Around 1616, Rubens painted a series of Hunts featuring lions and tigers. Delacroix love these and in 1855 painted his own Lion Hunt. But neither had ever seen anything like this.
Rubens
Tragedy for the great bard, as his attempt to rescue Eurydice from the Underworld fails, and he is later torn limb from limb by furious Maenads.
Normally drawn by 2-4 horses, you can sometimes identify deities by the creatures shown towing their chariot, from black horses to domestic cats.
How the Horn of Plenty came about, who filled it, how it often appears with the four elements, and some more complex mythological associations.
Cadmus, Europa’s brother, kills a dragon and sows its teeth to grow into the men who help him build Thebes. But his grandson Actaeon is killed when he catches Diana bathing.
An attribute of the goddess Athena (Minerva), it consists of the image of the face of Medusa on a shield or breastplate.
A symbol of the harvest with Ceres, a weapon for Bacchantes, the sign of the Divine Reaper Saturn, used by Iris to cut locks of hair, and for cutting the cereal crop.
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.
First, Achilles kills Penthesileia, an Amazon, whose great beauty fills him with remorse. Then come Memnon, who proves Achilles’ undoing by Paris’s arrow.
The curious myth of the swashbuckling hero Hercules dressed in women’s clothing and forced to serve Queen Omphale.
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