The Judgement of Paris

Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

The Judgement of Paris (1636)

Huntress Diana

French painter Guillaume Seignac (1870 - 1924). Seignac was a kind of "Neo Rococo" painter specialized on erotic women.

Diane (1899)

Helen of Troy

British academic painter Sir Edward John Poynter (1836–1919)

Helen (1881)

Helen of Troy, was the daughter of Zeus and Leda. As the daughter of Leda and her divine father she became the most beautiful (human) woman of the world. Hardly surprising that many kings and princes wanted to marry her, and she chose Menelaus the mighty king of Sparta.
The problems began when the goddess Aphrodite promised Paris a prince from Troy the love of the most beautiful of all women and helped him to take Helen away with him. As anybody knows was this was the cause of the Trojan war. Apart from that is not clear, if Helen followed Paris willingly or if she was taken by force, if she really loved Paris or if she was only a vain and selfish woman.
When the Greeks finally conquered and destroyed the city Menelaus wanted to kill his unfaithful wife, but seeing her beauty (she dropped her robe) he forgave her and took her as his queen back to Sparta.

It seems that artists were not very interested in Helen as a person. She appears more as the prize, the big trophy, that for the best champions of the world battled for years. She was as Christopher Marlowe said: "the face that launched a thousand ships."

On this painting by Edward Poynter she looks a little disturbed while Troy is burning down.

Clytemnestra

French painter Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833)

Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon (1817)

Andromeda

French painter Paul Gustave Doré (1832–1883)

Andromeda chained to the rock

Medea by Morgan

British painter Evelyn de Morgan (1850-1919)


Medea (1889)

Clytemnestra

Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon, the king of of Mycenae and leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War. When the winds prevented the Greek ships from sailing. Agamemnon was told that the winds would return if he sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia. Knowing that Clytemnestra never would permit this, he asked her to send Iphigeneia because he wanted to marry her to Achilles. When Iphigeneia arrived, she was sacrificed, which caused a lot of griev to her mother.

During the siege of Troja the horny Agamemnon quarrelled with Achilles for the posession of the female booty they made in the war, and nearly ruined the Greek cause by his greed. After the war he returned with Cassandra princess of Troy as his concubine.

In the meantime Clytemnestra had began a love affair with Aegisthus, her husband's cousin. When Agamemnon arrived in Mycenae she waited until he was taking a bath and then she slaughtered him. Liberating herself and Greece of an egoistic horny old king.

This interesting interpretation is by the British painter John Collier (1850–1934), and its called "After the murder" (1882). It depicts Clytemnestra bloody and with an hevy axe like a butcher, but she is looking proud and content.

Medea

German painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880)



Medea with the dagger (1871)