Levine, 'Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9410-levine-oxford
@@@@94.9.11, Reid et al., Ox. Guide to Myth/Arts
Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s.
2 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 1310.
ISBN 0-19-504998-5.
Reviewed by Steven Z. Levine -- Bryn Mawr College
The flyleaf of The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in
the Arts, 1300-1990s reminds us, in Shelley's words, that "we
are all Greeks," and the ensuing thirteen hundred pages of
entries and indexes exhaustively document the depth and breadth
of our enduring Hellenic heritage. Initially appropriated by
pagan Rome and then taken up again and again in the successive
waves of the Christian and secular reappropriations of antiquity
we call the Renaissance, Neo-classicism, the Enlightenment,
Romanticism, Modernism, and Post-modernism, the classical Greek
myths have been repeatedly represented in our literature, in the
visual arts of painting and sculpture, and in the performing arts
of music and dance. The Guide copiously chronicles the
transmission and transformation of classical mythology in the
most prestigious arts of the last seven centuries, and even
though it largely excludes from consideration the elite arts of
decoration (plates, coins, figurines, medals, furniture, jewels)
and the popular art of prints (including, in our own age, comics,
film, and television), within the parameters set by the
Guide the resulting array of some 30,000 works of art is
quite stunning enough. Exhaustively compiled by Jane Davidson
Reid, Senior Research Associate at Mount Holyoke College, with
the principal assistance of Chris Rohmann and a subsidiary roster
of the compiler's many "academic friends", the Guide
henceforth will be the standard tool for classicists and
modernists, historians and critics, artists and writers, and all
those others intent on studying the survival and revival of
classical mythology down to the present day. For general
bibliographical orientation to the field one will still consult
Frances Van Keuren's Guide to Research in Classical Art and
Mythology (Chicago, 1991).
The Oxford Guide's two thick volumes list
representations of all the major gods and heroes from Achilles to
Zeus as well as such lesser-known companion figures as Achelous
or Zetes. The blind entries of the latter personages are
cross-referenced with the entries of Heracles and Jason
respectively, where we discover many unfamiliar instances of the
river-god's struggle with the hero for the hand of Deianeira or
the winged Argonaut's participation in the pursuit of the
Harpies. In addition to the enumeration by proper name of
literary, pictorial, musical, or choreographical representations
of major and minor mythological exploits such as the above, there
are also a number of thematically or topographically demarcated
entries such as Ages of the World, Arcadia, Bacchanalia, Banquet
of the Gods (see Gods and Goddesses), Hades, Parnassus,
Seven Against Thebes, Shepherds and Shepherdesses, and Trojan
War. An individual entry may bear more than a single proper name
if the relevant story is that of a linked pair of figures, such
as the lovers Acontius and Cydippe, Hero and Leander, or Troilus
and Cressida, the last of whose "myth" is not Greek at all but
derives from the medieval Roman de Troie by Benoit de
Sainte-Maure. Other post-classical stories involving a properly
mythological figure are found as subentries under Aphrodite--at
fifty pages the longest entry in the Guide--where along
with numerous representations of the Greek myths of the goddess's
birth there are also listings of the Roman theme of Venus Frigida
derived from Terence's famous quotation "Sine Cerere et Baccho
friget Venus," as well as the thirteenth-century German
theme of the captivation of Tannhaeuser by Venus, best known to
us in the operatic version by Richard Wagner. Aphrodite's amorous
encounters with Ares are given a separate entry under the
couple's joint names whereas the goddess's love for the Trojan
prince Anchises is treated as a subentry under her name alone.
The mortal issue of their union, Aeneas, is accorded one of the
most elaborate entries in the Guide, following over the
course of thirty pages the recitation in Virgil from the hero's
flight from Troy to his encounter with Dido, his arrival in
Latium, and his eventual apotheosis. The wanderings of Odysseus,
the life and death of Orpheus, and the machinations of Eros are
treated at the same length as the tales of Aeneas, but only the
adventures and labors of Heracles are accorded the same attention
as that received by Aphrodite. So too in our own day when the
likes of Madonna and Schwarzenegger ritually embody Sex and
Violence for the cinematic devotions of our culture at large.
Ours has been called the culture of narcissism, and the entry on
Narcissus may be used as a means of assessing the scope and limit
of the Guide. As in the case of each entry, an initial
paragraph summarizes the story of the deathly metamorphosis of
Narcissus, the youth-turned-flower who spurned the love of the
nymph Echo in favor of pining after the inaccessible image he
perceived in the water of a pool. In Ovid this specular image is
understood as the reflection of Narcissus which the youth
eventually comes to acknowledge in the impossibility of its
possession; in Pausanias, however, the reflection reminds the youth
of his deceased sister over whose lost likeness he remains
suspended in mourning. Whether by way of the trauma of the
unfulfillable desire for an ideal image of Self or Other (as
psychoanalysis, not mentioned in the Guide, will reinterpret
the myth in our century), Narcissus inevitably dies. Beyond the
standard references to lines in Ovid and Pausanias, the Guide
also sends us to the versions of the story in Conon,
Philostratus, Ausonius, and Nonnus, as well as to Louise Vinge's
fundamental study of the latter-day literary reworkings of the myth
(Lund, 1967).
