Gods, Monsters and Windmills

These databases are worth perusing if you are still looking for a work of art to present. Spend some time looking through the various images for inspiration. Explore, and see the world with new eyes!

Art Museum Image Gallery: This will bring you to the list of databases available through the Newman Library. Select “Art Museum Image Gallery.” You must use your Baruch sign in to access it.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York: This gives you access to the collection online.

Art Institute of Chicago: This gives you access to the collection online.

The Louvre in Paris: This gives you access to virtual tours of the museum’s galleries.

Art Project on Google: This database allows you to search artwork in multiple museums.

Salvador Dali’s paintings of the Inferno

Prometheus (1737)

by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam

Sandro Botticelli “Chart of Hell” (c. 1480)

Canto 1 in Italian

Why is Virgil’s guidance vital for Dante’s journey through the Inferno?

Beowulf Manuscript (c. 1000)

Beowulf read in Old English

History of the English Language in Ten Minutes

Art

Medea about to Kill her Children by Eugène Delacroix 1838

The Greek Mythological figure of Medea from Wikipedia

In Greek mythology, Medea was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides’s play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Glauce. The play tells of Medea avenging her husband’s betrayal by slaying their children.

The myths involving Jason have been interpreted as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek “Pelasgian” cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Heracles, are all “liminal” figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.

Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC and called the Argonautica. However, for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony. It was known to the composer of theLittle Iliad, part of the Epic Cycle.

Euripides’s Medea (1983), as adapted by Robinson Jeffers

For your one-page response paper, please write about Euripides’s Chorus in “Medea” and how it differs from that of Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King.”

The Ancient Greek Theatre

Skene is the stage building that is background to the stage.

Parodos is the side entrance for actors as well as the chorus. It is also the name of the first song sung by the chorus as they enter the orchestra.

Orchestra is the center spot where the chorus stands.

Theatron is where the audience sits.

The Delphic Oracle

Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier

The Pythia, commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the name of any priestess throughout the history of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo. The Delphic oracle was established in the 8th century BCE, although it may have been present in some form in Late Mycenaean times, from 1400 BCE and was abandoned, and there is evidence that Apollo took over the shrine from an earlier dedication to Gaia. The last recorded response was given about 395 CE to Emperor Theodosius I after he had ordered pagan temples to cease operation. During this period the Delphic Oracle was the most prestigious and authoritative oracle among the Greeks. The oracle is one of the best-documented religious institutions of classical Greece.

From the Wikipedia entry on Delphic Oracle

Video of Delphic Oracle on YouTube

Important Terms related to Greek Tragedy

Oedipus the King in film

Tragic irony is the incongruity (disharmony) created when the (tragic) significance of a character’s speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned.

Example from Oedipus the King: Oedipus vows to find the murderer and curses him for the plague that he has caused, not knowing that he himself is the murderer.

Peripeteia (Reversal) is a change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite.

Example from Oedipus the King: the Messenger comes to relieve Oedipus of his fear with regard to his mother, but by revealing his true identity he does just the opposite.

Anagnorisis (Recognition) is a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading either to friendship or to hostility on the part of those persons who are marked for good or bad fortune.

Hamartia is a mistake or error of judgment, sometimes translated as “tragic flaw” – but for Aristotle it is not a moral defect.

Katharsis is the process of releasing repressed emotions, and is an uplifting of the spectators “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”