Aeneas has been rowed through the Straits of Messina, avoiding the rock pinnacle that Scylla had been transformed into. From there he heads north-west until he meets a fierce northerly storm that blows him and his crew south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid breezes through what takes Virgil almost a whole book in the Aeneid, in a brief summary of the affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage. This ends with him abandoning her to fall upon the sword he had given her, and her body to be consumed on her funeral pyre.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815, is probably the standard work showing the beginnings of their romance. Unfortunately it doesn’t give any clues to its tragic outcome.

In about 1875, when Paul Cézanne was still experimenting with narrative genres, he first drew a compositional study, then painted Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage. The queen 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 Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, who had been abandoned by Aeneas as the family fled the burning city of Troy.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it’s surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

Dido’s spectacular death is shown best in what is perhaps Henry Fuseli’s most conventional history painting, known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword 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 visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

After a close call with the Sirens, Aeneas reaches the land of the Cercopes, who had been transformed into apes by Jupiter because of their treachery. The ship continues to the north-west along the coast of Italy, passing Naples.

This has been shown only by those like Antonio Tempesta who engraved for illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses. Tempesta’s Jupiter Changing the Cercopians into Monkeys from around 1600 shows Jupiter at the right, accompanied as ever by his huge eagle, with the transformed monkeys.

Once past Naples, Aeneas and his crew land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. He needs her assistance to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises. The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. The two of them travel to the underworld bearing that golden bough, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity. When Apollo had invited her to wish for anything, she had pointed to a pile of sand, and asked to live as many years as there were grains, but forgot to wish for eternal youth to accompany that.

Apollo offered her eternal youth as well, but she declined and remained a virgin. After seven hundred years, with another three hundred still to go, she is well into old age, infirm, and steadily vanishing as her body wastes away until only her voice will remain. With that, the pair reach Cumae, and Aeneas sets sail.

This is depicted in one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity. Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a forward reference to Aeneas’ future visit, although that would have been seven centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle the first part of this story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, but is set at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story. Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this later scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition. True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance are Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno. The Sibyl, who doesn’t show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings. The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch, with the golden sickle used to cut that branch, in her right hand. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around a white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen, although he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps. In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

By the end of Book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aeneas is on the island of Sicily. Scylla has been combing Galatea’s hair, listening to her tell the tragic story of the death of her lover Acis. Ovid resumes the narration for the tale of Scylla, which doesn’t conclude until the start of the next book.

Scylla is walking naked along the beach when the figure of Glaucus suddenly breaks the surface of the water. He’s immediately enchanted by her, and tries to engage her in conversation to stop her from running away. But Scylla runs away in terror, and climbs a nearby cliff. There, she gets her breath back, and tries to work out whether he’s a god or monster with long hair and fishy scales below the waist.

Glaucus assures her that he’s a sea-god. He had once been an ordinary mortal, and fished with nets, and rod and line. One day, the fish that he had caught started to move when he had laid them out on the grass, and one by one they escaped back into the water. He couldn’t understand how that had happened, so chewed stems of the plants they had rested on. He was then transformed and swam off in the sea to visit the gods Tethys and Oceanus for removal of the last remains of his mortal form.

Scylla runs away, leaving Glaucus angry, so he makes his way to the sorceress Circe.

Bartholomeus Spranger painted his version of Glaucus and Scylla in 1580-82. Although the artist hasn’t followed Ovid’s distinctive colour scheme for his body, Glaucus is clearly pleading his case before the beautiful young woman. In the next book, Ovid will describe how Scylla was turned into a rock, and Spranger provides that link forward in the story in his background.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa makes Glaucus more of a beast, roughly mauling Scylla’s fair body and giving her good cause for her flight to the cliff.

A little later, probably in the late seventeenth century, Nicola Vaccaro is more sympathetic in his Glaucus fleeing from Scylla. Glaucus may be a bit rough, but arouses more pity. Scylla is accompanied by three Cupids as she flees not to the top of a cliff, but to the goddess Diana above.

The most interesting and unusual depiction of this story is surely JMW Turner’s from 1841, just a decade before his death.

Turner’s Glaucus and Scylla (1841) would perhaps have looked more at home among paintings made fifty or even eighty years later.

The naked Scylla is on the beach at the right, with a couple of cupids flying about. The inchoate form of Glaucus is emerging to the left of centre, holding his arms out towards Scylla. She will have none of it, though, and has already turned to run, and looks back over her shoulder towards him.

We look directly into the setting sun colouring the world a rich gold. In the right background the low coastal land rises to sheer cliffs with a temple on top. A tower atop a nearer pinnacle, or more distant lower red rocks, may be a reference to Scylla’s fate.

In the foreground are clues of the beach setting, with a crab, and several seashells. Turner has applied his paint in innovative and gestural ways, resulting in richly varied textures.

Turner had made an earlier and more traditional study in about 1810-15, but revised it almost completely by the time that he painted this in 1841. Its light appears influenced by the harbour landscapes of Claude, and its general lack of form anticipates Impressionism, perhaps even Abstract Expressionism in passages.

Rejected by the scared Scylla, Glaucus travels from Sicily to visit the sorceress Circe, whom he implores to use her dark arts to force Scylla to return his love. But Circe refuses, telling Glaucus to woo another: as she is in love with him, he could spurn Scylla and love Circe instead.

Glaucus rejects her, saying that nothing will change his love for Scylla. That annoys Circe, who cannot harm Glaucus because of her love for him, so turns her anger on Scylla instead. The sorceress prepares a magical potion from herbs, weaving her spells into it. Dressed in a deep blue robe, she then goes to a small bay where Scylla likes to bathe, and pours her potion into the water.

When Scylla wades into the water the lower half of her body is transformed into a pack of dogs. As Ulysses’ ship passes her, those dogs take some of its crew, but they allow Aeneas to pass safely. Scylla is finally transformed into a rock and becomes a famous hazard to navigation.

John William Waterhouse chose to portray the figure of Circe the sorceress in his Circe Invidiosa (1892). Despite its narrative limitations, this offers a marvellous insight into the character of Circe, as she pours her brilliant emerald green potion into the water, ready for Scylla to come and bathe.

John Melhuish Strudwick also chooses a moment early in Ovid’s story, which makes his painting of Circë and Scylla (1886) narratively rather thin. Circe, dressed in brown rather than blue, is sprinkling her potion into the water from within a small cave, as Scylla, at the left, walks down to bathe.

By far the most complete visual account is Eglon van der Neer’s Circe Punishes Glaucus by Turning Scylla into a Monster (1695). Circe takes the limelight, as she casts her potion from a flaming silver salver held in her right hand. Dripping onto that is the wax from a large candle, held in her left hand. In the water below, Scylla has already been transformed into a gorgonesque figure, with snakes for hair, and the grotesque Glaucus watches from behind. Above and to the right of Circe is a small dragon perched on a rock ledge.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) shows Charybdis the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks of Scylla at the right.

This fragment of fresco by Alessandro Allori shows Odysseus’ ship passing Charybdis, depicted as a huge head vomiting forth the rough waters of the whirlpool at the right, and the dogs’ heads of Scylla, which have captured three of Odysseus’ crew.

Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis (1794-96) is another vivid depiction of Odysseus passing the twin dangers. He stands on the fo’c’s’le of his ship, holding his shield up in defence as the oarsmen down below him struggle to propel the craft through the Straits of Messina.

