Previously: The many abductions of Ganymede.
Right-ho, so the abduction of Andromeda was a majorly popular artistic motif during the early modern era for reasons of “babes in chains are fun to draw,” but there’s a really wonderful sliding scale of what Perseus’ rescue looked like, depending on how much the artist felt like he’d gotten the hang of those winged sandals. Here are some of their efforts:
This one is better than some, in that Andromeda is effectively chained to the rock, but Perseus appears less to be battling Cetus than crashing like Icarus into the sea, so. Also Andromeda appears deeply unconcerned about the battle’s outcome? Like, “Perseus is cute, but Cetus has a lot of really good qualities too.” And maybe he does!
There are a lot of superfluous extras just milling around and…handing bits of coral to each other? Also, Andromeda is turning away in what looks like sheer indifference. “Excuse me, but you should really ask before unchaining someone.”
This one’s nice, you know? He’s wearing what appears to be fifteenth-century plate armor (someone feel free to correct me on the specifics), but she actually seems grateful that someone’s untying her. Overall all the necessary elements are in place. Three and a half out of five stars.
Again with the gratuitous putti! And Andromeda’s face is so carefully impassive while she avoids making eye contact; this is how you interact with that guy you’re afraid to say no to directly on the bus but you pray doesn’t follow you off at your stop, you know? “Hahahahahahah this is fine we’re all having fun here but please leave me alone” buys guy, you know how it is.
There is SIGNIFICANT EYE CONTACT going on between Andromeda and the dog-dragon here, and I am deeply concerned for Perseus’ seat on, I guess, Pegasus? Which is weird, that someone decided to conflate Perseus with Bellerophon, but stranger things have happened, I suppose.
“EXCUSE ME BUT YOU ARE GETTING WATER ALL OVER MY CLIT SASH”
A few thoughts:
- That is the least chained anyone has ever been to a rock
- What a remarkably ineffective suit of armor! Low collar, cap sleeves, no pants, helmet, iron miniskirt, massive shield that has to weigh at least a hundred fucking pounds on one arm!
- And, like, he is so confident in the Medusa-head’s effectiveness that he is languidly making out while the world’s angriest whale charges directly at his unprotected ankles! Perseus! At least GLANCE OVER to check the sea monster dies before tonguing this gal!
oh god, don’t let him see me, I’d rather drown than go home with either of them
That’s a thin hair ribbon chaining her to the rock. Walk away, girl.
HIS ONLY ARMOR IS THE FRONT HALF OF A HAT AND SHE IS CHAINED TO EXACTLY NOTHING, THESE ARE JUST TWO NUDE PEOPLE SHAKING HANDS OVER A MONSTER’S CORPSE
More “sullen languishing” than “awaiting rescue.”
“Sorry, were you defeating something? I didn’t catch it. Had something on my heel. Or, I mean, I thought I had something on my heel. It’s hard to tell.”
SOLID. She’s chained up with an actual chain and Perseus is wielding an undeniable sword against an actual beast. All the elements are there!
“That’s…thanks so much, for the killing, and you seem really sweet, but please don’t touch me. But thank you!! But don’t touch me.”
Flawless. Exactly how I imagined it went down. Angry squatting Gibson Girl, mustachioed, bubble-butted Perseus with a single wooden rod for a weapon, the crocodile from the cartoon version of Peter Pan. As true now as it was then.
[Images via, idea courtesy these two nice dudes on Twitter]
Angry squatting Gibson Girl is possibly my new aesthetic.
I actually honked when I scrolled down to that image. I actually made a sound that I’ve never before made in my life.
It’s not *that* weird that someone would put Perseus on Pegasus because for one thing, Pegasus supposedly sprang up from the blood after Perseus cut off Medusa’s head (Graves has got a pretty interesting theory about Gorgons and sacred horses from Greek pre-history), and for another thing Pegasus and Perseus really have names that seem like they should go together, you know? When I was a kid I always forgot about Bellerophon because Perseus just seemed like the right half of that pair.
anyway, I like the one where Perseus is killing a crocodile with a stick.
