Visual and verbal revulsion: Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda and the Younger Philostratus’ Hesione and Heracles*
Charlie Pemberton, Newnham College
In the small window of time between lockdowns two and three, a friend surprised me for my birthday with tickets to see Titian: Love, Desire, Death at the National Gallery in London. This special exhibition featured just seven paintings, displayed together in a single room. As someone used to long and often labyrinthine museum trails, I was initially sceptical about whether such a simple set-up would be able to take me on a journey or keep me hooked. Had I done my homework, I would have known that Philip II of Spain had commissioned the paintings with the express intention of hanging them together (Carol Atack has written a great piece on the relationship between their original and modern display contexts).
As soon as I entered the exhibition space, I was taken aback by the size of the paintings: they filled the room and dwarfed the visitor. As a classicist, I was also thrilled to learn that the paintings were of famous faces from Greek and Roman mythology (something else I ought to have known beforehand…). Much to my relief, there was more than enough upon which to feast the eyes.
I was mesmerised by the airiness of Zeus’ golden cloud but disturbed by the droplets falling into Danaë’s lap (fig. 1); unnerved by the bloodshot, frontal glare of Zeus in the form of a bull carrying off a dishevelled-looking Europa (fig. 2); charmed by one Cupid curled up fast asleep in the background of Venus and Adonis (fig. 3)...
...and by another tipping water into a stream in the middle of Diana and Callisto (fig. 4)...
...horrified by the pregnant Callisto’s agonised expression and stressed for Actaeon chancing upon Diana bathing (fig. 5) and facing the double onslaught of the goddess and his own hounds as punishment for his mistake (fig. 6).
After spending a good twenty minutes in front of each canvas, I emerged from the exhibition over two hours later feeling as though the paintings had embroiled me in the drama of the myths they depicted. Their collective impact was impressive.
There was one painting, however, that I just couldn’t bear - Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 7). Perseus, descending from the sky in garish garb, is about to slay a foul-looking monster in order to protect Andromeda, the woman shackled at the water’s edge. While Perseus’ heroic deed takes place in the background, the viewer is left alone with Andromeda, whose pale, naked body (save for a flimsy, transparent cloth covering her genitalia) is exposed frontally and in the foreground in a way that made me extremely uncomfortable—shouldn’t we be unchaining her while Perseus has the monster distracted? The longer I stared at the painting, the more I felt complicit in Andromeda’s suffering. I had to look away.
Returning to Cambridge, I pushed my unpleasant encounter with Perseus and Andromeda to the back of my mind, but it didn’t stay there for long. A few weeks later, I was doing some light PhD research when the grim memory of the painting came flooding back.
The paintings brought together in the Titian exhibition were referred to by the artist himself as his Poesie. Titian considered these paintings to be visual versions of selected scenes from classical literature, especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Mary Beard neatly highlights the cleverness and carefulness of Titian’s engagement with Ovid). It is widely accepted that Titian based his Perseus and Andromeda on Ovid’s account of the pair (Met. 4.663-752). Another likely influence is Leucippe and Clitophon, a novel by Achilles Tatius, whose description of a painting of Perseus and Andromeda is highly reminiscent of Titian’s take on the myth (Ach. Tat. 3.7, with thanks to Albert Bates for pointing out this passage to me). The narrator of the novel lingers on Andromeda’s face, ‘a mixture of beauty and fear’, her cheeks flushed in stark contrast to her pallid, statuesque body.
A lesser-known inspiration for Titian was a series of third-century CE descriptions (or ‘ecphrases’) of paintings known as Imagines. The first printed edition of the Imagines was published in Venice in 1503, around the same time as, and the place where, Titian began his career as a painter. The vast majority of these descriptions were written by the Elder Philostratus, an author perhaps better known for his Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius at Tyana and as the inventor of the literary-historical term ‘The Second Sophistic’. One of Titian’s earlier paintings, The Worship of Venus (fig. 8), closely follows one of the Elder Philostratus’ ecphrases (Imag. 1.6.). Philostratus describes a hoard of Cupids, some ‘gathering apples … not to speak of the Cupids dancing or running or sleeping or how they enjoy eating the apples … two are throwing an apple back and forth, and a second pair are shooting arrows at each other … as for the Cupids over there, surrounded by many spectators, they have come at each other with spirit and are involved in a kind of wrestling match’. Titian’s throng of Cupids engage in the same sorts of activities as the Cupids in the Elder’s description (see how many you can spot!).
The Elder’s Imagines also feature a painting of Perseus and Andromeda (Imag. 1.29.), but it bears little resemblance to Titian’s painting. Philostratus describes Perseus as lying in the grass, recovering after having slain the monster and eyeing up Andromeda who is being released from her chains. The image conjured by the Elder Philostratus is one of victory, desire, and relief.
We also possess a much smaller set of Imagines written by a Younger Philostratus, who claims to be the Elder Philostratus’ grandson and ecphrastic successor. It was one of the Younger’s descriptions that triggered my unwelcome déjà vu. The ecphrasis in question is not of a painting of Perseus and Andromeda, but of Heracles and Hesione (Imag. 12.). The myths are almost identical: both women are princesses exposed to the same monster (Cetus) as sacrifices to Poseidon. Both are also saved by semi-divine Greek heroes. The Younger’s vivid description of the monster threatening Hesione sent unnervingly familiar shivers down my spine.
‘For you see what big eyes it has, that turn about their encircling glance and glare so terribly … and how sharp is the projecting snout that reveals jagged “teeth in triple row” (Od. 12.91), some of which are barbed and bent back to hold what they have caught, while others are sharp-pointed and rise to a great height … the monster’s body is bent not at one point alone but at many … now it is moving with a most violent onrush and raises a great noise of splashing even though the weather is calm…’ (Imag. 12.2-4.)
The resemblance of this description to Titian’s big-eyed, hooked- and sharp-toothed, many-humped monster, with its convulsive movement disturbing the sea around it, felt uncanny. But the bit that really struck me was the very end of the ecphrasis, where the Younger Philostratus looks set to provide a long-awaited glimpse of Hesione.
‘As for the beauty of the maiden, the occasion precludes my describing it in detail, for her fear for her life and the agony caused by what she sees are withering the flower of her beauty’. (Imag. 12.8.)
Earlier brush strokes, discovered via X-rays of the canvas, reveal that Titian had originally intended his Andromeda to be facing away from us. The artist, like the ecphrasist, had aimed to avoid visualising the heroine’s distress. Could it be that Titian took inspiration not only from Ovid and Achilles Tatius, but also from the Younger Philostratus—at least at a preliminary stage of the painting’s composition, before he decided to turn Andromeda around? Either way, the ecphrasis did something much more powerful than simply disturb me. Just as I had felt unable to watch the struggling, fading body of Titian’s Andromeda, so had the Younger Philostratus felt unable to describe the agonised, withering image of Hesione. I felt like Philostratus’ aversion had somehow validated my revulsion.
The Younger Philostratus has since become a key player in my thesis, which is all about the expressive limitations and possibilities afforded by Graeco-Roman painting and sculpture. I really ought to be working on this rather than reminiscing about an exhibition, but I suppose I wanted to pay homage to Titian, whose emotionally fraught Poesie alerted me to the Younger Philostratus’ acute artistic sensitivity.
Charlie Pemberton, Newnham College