Hero and Leander
RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel
c. 1605
Oil on canvas, 96 x 127 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
The subject of the painting is a legend according to which Leander, a youth of Abydos, a town on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, used to swim across the waters at night to Sestos on the opposite side to meet his lover Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite. She would guide him by holding up a lighted torch. One stormy night Leander was drowned. Hero in despair threw herself into the sea. The story is related in this form by the Greek poet Musaeus (4th-5th century A.D.). Ovid (Heroides, 18, 19) tells of the lovers, omitting their death. The theme is found in Italian and Netherlandish painting, especially of the 17th century which depicts Leander swimming the Hellespont towards a distant tower lighted by Hero; or the drowned Leander is borne away by Nereids as Hero plunges to her death into the sea.
想起Donne的Epigrams 里头一首就是：
HERO AND LEANDER.
BOTH robb'd of air, we both lie in one ground ;
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drown'd.
Strormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe
1651
Oil on canvas, 192,5 x 273,5 cm
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
The two Phocion landscapes are extreme, but Poussin was to take his ideas even further, in such almost black pictures as the Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut at Frankfurt. In this picture the thoughts of the artist are so prominent that the spectator is denied any form of visual pleasure, and it requires a great deal of mental effort to contemplate it.
This painting is one of the few large-scale works of the master. It depicts the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as Ovid tells in Metamorphoses (4:55-166). The lovers , forbidden by their parents to marry, planned to meet in secret one night beside a spring. Thisbe arrived first but as she waited a lioness, fresh from a kill, came to quench its thirst, its jaws dripping blood. Thisbe fled, in her haste dropping her cloak which the beast proceeded to tear to shreds. When Pyramus arrived and discovered the bloody garment he believed the worst. Blaming himself for his lover's supposed death he plunged his sword into his side. Thisbe returned to find her lover dying and so, taking his sword, threw herself upon it. This story became widely popular in post-Renaissance painting.
