Ajax goes mad, then falls on his sword. The Greeks are told they need their master-archer and Achilles’ son, but still have to come up with a way of entering the city of Troy.
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The model for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, this couple committed suicide when each presumed they had brought the death of the other.
Byron, no stranger to forbidden love, swam across the Dardanelles in 1810, retracing the strokes of the legendary Leander who died trying to reach his lover Hero.
More paintings of music, from the Aesthetic watercolour of Marie Spartali Stillman to folk dance, and Vuillard’s friends playing in his apartment.
Evoking music from a painting is a serious challenge, yet many artists have tried it. See if any of these work for you. From Lavinia Fontana to Degas.
First, Achilles kills Penthesileia, an Amazon, whose great beauty fills him with remorse. Then come Memnon, who proves Achilles’ undoing by Paris’s arrow.
One of the charges leading to Joan of Arc being burned at the stake was that she cross-dressed in male military clothing.
The curious myth of the swashbuckling hero Hercules dressed in women’s clothing and forced to serve Queen Omphale.
Depicted as a physical place full of demons, torment and eternal suffering, and a deterrent to all those who commit sins on earth.
Christian visions of Heaven or Paradise are usually less of a location than an array of figures. Examples from 1475-1916.
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