Perseus: Armed by Nymphs - Walter Crane

Perseus: Armed by Nymphs - Walter CraneA print of Walter Crane's Perseus Armed by the Nymphs an illustration from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Houghton Mifflin, 1892). Three nymphs hand Perseus the equipment he will need to slay Medusa: the winged sandals, the cap of invisibility, and the kibisis the magic bag that will hold the Gorgon's head. In Greek myth, Perseus first has to find the Graeae the three grey sisters who share a single eye and tooth and extract

The companion front view: Pantheon (Exterior)

Aspendos was a standard subject of 19th century travel illustration and early archaeological photography

The tradition survives: the statue still sometimes wears a sheet of political commentary

where it has since been one of the most copied ornamental vases in European decorative art

forges an unbreakable net of bronze

Ionic columns are slimmer and taller in proportion than Doric

After Alexander the Great had himself portrayed in heroic nudity — in imitation of the heroes and gods of epic poetry rather than the togate or armoured figures of earlier civic sculpture — the type became the standard portrait mode for his successor kings across the Mediterranean and Near East

The sculpture has a strange history

The final figure

dedicated as Santa Maria ad Martyres

which belonged to Athena

Her canonical sculpted types run from the Aphrodite of Knidos of Praxiteles in the 4th century BC through the Venus de Milo and the Capitoline Venus into the whole Roman and Renaissance repertoire: the bather surprised at the pool