HOW HOMER BECAME GREAT ART – THE ODYSSEY/CIRCE’S MAGIC & THE LAND OF THE DEAD (BOOKS 8 & 7)

Homer’s Odyssey, one of the greatest epic poems ever written, tells its story as a film would, in non-stop episodes of action and flashback. Its pages are alive with the dramatic adventures of the Greek hero Odysseus (also known to us as Ulysses) who, ten years after the end of the war at Troy, has still not come home to the island of Ithaca. In fact, his life has been locked into a wandering voyage made thrilling by danger and enchantment in spectacular encounters with the elemental and supernatural worlds. Artists ever since have loved The
Odyssey with graphic energy and their imaginings illuminate the finest translations of this poem into English. Classical Art’s visions of the poem when it was new create exciting contrasts with paintings, watercolours and drawings by Pinturicchio, Titian, Brueghel, Rubens, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Angelica Kauffmann, Fuseli, David, Turner, Ingres, Corot, Leighton, Waterhouse, Matisse, Chagall and di Chirico, and exquisite sets of illustrations by Flaxman and Flint.

Aeolus, who commands the winds, gives Odysseus a bag containing them, but his crew undo the bag and so the ship is at their mercy. In Laestrygonia, they run into cannibals and escape from there only to fall into the clutches of Circe, who turns Odysseus’s sailors into pigs and back. A journey to the underworld sets up some unimaginable meetings.

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