Atlas Holding up the Sky

Atlas Holding up the SkyA print of Atlas bearing the heavens on his shoulders one of the oldest figures in Greek cosmology, the Titan condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky for eternity. Atlas was one of the second generation Titans the children of the Titans Iapetus and Clymene, brother of Prometheus and Epimetheus. When the Olympians led by Zeus defeated the Titans in the Titanomachy, Atlas was singled out for the heaviest punishment: forced to stand at the western edge of

most of those surviving statues are incomplete

a document — the most detailed surviving visual record of the Roman imperial army in action: its river crossings

The Pantheon survived the fall of the Western Empire because it was consecrated as a church early — a fate that also preserved the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

wounded by the mortal Diomedes at Troy

Her iconography followed the Greek — helmet

delaying the hero's voyage home for years in revenge for the blinding of his son

The Hesperides were the nymphs of evening

Antique intaglio illustration of Aeneas conversing with his mother

lost now except through Roman copies

beheads her

The work has since become the most famous Romantic depiction of Lucifer in European sculpture

his arms rise and fall in opposition