Section Four

25 HERACLES

Hendrik Goltzius (Dutch, 1558–1617)
Hercules and Cacus
1588. Chiaroscuro woodcut
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, Kennedy Fund

Heracles (Greek Herakles; Roman Hercules), legendary son of Zeus and Alcmene, was only a part-time god in the pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, but he was by far the most famous of all ancient mythical heroes. His celebrity extended throughout the Greco-Roman world, where stories of his exploits, mainly from the arduous “Twelve Labors,” were retold and embellished over the course of many centuries.

In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), writing during the age of Emperor Augustus, traced the early history of Rome from the times of its founder, Aeneas, a member of the Trojan royal family, cousin of Hector, and rare male survivor of the sack of Troy. Virgil drew parallels between the many legendary triumphs of Heracles and the seemingly endless successes of Aeneas in establishing a new homeland. Aeneas’s horse was covered with a lion’s skin, one of Heracles’ most identifiable attributes.

Hendrik Goltzius’s influence as a printmaker was particularly widespread; among his best-known prints are the monumental engraving of The Great Hercules and Hercules and Cacus, shown here. This is the earliest of the artist’s twenty-five chiaroscuro woodcuts, a technique, introduced into the Netherlands by Goltzius, in which multiple woodblocks were printed in separate colors to simulate the effects of drawings. Goltzius has depicted an episode from the “Cattle of Geryon,” one of the “Twelve Labors,” in which Heracles, apparently having mislaid his lion’s skin, is preparing to wield his great club in a deadly blow against the fire-breathing monster and cattle thief, Cacus.

26 ICARUS

Hendrik Goltzius (Dutch, 1558–1617)
Icarus, from the series The Four Disgracers, after Cornelisz. van Haarlem (Dutch, 1562–1638)
1588. Engraving
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, Kennedy Fund

Icarus was the beloved son of Daedalus, innovative architect, master sculptor, and builder of the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete. Daedalus divulged the Labyrinth’s secret configuration to Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, who, by means of a thread, helped Theseus find the escape route after he killed the Minotaur. When Minos learned about Daedalus’s betrayal, he imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus devised a plan to escape from Crete by fabricating two sets of wings made of feathers and wax so that he and Icarus could fly away to safety. Before taking flight, Daedalus cautioned Icarus not to fly so low that his wings would touch the waves of the Aegean or so high that the sun’s heat would melt the wax. Nevertheless, the boy Icarus, exhilarated by his new experience, flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that secured his wings, which sent him to drown in the sea.

In prints, drawings, and paintings, Hendrik Goltzius created some of the most potent images based on themes from antiquity in all of northern European art. His high Mannerist engraving of the mythical fall of Icarus does not represent a headstrong boy, but is instead a bizarre rendering, with exaggerated foreshortening, of a free-falling, muscle-bound giant, executed with unsurpassed technical facility. In the far distance, Daedalus looks on helplessly. The story of Icarus’s fatal plunge has been a compelling subject for many artists over time; the archetypal artist Daedalus served James Joyce as inspiration for Stephen Dedalus, the artist-hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

27 ICARUS

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Jazz
Paris: Tériade éditeur, 1947
20 pochoir plates in colors, lithographed text; pochoirs made by Edmond Vairel; wrapper, ornaments, and text printed by Draeger Frères, Paris. No. 229 of 270 numbered copies
Spencer Collection

La chute d’Icare (The Fall of Icarus) is the eighth plate in Henri Matisse’s Jazz, the most acclaimed painter’s book of the twentieth century. Reinterpreted in a new pictorial language, the doomed flier appears to float downward against a blue night sky illuminated with bright yellow stars. Designed by Matisse in collaboration with his Greek-born publisher, Efstratios Tériade (1897–1983), Jazz is composed of twenty vividly colored single- and double-spread pochoirs (stencil prints) made after the artist’s painted- and cut-paper collages, several of which relate thematically to circus acts (a working title for the book was Cirque). After completing the collages, Matisse composed his own text; although critics generally have said that the plates do not illustrate the text, an intriguing relationship would seem to be implied between the image of Icarus and passages, from a section entitled L’avion (The Airplane), on the preceding and opposite pages. In the section’s most telling sentences, Matisse wrote (in English translation): “A simple trip from Paris to London on an airplane gives us a vision of the world that our imagination could not have revealed otherwise…. Should we not encourage young people who have just finished their studies to take a long trip on an airplane.” Matisse perhaps preferred to transform the story of Icarus, with his heart aglow, from the traditional cautionary myth into a tale for aspiring artists and poets.

