Twelve famous paintings of Greek myths, from Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1485, to Gustav Klimt's Danae of about 1907 to 1908, show what painters found in these old stories: a tale everyone already knew, and a respectable reason to paint the naked body.
One of the pictures below was made for a king. The darkest was painted for nobody, on the wall of the painter's own dining room, and it stayed there for decades after his death.
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The Greeks told stories about their gods, Titans and heroes, and the Romans later retold them under Latin names. In paintings, Zeus often becomes Jupiter, Hera becomes Juno and Aphrodite becomes Venus. The titles below keep the names each painter used, and the text adds the other one when it helps.
Most painters found these stories in the Metamorphoses, a long Latin poem by Ovid, in which gods and mortals keep changing shape. Each myth turns on one decisive instant, a riddle answered or a crime discovered, so a single picture can carry the whole tale.
The academies, the official schools that trained artists, ranked such scenes as history painting, the highest genre, above portraits and landscapes. The least known come first and the best loved last. Each was chosen for what its painter did with that instant and for what happened to the canvas afterward.
12. The Forge of Vulcan, Diego Velázquez (1630)
In a dark forge, a blacksmith turns toward a visitor, a piece of red hot iron still gripped in his long pincers. The blacksmith is Vulcan, the god of fire, who forges metal for the gods living on Mount Olympus, their home above the clouds.
Diego Velázquez, painter to King Philip IV of Spain since 1623, made the picture in Rome in 1630, during his first stay in Italy. He chose the moment in the myth when bad news walks into the workshop.
The visitor's head glows with light because he is Apollo, god of the sun, and from the sky the sun sees everything. He has come to tell Vulcan what he saw. Vulcan's wife, Venus, is having an affair with Mars, the god of war, and her husband is the last to know.
Only the messenger looks divine. Vulcan and his four assistants have tanned skin, thick arms and the build of men who lift iron all day. All five have stopped working to listen, and on a shelf at the top right stands a white jug, painted with the same care as the gods.
At a Glance
Artist: Diego Velázquez (1599 to 1660)
Painted: 1630
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 223 × 290 cm (88 × 114 in)
Where to see it: Museo del Prado, Madrid
11. Prometheus Bound, Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders (about 1611 to 1618)
Chained head down to a rock, a naked giant twists while an eagle tears into his side. The giant is Prometheus, and the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens offered this canvas as one of his own originals. Yet Rubens did not paint the eagle.