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.
Ovid
Betrothed to Orestes, Hermione was forcibly removed and given to Pyrrhus. Later, Orestes murdered his mother. So why does Hermione appear in Harry Potter?
How you mustn’t look at what shouldn’t be seen: how Pentheus was torn limb from limb by his mother and aunts.
At the heart of Deianira’s letter to Hercules was the strange story of his enslavement to Omphale. Here are the paintings.
A puzzling painting of a lone woman, wrestling with inner turmoil; a trap laid by a dying Centaur; a king with a thing for Hercules, and his promotion to being a saint.
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.
A story which has been told by a long succession of literary and musical works. But this painting is almost the only one to depict it visually.
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 Pre-Raphaelites lived intense and passionate lives. For Edward Burne-Jones, 1869 and 1870 were almost disastrous, when both art and life became too controversial.
The Eclectic Light Company 