How her abduction by Hades to the underworld brought the seasons. Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Rossetti, and others.
myth
A battle in which the Romans were overwhelmingly defeated, used later as an icon of German nationalism. And the vicious murder of the wife of the emperor Claudius.
Absent from Classical art, she first appears in Apuleius’ ‘The Golden Ass’, which was written in the 2nd century. Wonderful paintings, particularly from women artists, of this novel.
Mark Antony made a bid for power, and revealed his dark side, before defeat by Octavian. In 27 BCE, under the name Augustus, he became the first Emperor of Rome.
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?
Three senators conspired with thirty others to end Caesar’s passion for royal powers. One artist ignored convention and painted two superb accounts.
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.
We journey on, through Thomas Cole’s classical city, to the Garden of Armida, briefly to Paradise, past the submerged city of Ys, ending up in a Surrealist vision of the Dorset coast.
With Umberto Eco as our guide, explore Parnassus, the Garden of Earthly Delights, Alcina’s island, Colchis, and the Garden of the Hesperides.
Caesar and Cleopatra in Egypt, the suicide of Cato the Younger, Caesar’s triumphs, and the development of a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar.
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