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Zeus and the Flood: Three Greek Myths
Rain and rivers covered the earth until only Parnassus remained above the waves, carrying Deucalion and Pyrrha to safety after nine days and nights. Once the waters withdrew, they cast stones behind them, creating men from Deucalion’s stones and women from Pyrrha’s. The Flood of Deucalion Rain fell over the earth while rivers broke from their courses. Zeus had resolved to destroy humanity because people had become wicked. He called on the god of the sea, and together they covered the land with water from the sky and from the earth. The flood rose over the highest mountains. Parnassus alone remained above the waves, with a small piece of dry ground at its summit. After nine days and nine nights, a vessel carrying Deucalion and Pyrrha came to rest there. Deucalion was the son of Prometheus. Pyrrha was the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, and his niece. They were the only human survivors. When the waters withdrew, the sea returned to its shores and the rivers to their channels. In one account, the north wind cleared the clouds at Zeus’s command, while the sea god sent Triton to sound the retreat of the waters. Deucalion and Pyrrha left their vessel and offered a sacrifice to Zeus, the preserver of fugitives. They then went to the shrine of Themis beside the river Cephissus. The shrine was covered with seaweed, and its altar was cold. They prayed for humanity to be renewed. Zeus heard them and sent Hermes to promise that their request would be granted. Themis then instructed them to cover their heads and throw the bones of their mother behind them. Deucalion and Pyrrha understood the words to mean the bones of Mother Earth, the rocks lying beside the river. They cast stones behind them as they walked. The stones thrown by Deucalion became men, while those thrown by Pyrrha became women. In this way, the human race began again. Source note: Primary text: Ovid, Metamorphoses. Corpus check: The Greek Myths; Greek Myths & Tales. Zeus and Lycaon Zeus entered Arcadia in the form of a mortal to see whether reports of human wickedness were true. He reached the palace of Lycaon as twilight darkened the earth. He gave a sign that a god had arrived. The people prayed, but Lycaon mocked their worship. He decided to test the stranger and planned to kill him secretly during the night. Lycaon then placed human flesh before his guest. Zeus recognised the deed and revealed himself. He overturned the table and punished the king by changing him into a wolf. Lycaon’s house was destroyed, either by a thunderbolt or by a flood. His punishment followed his contempt for the gods and his treatment of the divine visitor. One account gives a different explanation for the feast. Lycaon had warned his subjects that Zeus often came to inspect their conduct. When he announced that the god would visit, some of his sons carried out the deed to discover whether the visitor was truly Zeus, since a god would recognise what they had done. In another version, Lycaon himself, angered by Zeus’s seduction of his daughter Callisto, served his grandson Areas to Zeus. Zeus overturned the table and changed Lycaon into a wolf in response. Zeus and Lycaon. Original MythSource illustration created for this story; not a historical artwork. Source note: Primary text: Ovid, Metamorphoses. Corpus check: The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics); The Greek Myths. Zeus and Typhon Typhon rushed towards Olympus, and the gods fled in terror to Egypt. They disguised themselves as animals. Zeus became a ram, Apollo a crow, Dionysus a goat, Hera a white cow, Artemis a cat, Aphrodite a fish, and Ares a boar. Hermes became an ibis. Athene alone stayed behind and taunted Zeus for retreating. Zeus resumed his true form and attacked Typhon with thunderbolts. Typhon was the child of Gaia and Tartarus, born in the Corycian Cave of Cilicia after the destruction of the Giants. He was the largest monster ever born. His legs were coiled serpents, his outstretched arms reached a hundred leagues in either direction, and countless serpent heads formed his hands. His ass-head touched the stars, his wings darkened the sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming rocks came from his mouth. His many voices included the speech of a god, a bull’s bellow, a lion’s roar, a dog’s yelp, and a snake’s hiss. He challenged Zeus’s rule over gods and mortals. In the continuing fight, Typhon overpowered Zeus and removed the sinews from his limbs. He gave Zeus’s thunderbolts to Gaia and went after the source of music played by Cadmus. Cadmus told him that he would enjoy a lyre strung with Zeus’s sinews, then hid the sinews in another cave and continued playing. While Typhon was distracted, Zeus recovered his thunderbolts. When the music stopped, Typhon returned to his cave and found the weapons gone. He unleashed destruction across the world. Animals were devoured, rivers turned to dust, and seas became dry land. Hermes restored the sinews to Zeus in one account. Zeus returned to Olympus on a chariot drawn by winged horses and pursued Typhon with thunderbolts. At Mount Nysa, the Three Fates gave Typhon fruits that seemed to restore his strength but instead doomed him. At Mount Haemus, he hurled whole mountains at Zeus. Zeus struck them with thunderbolts, sending them back against Typhon and wounding him. Typhon fled to Sicily, where Zeus buried him beneath Mount Etna. Fire still belches from its cone. Source note: Primary text: Hesiod, Theogony. Corpus check: War in Greek Mythology; The Greek Myths.