Plus the coral in the second painting is because according to Ovid Perseus put Medusa’s head down on the beach and her blood turned all the seaweed to stone, which turned back into plants when the nymphs put it in the water again.
oh yeaahhhh I remember that part now. I guess that’s as good an explanation as any for coral if you don’t now anything about coral and also believe in Medusa
Also venomous snakes came from her blood hitting sand while Prickface Perseus flew over the desert to rescue Andromeda.
Perseus as a metaphor for careless environmental desolation in the wake of progress
I’m right there with you. Plus, so says Wikipedia:
“The replacement of Bellerophon as the tamer and rider of Pegasus by the more familiar culture hero Perseus was not simply an error of painters and poets of the Renaissance. The transition was a development of Classical times which became the standard image during the Middle Ages and has been adopted by the European poets of the Renaissance and later: Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Genealogia deorum gentilium libri” identifies Pegasus as the steed of Perseus, and Pierre Corneille places Perseus upon Pegasus in “Andromède.” Modern representations of this image include sculptor Émile Louis Picault’s 1888 sculpture, “Pegasus.”
Never knew that. I always just figured Harryhausen just put Pegasus in Clash of the Titans because he was easier to animate than winged sandals. Of course, Disney still has no excuse for letting Hercules ride him, other than their story being rather freely adapted from the source material.
The constellation Andromeda is located between Perseus and Pegasus in the night sky, near Cassiopeia, Cepheus and Cetus. (The constellations Andromeda and Pegasus are connected by a shared star.) Almost the entire cast of the story are pictured in the heavens.
Bellerophon isn’t in the constellations at all.
Don’t be silly, Perseus no.10 doesn’t need armour! He has a perfectly effective dick ribbon!
The only thing he needs to protect is his dignity (barely).
Is that the crocodile from Peter Pan or the alligator from The Rescuers?
Does that answer your question?
Yep, thanks!
Professor Twist was not confused. Neither, presumably, was Mrs. Twist.
I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
Once day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
(Ogden Nash)
Excellent aide memoire which I am showing to my children.
So in the last one Andromeda is just really relieved to finally be unchained so she can finally take a shit, right?
…and when the tip of that croc meets Mr. P’s gonads?
Look, if my parents decided to chain me up as a sacrifice to a sea monster, I would demand CLOTHES. It’s going to be cold af down by the water.
We should waste fabric on the inside of a monster? You’re only going to be cold for a couple of hours. Think of your parents.
they did let her have some nice earrings in the first one tho
I would demand not to be sacrificed to a sea monster, if I were in that situation and thought making demands would be helpful.
But yeah, clothes would probably be next on my agenda.
Look, baby steps, demanding the whole thing at once is a nonstarter but I’m sure we can reach an acceptable compromise on the exact manner in which you are fed to monsters
I’d go with ‘cushion to protect my ass (bare or not) from these jagged rocks’ – the clothes are just gonna get wet & that’ll feel gross.
“clit sash”
My thoughts, precisely!
Sometimes you need a dickribbon, but you don’t actually have a dick to beribbon. So, clit sash!
YOUR NAME. Maia is one of my favorite books ever.
Love it when breasts are just kinda thrown on there like a couple of upside down saucers, very realistic.
Well, that was the model…
I think the monster in #5 is actually Falkor the luck-dragon and Andy just wants Perseus to go away so she can go back to giving him scritches like so:
This GIF is quite soothing to look at.
By the look on Pegasus’s face in the fifth one, he definitely knows what is up between Andromeda and the dog-dragon.
Ah, my friends were just talking about Clash of the Titans last week. It will still be forever my favorite telling of the story.
“His name is Bubo!”
“You understand all those clicks and wheezes?”
“Clear as day to me.”
“Another gift from the gods!”
