Odysseus is warned about the Sirens, who lure ships’ crews to their deaths. After negotiating their threat, they sail past Scylla and Charybdis, but all his crew are lost in shipwreck, and he ends up with Calypso for 7 years.
Renan
Scylla accosted by the grotesque sea-god Glaucus. When she runs away from him, he seeks the help of Circe, only for her to turn Scylla into a pack of hounds, then into a hazard to navigation.
Human in their upper body, and fish from the waist down, these aren’t sirens at all, but have their own mythology in many traditions.
Did Sappho really throw herself from the Leucadian Cliff when she was jilted by Phaon the local ferryman, or was Ovid ridiculing the story?
Stories involving swimmers, including Hero and Leander, the Ship of Fools, and a poem by Thomas Gray, with paintings by Bosch, Rubens and others.
Some of the very few paintings that show what’s underwater, most usually a drowning woman like Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
Cupid gets revenge on Apollo by making him fall in love with Daphne, and she refusing to co-operate. The result is her being transformed into the laurel.
The abduction of Proserpine, Acis and Galatea, Scylla and Glaucus, the Battle of Himera, and the funeral of Timoleon, and great Greek general.
Odysseus is lashed to the mast as his ship passes the Sirens without being lured away. He’s the only survivor after shipwreck, then is trapped with Calypso for seven years.
Paintings from the second half of the 19th century, from Aivazovsky, Delacroix, Winslow Homer and others, as a prelude to The Tempest.
The Eclectic Light Company 