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?
Lévy
From bizarre origins as his mother was consumed by fire, and he completed gestation in Zeus’ thigh, to his marriage to Ariadne on the island of Naxos.
A relatively common motif, it started with the peculiar association of death and the erotic, then changed in the late 19th century.
Six of the best, from Nessus, Deianira and Hercules to the sacrifice of Iphigeia, painted by Tiepolo, Rubens, and others.
What to our ancestors would have been blurred and defective images are now accepted as depicting motion. How our perception has changed, thanks to photography.
Two delightful and gently humorous stories, with superb paintings by Domenichino, Poussin, de Clerck (a real jewel), and Émile Lévy.
After he lost Eurydice, Orpheus scorned the company of women. For this, a frenzied mob of Bacchantes overwhelm him, and tear him apart, for which Bacchus is not pleased.
How you mustn’t look at what shouldn’t be seen: how Pentheus was torn limb from limb by his mother and aunts.
Salome has become a femme fatale, the author of John the Baptist’s death, and a potent erotic symbol. But that was not the original story.
Two paintings of the buried dismemberment of a victim: one theatrical narrative, the other a serene reverie of anti-theatrical non-narrative. And an oriental witch.
