"In
olden times, when men still worshipped ugly idols, there lived in the land of
Greece a folk of shepherds and herdsmen who cherished light and beauty."...
Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, Book of Greek Myths, 1962
Fortunate is the child who has sat, on a
rainy afternoon in a warm cozy house, with Ingri and Edgar Parin Daulaire's
gentle retelling of ancient Greek myths about Zeus and his fractious family and
vain, foolish, and sometimes heroic mortals who worshipped them...
Historians and linguists make it clear the
"adult version" of these tales have a sometime darker side because
the Greeks made their gods in the image of men.
It took very little to provoke an angry or annoyed Olympian into
inflicting punishments so grisly that even a sadist would cringe at their
vengeance...
 |
| Zeus, wielder of thunderbolts, takes aim at a target in this illustration from Alfred Church's Stories of the Greek Tragedians |
The humanity of these gods made them
particularly attractive to artists both in classical times and in the years
following the Renaissance. (Medieval
artists did not ignore the Greco-Roman heritage but were far more dependent on
the Church's approval and the patronage of noblemen than in a time when the
power of organized religion was fading and wealthy merchants of common birth
looked to claim a higher social status.)
Zeus sat on the highest throne on
cloud-covered Mount Olympus as befitted the King of Gods and Men. As the Greeks became more sophisticated and
philosophical, the old stories of a philandering husband with an eye for pretty
nymphs and lovely mortals gave way to a more dignified deity. He assumed qualities of omniscience and
omnipotence and demanded justice for the indigent and those powerless against
earthly tyrants. We see him in this illustration from Alfred Church's Stories of the Greek Tragedians (1879)
in the way early Greeks saw him: god of the sky, lord of the wind, wielder of
lightning, giver and taker of rain...
 |
| Hera, as both wife and sister of Zeus, was part of the ancient tradition of divine couples related by birth and united by desire. |
Residents living near the river Theris in
Crete, if asked by curious travelers, would point to the exact spot where Zeus
consummated his marriage to Hera. The
country folk who toiled near Mount Cithaeron disputed this bold Cretan claim to
local fame, insisting he first lay with her on the crags of their mountain. It was a stormy union despite the fact Hera
was Zeus' sister and daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Despite constant bickering and his constant
need to bed any pretty girl unable to outrun him, Zeus adored Hera. Mortal men likely first knelt before her as a
sky goddess in a cult that rivaled that of Zeus. In time, she like her brother, evolved into a
more august deity and became the personification of all that is Woman and the
protector of marriage. Peacocks, those
vain and flashy and noisy birds, were sacred to Hera, seen here in a Roman copy
of a Greek statue chiseled between 450 and 400 BCE...
When I was much younger and first starting to
learn about Art and Myth, it was common for writers to disparage anonymous
Roman artisans who copied Greek statues and say the grace and beauty found in
Athens failed to make its way to the Italian peninsula. To some extent, this is true-- Roman copies
strike us as colder and more formal. But
these qualities tell us that those who spoke Latin were a purposeful people
whose business it was to get things done.
Appreciative of beauty, the Romans recognized it could also be used to
create a sense of power and destiny...
 |
| Athena, in her role as a war-goddess, commanded far more respect than did Ares. She was a strategist who sought victory with the lowest possible loss of life and the least destruction of property necessary. She craved peace for its gifts of prosperity and comfort. |
Power and destiny can be seen in a Roman
version of the Greek sculptor Phidias' vision of Athena, known as Minerva in
the Latin world. She transformed herself
into the ultimate warrior goddess but
desired a peaceful world above all.
Athena embodied the quality of prudent intelligence which allowed men to
live in harmony, to sculpt and build, to meet in assemblies and find solutions
to problems.
Artemis-- another powerful female figure--
ruled the forests and the hunt. Early Greeks
saw her as the Moon Goddess to her brother Apollo's Sun God. Over time, Selene and Helios took over these
functions to some extent. One of the
most horrific Greek myths tells the story of Actaeon. This unfortunate hunter stumbled across
Artemis bathing. It mattered not that
his transgression was accidental.