We watched Clash of the Titans when studying greek mythology in my 6th grade social studies class and my life, as well as the lives of every single classmate, was forever changed. This movie is flawless in every way there is absolutely, beyond any doubt, not a single thing wrong with it.
I wanted that owl SO BADLY
I have a replica of him, same size. He has elastic attached to him, so I can wear him on my shoulder.
the Perseus confident in Medusa’s head to save him from the whale gets his unshakable faith in victory from a phenomenon we’ve already discussed. with shield + without pants = victory assured. besides, he brought breastplate nipples. the whale probably just wants to lick em.
The lovingly-sculpted bellybutton is what gets me.
AGGGGGGGGGGGGGH! Again I ask: WHY DO NONE OF THESE LADIES HAVE PUBIC HAIR?!
[Questions I Have Asked Myself: Do I want to be known ’round these parts as the commenter always raving about the lack of pubic hair in Western Art?]
You are the squeaky wheel of pubic hair. One day Mallory will do a post about women with realistic pubic hair in Western art history, just for you.
In that case: ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS!
(that’s what she said)
Speaking of which, if you look closely, Andromeda #10 seems to have a little something going on down there.
What I like about this comment is that it indicates that you scrolled back up and scrutinized the vulvular region of every Andromeda in every painting.
If the end result of my casting propriety to the wind and raving about pubic hair in a public forum is that even one person has done this, it is enough.
Ah, so you ASSUME!
But the awful truth is that I had already checked them all for pubes (more carefully than you, it would seem) before I even read your initial comment. Because I’m the sort of person who would do that, apparently. And there is such a thing as the sort of person who would do that, apparently.
In fairness to me, I’m pretty sure it was because I remembered reading your pube-comment on “Women Inexplicably Aroused By Waves in Art,” and I was curious to see if the pattern held up.
Awful truth? More like BEST TRUTH.
“And there is such a thing as the sort of person who would do that, apparently.”
Yes. You and I. We are those people.
To affirm our strange bond, I suggest we form a club where we run around and affix merkins to the bare pudenda of women in Western art.
It’s like reverse Bowdlerism.
Our battle cry will be “This Woman’s Work”, as sung by Kate Bush.
Um … I never said I disapproved of pubeless representations of the female body, just that it piqued my curiosity when you pointed out that such representations aren’t a modern invention.
I think I’ll leave it at that, because if this thread were to turn into an unironic recapitulation of the first toast, that would just be tragic.
Also, don’t anyone dare read anything into the fact that my avatar is the hairless cat from Monty. I swear to god that is 100% coincidental.
(*steals toward your hairless avatar with a cat-shaped merkin*)
“…if this thread were to turn into an unironic recapitulation of the first toast, that would just be tragic.”
Oh heavens no!
I care not a whit what a lady chooses to do with her pubes. It just strikes me as strange that few-to-none of the women in these paintings have pubic hair because
a) I thought bare pubic regions were a relatively recent thing (disproved in OliviaPJones’s link above) and
b) there’s like, no pubic hair to be seen in any of these paintings, and I assume that not every lady of these times was Bare Down There.
It’s just that sometimes when you’re devouring a sacrificial victim one of her pubes gets caught in your throat. Sea monsters hate that.
Seems like a good question to me.
I do know that upper class women in Republican Rome would have all hair below the head plucked off. Imagine being the slave who had that job!
Jeezis, I would never get anything else *done.* 😛
You might find this helpful.
This was truly a fascinating read. Thank you!
Wasn’t there some reasonably famous person in Victorian England who was so shocked and dismayed to discover that his new wife had pubic hair that he couldn’t bear to touch her? Or is that completely fictional? I can’t remember where I heard this.
I have definitely heard this story as well. No idea if it is apocryphal though…
Yes! It is said that John Ruskin was so put off by the fact that his wife had pubic hair that he refused to consummate their marriage. They were married for five years before she left him for one of his proteges. #4years364daysTooLong
(To be fair, there are also folks who say that it wasn’t necessarily her pubic hair, but rather some other aspect of her body that didn’t match up with his ideal of the feminine form.)
