Achilles (1892) shows Achilles in his chariot driving at speed around the walls of Troy, towing the naked body of Hector and followed by celebrating Greeks.

Troy was also the site of the greatest deception using a horse, although in this case it was a huge wooden model containing a team of Greek commandos who were to open the city up for the rest of their army to enter.

Tiepolo’s Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (1773) is one of his series showing the construction and entry of the horse into the city. He follows accounts that refer to Troy’s women and children hauling the structure using lines, and some reporting that it was ostensibly an apology for the theft of the Palladium.

Subsequently, the term Trojan Horse has entered the languages of Europe, although that isn’t the case for the Roman hero Marcus Curtius, whose leap saved the city of Rome.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leap of Marcus Curtius (c 1850-1855) depicts the brief legend of this hero of classical Rome. Following an earthquake (now dated to 362 BCE), a great bottomless chasm opened up in the middle of the Forum. Attempts to fill it were unsuccessful, so an augur was consulted, who responded that the gods demanded the most precious possession of the state. Marcus Curtius was a young soldier who proclaimed that arms and the courage of Romans were the state’s most precious possessions. In a moment of supreme self-sacrifice, he then rode into the pit in his finest armour, astride his charger, the moment shown here. As he and his horse fell into its abyss, the chasm closed over him, and the city was saved.

Horses feature in many other legends from around the world. Among the more curious is that of Lady Godiva, who is claimed to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry, England, in protest at her husband’s swingeing taxes.

Jules Lefebvre’s first painting of Lady Godiva from 1891 shows her passing over deserted narrow cobbled streets, covering her breasts and appearing in some distress. Her horse is being led by a maid, and flying alongside are three white doves. She appears almost saintly in her mission, as if undergoing a form of psychological martyrdom.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses from 1892 is one of a series of paintings he made fusing the horses drawing Poseidon’s chariot with near-breaking waves, popularly known in English as white horses.

Another widespread legend is that of Saint George, a knightly Christian who slayed a dragon to save a princess. He is claimed by several countries across Europe as far as Georgia, and is patron saint of England.

Around 1553-55, Tintoretto retold his story in his small masterpiece of Saint George and the Dragon. The saint, the dragon and the Princess have escaped the confines of his earlier votive painting of this motif, and here run free in a rich green coastal landscape of the artist’s invention. George is locked in battle with the dragon and the Princess flees from the scene in terror. The dragon’s last victim still lies on the grass, his blue clothing in tatters. Above them and the massive walls of a distant fortress is the figure of God, in a brilliant mandorla in the heavens.

That leads us to tomorrow’s sequel, which starts with horses in chivalry.

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.

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.