The painters in this list worked from ancient texts that could spend a hundred lines on a single scene. A canvas has one instant. Each painter had to decide what to keep and what to change, and some of those decisions still hide in plain sight, like seven nymphs drawn from only two models, or a partridge with a past of its own.
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How These Were Chosen
Most painters knew the Greek myths in Latin, through the Roman poet Ovid and his Metamorphoses, which is why so many titles say Jupiter for Zeus and Venus for Aphrodite. The stories gave them a respectable excuse to paint the naked body, with a cast every educated viewer could name.
They also set a trap. A text can spend pages on one episode, while a painting has a single instant to show. The painter has to choose that instant and decide what to leave out.
Each picture here is among the best-known images of its myth, and each departs from its ancient source in a way that shows on the canvas. There is one painting per artist and no myth told twice, and the countdown runs by date, newest first, not by merit.
12. John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896)
On the bank of a dark pool, a young man in a blue tunic kneels with a wide-necked jar in one hand, and a pale arm has already closed on his. Seven naked nymphs rise around him among the lily pads. The young man is Hylas, the companion of Heracles, as John William Waterhouse painted him in 1896.
The story begins on a ship. Hylas sailed with the Argonauts, the heroes who followed Jason in search of the Golden Fleece. When they put in on the coast of Mysia, in what is now northwestern Turkey, Heracles went into the woods to cut himself a new oar, and Hylas went off to find water.
The fullest account of what happened at the spring comes from Apollonius of Rhodes, a Greek poet of the third century BC. Under a full moon, the nymph of the spring saw the boy and wanted him. As he dipped his bronze pitcher, she wrapped her left arm around his neck and pulled him down by the elbow. The Argo sailed at dawn without him.
Waterhouse kept the pitcher and the hand on the arm, and changed the number of nymphs. Apollonius has one. Theocritus, another Greek poet of the same century, has three and names them Eunica, Malis and Nycheia. The canvas has seven. It also stops the story a moment early, with Hylas still on dry ground.
Seven nymphs, and yet they look like sisters. The Waterhouse scholar Peter Trippi explains why: all of them were drawn from just two models. The same pale skin and the same flowers in the hair pass from one head to the next, so that the boy is surrounded by barely two faces.
At a Glance
Artist: John William Waterhouse (1849 to 1917)
Painted: 1896
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 98.2 × 163.3 cm (38.7 × 64.3 in)
Where to see it: Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
11. Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)
The front paws of the Sphinx are hooked into the bare chest of Oedipus. She has sprung onto him on a rocky mountain path, a winged creature with a woman's head and a lion's body, and the two stare at each other from a few inches apart. At the bottom of the canvas, Gustave Moreau laid the remains of those who met her before him, and nothing yet tells whether Oedipus will join them.