Yoshitoshi Finished a Hundred Moons as Ukiyo-e Died With Him
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) is usually called the last great master of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock print. His masterpiece, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (Tsuki hyakushi), pairs the moon with a hundred figures from Japanese and Chinese history and legend: a general on a night raid, an exiled poet, a fox spirit, an empress. He began publishing it in instalments from about 1885, and the last of the hundred sheets reached buyers only shortly before he died in 1892, completing the series in the same year as his own death. Through those same years, photography studios and imported mechanical presses were taking over the newspaper and portrait trade that had kept woodblock publishing solvent for two centuries. Yoshitoshi spent much of his working life in poverty and suffered repeated episodes of mental illness, one of them severe enough to put him in hospital. He kept working through all of it, and raised the woodblock print to one of its highest points at the exact moment the trade that had produced it was dying around him. A Merchant's Son in Kuniyoshi's Studio Yoshitoshi was born Owariya Yonejiro on 30 April 1839, in the Shimbashi district of Edo. His father was a merchant who had bought the family's way into samurai rank, a common transaction in the last decades of the shogunate. Sent to live with an uncle, a pharmacist, at the age of three, he had begun drawing lessons by five. At eleven he was apprenticed to Utagawa Kuniyoshi, already one of Edo's most established print masters. Kuniyoshi had studied Western engravings and, unusually for a woodblock studio, had his pupils draw from live models rather than copy stock poses. He gave his new student the art name Yoshitoshi. The boy's first known print appeared in 1853, when he was fourteen, and he went on designing under Kuniyoshi's supervision through the 1850s. Kuniyoshi died in 1861; Yoshitoshi was in his early twenties, and already working independently in one of Edo's most crowded trades. The Bloody Prints of the 1860s By the mid-1860s Yoshitoshi had a reputation for violence on the page. Wakan hyaku monogatari ("One Hundred Ghost Tales of China and Japan"), begun in 1865, mixed old folklore with images meant to unsettle. In 1866 and 1867 he and a fellow Kuniyoshi pupil, Utagawa Yoshiiku, published Eimei nijuhasshuku ("Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse"), each artist contributing fourteen sheets. The series became the defining example of muzan-e, the "cruel pictures" genre: close studies of torture and killing, printed with pigment mixed into the glue to suggest congealed blood. The timing was not accidental. These were the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, swept away by the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and Edo's print publishers were selling plenty of real political violence alongside the invented kind. Yoshitoshi followed the fall of the old government directly with Kaidai hyaku senso (1868), responding to the Battle of Ueno, fought a few streets from his own studio as shogunate loyalists made their last stand against imperial troops. Poverty, Breakdown, and the Name Taiso Success did not hold. By 1869 critics ranked Yoshitoshi among the best woodblock designers working in Japan, but commissions fell away within two years. Depression set in, and in 1872 it became a full breakdown. He was living at the time with a woman named Okoto, in conditions poor enough that the couple burned their own floorboards for fuel. Okoto eventually sold herself into a brothel to keep him working. Yoshitoshi recovered in 1873 and marked it by changing his art name from Ikkaisai to Taiso, meaning great resurrection. The new Meiji press gave him a market he had not had before: illustrated newspapers needed woodblock artists to draw current events for a mass readership, and Yoshitoshi supplied that market for the rest of the decade. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 brought him a further run of newspaper work. Japan's Most Popular Print Artist Through the late 1870s and early 1880s Yoshitoshi built a following with Dai Nihon meisho kagami ("Mirror of Famous Generals of Great Japan"), a run of warrior portraits for the publisher Funazu Chujiro. By 1882 he was financially secure for the first time in his career. Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute by Moonlight, from 1883, is usually named among his strongest single compositions: a court noble walks on undisturbed while a would-be attacker hesitates, stopped by the sound of the music. In 1880 Yoshitoshi had met Sakamaki Taiko, a former geisha with two children; they married in 1884, and he adopted her son, who trained under him and later worked, as Tsukioka Kogyo, on prints of Noh theatre. That same year, Japan's print publishers and booksellers named Yoshitoshi the country's most popular ukiyo-e artist. A Hundred Moons, A Hundred Stories One Hundred Aspects of the Moon began appearing in 1885, published in instalments by Akiyama Buemon. Yoshitoshi eventually completed a hundred sheets, oban size, each pairing the moon with a scene from Japanese or Chinese history and legend. The moon itself is not always shown; the connecting idea is that every episode in the series takes place beneath it. Early sheets include Inaba Mountain Moon, showing the young Toyotomi Hideyoshi leading a night climb up a cliff face to help Oda Nobunaga take an enemy castle, and Moon of the Enemy's Lair, in which the prince Yamato Takeru, disguised as a woman, waits to draw a sword hidden beneath his robe at a rebel feast. Other sheets turn to Chinese legend, with Chang'e fleeing to the moon after stealing the elixir of immortality, or to older Japanese folklore, with the story of an old woman abandoned on a mountainside. Buyers are reported to have queued before dawn for new instalments as they appeared. The series ran for seven years and was still unfinished when Yoshitoshi's health began to fail for the last time. New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts Yoshitoshi began his last major series, Shinkei sanjurokkaisen ("New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts"), in 1889. It returned to the ghost stories of his early muzan-e years, but the handling was different. Where the 1860s prints went for shock, the ghost series works through suggestion. One sheet shows Oiwa, the wronged wife of the kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan, calmly nursing her infant; the only warning of what is coming is a sash that curls across the print like a snake. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, The Yotsuya Ghost Story, from New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts (1892): Oiwa calmly nurses her infant while her sash rears up like a snake, the only warning of the horror to come. Thirty-six sheets and a title page were planned. Three were printed and published only after Yoshitoshi's death, from designs he had already completed. The Last Print, and the End of a Form Yoshitoshi's health failed for the last time in early 1891. He suffered a relapse severe enough that he believed, wrongly, that he was hosting a gathering of fellow artists in his own home; soon afterwards, thieves took what money he had. He was admitted to hospital. One Hundred Aspects of the Moon was still appearing in instalments, and its final sheet reached the public only shortly before his death, completing the run of a hundred within his own lifetime. Yoshitoshi left hospital in May 1892 but did not go back to his own house, renting rooms instead. He died on 9 June 1892, in Ryogoku, Tokyo, of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was fifty-three. He had already named his student Mizuno Toshikata as his successor; Migita Toshihide and others carried the studio's work on, and Yoshitoshi is thought to have trained something close to eighty pupils over his career. A stone memorial was raised in Tokyo's Mukojima Hyakkaen garden in 1898. He worked through the years that made his own trade obsolete. Photographic studios and imported mechanical presses took over the newspaper illustration and portrait work that had financed woodblock publishing for two centuries; by the 1890s, colour woodblock printing survived mainly as a specialist practice rather than a mass medium. The biographer Roger Keyes titled his 1982 study of the artist Courage and Silence; the historian John Stevenson judged that Yoshitoshi's work "gave ukiyo-e another generation of life." His prints are now held by, among others, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Yale University Art Gallery. One Hundred Aspects of the Moon remains the most reproduced of his series and is still exhibited as a complete set of a hundred. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson
Chinese Landscape Painting: Mountains the Scholars Never Climbed