Actaeon had seen her nakedness.
He found himself transformed into a stag to be torn apart by his own
dogs...
Titian, the most important member of the 16th
Century Venetian school of painting, told another myth associated with Artemis
in his Diana and Callisto, painted
1556-1559. (In Rome, Artemis became
Diana in the same way Zeus transformed into Jupiter and Hera into Juno.) The painting shows the moment Artemis learns
her handmaiden is pregnant with Zeus' child.
Expelled from Artemis' circle, Callisto gave birth to a son. Hera, more angry with her husband than with
his playmate, transformed the unlucky Callisto into a bear, hoping her son
Arcas would kill his own mother while he hunted. Zeus intervened and placed Callisto and her
son in the heavens, safely from the wrath of either his wife Hera or daughter
Artemis, as the constellations Ursa
Major and Ursa Minor...
 |
| Artemis, goddess of the Moon and of the hunt, bathes with her attendants in Titian's Diana and Calisto |
[Depending on where a person lived, the story
of how Zeus impregnated Callisto varied.
One version said he took on the appearance of Artemis and kissed the
handmaiden as they swam nude. Flattered
to think the goddess thought her beautiful, Callisto joyously yielded her
virtue.]
Contemporary students of the art of the High
Renaissance often echo praise heaped on Tiziano Cecelli by his contemporaries:
a canvas painted by Titian might be a landscape or a portrait or a scene from
pagan myths or a Biblical story. As a
painter, he showed a lifelong fascination with color in the same way other
painters explore light. A portrait by
Titian revealed subtle emotions in his subjects such as the resolute weariness
betrayed by Emperor Charles V when he
posed as a Christian knight on horseback.
Titian, or "da Cadore" as many called him during his lifetime,
is said to have found models among Venetian courtesans. However, one woman who posed for him among
the women he loved most deeply-- his daughter Lavinia. After Titian's wife died, his sister Orsa
took over the management of his household.
Lavinia assumed these duties upon her aunt's death...
 |
| Painter John Waterhouse tells the story of how the laurel tree came to be in a Pre-Raphaelite inspired Apollo and Daphne. |
John Waterhouse painted a scene taken from
the myths about Artemis' brother in 1908.
Apollo and Daphne follows the
style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of poets and painters and
critics formed in 1848, the year before Waterhouse's birth in Italy to English
parents. Although the Brotherhood had
long since disbanded and its tenets were no longer artistically fashionable
when Waterhouse began painting scenes from mythology, he shared the
Pre-Raphaelite rejection of the Mannerist style which followed Michelangelo and
Raphael. He hoped to continue their
"reforming" of Art by rejecting, like the Brotherhood, static classic
poses and overly elegant compositions...
Insulting Eros (Cupid) proved to be Apollo's
undoing in matters of the heart after the son of Aphrodite took his bow and let
fly two special arrows towards Apollo and the beautiful nymph Daphne. Struck by a gold-tipped arrow, the god burned
with desire for Daphne. The lead-tipped
arrow piercing her heart filled her with absolute repulsion at the sight of
Apollo and she fled in terror. Daphne
called out to her father, a minor river god, for help and was transformed
into a laurel. Grief-stricken, Apollo
decreed the tree would be forever sacred to him...
 |
| Poseidon, god of the sea, grasps his earth-shattering trident in a Corinthian plaque dating to over 500 years before the birth of Jesus. |
Historians of myth write that Apollo-- like
the other Olympians-- was a complex figure; his cult was -- also like the cults
of other Greek gods-- the result of fusion with the cults of deities from other
Mediterranean and Near East cultures.
Above all, Apollo was the god of light and reason. Perhaps these attributes led his worshippers
to see him as a patron of seers and diviners who could look past dark clouds of
the future to see what was to be in days to come. But it is his roles as god of shepherds, town
builders, and musicians that supports the historian's argument that his
functions likely resulted from the contact Greeks had with their neighbors or
nations whom they met on battlefields...
