The most famous Greek mythology paintings include the Birth of Venus, Bacchus and Ariadne and Goya’s Saturn. Twelve myths on canvas, a drowning boy nobody notices, and two lost Ledas by the two biggest names in art.
In 30 seconds:
12 mythology paintings, from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (about 1486) to Klimt’s Danae (1907).
The Prado in Madrid holds three of them: Saturn Devouring His Son, The Judgement of Paris, and The Forge of Vulcan.
Two of the twelve, both versions of Leda and the Swan, survive only through copies. The originals by Leonardo and Michelangelo are lost.
The Birth of Venus is the most reproduced painting of the group, by a wide margin.
Learn art the fun way
1 | The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli (about 1486)
The goddess of love arrives on a shell, blown to shore by wind gods. It was the first monumental pagan nude painted in Christian Europe for a thousand years.
Strictly, it shows her arrival, and almost every symbol in it has a second meaning. I decode the whole canvas in what the Birth of Venus means.
2 | Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (about 1560)
A farmer ploughs, a shepherd daydreams, a ship sails on. And in the corner, two small legs disappear into the sea. That splash is Icarus.
The painting in Brussels is probably an early copy of a lost original by Bruegel. I go into his habit of hiding the main event in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Auden wrote a famous poem about this very picture, and a 1996 technical exam once cast doubt on who actually painted it, both covered in the fall of Icarus in painting.
3 | Bacchus and Ariadne, Titian (1523)
The god of wine leaps off his chariot at first sight of an abandoned princess. Above her, her future crown already hangs in the sky as a ring of stars.
Titian bought the most expensive blue on earth, ultramarine, for that sky. I cover the painter who could afford it in Titian.
4 | Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya (about 1823)
The Titan the Greeks called Cronus eats his children to escape a prophecy. Goya painted him mid meal, directly on the wall of his own dining room.
The house paintings were peeled off the plaster after his death and moved to canvas. The full story of these late, private paintings is in Francisco Goya.
5 | Danae, Gustav Klimt (1907)
Zeus visits a locked princess as a shower of gold. Painters loved the excuse for gold and skin, and Klimt, son of a gold engraver, made the definitive version.
The myth ends with the birth of Perseus. Klimt, known as the painter of gold, gets the full account in Gustav Klimt.
6 | The Judgement of Paris, Peter Paul Rubens (about 1638)
Three goddesses, one golden apple, one shepherd asked to choose the fairest. Paris picks Venus, wins Helen, and starts the Trojan War.
Rubens painted the subject several times over his career. The Prado version was his last, painted with his young wife Helena as one of the goddesses. The Spanish court complained that the goddesses were too naked, and Philip IV’s brother wanted it altered, which Rubens refused to do.
7 | Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean Leon Gerome (about 1890)
A sculptor falls in love with his statue, and Venus grants the wish: the marble softens into flesh from the lips down while the feet stay stone.
Read as allegory, the myth doubles as a story about art itself, the artist falling for his own creation.
Gerome, a sculptor himself, painted the kiss from several angles and even painted himself carving her. The picture hangs at the Met in New York.
8 | Echo and Narcissus, John William Waterhouse (1903)
Narcissus stares at his reflection while Echo, cursed to repeat only the words of others, watches him from across the stream, unable to speak first.
Waterhouse built a late career painting doomed mythological women. I go into his whole world in John William Waterhouse.
9 | Leda and the Swan, the myth both giants lost
Leonardo painted Leda. Michelangelo painted Leda. Both paintings are gone, known only through copies by students and rivals.
Leonardo’s standing Leda survived into the 1600s at Fontainebleau before vanishing, possibly destroyed for indecency. The lost works are part of my guide to Leonardo da Vinci.
A 1691 inventory records one of those two originals being burned by royal order, a detail covered in full in the paintings France destroyed.
10 | Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ingres (1808)
A naked traveler answers the riddle of a monster with a woman’s face, painted by a 28 year old student in Rome.
The sphinx's mixed body is textbook iconography, a symbol that tells you which myth you are looking at before you know the story.
Ingres kept the canvas for decades and enlarged it late in life, the way other people revise a diary. I cover this perfectionist in Ingres.
11 | Prometheus Bound, Peter Paul Rubens (about 1618)
The Titan who stole fire for mankind, chained while an eagle eats his liver, which regrows every night. Punishment as subscription.
Rubens painted the body and hired the animal specialist Frans Snyders to paint the eagle. Division of labor, baroque style. It hangs in Philadelphia.
12 | The Forge of Vulcan, Diego Velazquez (1630)
Apollo drops by a blacksmith’s shop to tell Vulcan that his wife Venus is cheating on him with Mars. The workers freeze mid hammer.
Velazquez painted gods as working men with sunburnt necks, gossip landing in a real workshop. More on the painter in Diego Velazquez.
Where to see these paintings
The Uffizi has the Birth of Venus, London’s National Gallery has Bacchus and Ariadne, the Prado has Saturn, the Judgement of Paris and the Forge of Vulcan in adjoining rooms.
The Met has Pygmalion, and Vienna keeps Klimt’s Danae in private hands, shown on loan.
Brussels has the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the Louvre has Oedipus and the Sphinx, and Philadelphia has Prometheus Bound.
If a myth catches you, the Met’s classical holdings and the Rijksmuseum are the two best free places to keep reading.
Greek gods were not the only pantheon painters made visible. In India, Raja Ravi Varma gave the Hindu gods faces so widely printed that households across the country still recognize them today.
Greek myths on canvas, common questions
Which one is the true icon? The Birth of Venus, by a distance. Bacchus and Ariadne and Goya’s Saturn follow.
Is Saturn Greek or Roman? Roman name, Greek story. The Greeks called him Cronus, the Titan who ate his children.
Why is Icarus so small in Bruegel’s painting? That is the point. The world does not stop for a private tragedy, and the ploughman never looks up.
Which museum has the most mythology paintings? The Prado in Madrid, thanks to the Spanish kings’ appetite for Titian and Rubens.
Did Leonardo paint Greek myths? At least once: his lost Leda and the Swan, known today only through copies.
A last detail: in Bacchus and Ariadne, Titian signed his name on the urn at the lower left, right next to the sleeping cheetahs that stand in for the god’s leopards.
My own ranking puts Bacchus and Ariadne above the Birth of Venus, even though Venus gets all the reproductions. Botticelli's goddess is beautiful but static, a single graceful pose held forever. Titian's Bacchus is a painting about the exact second before impact, leaping mid air, and that split second does more work.
The saddest picture on this list is not Saturn eating his son. It is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, precisely because nothing dramatic happens on the surface. A boy drowns and the world simply carries on ploughing, which is closer to how most tragedy actually lands than any screaming Titan.
Of the two academic era entries, Waterhouse's Echo and Narcissus reads better than Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome stages the miracle with Cupid hovering and the kiss lit like a piece of theatre. Waterhouse lets Echo's silence carry the scene, with no special effect standing in for the emotion.
Prometheus Bound is the weakest picture on this list on authorship grounds. Rubens handed the eagle, the single image at the center of the myth, to the specialist Frans Snyders, splitting the canvas between two hands. Goya's Saturn, painted alone on the wall of his own dining room, carries a claim to authorship that the Rubens picture cannot match.