Mythology

Mythology is an art genre. The gallery holds 3,197 works in this genre, including works by Titian, Paolo Veronese and Jean Baptiste Camille Corot.

Mythological painting takes its subjects from the gods, heroes, and metamorphoses of Greek and Roman antiquity—and, more loosely, from Ovid, Aesop's fables, and the plays and poems through which those stories reached later ages. Although classical myth never wholly vanished from medieval art, the genre as we recognise it crystallised during the Italian Renaissance, when humanist scholars and patrons revived the literature and visual culture of the ancient world. Ovid's *Metamorphoses* (the poet lived 43 BC–AD 17) became its great quarry of motifs; in Titian's day its tales were said to be as familiar as scripture. In the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, Neo-Platonic philosophy lent these pagan fables intellectual dignity, allowing painters to treat love, beauty, and transformation as vehicles for allegory.

Freed from the decorum that governed sacred art, mythology gave painters their most legitimate licence to depict the nude—especially the female nude—alongside heroic anatomy, sensuous landscape, and dramatic narrative. Works range from the contemplative and emblematic to the frankly erotic, and an educated viewer was expected to identify figures by their attributes: Venus with her mirror or doves, Mars in armour, Cupid with his bow. Because the genre rewarded learning and ambition, it called on the painter's full command of composition, colour, and the rendering of flesh.

Sandro Botticelli set an early standard with the *Birth of Venus* (c. mid-1480s) and the *Primavera* (c. 1477–82), the former among the first Tuscan pictures painted on canvas. The supreme exponent was Titian, whose *poesie*—"painted poems"—made for Philip II of Spain between about 1551 and 1562 drew chiefly on Ovid; his *Venus and Adonis* (the Prado version dated 1554) proved so popular that some thirty period versions survive. Our collection holds several of these touchstones, including Titian's *Venus and Adonis* and *Venus with a Mirror*, Paolo Veronese's *Venus and Mars*, and Lorenzo Lotto's *Venus and Cupid*, with Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's later *The Repose* carrying the reclining-nymph tradition into the nineteenth century.

Mythology flowed into the grand manner of the Baroque—Rubens, Poussin, and Velázquez among its masters—and was enshrined by the European academies, where "history painting" (encompassing mythological, religious, and allegorical subjects) ranked highest in the hierarchy of genres, since it demanded both technical mastery and classical erudition. That prestige held from the seventeenth century until the academic system loosened in the nineteenth, after which myth endured as a recurring well of imagery for Symbolists, Pre-Raphaelites, and modern artists alike.