PirithousHippodamiaWedding2.0003_Maillol

PirithousHippodamiaWedding2.0003_Maillol

OGCMA s.v. "Pirithous, Wedding of P. and Hippodamia"
Musée d'Orsay brochure
Ovid Met.12.393-430

Aristide Maillol (11861-1944), "Desire (Man and Woman)" (1907), terra cotta relief panel, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, inv. 1558. Copies in lead cast (1907) at Musée d'Orsay, Paris; bronze cast (1909) Artizon Museum, Tokyo.

Maillol's "Desire" is carved to the same dimensions as the Parthenon metopes (British Museum, Duveen Gallery) and evokes that same artistic tension — Lapith vs Centaur, nomos vs physis — that the Athenian artists effected in their binary struggles.

The image at right is the bronze cast of the Artizon Museum.

Is Maillol's mythological provenance to be traced back into the Lapithocentauromachy or, better, into the mythological depictions of Eros?

Other artists to pay attention to Hylonome include Francesco Bertos and David Backhouse. Aristide Maillol's treatment of the Lapithocentauromachy may bear some awareness of this approach to the myth.

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, 1300 - 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.