![]() Gillis van Valckenborch (attr) (1570-1622), The Sack of Troy, oil on canvas, 141 x 220 cm, Private Collection. ![]() The fall of Troy forms the start of Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid are already concealed inside the horse, and those around the horse are probably Trojans, sent out from the city to check it out. The city is seen in the background, with its lofty towers and impregnable walls. The Trojan Horse (1924) was Lovis Corinth’s last major painting from classical myth. Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), The Trojan Horse (1924), oil on canvas, 105 × 135 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. At the door to the left, Paris is still holding the bow which loosed the arrow, and behind him is Apollo aiding and abetting in the killing.Īnother memorable part of the story omitted from the Iliad is the wooden horse used by the Greeks to gain entry to the city of Troy, so bringing about its destruction. But Rubens doesn’t place Achilles in battle, as does Ovid in his account in his Metamorphoses: he has been standing at a small altar to the goddess Artemis, with her strong associations with archery. Peter Paul Rubens tells this most vividly in The Death of Achilles, from a series on the hero painted between 1630-35, towards the end of the artist’s own career and life.Īchilles, an arrow piercing straight through his right foot, is shown in the centre foreground, his face is deathly white. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Death of Achilles (c 1630-35), oil on canvas, 107.1 x 109.2 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrificial victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.Īs a warrior Achilles was supreme, but had one vulnerability, his heel, which Paris was able to exploit with a single arrow. In a direct line with that hand, comes Artemis (Diana) in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with a deer. Iphigenia sits, almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon himself, looks up to the heavens, the knife held in his right hand. ![]() Tiepolo painted his account, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, in 1770. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1770), oil on canvas, 65 × 112 cm, Private collection. The huge Greek fleet struggled to set off for Troy, a problem only resolved in the end by the sacrifice of Iphigenia, its commander’s daughter. On the other side of the table, Hera (Juno) reaches her hand out for it too. In front of her, Aphrodite (Venus), her son Eros (Cupid) at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. At the left, Athena (Minerva) reaches forward for it. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just given the golden apple, which is at the centre of the grasping hands, above the table. This is Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), The Golden Apple of Discord (1633), oil on canvas, 181 × 288 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Some of the preceding events that led to the war against Troy are well known, and have been well painted, among them the wedding feast of Thetis and Peleus, where Eris left her golden apple as a prize ‘to the fairest’, setting up the Judgement of Paris. In this new series of narrative paintings, I’m going to trace and tell as much of the whole cycle as I can.Īlthough the Iliad refers to events before and after its narrow window of fifty-one days during the siege of Troy, it’s primarily focussed on the story of Achilles, and ends well before his death. But Homer’s two epic poems are the sole survivors of a whole cycle that began with Zeus’s decision to reduce the population of mortals, and ended with the deaths of those who had survived the Trojan War, including Odysseus, in what’s known as the Epic Cycle. For most of us, the epic stories of the Trojan war are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and maybe Virgil’s much later Aeneid.
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