As Ovid nears the end of Book 13 of his Metamorphoses, Aeneas and his companions are in transit across the Mediterranean, heading towards Italy and destiny. He rushes them through a rapid succession of adventures before bringing them to Sicily for the closing stories in this book.

Ovid summarises much of Virgil’s Aeneid in just a few lines, taking Aeneas from Crete through Ithaca, Samos, Dodona, and Phaeacia, to land on Sicily, where Scylla and Charybdis threaten the safety of mariners. Scylla is combing the hair of Galatea, as the latter laments her tragic love-life. Wiping tears from her eyes, Galatea then tells us her story.

When he was only sixteen, Galatea had fallen in love with Acis, the son of the river nymph Symaethis, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The Cyclops did his best to smarten himself up for her, while remaining deeply and murderously jealous of Acis.

Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polyphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye, as told in a separate story in Homer’s Odyssey. This inevitably upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there playing his reed pipes. Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach.

Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he saw the two lovers together, he grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but her lover was buried by the side of a mountain hurled by the Cyclops. The blood of Acis was turned into a stream that gushed forth from a reed growing in a cleft in the rock, with him as its river-god.

Claude’s wonderful Coastal Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657) is first and foremost a coastal landscape, but also tells Ovid’s story faithfully. Polyphemus is seen at the right, watching Acis and Galatea in their makeshift shelter down at the water’s edge, with Cupid sat beside them. Additional Nereids are tucked away in the trees at the left.

Nicolas Bertin’s Acis and Galatea from around 1700 also follows Ovid’s detail. At its centre, the two lovers are behind a rock pinnacle, with three cupids sealing their love. Polyphemus is already in a rage at the upper right, although he hasn’t yet armed himself with the huge boulder. Below the couple Bertin provides a link into Ovid’s greater narrative, with Scylla and Charybdis, and possibly the goddess Venus with her son Cupid by her breast.

Johann Heinrich Tischbein prefers a plainer account in his Acis and Galatea from 1758. Galatea is almost naked in the arms of Acis, as Polyphemus peers at them, a voyeur behind a tree trunk. There are now no cupids or other distractions.

Alexandre Charles Guillemot’s The Love of Acis and Galatea (1827) doesn’t pursue the theme of Polyphemus’ voyeurism, but returns to a more conventional composition of the Cyclops sitting on a distant hill. He also sows potential confusion: Polyphemus is holding his reed pipes, although they are harder to see, and the pipes on Acis’ back are extras that are perhaps a little too obvious.

Later in the nineteenth century, emphasis switched from the jealousy of Polyphemus at the sight of the couple together, to Tischbein’s theme of voyeurism.

Gustave Moreau’s first Galatea from about 1880 shows her resting naked, alone in the countryside with her eyes closed, as the Cyclops plays sinister voyeur. Surrounding them is a magical countryside, filled with strange plants recalling anemones, as would be more appropriate for a sea-nymph. Acis is nowhere to be seen.

Moreau’s second Galatea from near the end of his career in 1896 is dark, and shows Galatea and Polyphemus hemmed in within a deep canyon. Around her aren’t flowers but the seaweeds and corals more appropriate for a sea-nymph.

One of the masterpieces of Symbolism, Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops from about 1914 follows Redon’s personal theme of the eye and sight, and further develops that of voyeurism. Polyphemus’ face is now dominated by his single eye looking down over Galatea’s naked beauty, with Acis absent.

Curiously, none of the above paintings shows the moment of climax, or peripeteia, in which Polyphemus murders Acis.

Only Pompeo Batoni’s Acis and Galatea from 1761 shows the Cyclops, his reed pipes at his feet, hurling the boulder at Acis, so making clear the couple’s tragic fate.

Ovid assures us that the Fates didn’t completely crush the hopes of Troy in its destruction: from within the burning ruins, the hero Aeneas is fleeing, his aged father on his shoulders, and with his son Ascanius. For a Roman reader, Aeneas needs no introduction; like so many classical heroes, he’s the product of a union between a god and a mortal. His case is unusual, as it wasn’t Jupiter to blame, and Aeneas’ father was the mortal Anchises, now being carried on the shoulders of his son, and his mother was the goddess Venus.

Venus and Anchises, painted by William Blake Richmond between 1889-90, shows this legend. Jupiter challenged Cupid to shoot an arrow at his mother, causing her to fall in love with Anchises when she met him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. Aeneas was the result of that union, and the legend is the explanation for Venus watching over the safety of Aeneas during his prolonged journey from Troy.

There have been many fine paintings of Aeneas fleeing the sacked city with his family.

Unusually, one of Adam Elsheimer’s paintings of Aeneas Saving Anchises from Burning Troy was made in gouache. Of all these depictions, this seems to be the only one based on a reconstruction with models, as the method of carrying is not only feasible, but practical. Note how Aeneas is grasping a robe acting as his father’s seat, and Anchises has interlocked his fingers on his son’s forehead.

That doesn’t, though, appear to have been a study for Elsheimer’s finished work The Burning of Troy (c 1600-01) painted in oil on copper. The pair, with young Ascanius and his mother to the right, are seen in the left foreground. Elsheimer’s backdrop of the burning city includes the Trojan Horse, to the left of the upper centre, and hints with subtlety at the vast tragedy taking place.

Simon Vouet’s Aeneas and his Father Fleeing Troy from about 1635 shows the family group in close-up. From the left are Creusa, Aeneas’ wife who dies before she can leave the city, Aeneas, Anchises, and a very young Ascanius. This is the start of their flight, as Aeneas and Creusa are persuading Anchises to let Aeneas carry him to safety.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is already falling slightly behind, and looks particularly distressed.

Oddly, Ovid doesn’t mention Creusa’s fate in the Metamorphoses, although a Roman reader would have been well aware of the detail in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she is left behind. By the time the hero reaches the city gates with his father and son, his wife is nowhere to be seen. Aeneas re-enters the burning city to look for her, but her ghost tells him that his destiny is to reach Hesperia, where he will become a king and marry a princess.

Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius then sail with a fleet of Trojan survivors to reach Delos, site of a temple to Apollo, whose priest and ruler of the island is Anius. He shows them the temple and city, and the two trees that the goddess Latona had held onto when she gave birth to the twin deities Apollo and Diana.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s engraving of Aeneus Meets Anius (c 1639), for an illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might appear generic, but is actually carefully composed. Aeneas stands upright, his spear almost vertical, in its centre. To the right his father Anchises embraces his old friend Anius, and to the left is the young Ascanius. In the right background is the city, with its imposing temple at the edge.

This singular painting is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos from 1672. This was the first of half a dozen works that Claude painted in the final decade of his life, based primarily on Virgil’s account in the Aeneid. Its meticulous details are supported by a coastal landscape of great beauty.

The twin trees at its centre, an olive and palm according to myth, are those that Latona held when she gave birth to Apollo and Diana, and now provide shade for a shepherd and his flock of sheep.

The king and priest Anius is at the left of the group, wearing priestly white, and pointing out the twin trees to his guests. To his right is Anchises in blue, then Aeneas holding his spear, and his young son Ascanius, with a suitably shorter spear in his right hand.

Claude’s fine details tell further stories too.

The relief at the top of the temple, immediately below a couple of casual onlookers, tells the story of Latona’s twins killing the giant Tityus, who had tried to rape their mother. Tityus is seen at the right of the relief, fallen down and wounded by the arrows of Diana (centre) and Apollo (left). Similarly to the Titan Prometheus, Tityus was sentenced to spend his time in the Underworld with two vultures feeding on his liver, which regenerated each night.

