Classical Mythology
The gods, heroes, monsters and transformations of Greek and Roman myth, as told in art from antiquity onwards.
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Greek and Roman myths gave artists a vast cast of gods, heroes and monsters, and a licence to show love, violence and the nude. Athenian vase painters told them early: Exekias shows Achilles and Ajax bent over a board game on an amphora of about 530 BC, and the Niobid Painter takes his name from a krater of Apollo and Artemis shooting down Niobe's children.
Medieval readers kept the stories alive by moralising them, above all Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Renaissance princes wanted them in paint and bronze. Benvenuto Cellini cast Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–54), Titian's paintings for Philip II of Spain, among them Diana and Actaeon (1556–59), turned Ovid into sensual drama, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini caught a nymph becoming a laurel tree in Apollo and Daphne (1622–25). Myth reached silverware too, in John Flaxman's silver-gilt Shield of Achilles, first cast in the early 1820s.
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