Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ceyx.
The gallery
Halcyone
Herbert James Draper, 1915
In this large oil on canvas (155 by 216 cm), the British painter Herbert James Draper renders the climax of the Ceyx and Alcyone legend. Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus, stands distraught upon the shore searching the sea for her husband Ceyx, king of Trachis, who has drowned in a storm. Kingfishers wheel above her head, foreshadowing the gods' mercy that will transform the grieving pair into halcyon birds. Painted at the height of late-Victorian and Edwardian classical revivalism, the work translates Ovid's Metamorphoses into a brooding study of conjugal love and loss against a tempestuous coastal light.
Ceyx prenant congé d'Alcyone (Ceyx Taking Leave of Alcyone)
Unknown, c. 1450
This fifteenth-century French manuscript illumination, from a copy of Christine de Pizan's Épître d'Othéa (Lille, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 0391, fol. 78), depicts Ceyx, king of Trachis, bidding farewell to his wife Alcyone before the fateful sea voyage that will end in his drowning. Rendered in the courtly Gothic idiom, the scene transposes the ancient Greek myth, transmitted to the Middle Ages chiefly through Ovid, into a medieval moral allegory of fidelity and foreboding.
Ceyx in the Tempest (illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI)
Virgil Solis, 16th century
A sixteenth-century engraving by the Nuremberg printmaker Virgil Solis (1514–1562), made for an illustrated edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The plate shows Ceyx, king of Trachis, aboard his ship as a violent storm overwhelms the vessel, the moment of the king's death at sea that sets in motion the lovers' grief and ultimate metamorphosis. Solis's densely worked composition exemplifies the way Renaissance book illustration popularized the classical myths for a broad European readership.
Morpheus Appears to Alcyone (illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XI)
Virgil Solis, 16th century
In this engraving by Virgil Solis (1514–1562) for Ovid's Metamorphoses, the dream-god Morpheus, having taken on the form of the drowned Ceyx, appears at Alcyone's bedside to reveal her husband's death. The somber visitation is the narrative hinge of the myth: it is Alcyone's grief at this apparition, and her subsequent discovery of Ceyx's body on the shore, that moves the gods to transform the faithful couple into halcyon birds. The plate belongs to one of the most influential Renaissance picture-cycles of the Ovidian fables.