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.
The astonishing Tapestry of Dionysus at Abegg-Stiftung
The Abegg-Stiftung’s Dionysus tapestry reveals the god of wine and ecstasy surrounded by lush ornament and mythic figures, reflecting Late Antique beliefs in joy, abundance, and life beyond death.
Theseus and Antiope
The Theseus and Antiope pediment sculpture from Eretria (late 6th century BC) captures a pivotal Archaic moment of abduction, blending emerging naturalism with restrained emotional tension in early Greek monumental sculpture.
Titian in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Titian’s poesie for Philip II reimagined Ovidian myths as sensuous, emotionally charged paintings of gods and mortals, exploring love, desire, violence, and fate through innovative, poetic Renaissance compositions.