So maybe my favorite part about all of Greek history is that Sappho was just such a BIG GAY BUMMER that it pretty much killed her. (This may or may not be true. 100% of what we know about Sappho is "this may or may not be true," except for the rumor that she threw herself off of a cliff for the love of some male boatman, which is a vile calumny invented by, I…
Orpheus is one of those great Greek figures who stuck around long enough to get every single myth eventually attributed to him. He invented music, sort of, but he also become a figure of mourning after failing to rescue his wife Eurydice from the Underworld (on account of looking back at her before she was 100% rescued), but he's also credited with introducing pederasty to Thrace (!!!)
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.
Let me clue you in on a great little secret about paintings of saints and martyrs: it's a long-standing excuse to paint Babes. You know how Renaissance artists were always like, "It's VERY historically important that I paint this naked babe with a swan that looks like a dick growing out of a snowdrift so that posterity never forgets the importance of Leda for...for Iliad reasons"? Same thing with martyrs, a lot of the time, and…
