How the Horn of Plenty came about, who filled it, how it often appears with the four elements, and some more complex mythological associations.
myth
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.
Cadmus, Europa’s brother, kills a dragon and sows its teeth to grow into the men who help him build Thebes. But his grandson Actaeon is killed when he catches Diana bathing.
Is that the god Cupid, a Cupid, a putto, an amorino, or a cherub? The differences explained and illustrated in paintings by Botticelli, Titian, Raphael and others.
A princess takes her handmaids to the coast to wash her fine robes and themselves. Out steps Odysseus, naked except for strategic leaves, and asks for their help.
The goddess Diana, Selene, the Virgin and Child, or is it just the moon in the sky of a pastoral landscape? Paintings from Bosch to van Gogh.
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.
She invited Odysseus and his crew to a feast, where she turned most of them into pigs. Odysseus avoids that fate, and later gets a prophecy from Tiresias.
A symbol of the harvest with Ceres, a weapon for Bacchantes, the sign of the Divine Reaper Saturn, used by Iris to cut locks of hair, and for cutting the cereal crop.