28 PARMENIDES OF ELEA

Kiki Smith (American, born 1954) and Parmenides (born ca. 515 B.C.E.)
The Vitreous Body … text by Parmenides of Elea
Tampa: Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, 2001
Book with 18 woodcuts, 12 with die-cut, and text on Chochin paper. No. 55 of 120 numbered copies
Spencer Collection

Considered the Greek father of metaphysics and one of the leading pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides was born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. His only known work, On Nature (ca. 474), partially reconstructed over time from the few surviving fragments, was a long verse composition in three parts: an introductory discourse, The Way of Truth, and The Way of Seeming. His most important principle, simply stated, was that anything rationally conceivable must exist.

Like many previous works by Kiki Smith, The Vitreous Body is an exploration of a single part of the human body, in this instance the eye, and its representation. Smith chose Parmenides’ text upon the suggestion of Hank Hine, the publisher and designer of the book, for which she adapted an ongoing series of woodcuts, based on drawings after illustrations of the anatomy of the eye, to accompany several lines of Parmenides’ verses from The Way of Seeming. Her woodcuts of the eye, its interior components and surrounding structure, present a meditation on the physical nature of light and the artist’s inner vision.

29 SAPPHO

Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian, 1313–1375)
De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women)
Ulm: Johann Zainer, 1473
Spencer Collection

Born on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh century B.C.E., Sappho (Plato’s “tenth Muse”) was the most acclaimed poet of antiquity after Homer. Almost none of her elegantly personal poetry survives, with the exception of one twenty-eight-line poem and a few clustered fragments that have come down to us as quotations in later authors’ works. Sappho is thought to have been the principal mistress of a school for wellborn girls, as well as the leading lyrist among a society of prominent women of Lesbos devoted to poetry, music, and art, some of whom were objects of her poetically expressed feelings of admiration and eros.

Images of Sappho appeared on red-figure Attic vases; her pensive face was painted on a first-century Pompeiian fresco; Raphael included her among the immortal poets on Mount Parnassus, home of Apollo and the Muses, in his fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican; she was depicted as the heroine of sweet and tragic events in paintings by David, Gustave Moreau, Alma-Tadema, and many others; and in a caricature by Daumier.

Boccaccio, using Ovid as his source, included Sappho in De claris mulieribus (1360–74), his compilation of 104 brief biographies of famous and infamous women of antiquity. Shown here is the first printed edition (1473) of the Latin text. In one of the eighty-one anonymous colored woodcuts within the text, Sappho (on the left) is portrayed in her room as a singing poetess dressed in medieval garb, playing one of her lutes, and surrounded by other musical instruments and her books. An amorous couple, visible through a doorway, listen to her in the adjoining room.

30 FAITH and LEGACY

Jannis Kounellis (Greek, born 1936)
La via del sangue
Rome: Galleria La Salita, 1973
Book with seven burnt Italian matches, each mounted on a page annotated with a day of the week, Monday through Sunday. No. 165 from an edition of 290 copies
Spencer Collection

Kounellis created this artist’s book in conjunction with a gallery show, entitled “Apollo,” in Rome in 1973. A performative exhibition, “Apollo” consisted of a table on which were arranged fragments of plaster casts and a stuffed raven, referring to the blackbird perched atop a bust of Athena in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem. Holding up a mask of Apollo, Kounellis sat behind the table every day for two weeks, as a flutist repeatedly played a short musical passage by Mozart. Kounellis said of the piece, “Apollo is a request for identity,” and an attempt “to regain the holy, the sacred, in a secular historical sense.”

