How the Horn of Plenty came about, who filled it, how it often appears with the four elements, and some more complex mythological associations.
Rubens
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.
Surprise, suspicion, and sheer horror in these wide open eyes painted by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Rubens, Annie Swynnerton and others.
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.
Masaccio’s 20-panel polyptych, Bosch’s triptych, and one of the most substantial paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Even Monet’s Grainstacks series.
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