Anius then entertains his guests to a feast in their honour. Anchises asks what happened to Anius’ four daughters and one son. Anius replies that he is now almost childless, with his son far away on the island of Andros, and his daughters taken from him by Agamemnon. Bacchus had given his girls the remarkable gift that whatever they touched was transformed into food, wine, and oil. Because of that, the Greeks departing from their conquest of Troy abducted them to feed their army. When the daughters begged Bacchus to release them, the god turned them into white doves of Venus, Aeneas’s mother.

Anius and his guests continue to tell tales before retiring to sleep for the night. In the morning Aeneas goes to the oracle of Phoebus, who cryptically tells him to seek his ancient mother, and head for ancestral shores. They then exchange gifts, including a decorated krater (wine bowl) telling another story. The image on the krater shows the death of Orion’s daughters in Thebes. Their funeral procession took the bodies to the great square, for their cremation on pyres. From their ashes rose twins known as the Coroni.

After that, Aeneas and his companions sail on to Crete.

Ovid has raced through the destruction of Troy and its nobility, including the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax.

As the Greek ships prepare to depart, Priam’s widow Hecuba is the last to board. Her youngest son Polydorus has been secretly in the care of King Polymestor in Thrace, who was paid a great sum to protect him. With Troy destroyed and that source of income lost, Polymestor slit the child’s throat and threw his body into the sea.

The Greek fleet shelters off the coast of Thrace, again waiting for favourable winds. While there, the ghost of Achilles appears and demands the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena in appeasement.

As with Iphigenia’s sacrifice a decade earlier, it’s now the turn of Hecuba’s daughter to be sacrificed to secure good weather. Polyxena is taken from the arms of her mother and put before the altar where Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, stands ready with his knife. Polyxena pleads eloquently for her body to be given to her mother without a ransom, a speech bringing even the priest to tears. Nevertheless, he thrusts the knife into her breast, and she falls to her knees, still resolute, but dead. The Trojan women mourn her and care for her body, so her mother can embrace her in final farewell. Hecuba then responds in a long speech of lament.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s fine painting of Hecuba and Polyxena, from after 1814, is superb in its treatment of fabrics, but more puzzling in its narrative. Hecuba, the older woman, appears to have fainted, presumably at the announcement of Polyxena’s imminent sacrifice, with her daughter kneeling at her feet.

Several paintings show the sacrifice of Polyxena, of which Charles Le Brun’s from 1647 is arguably the finest, and in superb condition. Polyxena is being led to the altar as Hecuba tries to hold her back. Behind Polyxena is the same Neoptolemus who threw Astyanax to his death, threatening to kill her where she is.

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena, from about the same time, shows the moment the priest is about to sink his knife into the woman’s breast. A young assistant, their head averted, kneels ready with a large bowl to catch the sacrificial blood.

Hecuba then walks down to the beach for a jar of seawater, and stumbles across the body of her son Polydorus. She is initially struck dumb, and freezes like a rock with the shock. As that subsides, her wrath grows. She makes her way to meet with Polymestor, on the pretext of wanting to show him some hidden gold. He immediately starts lying to her, so she flies at him, burying her fingers deep into his eyes to blind him. She is then stoned by Thracians, and is transformed into a dog, and that place is named Cynossema, the dog’s tomb.

The Vengeance of Hecuba is a magnificent Macao tapestry from the seventeenth century, showing Hecuba and three other women sealing Polymestor’s fate for his murder of Polydorus. Hecuba is poking his eyes out, as the others swing long wooden clubs at him.

Giuseppe Crespi probably painted his version of Hecuba kills Polymestor in the early eighteenth century. His skilful composition makes it a chilling but carefully implicit image, as a woman associate holds the king down, and Hecuba reaches up to remove his eyes. Crespi has minimised the amount of limb visible in the upper part of the painting, to keep the composition there clean and clear. He seems to have compensated for that in the legs of the lower half, made even more complex by deep shadow.

The goddess Aurora joins in the lament over the destruction of Troy. She had not only supported the Trojan cause, but her son Memnon had been killed by Achilles in combat. She is stricken with grief, and can’t bear to watch his cremation on the funeral pyre. She kneels before Jupiter and begs him that her dead son might be granted an honour. Jupiter agrees, and the smoke from Memnon’s pyre darkens the whole sky, as might have happened during a major volcanic eruption. That smoke is then transformed into a flock of birds, the Memnonides, in honour of Memnon.

Bernard Picart’s engraving from the early eighteenth century of Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus shows a young warrior in Egypt, looking into Aurora’s dawn light. He may be sat on his own sarcophagus too.

The two colossi at Al Bairat near Luxor in Egypt were known in classical times, and became popular motifs for ‘orientalist’ artists in the nineteenth century, several of whom show them in dramatic lighting.

Gustav W. Seitz’s Egypt: the Statues of Memnon, seen here as a colour lithograph of his original watercolour, is highly atmospheric, and an excellent demonstration of the moon illusion.

The colours in Charles Vacher’s watercolour of The Statues of the Memnons (1864) are superb.

Finally, Albert Zimmermann’s oil painting of The Memnon Statues captures the heat haze, and a snake moving through the water.

Ovid closed Book Twelve of his Metamorphoses with the death of the great Greek warrior Achilles at Troy. As was customary, his arms and armour were then to be passed on to a successor. As they had been made specially for him by the god Vulcan (Hephaestus), they were particularly sought-after. Two contenders emerged, Ajax the Great and Ulysses. Agamemnon therefore summoned his leading warriors to determine who was to be given these unique arms and armour.

Ovid uses the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses as a means of quickly summarising some of the action that had taken place in the war against Troy up to this moment.

Ajax puts his case first. He claims that, when Hector tried to set fire to the Greek fleet, it was he who stayed to fight the Trojans. He mentions that Ulysses was late joining the combat, as his rival had feigned madness, but he had been there from the start. When his colleague Philoctetes was dying, Ulysses had abandoned him to die alone. Ajax even had to save Ulysses on the battlefield, and finally he says that he needed a new shield as his current one was worn out with fighting, but Ulysses’ shield had barely been used.

Ajax concludes by proposing that the two should settle the matter in a fight, in which he feels Ulysses would stand no chance. This elicits applause from the surrounding crowd.

Ulysses doesn’t play to that gallery, but when he steps up, he delivers an eloquent argument to the leaders who are to make the decision. He says that he found Achilles hiding on the island of Scyros, and brought him to the war, so can claim Achilles’ successes as his. It was he who convinced Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigenia in the first place, so enabling the thousand ships of the Greek fleet to sail on Troy. He had worked hard at diplomatic solutions during the first nine years of the war, when Ajax had done nothing. He had also convinced both Agamemnon and Ajax not to abandon the campaign.

Ulysses had killed a Trojan spy, Dolon, and unlike Ajax had been wounded in battle. He also denies Ajax’s claim to have saved the fleet from fire, arguing that had been Patroclus in disguise. Ulysses had later carried Achilles’ dead body from the battlefield, and will recover that of Philoctetes.

To emphasise that, at least in Ovid’s world of Metamorphoses, it is words that carry greater weight than deeds, Achilles’ armour is awarded to Ulysses.