Kounellis often introduces temporal elements – frequently fire, smoke, and ash – into his works, as in La via del sangue. The simple act of striking a match to mark each day of the week suggests a ritualized cultural or religious expression, even one of penitence. In this instance, Kounellis, reportedly not a Christian believer, is indirectly invoking Apollo (in antiquity known as “Phoebus” Apollo, god of light and the sun), son of Zeus and Leto, who bore him on the seventh day of the month, the day considered holy to the forever youthful god. The spirit of Apollo represents enlightenment and innovation, as well as the renewal of traditions, comprising a kind of faith that is the duty of artists to fulfill in their work.

31 HESIOD

Hesiod (fl. ca. 700 B.C.E.) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963)
Théogonie
Paris: Maeght éditeur, 1955
16 full-page etchings executed by Braque in 1932; and front cover design printed in five colors and varnished by the artist, a frontispiece, and two additional etchings executed by Braque in 1953. Etchings printed by Visat, Paris; text in Greek. No. 32 of 150 copies
Spencer Collection

Hesiod, writing in the same period as Homer or somewhat later, established the traditional chronology and genealogy of the Greek gods in his two surviving epic poems, Theogony and Work and Days. In Work and Days, Hesiod lauded the necessities and virtues of hard work and lamented the decline of humans after the Golden Age. In his earlier Theogony, Hesiod presented the descent of the gods, beginning with the creation myth and culminating in the defeat of the twelve major Titans, led by Cronus, by the Olympian gods, led by Zeus. Following in the poem are descriptions of hundreds of individual gods and goddesses, and lesser gods and heroes; finally, men are brought into the narrative.

Braque developed a neoclassical figurative style in some of his paintings of the 1920s, an approach he pursued further by studying Greek vase paintings at the Louvre and by reading classical literature. When commissioned by his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, to provide illustrations for a deluxe edition book, Braque himself selected Hesiod’s Theogony as his text, a choice perhaps influenced by his professional association with the Greek art writer and publisher Christian Zervos. Théogonie contains Braque’s series of etchings creating a procession of gods and goddesses, each visualized in a curvilinear pictorial mode reflecting both the austerity of Attic designs on vases and 1930s surrealist automatism. Braque’s color-printed cover features silhouetted birds, the hand-lettered title in Greek, and suggestions of pottery forms, enhanced by the textured coating of mellow-toned varnish applied by the artist.

32 CAVAFY

Cavafy in Alexandria, etching from:
Constantine Cavafy (Greek, 1863–1933) and David Hockney (English, born 1937)
Fourteen Poems … Chosen and Illustrated with Twelve Etchings by David Hockney
Translated by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender
London: Editions Alecto, 1967
12 full-page etchings accompanying the text and one etching laid in by David Hockney. Edition A, no. 165 of 500 copies
Spencer Collection

A citizen of Greece born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Cavafy is often considered the most important Greek poet of the twentieth century. After spending part of his adolescence in England and in his family’s homeland, Cavafy eventually returned to Alexandria to work for thirty years as an employee of the Ministry of Public Works. He began writing poetry as a boy, and the Homeric themes of his early verses foretold a lifelong interest in ancient history. After completing his poem Ithaka in 1911, Cavafy claimed to have found a new, personal voice and began to write largely about people and events in his own life, often in sexually specific terms. In his introduction to a 1961 edition of Cavafy’s poetry, W. H. Auden wrote: “As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest…. The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs. Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion…. At the same time, he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.”

Also homosexual, David Hockney discovered Cavafy’s poetry in the early 1960s, and because of his great enthusiasm was inspired in 1966 to create a series of etchings to accompany a selection of the poet’s most evocative works. In Fourteen Poems, Hockney emulated Cavafy’s homoerotic imagery with visual translations of the young men the poet describes. Hockney’s admiring portrait of Cavafy, shown here, is as sparing in style as the poet’s lyrical verses.