All this takes up less than thirty lines of type, a brief
descriptive and bibliographical prelude to the ten pages of
entries of 306 writers, painters, sculptors, composers,
choreographers, etc. who variously have taken up the Narcissus
myth. Several medieval sources are cited such as Le Roman de
la Rose (ca. 1230) where, for example, the fate of Narcissus
is warningly evoked at the site of the narrator's discovery of
the Fountain of Love. A number of fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century sources are also cited such as the Ovide
moralise (ca. 1320) or Christine de Pizan's L'Epistre
d'Othea a Hector (ca. 1400), where once again the lover's
plight is didactically compared to the unassuaged youth of the
myth. In the latter case the Guide misses noting the
painted illuminations that accompany the text of the manuscript,
a reference available, however, in Andor Pigler's monumental
Barockthemen: Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur Ikonographie
des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Budapest, 1974), a work duly
acknowledged in the introduction and cited only selectively in
the Guide. The listings in the two volumes share thirty
entries, from Filarete's bronze door (ca. 1445) at the Vatican to
a painting in a Darmstadt private collection by Johann August
Nahl the Younger (1752-1825). The index of artists at the back of
volume two indicates that Filarete's sculptural reliefs feature
many additional representations of myth from the death of Actaeon
to the infancy of Zeus, whereas the much less well-known Nahl is
listed as the author of only a single work, "Hector's Farewell to
Andromache," in addition to the aforementioned "Narcissus." The
Guide cites Pigler as the source for the obscure Nahl
reference (all abbreviated sources are listed in full at the back
of volume two), but the Guide silently passes by some
fifty entries in Pigler, many of them from the underexamined
media of drawings and prints although several paintings in known
locations by otherwise included artists are omitted as well.
Conversely, the Guide adds to Pigler's often inaccessible
and unillustrated references some thirty Renaissance and Baroque
representations of Narcissus in readily accessible, recent
publications.
Too recent to be included in the Guide is Colin Bailey's
exhibition catalogue The Loves of the Gods: Mythological
Paintings from Watteau to David (Fort Worth, 1992) with its
comprehensive listing of mythological paintings exhibited at the
Salon, 1699-1791, compiled by Carrie A. Hamilton and Rosamund
Downing. The Loves of the Gods exhibited two Narcissus
paintings not included in the Guide by Nicolas-Bernard
Lepicie (a variant of 1771) and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
(1792), but approximately two-thirds of the exhibition's
sixty-seven works are known to the Guide though not always
at their current location. Also missing from the Guide is
Hendrick van Balen's representation in the Philadelphia Museum of
Art of Narcissus as one of his "Four Ovidian Scenes" (ca. 1600), a
work included in Mercedes Rochelle's useful but now largely
superceded Mythological and Classical World Art Index: A Locator
of Paintings, Sculptures, Frescoes, Manuscript Illuminations,
Sketches, Woodcuts and Engravings Executed 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1900,
with a Directory of the Institutions Holding Them (Jefferson,
N.C., 1991).
Nothing comparable to either Pigler or Bailey exists for the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is here that the
Guide breaks quite new ground. Having just completed a
book on the myth of Narcissus and the paintings of reflections in
water by Claude Monet (1840-1926), I'm astounded by how much in
the Guide I didn't know. This is especially true on the
musical side where the Guide goes farthest in documenting
the thorough mythological saturation of public entertainment.
>From Scacchi (1638) to Scarlatti (1720), Glueck (1779), Scribe
(1820), Massenet (1877), Fokine (1911), and Villela (1966),
composers and choreographers have repeatedly conspired to keep
the myth of Narcissus before the public in alternatively tragic
or comic manifestations, thus enriching our context for
understanding the mute, often too-seriously-taken representations
of the visual arts.
Of the Narcissus-representations mentioned in my book, the
Guide notes paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning
three centuries by Poussin (ca. 1630), Claude (1644), Houasse
(1691), Le Moyne (ca. 1725), Lepicie (1771), Daumier (1842),
Gleyre (1847), Dubois (1863), Moreau (ca. 1890), Desvallieres
(1893), Brancusi (ca. 1910), and Dali (1937), as well as poems
from Ronsard (1554), Marbeuf (1620), and Chenier (ca. 1790), to
Gide (1891), Valery (1891), Regnier (1895), and Rilke (1926). My
research turned up additional works exhibited at the Salon in
Paris by the lesser-known artists Desgoffe (1844), Vibert (1864),
Machard (1872), Courtois (1887), Cave (1890), Lemaitre (1894),
Oble (1895), Boisson (1896), Bisson (1896), Charpentier (1897),
and Greber (1909), as well as poems and prose by the Symbolist
writers Baudelaire, Bernard, Bouhelier, Darnetal, Dauguet,
Gasquet, Gilkin, Gourmont, Lorrain, Mallarme, Mauclair, Pilon,
Rollinat, Royere, Scheffer, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Such
supplementary listings could be multiplied for each and every
entry, and I offer mine in the spirit of the Guide's
generous invitation to its readers "to help close the
lacunae inevitable in a work of this sort." Given that
Heracles could have herded the cattle of Geryon through the
lacunae of previous guides, it is the heroic labor of
Reid's Guide to have done so much to close the gap.