Cadmus’ daughter Semele is destroyed by Jupiter’s lightning, but her infant grows into Bacchus. Pentheus is then torn apart by bacchantes, and Cadmus and his wife are turned into snakes.
Moreau
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.
An attribute of the goddess Athena (Minerva), it consists of the image of the face of Medusa on a shield or breastplate.
Although unusual in paintings, tortoises can have several different readings, from love to slow and faltering political reforms.
Unfinished paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Bonington, Bazille, Bastien-Lepage, Moreau and others.
Zeus, disguised as a gander, raped Nemesis, who laid Helen as an egg. She became step-sister of Castor and Polydeuces, and went on to be abducted by Paris as Aphrodite’s bribe.
Inscriptions in paintings that reveal the story, or quote from its literary source, from Rembrandt to the Pre-Raphaelites.
Paris, Prince of Troy, is the perfect pawn in Zeus’s plan for war. He develops a taste for beautiful women, then accepts Aphrodite’s bribe in the beauty contest of the three goddesses.
Stories of Odysseus and Circe, the prodigal son, the miracle of the Gadarene swine, and St Anthony. And Félicien Rops’ ‘Pornocrates’?
Examples of painted fables from the 19th century, from Landseer, Millet, Moreau, Klimt, Morisot, Hodler, and Pierre Bonnard.
