Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cephalus.
The gallery
Cephalus and Procris
Paolo Veronese, c. 1580–1584
Veronese stages the tragedy's final, ruinous instant. Hidden in the thicket on a hunt, Cephalus mistook a rustle for game and hurled the unerring javelin he had received from Procris herself; it found his wife. Here the hunter cradles the dying Procris among dogs and dark foliage, his face caught between bewilderment and grief as he tries at once to understand her and to plead his innocence. Painted as a pendant to the artist's 'Venus and Adonis', the canvas pairs two myths in which love and the hunt end in death. Oil on canvas, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg.
Landscape with Cephalus and Procris Reunited by Diana
Claude Lorrain, 1645
Claude Lorrain dissolves the myth into a luminous Arcadian panorama, the human drama small against gilded sky, water and trees. The painting captures an earlier, hopeful turn of the story, when the goddess Diana (Artemis) reconciles the estranged Cephalus and Procris and bestows on the couple the gifts that will later doom them — the hound that never loses its quarry and the javelin that never misses. Bathed in Claude's celebrated golden light, the small figures gather at the left while the eye is drawn into a serene classical distance. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.
Aurora and Cephalus
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, 1810
Guérin paints the other great episode of Cephalus's life: his abduction by Aurora (Eos, the Dawn), who fell in love with the young hunter and carried him off — the very moment that draws the Phocian prince out of the mortal catalogue and into the orbit of a goddess. The amorous Dawn, robed in pale rose, lifts the beautiful sleeping youth upon a cloud, gazing down at him with longing while a winged Eros hovers nearby. A polished Neoclassical reverie of cool flesh and soft morning light, the painting follows Ovid's Metamorphoses. Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.