Would you like to learn more about Venus and Mars, Daphne and Apollo, Minerva, Juno and Jupiter?  Would you like to know your Achilles from your Echo?  This session will provide an introduction to Roman and Greek mythology using works from the National Gallery collection to pose questions about the relationship between art and myth.  We will see how many eras, including the Italian Renaissance, shared an enthusiasm for stories of gods and goddesses, magical beings and mortal folly.  Topics to be explored include the ‘bacchanal’, paintings inspired by poems (‘poesie’) and how myths originating in oral and written sources were retold in paint as text became image.  We will also be joined by Emily Stone, the National Gallery’s Project Curator for the Jeremy Deller Commission, who will introduce the collaboration with Jeremy and the four nations, with a focus on how mythology continues to inspire artists and creatives today. 

Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, from around the year 8 AD, and meaning ‘transformations’ in Greek, is perhaps the most influential re-imagining of ancient Roman and Greek myths in Western culture.  In this session, we will see how the major themes of Ovid’s text such as love and loss, provided inspiration for artists in our collection including Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Titian and Poussin. Ovid’s stories were re-worked by painters to reflect contemporary thought on matters of gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity, politics and power, death and commemoration.  

After the break, guest speaker Erin Farley, a historian and storyteller from Dundee, will explore the richness of Scottish myths and folk tales.  Erin will speak about the creation and transformation of matter in myth and folklore and the relationship between landscapes, bodies, and cosmologies.  In between, Erin will tell a selection of stories from Indo-European tradition and Scotland, which bring these themes to life. 

Artists in our collection including Claude, Poussin and JMW Turner, inspired by the classical past, focused on arcadian-style landscapes that were prompted by journeys to Italy or written descriptions of ancient Greece. These artists evoked the weight of tradition by including in their works classical ruins, fragments of arches and columns, decorative goat herds and shepherds, and mythological characters such as Aeneas, Prince of Troy. Just as it does in mythology, the landscape functions as more than a setting and becomes another character in the story.  Classical mythologies to do with nature, such as Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree or the turning of the blood of Adonis into the anemone flower, will be our focus.

After the break, guest speaker Rhys Mwyn, archaeologist and a punk musician from North Wales, will explore this sense of place by drawing on his knowledge of archaeology to discuss prehistoric art and sites in Wales such as Barclodiad y Gawres. He will consider how Turner’s paintings of Welsh Castlesand landscapes, including Dolbadarn, are in dialogue with Welsh culture and history, both past and present.