Oooh, interesting. After digging through those links I’m inclined to believe they were both lying, and only said they hadn’t consummated the marriage to get the annulment they wanted (divorce not being an option).
I dunno. She had eight children with the guy she married after Ruskin, so unless Ruskin was impotent, I’m assuming some children would have been born from their union had they been boning.
Ruskin also “fell in love with” a ten-year old named Rose La Touche after divorcing Effie Gray (his pubic-hair-possessing first wife), soooooooo…I’m inclined to believe that he might have been the kind of guy who would not consummate a marriage with an appropriately-aged female.
Hmmm, so maybe his ideal of the female form was prepubescent. Sounds like Effie dodged a bullet.
Pubic Hair: Protecting Women From Creepers Since At Least 1848
John Ruskin, influential Victorian art critic! His marriage was eventually annulled, because it was never consummated. Although all he said was that his wife’s “person” was disappointing; he never specified what the problem was – a biographer suggested it was the pubic hair, because he’d only seen naked ladies in art, but others think it was probably the menstruating that turned him off.
(I’d already googled his wikipedia page today as a result of this discussion, so.)
I’ve seen various attempts to debunk “John Ruskin couldn’t deal with pubic hair!” but to me that remains the simplest and best explanation. Menstruating isn’t all the time and Effie wouldn’t have expected him to have sex with her when she was on her period. But pubic hair is a permanent feature unless you do something about it, which is not easy even NOW.
Since then it has been proven that Ruskin had seen Turner’s erotic sketches, which did include pubic hair (there was another myth that he burned said sketches, but he didn’t — he just hid them in the archives where they were turned up by more thorough catalogers later on). In any case there is no contemporary source suggesting such a thing — it was first proposed by Mary Lutyens in 1965.
Supposedly Ruskin, IIRC. I think he was really vague about WHAT it was that shocked him about seeing his wife naked for the first time so people just assume it was the presence of normal body hair.
Effie’s new husband was John Everett Millais whose own version of this painting can be seen here: http://www.artnet.com/artists/sir-john-everett-mi…
Since she has a relatively substantial clit sash, there’s no way to see whether she was smooth or the carpet matched the drapes.
The lack of pubic hair doesn’t disturb me half so much as the apparent lack of labia. All these women appear to lack genitals entirely.
They are the proto-Barbie.
I told you already: the sea eats shorthairs.
John Ruskin, big shot art critic, (probably) could not consummate the marriage to his wife Effie because as he said “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.” Dude was pretty used to the smooth, non-pubes-having statues and paintings of Classical art, and was (probably) shocked to find that ladies have actual hair, and are not marble, and also therefore menstruate and have body odor. (He was definitely helping to further the Classical-style portrayl of figures with the Pre-Raphaelites, so really had a big hand in promoting this mode of representation, thanks dude!) Ruskin scholars are loathe to reduce him to this one anecdote, but not one of the theories as to the source of his repulsion are any better or less gross than the other, so.
idk, there are plenty of other kinda icky anecdotes if you want to go there. . .his weird and totally-not-sound-art-judgment crush on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal, that weird diary entry when he went to tea at the Liddells and was terribly disappointed when the parents came home early, the letters he wrote to Kate Greenaway asking for her to draw him naked fairies. . .dude was weird, even within the parameters of weird Victorian dudes, imo.
And I mean, let’s not forget the ten-year old he “fell in love with”, “mentored” over the following years, and proposed to when she turned 18.
I remember our art history teacher telling us there was a reason for this that had to do with Classical ideals in art and also possibly sex workers and/or class, and that’s what made Courbet’s L’Origine so controversial. This is from 1998, so I may remember wrong.
-Clit-sash picture: that’s a very weird dive-attack he’s doing there.
-Half-a-hat picture: Peter Serafinowicz has very carefully arranged his dick ribbon into a cock sock, and it’s hilarious.
-The last one: whut.