In 1072 the court painter Guo Xi signed and dated a large hanging scroll called Early Spring, made for the Song court. It shows no place a traveller could find and stand in. Mist pools between crags that swell and recede as though breathing, and a fisherman's boat and a mule train surface and vanish among rock forms built from years of habit and convention, not from a morning spent sketching one hillside. Guo Xi did not pretend otherwise: in his writings on landscape, recorded by his son, he said a good painting let a city-bound official travel in his mind without leaving his desk. Within two generations, the scholar-officials who collected and judged paintings like his had turned that same idea, that a landscape is made rather than copied, into an argument against professional painters altogether. For roughly a thousand years, from the Tang poet Wang Wei to the Ming critic Dong Qichang, China's scholar-officials, the literati, painted mountains and water (shanshui) as self-cultivation, a private discipline rather than a trade. Painting for a fee was looked down upon. They looked hard at real mountains. What they refused was the idea that looking, on its own, was the point. An Ancestor Chosen After the Fact Wang Wei (699 to 759) is the tradition's usual starting point, though he did not set out to found one. He was a Tang dynasty official who wrote poetry and painted as a private pursuit, and almost nothing he painted survives in a form anyone can trust. His reputation as the ancestor of literati landscape was built three centuries later by the poet and official Su Shi, who wrote a colophon on a Wang Wei painting of misty hills at Lantian, since lost, and delivered a verdict that stuck: that there was a painting hidden inside Wang Wei's poems, and a poem hidden inside his paintings. That line did more to place Wang Wei at the head of the tradition than anything Wang Wei painted. The literati chose their ancestor after the fact, then wrote the history backwards from that choice. Meaning Over Likeness The clearest statement of the literati position comes from the eleventh century. The scholar-official Ouyang Xiu wrote that painters of the past had painted meaning, not outer form. His younger contemporary Su Shi went further: "Anyone who judges painting by likeness has the understanding of a child." Su Shi ranked a Tang court muralist, Wu Daozi, below Wang Wei for the same reason. Wu Daozi could paint anything, Su Shi conceded, but he remained a mere craftsman, while Wang Wei's simpler, sparer mural reached something beyond the image itself. The connoisseur and collector Mi Fu argued the same point from another angle: horses and oxen could be copied from life and still convince, but a copied landscape never succeeds, because its value lay in the painter's own thought rather than in the scene before him. Li Gonglin, part of Su Shi's circle, put the theory into practice. He painted his family estate in the Longmian Mountains while sitting in the capital, hundreds of miles from the actual site, in a deliberately archaic style that resembled no real hillside anyone could visit. That invented estate, not a sketch made on the spot, was the literati's idea of a true likeness. Ink Before Colour Brush and ink took priority over colour for reasons of status as much as taste. Every scholar who sat the civil service examinations had to write well, and examiners marked calligraphy nearly as closely as content, so a clumsy hand could sink an able essay. Critics judged calligraphy as a direct record of character, and landscape painters carried the same standard into their texture strokes (cunfa), built from the same wrist movements as handwriting. A painting could be read, like a letter, for the quality of the mind behind it. Mineral colour, especially the blue-and-green palette used on decorative and courtly landscapes, took skilled preparation and time, and it was associated with the paid professional's workshop. Ink and paper were cheap, and forgiving of a spontaneous hand: a scholar could pick up a brush after dinner and paint from feeling, but he could not mix and layer malachite green so casually. Monochrome ink was not a limitation literati painters worked within. It was the version of the medium suited to a man with another job. A Poem, a Seal and a Painting on One Sheet Chinese critics called the combination of poetry, calligraphy and painting on a single work the "three perfections" (sanjue), a term first recorded in the New Book of Tang. A literatus rarely handed over a finished, sealed object the way a commissioned professional did. He often added his own poem into the blank space above the ink mountains, then left room for friends and later owners to add colophons and seals of their own over the centuries. Some scrolls reached