Neptune’s trident has three tines, while Pluto’s is a bident with only two. Or it could be a pitchfork. How to read them in paintings.
Poussin
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.
The model for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, this couple committed suicide when each presumed they had brought the death of the other.
Achilles had gone missing, hiding as a young woman in the royal court on Skyros, where Odysseus found him. And a master archer was bitten on the foot by a snake.
Zeus comes up with a plan to reduce the number of mortals, and completes one of the first two steps, marrying Thetis to a mortal. And what a wedding feast, thanks to Eris.
The myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and others, painted by Rubens, Poussin, John Martin, and real floods by Alfred Sisley.
Motion can be implied against the rules we learn about how the world works. It can also be shown in billowing garments.
Transformations of Chloris into Flora, Daphne into a laurel tree, and Actaeon into a stag which is promptly killed by his own hunting dogs.
The popular story of the Judgement of Solomon is a great challenge for visual art. Here are some of the better attempts at solution, from Raphael to Blake.
One of the greatest British narrative painters of the 19th century, a small selection of his best from Eris picking a golden apple in 1806 to the slaveship of 1840.