Adaptation of Classical Myth
The items featured below reflect recent thinking about the adaptation of classical mythology in the arts. Index numbers throughout this site reference the OGCMA — Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts (OUP 1993).
Perdix hardly cuts a common figure in our contemporary awareness of classical mythology. You may not have ever noticed him. Perdix flies too low for notice and only rarely squawks from the fringes. A couple of well-known Renaissance paintings adapt the Perdix myth. These adaptations …
Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation holds a canonical place on my bookshelf and in my heart. The book’s sanity cuts through problems of theorizing adaption. Hutcheon’s approach is unencumbered by jargon and murk. Since its publication in 2006 and revision in 2013 — 2nd ed. from Routledge …
ogcmaHermes2.0086_Jordaens “The Gifts of the Sea” by Jacob Jordaens and Frans Snyders (1640/1650) celebrates a teeming catch being brought to the shore by a throng of naked merfolk. All this takes place under the watch of the commercial god Mercury. The marine divinities slip and …
Hans Baldung Grien (1485/85-1545) sketched a “Judgment of Paris” for a mural or tapestry that, if it ever was executed, is now lost. The preserved ink drawing shows that even late in his career, in the middle of the 16th Century, certain Medieval elements of …
Scylla was not always the man-eating cliff-dwelling creature that devoured seafarers and their crews. Scylla came to be all that after Circe’s magical potions transformed her into the atavistic horror Odysseus met first-hand. In her earlier existence, Scylla was once a comely young woman whom …
Honoré Daumier’s satirical cartoon “De Charybde en Scylla” (From Charybdis to Scylla) is cataloged in the Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts as a usage of the myth of Odysseus with Scylla and Charybdis. The usage, however, has more to do with Scylla …
