Not a Greek myth, this tragic love story is the ultimate ancestor to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and other major works. Here are the best paintings.
Metamorphoses
How you mustn’t look at what shouldn’t be seen: how Pentheus was torn limb from limb by his mother and aunts.
A challenge to painters: a story of a gender-changing seer, a nymph who becomes no more than an acoustic effect, and a young man who dies of self-love.
One of the strangest of all myths, only two painters managed to approximate Ovid’s account.
The grandson of the founder of Thebes suffers a grisly fate when he stumbles across the goddess Diana bathing naked.
The slaying of a dragon/serpent, and transformation of its teeth into warriors, make for five superb paintings spanning most of the story.
Less than 30 lines of the book are devoted to the abduction of Europa, which has become its best-known and most-often painted story.
The idea was to create a single document which would get the best out of both apps. Here is my solution, and the file to download.
Two turned to stone: Battus for betraying Mercury, and Aglauros for obstructing Mercury’s courting of Herse, and her jealousy.
No less than 6 different stories, 4 transformations, 5 wonderful paintings, all from less than 150 lines of Latin verse.
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