Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Canace.
The gallery
The Death of Canace (Lucanian red-figure hydria from Canosa)
Unknown (attributed to the circle of the Amykos Painter), c. 415–410 BCE
Painted on the shoulder of an early Lucanian red-figure hydria (kalpis) from Canosa, this is the earliest surviving image of Canace's tragedy and likely reflects Euripides' lost tragedy Aiolos. Canace lies dying upon a bed, the sword her father sent her still in her hand, while her brother Macareus stands with bowed head and bound wrists and King Aeolus presses forward, gesturing with his staff. The compressed, theatrical grouping turns the vase into a frozen stage scene of incest discovered and a daughter condemned. Museo Archeologico, Bari (inv. 1535).
Canace (Roman wall painting from Tor Marancia)
Unknown Roman painter, 3rd century CE
This fresco, from a villa at Tor Marancia near Rome and now in the Vatican Library's Sala delle Nozze Aldobrandine, belongs to a series of full-length heroines each labelled by inscription, all of them women undone by illicit passion. Canace stands holding the sword that names her fate, a quiet emblem of the suicide her father forced upon her after her affair with her brother Macareus. The painting's restrained, almost portrait-like dignity lets the lone blade carry the whole weight of the story.
The Suicide of Canace (miniature from Ovid's Héroïdes)
Jean Pichore, c. 1510
An illumination by the Parisian master Jean Pichore for a French manuscript of Ovid's Heroides, translated by Octovien de Saint-Gelais (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 874, fol. 47v). Illustrating Heroides 11 — Canace's letter to her brother and lover Macareus — the miniature stages the grim conclusion of her story: having borne a child in secret, Canace receives the sword her father Aeolus sends, and the composition draws together discovery, the sword, and her impending death. The richly coloured Renaissance setting transposes the ancient Aeolid tragedy into a French courtly idiom.