A banquet with a river god, a pitched battle at his friend’s wedding which turned into a full-scale war, a relationship involving incest, suicide and violent death, and the abduction of Helen – quite the career of a Greek hero.
de Clerck
Huge clam shells were a common feature in paintings of the birth of Venus, and other classical myths. They also feature in many ‘vanitas’ paintings.
After 1600, series of four paintings fell from favour, and artists, particularly the Brueghel family, combined all into single images.
Whether gentle, young and pipe-playing or hoary and older, he had the body of a man and the legs of a goat. Is he tender, or ribald?
Popular with painters during the early 1600s, copper sheets were used by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam Elsheimer, David Teniers the younger, William Blake, and Joseph Stella, among others.
Two delightful and gently humorous stories, with superb paintings by Domenichino, Poussin, de Clerck (a real jewel), and Émile Lévy.
Meleager is burned to death by proxy, his sisters transformed to guinea hens. Then Achelous transforms nymphs into islands.
