0910aPolyxena

00910aPolyxena_Blondel

Wikipedia Commons
Homer Iliad 3 and passim
Apollodorus Libr. Ep.3.1-6.29

Carl Rahl, "Orestes Pursued by the Furies," oil on canvas, ca. 1852; Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte

Orestes covers his ears and recoils in horror from the pursuing Erinyes who menace the fresh matricide. Each of them threatens to goad him with her flaming torch, and each offers a separate threat in her other hand: the murder weapon, the Fury's grip, the snake of the Underworld.
Orestes' crimson drape manifests his symbolic guilt, and his gait demonstrates his hasty departure from home and hearth.
Painting perhaps a decade before Bouguereau's work of the same topic, Rahl may demonstrate awareness of the his rival.

The painting was at the Augusteum in Oldenbourg, Germany... and may still be. (RTM: March 2017)

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.