Adaptation of Classical Myth
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 …
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 protagonist of Cold Mountain, Ada, reads to Ruby’s kids and to her own nine-year old daughter the story of Baucis and Philemon, a myth of gained paradise. Without any overt acknowledgement of this myth’s approach within the novel, Frazier uses the myth’s telling as …
———— Post by Sophia Ison* Andrew Bird’s music is often filled with philosophical themes, historical events, current issues, and scientific reference. He also dabbles in exploring classical myths. The folk indie song “Sisyphus”, by whistler extraordinaire Andrew Bird, depicts the endless labor of the previously …
The work called “Perseus and Andromeda — a role reversal” reworks the central premise of the familiar moment in the Perseus and Andromeda rescue. Here two nudes participate heroically in the rescue of a victim on a sea-side cliff. A desiccated piscine seamonster rises between the …
Agnolo Bronzino executed in 1539 a commission and painted Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, arguably Europe’s most eligible bachelor. The cocksure portrait (vid. left; link) was intended to convince Eleanora of Toledo of the desirability of her becoming a new Eurydice to Cosimo’s Orpheus. The …
International Cinema — a powerhouse program, a jewel in BYU’s crown — will bring three or four films to registered viewers every week of the Fall semester. Two of the Fall2020 films treat classical mythological themes, one as a reception and one as an adaptation. …
Bethany C. Morrow (2020), A Song Below Water (Tor Teen) — two adolescent sirens in and off-shore contemporary Portland, Oregon encounter challenges not unfamiliar to the adolescent and YA readers who will read the novel. I CONFESS*: I am not in the demographic readership for whom Bethany …