Flaxman's Odyssey

'The Odyssey' in Western art

Anyone fortunate enough to have watched Christopher Nolan’s latest film The Odyssey since its release in cinemas a fortnight ago will appreciate just how inventively some of the story’s most challenging and crucial moments were captured. From Polyphemus’ cave to a harrowing Hades, the director approached the poem’s most significant scenes in a manner that was both brilliant, and utterly unique.

However, Nolan is only one small cog in the wheel of creatives whose varying visualisations over two and a half millennia have brought this Classical tale to life. Whether it be a delicate depiction of the Sirens’ sound on a Grecian stamnos (vase) from the 5th century BC (fig. 1), or Odysseus threatening Circe in a Jacob Jordaens masterwork (fig. 2), Homer’s epic is an ever-recurring subject throughout the history of Western art.

'The Siren Vase' — Fig. 1. The Siren Painter (Attica, Greece), *The Siren Vase*, c. 480-70BC, red-figured stamnos, 38 x 29 x 34 cm, The British Museum, London © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Jordaens' 'Ulysses threatening Circe' — Fig. 2. Jacob Jordaens, *Ulysses threatening Circe*, c. 1630-5, oil on canvas, 86 x 105.5 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel

Engravings after Flaxman

Indeed, tucked away in the National Gallery of Ireland’s Yeats Archive is a book of illustrations after engravings of John Flaxman’s Odyssey compositions dating back to the 1790s (figs. 4, 5, 6). Presented to Mary Cottenham White (later Yeats) in 1887 for excelling in the Department of Science and Art’s 2nd Grade Art Examination, the thirty-four captioned plates portray the pivotal points of Odysseus’ journey, and offer an intriguing comparison of imagery to a 21st century Hollywood blockbuster.

John Flaxman R.A. was a renowned British neoclassical draughtsman and sculptor whose Odyssey and Iliad compositions were the outcome of a commission by the patron Georgiana Hare-Naylor in the final decade of the 18th century. This book of Odyssean illustrations – the original drawings for which are now held in the Royal Academy in London – is available to consult in our Reading Rooms by emailing library@ngi.ie.