My God, that is Peter Serafinowicz.
Right? It’s eerie.
Am I the only one who sees #13 as homoerotic? The focal point is that glorious arm, whose musculature is lovingly detailed. Andromeda’s right there naked, but she’s just kind of….there. Not the focal point of the painting or the artist.
No Pants Perseus is the hottest, though. I’d make out with him too.
Bitches languish sullenly.
Perseus no 10 (half hat, dick ribbon) has certainly been hitting the gym hard. Those winged sandals must have had to work overtime to lift him off the ground…
When P sets down Meduda’s head the blood dripping out of it petrifies the seaweed(/water?) making the first coral reefs, so that explains that.
The crouching gibson girl one is magnificent.
Warning: rant.
ANDROMEDA IS THE PRINCESS OF ETHIOPIA WHY IS SHE ALWAYS SSSSOOOOOOOOO WHIIIIIIIIITE
I mean, I know why, because Western art history, but I really feel like the world is ready for an awesome WOC Andromeda.
That would be fabulous!
I wants it, precious! We’ll have a way browner Perseus than any of these, too.
For what it’s worth, the territory called “Aethiopia” in the ancient world was associated with people of Phoenician descent, whose closest modern ethnic relatives are the Lebanese.
So pink-skinned blonde Andromeda is definitely a contemporary fudge by the painters of the era, but an Andromeda with the North-Eastern African features of the current majority population of Ethiopia would also be an anachronism.
Oh yes, I’m a trained classicist, but there’s still a long-ass way from “Phoenician” to “misplaced Viking.”
Oh hell yeah, and high fives all around. I’m just that cranky classicist who gets annoyed by modern projections, too (however well-intentioned). I’m a real bummer at parties. ._.
Eh Phoenicia was on the Arabian Peninsula. Aethiopia was used to Denote the Upper Nile AND sub-saharan Africa. And it seems like the term “Ethiopean” was used to describe anyone with black skin. Black Andromeda stands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aethiopia#/media/Fi…
I first encountered Bellerophon as the rescuer of Andromeda, not Perseus. *shakes fist at revisionist mythologies*
Hilarious! So many good ones here. Please never stop doing these, Mallory!
“More “sullen languishing” than “awaiting rescue.””
Seriously tempted to put this on top of my online dating profiles now.
ps in the Goddamned Novel, there’s a scene I defended vigorously against doubters in large part because it has a girl reminiscing about having made a gingerbread representation of this scene. I want to believe!
<img src="https://estherschreuder.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/diepenbeeck-andromeda-engraving.jpg">
Andromeda #7 is sooooooooo needy. That girl could totally get herself free, but she neeeeeeeeds a man to save her. I have no respect for Andromeda #7. Girl is going to be non-stop drama.
I desperately need a t-shirt that says “Again with the gratuitous putti!” so I can wear it to museums.
#7's suit of armour also has Batman and Robin-style unnecessary nipples.
I always thought Rembrandt’s “Andromeda” at least shows some of the genuine fear one might display if one were chained to a rock for a sea monster to eat; it’s actually a bit disturbing:
http://rlv.zcache.nl/andromeda_door_rembrandt_van…
#13 is the most Metal.
Number 2 looks like, “Aw, I wanted one of the coral traders to rescue me :(“
I’m sure someone has mentioned the breastplate-navel…but has someone mentioned the breastplate-navel? I mean can we talk about it? The craftsmanship?
Late comment (I just discovered the Toast and have been enjoying past articles, especially Mallory’s): The armoured guy on the winged horse is actually Rinaldo and he’s rescuing Angelica. He would go on to try to rape her after that (she escapes thanks to her magic ring which makes her invisible). Ariosto actually “borrowed” Perseus’ and Andromeda’s myth for his “Orlando Furioso” 😉
probably 'cause Bellerophon was a huge butt and the gods thought it would be hilariously ironic to deny him from the heavens after he SPECTACULARLY failed to reach them in life.