This Byzantine ivory from Constantinople shows Ariadne amid Dionysiac figures, likely from luxury furniture, now at the Musée de Cluny, reflecting myth, refinement, and classical themes reinterpreted in Late Antiquity.
Persephone as Isis and Hades as Sarapis
The Gortyn statue group of Persephone–Isis and Hades–Sarapis from Crete reflects Hellenistic religious syncretism, merging Greek and Egyptian divine imagery to express shared ideas of fertility, death, and rebirth.
Flora
The fresco of Flora from Stabiae captures Toru Dutt’s floral rivalry in paint, transforming myth into elegance, where spring, beauty, and nature’s abundance merge in delicate harmony.
Diana and her Companions by Vermeer
Homer’s Artemis and Vermeer’s Diana and her Companions share a quiet fascination with divine femininity, hunting, and stillness—translating myth into atmosphere, where movement becomes suspended light and contemplative presence.
Eros and the Bee
Theocritus’ playful tale of Eros stealing honey—only to be stung—becomes, in Cranach’s paintings, a moral allegory on desire, pleasure, and the painful consequences hidden within sweetness and beauty.
Astragaloi Players
Ovid’s Niobe, turned to stone by grief after Apollo and Artemis punish her pride, finds an unexpected prelude in the Herculaneum Astragaloi Players, where myth, innocence, and fate quietly converge before catastrophe.
The Apotheosis of Herakles
Hail, lord, son of Zeus!” — so opens Homeric Hymn 15, perfectly capturing the divine glory of Herakles, whose Apotheosis Pediment now greets us from the Acropolis Museum.
The Epiphany of Dionysus Mosaic in Delos
Delos’s breathtaking Epiphany of Dionysus — ivy-crowned, winged, tiger-mounted — captures antiquity’s most electrifying god in one million tiny tesserae of pure Hellenistic genius.
The Fall of Icarus
Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, read alongside Ovid and Williams, transforms myth into quiet tragedy, where Icarus’s drowning is almost unnoticed amid a vast, indifferent world of labour, nature, and everyday human activity.
The Sarcophagus of the Muses in the Louvre
The nine Muses—daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne—embody epic poetry, history, music, dance, tragedy, and astronomy, inspiring ancient and modern creativity through their distinct artistic domains.