Clytie1.0010_deLaFosse

Clytie1.0010deLaFosse

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Ovid, Met. 4.169-270

Charles de La Fosse, 1636-1716, "Clytie," oil on canvas, before 1688, one of 27 Ovidian subjects ordered by Louis XIV for Versailles, Le Grande Trianon, Musée du Versailles no. 7256, inv. 4534, MR 1700.

Clytie was jealous of Sol's interest in Leucothoe, tattled to Leucothoe's father of their affair — though the god had forced herself upon the girl— and beheld the appalling corporal punishment imposed by the father. After Leucothoe was transformed into a a shrub of frankincense, Clytie herself lost her wits, sitting dissheveled for nine days in the direct sun, until she was transformed into the heliotrope (sun-turning flower).

Another, Roman bust of Clytie belongs to the British Museum.

C. Allen, "Ovid in Art," in Cambridge Companion to Ovid, says that this painting is "one of the last French mythologies to retain any sense of poetry." The pomp of the French court enervated French mythological painting, Allen contends, and led to the work of diminished poetry such as Watteau and Boucher turned out.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.