Poseidon, like Hades, was a brother of
Zeus. A Corinthian plaque from circa 550
BCE shows the god of the sea with his trident with which he created earthquakes
by merely striking the ground. The Greek
historian Herodotus believed he came to be part of the Olympic pantheon after
Greek contact with Libyans. Modern
historians believe he was actually a very ancient figure, even older than Zeus,
worshipped by the earliest people living in the neighborhood of the Aegean
region. His earth-shaking trident may be
the remnants of a time when he, and not Zeus, was believed to cast lightning
from heaven. Poseidon's wife, the Greeks
believed, was Amphitrite. We know too
little of her origins in the historical sense.
Myths say this daughter of Oceanus or Nereus rarely showed jealousy of
the sort Hera displayed when her husband dallied. This made Poseidon a truly lucky god...
Love in its holiest and most profane aspects
belonged to the province ruled by magical Aphrodite. Scholars tell us she was, in her origins, a
fertility goddess who nourished all creation and whose first worshippers may
have been Phoenicians. Her cult followed
sea routes used by Phoenician traders to Cythera and Cyprus before spreading
out to Greece and Sicily. One myth had
it that Aphrodite sprang into being from the foam of the sea. Blown gently across stormy waters by the West
Wind, her perfect feet (for all of her was perfect) first touched land along
the coastline of Cyprus. Four goddesses,
rulers of the four seasons, waited on the shore to greet her and cloak her
radiant nudity in the most beautiful garments ever made. Then these Horae conducted Aphrodite to the
highest realm of heaven where she took her place among the Immortals...
 |
| Aphrodite comes ashore for the first time in Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus. |
We've previously, in an earlier issue of this
blog, told the story of the sculptor Praxiteles who sculpted the courtesan
Phryne nude. He opened himself to
charges of blasphemy after naming the resulting work after Aphrodite for the
goddess was feminine perfection incarnate.
The challenge to artists since this incident has remained the same-- not
just any woman can model as Aphrodite because, to model as Aphrodite, a woman
must be perfect...
Exactly who served as Sandro Botticelli's
model for the Birth of Venus remains
clouded in mystery. This masterwork of
the Italian Renaissance, painted from 1485 to 1486, graced the villa of Lorenzo de Medici, a scion
of a powerful banking family and de facto ruler of Florence. Popular belief has it Simonetta Vespucci-- considered
to be the most beautiful woman of her time-- inspired Botticelli's portrait of
Aphrodite under her Roman name of Venus.
Many critics pooh-pooh the idea, pointing out Vespucci died nine years
before the painter first put a brush to this canvas. But, we must also note, Botticelli did
request to be buried at Simonetta's feet in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence. His wish was granted in 1510...
Our journey together this week ends at the
shores of Aeaea, an enchanted island of the ancient world, where we foreshadow things to come by briefly
introducing ourselves to Circe, a minor goddess to some, but a major force to
be reckoned with for others. We see her
here in an 1894 work by Alfred Drury whose art is part of a late 19th century
"New Sculpture Movement" whose members sought to make sculpted forms
more vital and lifelike...
The blind poet Homer says a shipwrecked king
named Odysseus found himself sharing a year of his arduous ten year journey
home from the Trojan War on this island with the stunningly beautiful sorceress
who could transform fierce men into docile beasts. And, perhaps blasphemously or perhaps with
access to tales long lost to us moderns, Homer also describes Circe as the
loveliest of all immortals...
 |
| Alfred Drury, Circe, 1894: Men transformed into beasts howl, begging for the attention of the lovely sorceress. |
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| Louis Nugent: Civic League Park |
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Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by sixteen artists who celebrate the majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and animals of West Texas. Featured this week:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html
 |
| Karen Slagle: Born of the South Wind |
 |
| Louis Nugent: Electric Triangles |
Fine Arts America now
features work celebrating the mysterious
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Hera
from utexas.edu; Circe from http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/drury/50.html;
information about the Greek gods, goddesses, and their cults from the Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology, London, 1959
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