Ajax’s response is sudden and shocking: he literally falls on his sword, and like Hyacinthus before, his blood is turned into the purple hyacinth flower, its leaves marked with the letters AI, both the start of Ajax’s name and a cry of grief.

This, created by the ‘Taleides Painter’ in about 520 BCE, shows the warriors being held apart as they vie for the arms and armour.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Just a year or two later, Ajax’s suicide appeared prominently in one of Nicolas Poussin’s greatest narrative paintings: The Empire of Flora.

Poussin painted this in early 1631 for someone named Valguarnera, who turned out to be a thief of uncut diamonds, whose prosecution in court enables its unusually precise dating. At that time it was simply known as Spring. It’s set in a garden, with trees in the left background, a flower-laden system of pergolas, a large water feature, and dancing putti. In this are a series of well-known characters, one of whom is Ajax, shown in the act of falling on his sword.

Poussin has already used the purple hyacinth for the death of Hyacinthus, so here places under Ajax a white carnation which will shortly turn blood red.

Ovid races through the final destruction of Troy and its nobility: the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax, Hector’s young son, who is thrown from one of the city’s towers.

There are many paintings showing the sacking and destruction of Troy, of which my favourite, for its truly apocalyptic vision, is this, attributed to Gillis van Valckenborch.

The story of Astyanax is a relatively recent addition, and probably developed well after 700 BCE.

The clearest narrative painting showing this is Edouard-Théophile Blanchard’s winning entry for the Prix de Rome in 1868, The Death of Astyanax. It breaks convention in depicting Neoptolemus, Achilles’ vicious son, as a North African. Given that Achilles was the king of Thessaly, in central Greece, that seems a stretch of the imagination. Andromache pleads on her knees with the warrior to spare her son, her left hand vainly trying to prevent him from being slung from the wall. Two men cower in fear in the background. Two of Troy’s famous towers are shown, but there is no smoke or other evidence of a sacking in progress, neither is there any sign of King Priam.

Georges Rochegrosse enjoyed great success at the Salon in 1883 with Andromache, a huge and gruesome painting nearly nine metres (27 feet) high. She is at the centre, being restrained by four Greeks prior to her abduction by Neoptolemus. Her left arm points further up the steps, to a Greek warrior in black armour holding the infant Astyanax, as he takes him to the top, where another Greek is shown in silhouette, to murder him. There is death and desolation around the foot of the steps: a small pile of severed heads, a jumble of living and dead, and the debris of the sacking.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre won the Prix de Rome in 1861 with his Death of Priam; Georges Rochegrosse was later to become one of his students. A thoroughly conventional and Spartan Neoptolemus is just about to swing his sword at the prostrate figure of King Priam, who is lying on the floor by the altar to Zeus. Priam looks up at his killer, knowing that he has only seconds to live. Behind Neoptolemus is another body, presumably that of Priam’s son Polites. To the right, in the darkness behind, Queen Hecuba tries to comfort other Trojans. At the left, a young Trojan is trying to sneak away, back into the burning city, with smoke twisting its way into the dark sky.

As Ovid reaches the end of Book Twelve of his Metamorphoses, Nestor is still telling stories to the feast in honour of Achilles’ victory over Cycnus in the Trojan War. He has just completed the long and colourful story of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodame.

Tlepolemus, the son of Hercules (Heracles), is offended that Nestor hasn’t mentioned his father in his stories, to which Nestor points out his hatred for Hercules. Nestor says that he’s the only survivor of twelve sons of Neleus, Hercules having destroyed all the others. Nestor then goes on to tell of the strange death of his brother Periclymenus, who had been given the power of shape-shifting by Neptune. After Periclymenus had torn the face of Hercules and had flown away as an eagle, Hercules’ arrow severed the sinews of his wings. When he fell to earth, the arrow was driven into his neck, killing him.

Ovid then jumps to the closing months of the Trojan War, writing that Neptune’s hatred of Achilles has not gone away. Seeing the Greeks are about to conquer the city, Neptune speaks with Apollo, seeking a way to kill Achilles at last. As Neptune cannot face him in combat, Apollo agrees to use his skills as an archer to bring about the warrior’s death.

Apollo goes down to the walls of Troy, where he finds Paris (Alexander), whose abduction of Helen had started the war, shooting arrows almost at random. The god reveals himself and offers to help him make his shots more effective by aiming them at Achilles. Apollo assists Paris and his arrow, to ensure that it reaches its target; Achilles falls, mortally wounded, as a result.

Of those who have painted this, it was Peter Paul Rubens who has told the story most vividly, in a series on Achilles that he completed between 1630-35, towards the end of his own career and life. This painting of The Death of Achilles is an oil sketch on a smaller panel.

Achilles, an arrow piercing straight through his right foot, is shown in the centre foreground, overtly moribund. But Rubens doesn’t place Achilles in battle, as does Ovid: he has been standing at a small altar to the goddess Diana, with her strong association with archery. At the door to the left, Paris is still holding the bow that loosed the arrow, and behind him is Apollo aiding and abetting in the killing.

Rubens’ finished painting of The Death of Achilles adheres faithfully to that sketch. Achilles’ face is deathly white, and this brings to life the supporting detail, particularly the lioness attacking a horse at the lower edge of the canvas, symbolising Paris’s attack on Achilles.

Much later, Alexander Rothaug’s undated Death of Achilles is true to the original accounts, with the arrow passing through the Achilles tendon. Paris, still clutching his bow above, looks mortified, and Apollo stands behind him.

Henry Fuseli’s Thetis Lamenting the Death of Achilles (1780) is less straightforward to read. In the foreground, Achilles’ body lies like a fallen statue on his shield, his great spear by his left side. There is no sign of any wound, arrow, or injury. At the water’s edge, his mother Thetis is waving her arms in lament for her dead son. Another deity is flying past in the distance, and is seen white against the dark and funereal sea and sky.

Ovid is quite vague as to how Achilles died, other than telling us it was from an arrow shot by Paris. Since that account in his Metamorphoses, a new myth has flourished, giving a more familiar explanation. When Achilles was a young child, his mother Thetis immersed him in the water of the river Styx, to make him invulnerable. However, she had to hold him by part of his body, the left heel, which was therefore left as his only weakness, hence his Achilles Heel. This was first recorded in the poetry of Statius, in the first century CE.

Rubens included this oil sketch in his Achilles series, showing Thetis Dipping the Infant Achilles into the River Styx (1630-35). This is taking place in the foreground, while in the middle distance Charon is seen ferrying the dead across the River Styx into the Underworld. Rubens complies with Statius’ story in making Achilles’ left heel the one left vulnerable.

Nearly thirty years after Rubens’ death, Jan-Erasmus Quellinus painted his version of Thetis Dips Achilles in a Vase with Water from the Styx (1668). It’s set not on the bank of the River Styx, but at a temple, where Achilles undergoes a baptismal procedure in a a huge pot, at the lower left. Thetis appears to be holding the infant, who is almost completely immersed, by his left foot, again in compliance with Statius. Quellinus has engaged in a little intentional Christianisation of this myth, which may also have made it seem more familiar to those who saw it.

Antoine Borel’s more traditional account of Thetis Immerses Her Son Achilles in Water of the River Styx was painted at least a hundred years later, in the late eighteenth century, and again has Thetis hold Achilles by his left foot.

Unusually for Rubens, though, his paintings of the death of Achilles show the arrow transfixing his right foot, not the left. That was a necessity by virtue of its composition, although Rubens could just as easily have reversed his drawing to achieve consistency with this detail.

