Actaeon2.0001_Hogarth

Actaeon2.0001_Hogarth

William Hogarth, "The Toilette" scene 4 from Marriage à la Mode, before 1743, National Gallery, London, NG 116

In his series of paintings, called “Marriage à la Mode”, Hogarth aggressively satirized one of the most “modern moral subjects,” a young lady’s search for the perfect life: marry an apparently wealthy aristocrat and pursue adulterous happiness with younger men. Hogarth said that the series ‘represent[s] a variety of modern occurrences in high-life.’

Throughout the series mythological allusions flavor the scenes. In another painting, “ The Marriage Settlement,” the walls above the girl are hung with foreboding paintings of Biblical martyrdoms, and a copy of Caravaggio’s Medusa spells certain doom in the air over the signing of the betrothal contract.

This slide might as well by catalogued under OGCMA for Ganymede or Io or even Leda, for each of these myths contributes to the intertextual richness of this painting's narrative.

The painting at left has no fewer than four keen mythological allusions: 1) Michelangelo's "Rape of Ganymede" comments on the vignette of the foppish choclate-drinker and the singing castrato to his right; 2) the young widow who married for fantastic wealth and could do it again has “Correggio's Jupiter and Io” and a “Lot and his Daughters” as a dual “caption”; 3) beneath the lawyer Silvertongue a little boy makes sport over the antlers of Actaeon, a common allusion to the cuckold, as the young widow’s deceased husband had become (presumably in her illicit affair with Silvertongue?); and 4) the boy looks laughingly at Giulio Romano's (?) version of the "Leda and the Swan". [These captions together spell out a message: old man marries lithe young thing ... DOOM.]

Actaeon is the pathetic figure who sees Artemis at the bath accidentally and soon pays violently for an inadvertent mistake.
A rude gesture in some cultures is known as "the horns of Actaeon". "Descriptions of cuckolds as 'Actaeons' implied that cuckoldry was a natural punishment for men's lusts. The story [of Diana and Actaeon] conveyed women's powers to effect men's destruction." D.M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery (Cambridge UP 2002)