Did Sappho really throw herself from the Leucadian Cliff when she was jilted by Phaon the local ferryman, or was Ovid ridiculing the story?
heroines
The story of Hypermnestra’s faithfulness to her husband, her trial for not murdering him, and what happened to her sisters, the Danaides.
In an act of revenge by Aphrodite, Phaedra, wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, with tragic consequences.
After Achilles slaughtered the rest of her family, Briseis becomes his enslaved concubine. While he’s angry, she remains devoted to him until his death.
When Edward Burne-Jones was invited to remove his painting from exhibition, it wasn’t so much the male genitals in the centre, but the scandal surrounding its model.
Odysseus had been away from his home, wife Penelope and son Telemachus for over 20 years. What would she have written to him?
A tragedy with a happy outcome, painted by Waterhouse, Kauffman, Paulus Bor, Delacroix, Maurice Denis and Lovis Corinth.
Final two stories, of a brother and sister caught in an incestuous relationship, and one of the many widowed Greeks from the Trojan war. Very different paintings hidden away.
Ovid’s fictional letter made it clear how the legend of Phaon was absurd. Yet it has been painted repeatedly ever since.
Was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore? Ovid’s pair of letters between Helen and Paris raises questions which many artists have tried to tackle.
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