With Achilles on his funeral pyre, Ovid closes the book as King Agamemnon calls his warriors to meet, to decide who should be awarded Achilles’ shield and arms, in the opening of book thirteen.

Borne on the fair winds brought by the near-sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, the thousand Greek ships sail for the shores of Troy. The Trojans had already become aware that they were on their way, and were ready guarding its shores. Protesilaus, the first of the Greek forces to land, is quickly killed by Hector.

Achilles then flies off in his chariot, in pursuit of Hector or Cycnus to redress the balance for the invading force. Finding Cycnus, Achilles drives his chariot at him and implants his spear in Cycnus’ shield, but that makes little impression. Cycnus responds by throwing his lance at Achilles, but he too fails to make any impact. After a second attempt, Achilles is still thwarted, and becomes angry with his enemy.

To test his weapon, Achilles throws his spear at Menoetes, pierces his armour, and kills him instantly. He tries the same combination of spear and throwing arm against Cycnus’ shoulder, but the projectile just bounces off. For a moment, Achilles thinks he may have drawn blood, but realises it’s that of Menoetes, not Cycnus.

Achilles grows even angrier, so draws his sword and attacks Cycnus at close quarters, but that only blunts the sword. As Cycnus is forced to step back from Achilles’ assaults, he backs up against a large rock. Achilles throws his opponent to the ground and strangles him with the thongs of his own helmet. As Cycnus dies, he’s transformed into a white swan. Following that, there’s a pause in the fighting while Achilles sacrifices to Pallas Athene, and the Greeks feast his victory over Cycnus. During that, Nestor tells the story of Caeneus of Thessaly, who survived a thousand wounds in battle, but had been born a woman.

Caenis, as she was previously, had been the prettiest girl in Thessaly, although she remained unmarried. When walking on the beach one day, Neptune raped her, but offered to fulfil her request. She asked to be turned into a man, and Neptune not only granted that wish, but made Caeneus the warrior proof against all wounds inflicted by spear or sword.

Johann Ulrich Krauss tells a fragment of the story of Caenis and Neptune (before 1690), although he doesn’t make any allusion to the transformation to Caeneus. As is usual, the flying Cupid indicates entirely inappropriately the rape of Caenis, and Neptune’s horses are held ready for his return.

Virgil Solis’ Caenis and Neptune from about 1560, moves the story on to the rape itself. Neptune puts his arms around Caenis, who doesn’t reciprocate. The god’s trident has been dropped to the ground, and his horses are prancing in the waves. In the distance is a walled city, possibly a reference to Troy, although this rape took place in Thessaly, Greece, on the opposite shore of the Aegean Sea.

After that story, Nestor tells of the battle between the Lapiths and Centaurs, at which he claims to have been present. This is one of a pair of primaeval battles said to have established world order: that between the Titans and the Gods ended the heavenly Titanomachy, and that between the Lapiths and Centaurs ended the earthly Centauromachy.

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried Hippodame off by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked.

Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at Eurytus, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Nestor details a succession of grisly accounts of Lapiths and Centaurs killed. Gryneus the centaur ripped up the altar and crushed two Lapiths with its weight, only to have his eyballs gouged out by a Lapith using the prongs of some antlers. Not content with using the objects around them as weapons, they started using their own lances and swords.

When the centaur Petraeus was trying to uproot a whole oak tree, Pirithous, the groom, pinned the centaur to the tree-trunk with his lance. Nestor also tells of the success of Caeneus, formerly Caenis, in killing five centaurs. The centaur Latreus taunted Caeneus, so the latter wounded the centaur with his spear. Latreus thrust his lance in Caeneus’ face, but was unable to hurt him, so he tried with his sword, which broke against the invulnerable Caeneus, leaving him to finish the centaur off with thrusts of his own sword.

The centaurs then united to try to overwhelm Caeneus by crushing him under their combined weight. Just as they thought they had succeeded, Caeneus was transformed into a bird and flew out from underneath them. With that the survivors dispersed, the Lapiths having won the day.

Piero di Cosimo’s The Fight between Lapiths and Centaurs (1500-15) is my favourite among the earlier paintings, and remains one of its best-structured and complete accounts. In the centre foreground, Hylonome embraces and kisses the dying Cyllarus, a huge arrow-like spear resting underneath them. Immediately behind them, on large carpets laid out for the wedding feast, centaurs are still abducting women. All around are scenes of pitched and bloody battles, with eyes being gouged out, Lapiths and Centaurs wielding clubs and other weapons at one another.

Towards the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens painted this brilliant oil sketch of The Rape of Hippodame (c 1637-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

That became the finished painting, The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38), which remains faithful to Rubens’ sketch and its composition. Facial expressions, particularly that of the Lapith at the left bearing a sword, are particularly powerful.

Luca Giordano’s later painting of the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs from 1688 lacks the narrative structure of Piero di Cosimo’s, and covers later action than Rubens’. As a result, its story has become a little lost in the mêlée of battle.

Sebastiano Ricci’s The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs from about 1705 has similar problems, although it does use multiplex narrative to help. In the left background, Hippodame is seen being carried away by Eurytus, and to the right there are scenes of abduction at the wedding feast.

Francesco Solimena’s Battle between Lapiths and Centaurs (1735-40) puts multiple abductions in the foreground, with pitched battles taking place behind.

There’s a moral, of course: never invite centaurs to your wedding feast, as they’ll go way beyond smashing the crockery.

As Ovid ended Book Eleven of his Metamorphoses with some unrelated myths, he returns to the story of the war against Troy in the opening of Book Twelve. King Priam, father of Aesacus and King of Troy, is then linked with his other son Paris, whose abduction of Helen triggered the Greeks to launch ‘a thousand ships’ to start their war against Troy.

The Greek fleet gathered at Aulis in Boeotia, where they made sacrifices to Jupiter in preparation for their departure. Just as the Greeks were preparing a sacrifice they saw an omen, when a snake slithered up a plane tree and seized a nest of nine birds. This was interpreted by Calchas as portending their success against Troy, but only after nine years of war. With that the snake was turned into stone.

Despite their sacrifice, the sea remained stormy and prevented the fleet from sailing. Some claimed this was because Neptune had helped build the walls of Troy (as Ovid had told earlier), but Calchas said that it would require the sacrifice of a virgin to satisfy Diana, whom Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, had offended. Agamemnon had to set aside his love for his daughter Iphigenia, and in his role as king, give her as a sacrifice to propitiate Diana.

Ovid is meticulous in leaving open whether the princess was really killed, or a deer acted as her proxy, so accommodating the many variants of this story with their conflicting outcomes.

Among the earliest post-classical depictions is Domenichino’s fresco in Viterbo, Italy, of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia from about 1609. The princess kneels, her wrists bound together, as an axe is about to be swung at her neck. Onlookers at the left are distraught, as Agamemnon at the right watches impassively. But in the distance, Diana is leading a deer towards the altar, ready to make the substitution.

Charles de La Fosse’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1680), now hanging in the Versailles palace, uses a powerful triangular composition to arrange the figures, with Diana at the top, telling Agamemnon to spare the young woman, to his evident surprise. His large sacrificial knife, dropped from Agamemnon’s right hand, rests by Iphigenia’s right foot. At the lower right, one of the Greek warriors, possibly Achilles, is still resigned to her sacrifice, but the warrior standing above is already smiling with relief.

