Cassandra1.0053

Solomon Joseph Solomon, 1860-1927, "Ajax and Cassandra" (Ajax the Lesser carrying Cassandra from the sanctuary of Athena in the sack of Troy), oil on canvas, 1886, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Australia.

Kestner uses this painting as the cover and frontispiece of Mythology and Misogyny: the social discourse of nineteenth-century classical subject-painting (Wisconsin, 1989) as a simplex statement of his thesis, that "as pictorial ideograms, [Solomon's paintings and his peers'] were an integral part of a broad-based value system that reinforced patriarchal dominance by inculcating misogynistic and gynophobis attitudes among the broad public." Ajax hereby, in Solomon's auspices "symbolically denies women the solace of wisdom, as did the culture of the nineteenth century."

Critics would be careful to note Ajax' desecration of the sanctuary, his prying the protected woman from the Palladium (she still holds it for all her might with her right hand) and his having kicked over the burning embers intended for sacrifice at the altar.