the twentieth century carrying inscriptions from half a dozen different hands and eras, a private conversation still being carried on in the margins. Format mattered too. A hanging scroll was displayed briefly, then rolled and put away. A handscroll was never displayed at all in the Western sense: it was unrolled a little at a time, right to left, in the company of one or two friends, so that a mountain journey unfolded exactly as slowly as its owner allowed. Neither format was built for a shop wall. From a Monumental Cliff to an Empty Riverbank Fan Kuan, who died around 1023, is said to have turned down official life and studied mountains directly, spending days seated beneath cliffs and nights walking the snow-covered hills by moonlight. The result, Travellers among Mountains and Streams, is not a record of that experience. It is a single invented massif nearly seven feet tall, cropped at the edges as though there were more mountain than the silk could hold, with a mule train and two travellers reduced to a detail near its base. Direct observation fed the picture. It did not dictate its shape. Three centuries later, after the Song collapse and the Mongol conquest, that same discipline turned austere. Ni Zan (1301 to 1374), one of four painters later grouped together as the Yuan masters, gave away his property rather than serve the new court and spent his last decades moving between the houses of friends around Lake Tai. His late paintings repeat one composition: a foreground bank scattered with a few thin trees, then a wide empty river standing between it and a low, distant shore. A figure is almost never in sight. Ni Zan, The Rongxi Studio (1372): the 'one river, two banks' composition, a few thin trees on the near bank with bare paper standing in for water and a low distant shore. National Palace Museum, Taipei. The Rongxi Studio, painted in 1372, two years before Ni Zan's death, reduces Fan Kuan's towering invention to next to nothing: a handful of trees at the edge of a blank stretch of paper standing in for both water and shore. Ni Zan called that reduction, not the cliff, the finished statement. Dong Qichang Draws a Line Through History The theory reached its final, most influential form under Dong Qichang (1555 to 1636): a wealthy landowner, high official, collector and painter who was also the most consequential critic of his age. Dong Qichang split the entire history of landscape painting into two schools. His Southern School ran from Wang Wei through the tenth-century masters Dong Yuan and Juran to the Song connoisseur Mi Fu and on to the Yuan masters, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Wang Meng: scholars who painted for themselves, without a client. His Northern School collected the trained court professionals, among them the Southern Song court painters Ma Yuan and Xia Gui. The names came from Chan Buddhism, whose southern branch taught sudden enlightenment and whose northern branch taught a slow, disciplined climb towards it. Dong Qichang borrowed the metaphor for style, not geography, and judged his own Southern School the superior of the two. His landscapes, including Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains of 1617, were a deliberate continuation of it. The division has shaped how the subject gets taught ever since, even though Dong Qichang built it from his own side of an argument, and his own class. The Trade They Disdained The amateur ideal was never quite as clean as its theorists claimed. Zhao Mengfu, a scholar-painter later folded into Dong Qichang's Southern lineage, worked for years as a paid instructor and, by some accounts, relied on assistants to finish work sold under his name. His wife, Guan Daosheng, admired for her ink bamboo, painted Buddhist temple murals on commission. Historians of the period now argue that economically disinterested amateurism was, for most Yuan scholar-painters, an ideal rather than an accurate account of how they lived. The line between a literatus and a professional was real, but it was drawn as much in rhetoric, in who called whom vulgar, as in anyone's ledger. What survived from a thousand years of that argument was not a clean division of labour. It was a way of painting a mountain nobody had climbed, and insisting that this was the only mountain worth painting. Art of China Along the River During Qingming Chinese Landscape Painting Art of China I: Neolithic Pottery & Jade Art of China II: Shang Bronzes Art of China III: Han Silk & Lacquer Art of China IV: Tang Gold & Silver Art of China V: Song Porcelain Art of China VI: Ming & Qing