Many other artists painted this story in the meantime, but the next outstanding work is Tiepolo’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia almost a century later, in 1770. Iphigenia sits, almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon, looks up to the heavens, with the knife held in his right hand. In a direct line with that hand comes Diana in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with the substitute deer. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrificial victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.

My next choice is an unusual painting by Jacques-Louis David, who develops the story using other sources, and packs his figures close together to great effect, in The Anger of Achilles from 1819. Iphigenia had already been promised by her father as a bride to Achilles, and the announcement of her impending sacrifice throws Achilles into the first of his many rages.

Achilles, at the left, reaches for his sword in an uncomfortable manoeuvre with his right arm. A rather masculine and tearful woman just to the right of him is Queen Clytemnestra, Iphigenia’s mother, and her right hand rests on Iphigenia’s shoulder. Iphigenia is dressed as a bride, and looks wistful, staring into the distance, her face empty of outward emotion. At the right, Agamemnon appears emotionless, but indicates firmly to Achilles for him to restrain his emotions.

Over a century later, more modern artists continued to paint this story. Louis Billotey, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1907 but is now forgotten, painted his version of Iphigenia in 1935. Clytemnestra looks distant at the left as she leads her daughter towards the sacrificial altar beside her. Diana, marked only by her bow and hunting dog, stands at the right, as the deer runs past.

No matter how it ends, the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice is a glimpse back into a dark and distant past, at humans whose commitment to savage rituals overrode their humanity to one another.

With Diana’s wrath assuaged, the winds and sea abate, and the Greek fleet sets sail for Troy.

With Peleus and Thetis safely married and the birth of their son Achilles, Ovid brings Book Eleven of his Metamorphoses to a close with a series of less-known myths that have also been rarely depicted.

Peleus, with his sheep and cattle, was forced to flee from Aegina to Trachis after he had been involved with his brother Telamon in the killing of their brother Phocus. When in Trachis, Peleus kept company with King Ceyx, son of Lucifer (the Morning Star, not the devil). The king told the story of his brother Daedalion, whose daughter Chione was raped on the same night by both Mercury and Apollo. She conceived by them, and gave birth to twins, Autolycus and Philammon. However, Chione was very beautiful, and boasted that she was fairer than the goddess Diana.

Diana decided to silence her, so shot an arrow through Chione’s tongue, causing her not only to fall dumb, but to bleed to death. Her father Daedalion tried to throw himself on Chione’s funeral pyre four times. Eventually, in his grief, he ran off and threw himself from the top of Mount Parnassus, and was turned into a hawk by Apollo.

Johann Wilhelm Baur’s set of engravings to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses include a particularly fine account of Chione (c 1639), with rich multiplex narrative. At the left, in the foreground, the vengeful Diana has just loosed an arrow, still in flight, at Chione on the right. She is shown with her twins Autolycus and Philammon. Behind them, in the centre, Daedalion tries to throw himself on Chione’s funeral pyre, then hurls himself from the sea cliff, being transformed into a hawk.

As Ceyx was telling of Daedalion being turned into a hawk, the royal herdsman rushed in and reported that a monster wolf was killing their cattle down by the beach. Ceyx had his men prepare to go and tackle the beast, but Peleus offered to deal with this by praying to the sea-goddess who was responsible. They went down to a lighthouse tower above the beach, and saw the bodies of many mutilated cattle and the wolf covered in their blood. Peleus prayed to Psamathe, and his wife Thetis secured the solution as that goddess turned the monster wolf into marble.

Ovid’s penultimate story in this book concerns King Ceyx and his wife Halcyone (or Alcyone), and is told at length, with several lyrical passages, particularly those describing the storm and shipwreck.

Ceyx was still troubled by his brother’s transformation into a hawk, and wanted to visit an oracle. However, the road to that at Delphi was blocked by bandits, so he was forced to go by sea to the oracle at Claros in Ionia. That troubled his wife, but Ceyx pointed out that his father Aeolus ruled the winds so should ensure his safe passage.

Ceyx set out, Halcyone sobbing as he left. At first the ship’s crew had to row because of the lack of wind, but soon there was enough to stow the oars and proceed under sail. By nightfall the wind was blowing a gale, and the sails were fully reefed as they tried to weather the storm out. The waves grew larger until they came crashing down on their ship.

With water pouring in, the tenth wave (by legend always the largest) broke the vessel up, it sank, and its terrified crew drowned. Ceyx, his thoughts turning to his wife, clung to wreckage, fighting for his life. Just before he too drowned, he prayed for the waves to carry his body to the shore, so his wife could tend to it before burial. Still muttering her name, he sank into the black water and died.

Knowing nothing of this, Halcyone prepared for Ceyx’s return, and worshipped at Juno’s shrine. The goddess took pity on her, and despatched Iris to wake Sleep and break the news of Ceyx’s death to his wife. Sleep did this through his son Morpheus, who appeared to Halcyone in her sleep as the ghost of her dead husband. Halcyone woke as Morpheus went away, realised that he was only a ghost, and descended into profound grief. In the morning, she went to the shore to look for her husband’s body, which she saw slowly washing in on the tide. Ceyx and Halcyone were then transformed into kingfishers.

Herbert James Draper’s oil painting of Halcyone from 1915 shows the widow looking out to sea, watching Ceyx’s body float slowly in. He completes the story with a pair of kingfishers flying above her head, matching the kingfisher blue of her clothes.

Helen Stratton’s illustration of Ceyx and Halcyone, published in 1915, doesn’t follow Ovid’s account as closely. The sea is still rough, and spume covers the beach. Halcyone is walking past flotsam from the wreck, but the birds appear to be terns and are definitely not kingfishers, however inappropriate they might be on a beach.

A man watching kingfishers fly together tells the final story of Book Eleven, of one of the sons of Priam king of Troy, thus Hector’s brother. While Hector’s mother was Hecuba, this brother, Aesacus, was secretly born of Alexiroe. Unlike his more famous brother, Aesacus shunned Troy and populous places. He often pursued Hesperia, daughter of the river-god Cebren, but one day as she was fleeing from him, she was bitten on her foot by a venomous snake. She died immediately, and Aesacus held her limp body in his arms, blaming himself for being the cause of her death. He went straight to the top of a sea cliff and flung himself from it. Tethys took care of him as he entered the water, and transformed him into a diver (a seabird).

Although seldom painted, this myth does have the benefit of a fine engraving by Virgil Solis of Aesacus and Hesperia for sixteenth century editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the foreground, Aesacus has just caught up with the dead body of Hesperia, the offending snake still by her foot. Behind them is the sight of Aesacus throwing himself from the top of a cliff, with Tethys ready to catch him below.

The great nineteenth century narrative painter Jules-Élie Delaunay, a friend of Gustave Moreau, is probably the only painter to have depicted this story in a significant work, The Death of the Nymph Hesperia (1859). I apologise for the poor image quality, which lacks sufficient detail to determine whether the snake is still present. Hesperia lies, cold, white and dead, as Aesacus blames himself for the tragedy. At the top right corner are the overhanging cliffs from which Aesacus will shortly hurl himself.

This brings us to the end of Book Eleven.

In this second article looking at how difficult it is to depict the purpose or intent of an inanimate object, specifically here a poisonous liquid, I show some more classical history paintings before ending with modern retellings of Arthurian legend.

