After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular literary source for paintings before 1900, yet hardly anyone knows this epic today. The introduction to a new series.
Tiepolo
River gods from Rubens, Poussin, Coypel and Boucher, with Naiads from Walter Crane, JW Waterhouse, Henrietta Rae and others.
With ancient origins, and relatively unusual in wooden panels, round canvases became popular in the Renaissance. Examples by Raphael, Poussin, Tiepolo, Girodet, Richard Dadd and others.
Paintings by David Teniers the Younger, Domenicus van Wijnen, Tiepolo, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Félicien Rops and Lovis Corinth.
From the foundation of Troy, the start of the war with the Judgement of Paris, the death of Achilles, the sack of Troy, and Aeneas journey to found the precursor to Rome, and on to the age of Augustus.
The fall of Icarus, Calydonian boar hunt, Philemon and Baucis, the origin of the Horn of Plenty, death of Hercules, Orpheus and Eurydice, death of Hyacinthus, Pygmalion and Galatea, death of Adonis, and of Orpheus.
Summary and contents of the first 19 articles, covering the origin of the world, the great flood, fall of Phaëthon, rape of Europa, the fall of Thebes, and more.
In the closing pages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he praises the achievements of Emperor Augustus, and hopes for his own immortality.
Parrots as extras in myths, witnessing Eve taking the apple from the serpent, and as companions to a succession of beautiful women.
The faithful king turned into a woodpecker, Aeneas’s long war against Turnus, his founding of the city of Alba, and promotion to deity on his death.
