0759OedipusSphinx

0759OedipusSphinx_Moreau

Gustave Moreau, "Oedipus and the Sphinx," 1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 12.134.1

The Sphinx inhabited a mountain west of Cadmeia (old Thebes) and tormented the Cadmeans until she met her match in Oedipus. For, he is the first to answer the riddle: "What has one voice and yet becomes four-footed, and two-footed, and three-footed?" In some versions his answering her riddle (e.g. Apollodorus Library 3.5.8) incites her to suicide. In others he kills her outright. Either way, defeating the Sphinx opens the way for Oedipus to become tyrannus at Thebes and the husband of Jocasta.

Moreau later (1878) revisted the moment in a painting entitled "The Sphinx's Riddle Resolved" which has Oedipus watching the Sphinx plummet into a chasm.

Mythological painting of a winged sphinx embracing a bare-chested man holding a staff, in a rocky landscape

Supremely heroic — in physical stature (atire) and in externally visible intellectual focus — this is a man who will rise above the challenges that will crush all others. He is a man fit to lead. And he demonstrates it especially here in his early career.

ML p. 417 offers good analysis of this painting:

"The spinx clutches Oedipus, ready to tear him to pieces (like his predecessors whose remains lie in the fore-ground), while Oedipus gazes at her intensely. Like Ingres' [earlier] "Oedipus and the Sphinx," 1808, Moreau sets the scene in the mountains outside Thebes (faintly seen in the background of both paintings), but he paints the whole of the monster's body and includes a column with a serpent, topped by an ancient vase with griffins' heads. ... The close physical contact of man and monster heightens the intensity of Oedipus' encounter. This was Moreau's best-known work [and his debut at the Paris Salon], and it drew the attention of critics (favorable and unfavorable) and cartoonists."

Sophocles' treatment of Oedipus the King allows Oedipus himself to recall the moment of supreme intellectual prowess at lines 384 - 407, a moment where he rebukes Tiresias for what Oedipus regards as quackery and false prophecy. (Click the link upper left.)