The jury of the Prix de Rome chose another grim subject for 1805, the suicide of the great Athenian statesman Demosthenes, who had incited the Athenians to seek independence from the Macedonian Empire. He escaped to a sanctuary on the island of Kalaureia (modern Poros), where he was discovered by the Macedonians. To avoid capture, he drank poison from a reed pen.

Felix Boisselier shows Demosthenes looking up at a statue of Poseidon, clinging onto the altar as he weakens. His pen has fallen to the ground, and his left arm is outstretched towards Archias as he approaches to arrest him.

When the jury again chose the suicide of Demosthenes as the subject in 1879, Alfred-Henri Bramtot’s successful painting shows Demosthenes’ limp body being supported from falling in front of the altar, with Archias angry and frustrated at the far right. The altar tripod is at the left edge, and the orator’s pen and writing materials are behind it.

Without knowing this story in detail, you’d spend a long time guessing that it was the original poison pen.

Last in this succession of suicides set as subjects for the Prix de Rome is that for 1887, the suicide of Themistocles. Henri-Camille Danger recreates the moment of great drama as Themistocles, visibly aged, raises a goblet ready to drink to his death. Although the goblet is of obvious significance, there’s little to suggest that it’s about to end the life of Themistocles.

Just a couple of years before his death in 1889, Alexandre Cabanel found a tragic heroine in Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (1887). Known for her ruthless pursuit of power and her alleged beauty, Cleopatra spent much of her life as co-ruler of Egypt with one of her brothers, including Ptolemy XIV. A few months after the assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome, in 44 BCE, Cleopatra had returned to Egypt, where she had her brother killed by poison, making her co-ruler her son by Caesar, Caesarion. It’s likely that this painting refers to an apocryphal story that Cleopatra had candidate poisons tested out on prisoners to help her select the one to be used to kill her younger brother. The clues are here, if you know what you’re looking for.

In Arthurian legend, King Mark and Sir Tristram fell out over their love for another knight’s wife. The king then devised a way to destroy Tristram, by sending him to Ireland to bring La Beale Isode back for Mark to marry. The Queen of Ireland sent Tristram back with her daughter and her lady-in-waiting. As they were sailing back to Cornwall, Tristram and Isode drank together from a golden flask containing a potion that ensured their love for one another would never end, setting up the love triangle.

Isolda with the Love Potion (1870) is one of Frederick Sandys’ late Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic paintings, and shows as femme fatale Isolde of the legend and Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. The opera had only received its première five years earlier, although its next production didn’t occur until 1874. In the operatic version, the couple drink what they believe is a poisonous potion, which instead of killing them both, makes them fall in relentless love with one another. Sandys shows only Isolde, the cup of poison in her right hand, looking into the distance. The floral language, red roses in particular, is symbolic of love.

Herbert James Draper’s Tristan and Isolde from 1901 shows the couple on the deck of the ship as they return to Cornwall. The golden goblet is empty as he looks in desperation into her half-closed eyes. Behind them the crew are rowing through the choppy waters.

John Duncan’s ornate tempera painting of Tristan and Isolde from 1912 shows them holding a crystal glass in their hands, staring into one another’s eyes just before they drink, although by now it’s impossible to tell whether they think the potion will kill them, or make them fall in love.

Koloman Moser’s Tristan and Isolde from about 1915 shows Isolde persuading Tristan to drink the potion, as his sword rests at their feet.

In his painting of the couple from 1916, John William Waterhouse gives a faithful pictorial account of them drinking the potion from a golden chalice, while on the ship carrying them back to King Mark. Is it poison, though? Without knowing the literary reference, I doubt whether we’d ever guess.

In this week’s two articles about reading paintings, I tackle one of the greatest challenges in narrative art: how to depict the purpose or intent of an inanimate object, specifically here a poisonous liquid? In this series of examples drawn from paintings largely of classical myth and history, I’ll show the image of each before explaining its story.

The Greek hero Theseus was the estranged son of King Aegeus of Athens. As a young man, his mother dispatched him in search of his father. When Theseus arrived in his father’s court, the king didn’t recognise him. The sorceress Medea tried to keep the king to herself, so prepared a poisonous drink of aconite for the king to unwittingly give to 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) above, 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.

Without knowing the full story, you’d be fortunate to guess from either of those paintings that it revolved around a cup of poison.

Jason, another classical hero, had challenged Pelias for his throne, and was given the quest for Poseidon’s Golden Fleece to win it. This took him and his Argonauts to Colchis, where they discovered the owner of the fleece was King Aeëtes, who set Jason three tasks to achieve before he could take possession of the fleece. To ensure his success, Jason enlisted the help of the king’s daughter Medea, already a proficient sorceress, and the inevitable happened when she fell in love with Jason, thanks to the divine intervention of Hera (Juno) through Aphrodite (Venus). In return for her assistance, Jason promised to marry Medea.

John William Waterhouse’s painting of Jason and Medea (1907) shows her preparing the potion given later by Jason to the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. Medea wears a dress suggesting in its bold icons her role as a sorceress. In front of her, a flame heats ingredients for the potion, which she is adding to a chalice. Jason appears anxious, and is dressed and armed ready to go and fight the dragon.

Although identified as being The Etruscan Sorceress (1886), Elihu Vedder’s painting has all the symbolic associations of Medea. She’s holding a vial which Jason used to capture the fleece, and at her feet is an open fire which is associated with preparation of the potion for the vial.

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

The presence of Medea in her role as sorceress and the liquid’s preparation are valuable clues here.

Socrates (470/469-399 BCE) was a major Greek philosopher known still for the Socratic Method, although none of his writings have survived. At the time when Athens was trying to recover from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Socrates was openly critical of Athenian politics and society, and made prominent Athenians appear foolish. He was tried, ostensibly for corrupting the minds of the young and for being impious, found guilty, and sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock.

Plato’s Phaedo describes Socrates’ execution. Although several encouraged him to escape, he refused. After drinking the hemlock from a bowl, he was told to walk around until his legs became numb. He then lay down, and the numbness slowly ascended until it reached his heart, and caused his death.

Jacques-Louis David shows Socrates half-sitting on a bed, his right hand over the bowl of hemlock, his left gesticulating with his index finger pointing upwards. His face is expressionless. By the head of the bed, five friends are distraught at what is happening, although only one shows grief on his face. Another friend (Crito) sits by Socrates, his right hand resting on Socrates’ left thigh.

The bowl of hemlock is held out by a young man, who is turned away, averting and shielding his eyes from the bowl. At the foot of the bed, an old man (Plato, who told the story) is sat, asleep, but behind him, under an arch, another of Socrates’ friends (Apollodorus) is pressing his face to the wall in his anguish. In the far distance, a small group of patricians are seen walking away, upstairs, the lowermost holding his right hand up as if to bid Socrates farewell.

Phocion was an incorruptible statesman in a Greece that had become all too corrupt. When he was wrongfully accused of treachery, he and his colleagues were sentenced to death by the mob. They were taken to prison, where they had to drink poisonous hemlock. There was sufficient to kill the colleagues, but not enough remained for Phocion, who had to arrange for a friend to pay for more hemlock so that he too could be executed.

In 1804, The Death of Phocion was the subject for the prestigious Prix de Rome competition. Charles Brocas’ unsuccessful entry shown above gives Plutarch’s account clearly. At the right, Phocion’s friends are dying as they drink their goblets of hemlock. In the centre, Phocion is arranging for the payment of the executioner so that he too can be killed. Behind Phocion stands another man, pointing to the empty bowl into which the hemlock plant was to be put to make the infusion.

