Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Alcyone (Aeolid).
The gallery
Halcyone
Herbert James Draper, 1915
Herbert James Draper, a leading painter of the late Victorian and Edwardian classical revival, gives Alcyone (Halcyone) a single arresting figure. Daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx, she is shown as the grieving woman of Ovid's Metamorphoses Book XI, who keeps vigil for a husband lost at sea. Draper's lush, atmospheric handling and the bird motif allude to the myth's resolution, in which the gods take pity on the couple and turn them both into halcyons, the kingfishers said to nest on calm midwinter seas. The work survives in a private collection.
Ceyx Taking Leave of Alcyone (Ceyx prenant congé d'Alcyone)
Unknown, c. 1450
This fifteenth-century French manuscript illumination, from a copy of Christine de Pizan's Epître d'Othéa (Lille, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 0391, fol. 78), depicts the parting that opens the tragedy of Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus. Her husband Ceyx leaves to consult an oracle by sea against her pleading; he will drown in the storm to come. The painter renders the leave-taking in the courtly idiom of late-medieval France, transmitting the Ovidian myth to a new audience through the moralizing frame of Christine's text. It is held by the Bibliothèque municipale de Lille.
Morpheus in the House of Ceyx, before Alcyone
Johann Wilhelm Baur, 1641
Johann Wilhelm Baur's etched illustration for Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book XI, 633–676) captures the most poignant episode of Alcyone's story. Unaware that Ceyx has perished in the wreck, she sleeps while Juno sends the dream-god Morpheus, wearing the drowned king's likeness, to reveal his fate to her. Baur, a Strasbourg-born miniaturist and printmaker active in Italy and Vienna, stages the dream-vision with dense Baroque detail, the spectral figure looming over the sleeping daughter of Aeolus. The print belongs to his widely circulated Ovid cycle.
Alcyone and Ceyx Transformed into Halcyons
Bernard Picart, 1733
This copper engraving by the French printmaker Bernard Picart, published in the Neueröffneter Musen-Tempel (1733), illustrates the climax of the myth of Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus. Having found the drowned body of her husband Ceyx washed ashore, she throws herself toward the sea in grief; the gods, moved by such devotion, transform them both into halcyons (kingfishers) so they may be united again. Picart depicts the moment of metamorphosis, the human forms giving way to wings, the origin myth of the proverbial 'halcyon days' of calm weather. The plate is preserved at the University of Heidelberg.