Greek Mythology in Art

From Ancient Vases to Renaissance Masterpieces

Greek mythology has been the single most important subject in Western art for over two thousand years. From the black-figure pottery of Athens to Botticelli's Birth of Venus, from Bernini's sculptures to modern graphic novels, these myths have provided artists with an inexhaustible source of dramatic, beautiful, and emotionally powerful imagery.

Ancient Greek artists depicted mythology on virtually every surface — temple pediments, painted pottery, bronze mirrors, gemstones, coins, and wall paintings. The Parthenon's sculptural program alone depicts the birth of Athena, the Gigantomachy, the Centauromachy, and the Panathenaic procession. The Renaissance rediscovered Greek mythology as a vehicle for exploring human beauty, emotion, and drama. Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera transformed the goddess into a Renaissance ideal. Michelangelo carved mythological figures alongside Biblical ones. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne captures the exact moment of transformation with breathtaking virtuosity — you can see bark growing up Daphne's legs while Apollo's fingers press into flesh that is becoming wood. The Pre-Raphaelites returned obsessively to Greek myths, painting Circe, Psyche, Pandora, and the Sirens with jewel-toned intensity.

Painted pottery: where most myth images survive

Far more mythological scenes survive on Greek vases than in any other ancient medium, because fired clay endures where wall painting and wooden panels did not. Two techniques dominate. In black-figure, developed in Corinth and perfected in Athens during the sixth century BC, figures are painted in black slip on the orange clay and details are incised. Around 530 BC Athenian potters reversed the scheme to create red-figure, leaving figures in the clay colour against a black background, which allowed painted lines for muscles, drapery and facial expression.

A few vases are landmarks. The François Vase (c. 570 BC, Florence), signed by the potter Ergotimos and painter Kleitias, packs more than two hundred labelled figures into bands showing the Calydonian boar hunt, the funeral games for Patroclus, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and other myths. Exekias' amphora in the Vatican shows Achilles and Ajax bent over a board game, a quiet scene found in no surviving text. The Euphronios krater shows Hypnos and Thanatos lifting the body of Sarpedon, the episode from Iliad Book 16; it was returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum in 2008.

Temples and sculpture

Temple sculpture used myth to make civic and religious statements. At Olympia the Temple of Zeus showed the chariot race of Pelops and Oenomaus on the east pediment, the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs presided over by Apollo on the west, and the labours of Heracles on its twelve metopes, one of the earliest groupings of twelve labours. The Hellenistic Great Altar of Pergamon (now in Berlin) wraps a vast frieze of the Gigantomachy around its base, with the gods crushing snake-legged Giants. The Laocoön group, unearthed in Rome in 1506 and admired at once by Michelangelo, shows the Trojan priest and his sons crushed by serpents.

How to recognise the gods

Ancient artists identified figures through attributes rather than portrait likeness, and later painters kept the same code:

Zeus — thunderbolt, sceptre, eagle; usually bearded and enthroned.
Athena — helmet, spear, the aegis with the Gorgon's head, often an owl.
Hermes — the caduceus (herald's staff), a broad travelling hat and winged sandals.
Dionysus — ivy wreath, the thyrsus (a fennel staff topped with a pine cone) and a wine cup, surrounded by satyrs and maenads.
Artemis and Apollo — bow and quiver; Apollo also with the lyre or laurel.
Heracles — the lion skin and club.

From Titian to the twentieth century

Between the 1550s and 1560s Titian painted a series of mythological poesie for Philip II of Spain, largely drawn from Ovid: Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, and the Rape of Europa. Rubens and Poussin made Ovid's Metamorphoses a staple of Baroque painting. Antonio Canova's marble Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss in the Louvre turned the story from Cupid and Psyche into a Neoclassical icon. John William Waterhouse painted Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), unusually showing the Sirens as birds with women's heads, as Greek vase painters had. In the twentieth century Picasso returned repeatedly to the Minotaur in his etchings of the 1930s.

What people often get wrong

Greek marble statues were not meant to be white; traces of pigment show they were painted in bright colours. Many famous "Greek" statues are actually Roman marble copies of lost Greek bronzes. And the gods' appearance was not fixed: Eros is a lithe adolescent in Classical Greek art but became a chubby baby only in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Ancient sources

Homer, Iliad 18 — the description of the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles, the founding example of ekphrasis, writing about a work of art.
Pausanias, Description of Greece — an eyewitness account of the sculptures at Olympia and the Parthenon pediments, and of the elaborately carved Chest of Cypselus with its many myth scenes.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Books 34–36 — anecdotes about Greek painters and sculptors, including his attribution of the Laocoön to three sculptors from Rhodes.
Philostratus, Imagines — vivid descriptions of a gallery of mythological paintings, influential on Renaissance artists.
Ovid, Metamorphoses — the single most important text source for European painters of myth from the Renaissance onward.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most famous Greek mythology painting?

Botticelli's Birth of Venus is probably the best known, though it shows the Roman name for Aphrodite. Titian's poesie and Waterhouse's paintings are other popular candidates.

Why are Greek statues white?

They were originally painted. Most of the colour wore away over centuries, and Renaissance and Neoclassical artists then admired the bare marble as an ideal.

What is the difference between black-figure and red-figure pottery?

Black-figure paints the figures black on the clay background with incised details. Red-figure, invented in Athens around 530 BC, leaves the figures the colour of the clay and paints the background black.