Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Boreas.
The gallery
Boreas Abducting Oreithyia
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1620
In this Baroque oil on panel (146 by 140 cm, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Rubens seizes the most violent instant of the myth: Boreas, the dark-winged god of the North Wind, sweeps the Athenian princess Oreithyia bodily into the air. The composition spirals upward in a tumult of straining muscle and billowing drapery, the wind-god's powerful frame and beating wings answered by the helpless, twisting body of his bride as she is carried off from the banks of the Ilissus toward wintry Thrace. Rubens transforms Ovid's account of the spurned wooer who 'fell back on his own nature' into a whirlwind of flesh and storm.
Boreas and Oreithyia
Evelyn De Morgan, 1896
Painted by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Evelyn De Morgan and now held at the De Morgan Centre in London, this oil reimagines the abduction as a sweeping aerial dance. The shadowy, blue-grey figure of Boreas, the North Wind, enfolds the pale Athenian princess Oreithyia as the pair are borne aloft over a cold landscape, her draperies streaming with the gusts that carry her away. De Morgan's symbolist sensibility softens the ancient theme of seizure into an image of irresistible elemental force, the chill of the north made flesh.
Boreas Abducting Oreithyia (Apulian red-figure oenochoe, Louvre K 35)
Attributed to the Salting Painter, c. 360 BC
On this South Italian (Apulian) red-figure wine jug in the Louvre, the painter renders the canonical Athenian myth of the wind-god's bride. Boreas, the bearded and winged North Wind, grasps Oreithyia, daughter of King Erechtheus, and lifts her from the ground in the act of carrying her off. The scene belongs to a long iconographic tradition in Greek vase painting, where Boreas is regularly shown as a powerfully winged male figure abducting the struggling Athenian princess, the union that would produce the winged Boreads Zetes and Calais.
Boreas and Oreithyia (Attic red-figure pointed amphora, the name vase of the Oreithyia Painter)
The Oreithyia Painter, c. 470–460 BC
This Attic red-figure pointed amphora in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (56 cm high), is the very name-vase of the anonymous master scholars call the Oreithyia Painter. Boreas, the winged North Wind, takes hold of the Athenian princess Oreithyia as her sister Herse rushes in from the left in a vain attempt to help. The vase preserves the classical Athenian image of the abduction by the Ilissus, the myth by which the wind-god became a kinsman of Athens and which Pausanias records was also figured on the chest of Cypselus at Olympia.