Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, was carried off by Hades into the underworld, and the Greeks said that the time she spends below each year is why the earth goes bare. The picture that fixes her image best is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine, painted in 1874 and now at Tate Britain, where she holds a pomegranate.
Proserpina is the Roman form of her name, as Pluto is the Roman form of Hades, which is why Bernini, Rembrandt and Rossetti used the Roman names in their titles while Leighton alone kept the Greek one. Between them they chose four different moments of the same story.
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Most retellings keep a neat sum. Six pomegranate seeds, six months below ground, six months above, and the seasons turn on that arithmetic. The oldest full telling that survives, a Greek poem called the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, does not say that.
In the hymn, Hades secretly gives Persephone one pomegranate seed to eat. When Zeus settles the matter, she is to go down into the dark for a third part of the circling year and spend the other two parts with her mother and the gods. A third of a year is four months, and the seed is a single one.
The painters inherited the fruit and the abduction, but not the count. Bernini and Rembrandt took the seizure, Rossetti her captivity, Leighton her release. The first question is what Zeus had agreed before any of it began.
What You'll Discover
What Zeus agreed to beforehand.
What Pluto's fingers do to marble.
Who Rembrandt added to the chariot.
Where Rossetti keeps her afterwards.
Who is waiting for her in Leeds.