Joseph Denis Odevaere’s winning painting shows Phocion standing in the middle, comforting his friends as they die. At the right, the executioner is being paid for the additional supply of hemlock. As with the previous paintings, the goblets and bowls containing the poison aren’t prominent, and you have to know what you’re looking for to see all the clues to the story.

After two humorous stories poking fun at King Midas, Ovid makes a start on the central theme for much of the remainder of his Metamorphoses, retelling the myths about Troy, and how its fall led to the foundation of Rome. This begins with the foundation and fall of the first city of Troy, leading into the birth of Achilles.

Once Apollo had won his musical contest against Pan, he made his way to Laomedon’s kingdom, where he found the king struggling to build the great walls of the first city of Troy. Apollo and Neptune agreed to lend a hand, but when the walls were complete, Laomedon denied striking any bargain to repay the gods for their labour.

One of the few works showing the story of Laomedon is thought to have been painted by Joachim von Sandrart and Girolamo Troppa in the late seventeenth century. Its close-cropped figures show Laomedon Refusing Payment to Poseidon and Apollo. The youthful Apollo holds his hand out at the left, while behind him the much older Neptune leans forward next to his trident.

Neptune responded by flooding the city. In a scene reminiscent of Andromeda being offered for sacrifice to the sea-monster Cetis, Laomedon’s daughter Hesione was then chained to rocks to await her grizzly fate. When she was rescued by Hercules, Laomedon again welshed on his debt, so Hercules gave Hesione to Telamon.

In Hans Thoma’s Hercules Delivering Hesione (1890) Hercules stands on the beach in front of the early city of Troy, his trademark club in his right hand. A naked Telamon is busy keeping the sea monster at bay by throwing boulders at it, while Hercules is bargaining with the fair Hesione.

Ovid’s story then switches to that of Telamon’s brother, Peleus, who married Thetis, one of the fifty Nereid daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus. She had been told by Proteus that her son’s deeds would be famous, and even Jupiter had left her to his grandson Peleus to marry. Thetis used to ride naked astride a dolphin to visit the remote sea cave where she slept. Peleus found her there, and tried to rape her. But she used her powers of transformation to escape his clutches, first turning into a bird, then a tree, next a tigress. Peleus pleaded with the sea gods for their help, and Proteus told him to bind her with ropes while she was still asleep. When he did that, she relented, and they were married.

According to other sources, their wedding was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion, and attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, hadn’t been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’. This set up the Judgement of Paris, and led to the Trojan War.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis from 1593 segregates the deities into a separate feast in a sacred grove on the left. There is, as yet, no sign of discord among them, nor of any golden apple. Some of the gods are still among the other guests in the foreground, including Pan (near his pipes, at the left) and Mercury, with his winged hat and caduceus at the right. They seem to be having a good time.

Joachim Wtewael’s undated painting of The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis is great fun, with its aerial band, and numerous glimpses of deities behaving badly. I think that I can also spot Eris, about to sow her apple of discord into their midst: she is in mid-air to the left of centre, the apple held out in her right hand.

Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder combined their skills to paint The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus together in about 1630. Here it’s the innumerable putti who seem to be running riot, and there’s no sign of Eris or her golden apple.

It’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

The most famous painting of this event doesn’t show the wedding at all, only the introduction of the golden apple to the feast of the gods.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, now at the centre of the grasping hands above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too, leading on to the Judgement of Paris.

In a complete contrast to the death of Orpheus, the opening myth in Book Eleven of the Metamorphoses, Ovid continues with two lighter and humorous tales about King Midas.

Once Bacchus had turned the murderous Bacchantes into an oak wood, he left the scene and wandered to the River Pactolus. As was usual, the god was in the company of his friends, although Silenus was absent until he was retrieved by King Midas. To celebrate the return of Silenus, Bacchus invited the king to ask for whatever he wanted as a boon. Midas responded by wishing that everything he touched was turned to gold.

That wish was granted, and at first Midas was delighted and amazed with his new power. He turned a twig to gold, then a stone, a lump of earth, ears of wheat, and an apple. When he put his hands into running water, it too flowed gold. But when he tried to eat, the food he touched turned to gold before he could put it into his mouth, so too the wine that he was going to drink. Midas admitted to Bacchus how his boon was proving such a disaster, and pleaded for his power to be removed. Bacchus told him to go and wash his crime away in the headwaters of the River Pactolus, which coloured that river and its sands gold from contact with the king.

Walter Crane’s book illustration of King Midas with his Daughter, published in 1893, seems to be one of the few works telling this directly. It shows the hapless king, surrounded by all the gold objects he has touched, with his daughter dead on his knee, cold and gold.

Nicolas Poussin (probably) painted a remarkable and subtle work showing Midas Washing Himself in the Source of the Pactolus in 1627. Midas is almost out of sight at the left, but his touchmark gold is seen on the wreaths crowning the others present, and glowing on the nose of rock above them.

Having told us that unusual story in which one of the mortal characters performs all the transformations, albeit with the aid of a god, and accounting for natural gold in a river, Ovid moves on to the less known myth of Midas and a music contest. Despite similarities with that between Apollo and Marsyas, this has a humorous rather than gruesome ending.

Having developed a real loathing for riches, Midas led an outdoor life with the god Pan, but continued to do stupid things. Pan sang and played his pipes, making music he claimed was even better than that of the god Apollo, a boast that resulted in a contest between them, with Tmolus as the judge.

Pan played first, then Apollo, and inevitably Tmolus gave his verdict in favour of Apollo’s lyre, so Midas took exception to that, considering it unjust. Apollo responded by transforming the king’s ears into those of an ass, forcing him to hide them with a purple turban to spare him the laughter they caused. A servant who came to cut the king’s hair witnessed his secret, and told it to the earth in a hole that he dug. A grove grew where that hole had been, and when the south wind blew, the grove whispered the secret of the king’s ears.

Domenichino included The Judgement of Midas as part of the superb frescoes he and his workshop painted in the Villa Aldobrandini in 1616-18. Midas stands proud in his folly, his ass’s ears plain to see, with Apollo and Pan on each side. Amazingly, seven chalk drawings made for this have survived, and are in the British Royal Collection.

This jewel of a painting by Hendrick de Clerck, showing The Contest Between Apollo and Pan was painted in about 1620, just after Domenichino’s frescoes. Pan holds his pipes and dances at the right, and Apollo is seen bowing an early form of violin just to the left of centre. Between them are Tmolus, the judge next to Apollo, and Midas, with his ass’s ears. Seven Graces are also present, and Minerva is talking to Apollo.

A few years later Nicolas Poussin (probably) painted his version of Midas and Bacchus (1629-30), showing a different group. The centre trio are, from the left, Apollo, Pan (with his pipes), and King Midas, with fairly regular ears. At the far left, Bacchus has nodded off at the table, presumably from his customary excess of wine. In front could be Venus, perhaps, and there are sundry figures scattered, including two putti wrestling with a black and white goat.

Émile Lévy’s painting of The Judgement of Midas was completed in 1870, and is as clean and uncluttered as Crane’s later illustration. Apollo stands in disdain. Seated with his ass’s ears and a facile smile all over his face is King Midas, who is passing a gold laurel crown, a reference to his earlier golden touch, to Pan, who holds his pipes aloft in victory.