The fourth ‘basic plot’ is the story of voyage and return, for which we turn to Ovid’s account of this couple, and a dozen superb paintings. But does the model fit?
Poynter
Odysseus finally arrives home, but has to decide what to do with more than 100 suitors to his wife Penelope.
Easily confused with Artemis (Diana), her sign is the crescent moon, and her lover is Endymion, who despite sleeping forever, fathered her 50 daughters.
God of medicine and the healing arts, he has several unusual myths and features, including a strange relationship with a snake when he was a child.
Aglaea (representing splendor), Euphrosyne (mirth), and Thalia (good cheer), who together represent the better aspects of human nature, bit got Burne-Jones into trouble.
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.
Paintings from 1885 onwards, looking at women from Ovid’s ‘Heroides’, his ‘Metamorphoses’, women of Troy, and this unusual time series across the canvas.
One of the most prolific and accomplished narrative painters, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and North America.
Bad girls whose beautiful voices lured sailors to their deaths, so that the women could eat them. Paintings by Etty, Moreau, Waterhouse, Rae, Nash and others.
From Gustave Doré and Winslow Homer, to Vincent van Gogh and Odilon Redon – modern paintings of butterflies.
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