Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Deion.
The gallery
A Satyr mourning over a Nymph (The Death of Procris)
Piero di Cosimo, c. 1495
Oil on poplar panel, c. 1495, now in the National Gallery, London (NG698). Deion, the Phocian son of Aeolus, is almost never shown in his own right; his place in the heroic age runs entirely through his son Cephalus. This long, dreamlike panel depicts the tragedy that defines that line: Procris, Cephalus's wife, killed by his hunting spear, lies bleeding on the grass while a satyr kneels in grief and her loyal dog Laelaps keeps watch. Piero's tender, melancholic treatment of the myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most celebrated Renaissance images of the Cephalus saga, the cycle that carries Deion's blood into legend.
The Death of Procris
Paolo Veronese, c. 1580
Oil on canvas by the Venetian master Paolo Veronese, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (P17w32.7). The wide horizontal format shows the fatal hunting accident at the heart of the legend of Cephalus, son of Deion: mistaking the rustle of his hidden wife for game, Cephalus has struck Procris with the unerring javelin, and she collapses among the trees as he rushes to her. Veronese's shimmering palette turns the catastrophe of Deion's descendants into a luminous pastoral, witnessing how the house of the Aeolid king lived on chiefly through this much-painted myth.
Landscape with Cephalus and Procris Reunited by Diana
Claude Lorrain, 1645
Oil on canvas, 1645, National Gallery, London (NG2). In Claude Lorrain's serene golden landscape, the goddess Diana presides over the reconciliation of Cephalus, the son of Deion, with his wife Procris, after the jealousy and gifts that set their tragedy in motion. The tiny mythological figures are dwarfed by an idealized expanse of trees, water and warm light, the hallmark of Claude's classical landscapes. As with the other surviving images of this line, the painting honors Deion not in person but through the celebrated saga of his son, the chief vehicle by which his name endures in art.