Perseus and Andromeda is the Greek myth of a princess chained to a sea cliff as a sacrifice to a monster, and of the hero who killed it and won her as his wife. Titian's Perseus and Andromeda, painted between 1554 and 1556 and now in the Wallace Collection in London, shows him dropping out of the sky to strike the monster.
Ovid tells the story in the fourth book of his Metamorphoses, and most painters after the Romans worked from him. Andromeda is chained to the rock to pay for what her mother Cassiopeia had said about their beauty. Perseus, flying home after killing Medusa, sees her from the air and offers to save her in return for her hand.
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Ovid does not open with a rescue. Perseus sees a figure on a cliff and takes her for a marble statue, until a light breeze stirs her hair. Only then does he see a living girl in chains, and he tells her that she does not deserve these chains, only the ones that link lovers.
Everything after that is a sequence rather than a single scene: Cassiopeia's words, the chains, the bargain with her parents, the fight, the wedding. Each painter has had to decide which of those moments is the picture, and the choice says what he thinks the story is about. Titian chose the fight. Others painted the moment before it, the moment after it, or a girl with no hero in sight.
The oldest picture below is Roman, and it makes a choice that most later painters refused. The others, from a Florentine wedding room to Geneva in 1910, each made a choice of their own.
What You'll Discover
What a Roman painter left out.
What Piero put behind the monster.
What Rembrandt did with the monster.
Why Burne-Jones needed two canvases.
Who turns away in Vallotton's version.