Adaptation of Classical Myth
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 …
OresteiThis post was written for MythMatters in August 2015 and modestly corrected here. Miklós Jancsó adapted the stageplay by L. Gyurkó, Szerelmem, Elektra, into the 1974 film Electra, My Love. The film is very watchable as cinema … for some viewers (to judge by the Amazon.com reviews!). …
Carol Ann Duffy’s (b. 1955) “Eurydice” appears as the twenty-fourth poem in her collection The World’s Wife, sidled between “Salome” and “the Kray Sisters”. Like her sisters in the collection, Duffy’s Eurydice vocalizes a silenced woman from literature and myth. Duffy’s witty feminist …
The British National Gallery’s painting of the month for October 2021 is an old favorite of mine, “Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (or, Peace and War)” (1629-1630). Having spent much of my weekend with my beautiful little granddaughters, contemplating the painting this morning takes me …
The big question, the deep thought behind this post is this: What does it mean when a place like Nashville, TN claims to be “THE Athens of the South”? Granted, I have added the emphatic CAPS. Yet, this was the claim in the age of …