They tried to lure Odysseus and his crew to their deaths, and the same with Jason and his Argonauts. With the head of a beautiful woman and the legs of a bird, their singing was alluring to sailors.
Etty
More rich narratives, including Titania and Bottom, Falstaff, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Odysseus, Satan, Lady Macbeth, and Fairy Mab.
Stories involving swimmers, including Hero and Leander, the Ship of Fools, and a poem by Thomas Gray, with paintings by Bosch, Rubens and others.
The double pipe with reeds played by Marsyas in his doomed contest with Apollo, blown by the Sirens, and more.
Orientalism, a duel in fancy dress, gladiators in the Colosseum, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the cynic Diogenes.
Odysseus is lashed to the mast as his ship passes the Sirens without being lured away. He’s the only survivor after shipwreck, then is trapped with Calypso for seven years.
Byron, no stranger to forbidden love, swam across the Dardanelles in 1810, retracing the strokes of the legendary Leander who died trying to reach his lover Hero.
The modified myth of Pandora remained popular well into the 20th century, when it must have seemed even more appropriate with war and pandemic.
The stories of Samson, whose prodigious strength depended on not having his hair cut, and Mary Magdalene, who dried Christ’s feet with her hair.
An allegory of a flawed democracy by Plato, a fragment of a triptych by Bosch, then two paintings in 1922 and 1930. What is its meaning?
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