Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Deucalion.
The gallery
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Rubens' Prado sketch for the Torre de la Parada shows the flood survivors casting stones that become a new human race — Ovid's Metamorphoses staged as Baroque energy after the waters fall. Deucalion and Pyrrha kneel among wreckage while earth repopulates behind them.
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, 1655
Castiglione's Denver Art Museum canvas isolates the couple in a rocky waste as they throw their 'mother's bones' — the stones of earth — that rise as men and women. The Genoese painter makes the Greek flood myth a study of survival and second creation.
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Virgil Solis, 1562
Solis's woodcut for Ovid's Metamorphoses freezes the oracle's command: husband and wife hurl stones over their shoulders while new bodies form from the ground. The print carried Deucalion's flood into countless Renaissance editions of the poem.
In play
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book 1 makes Deucalion and Pyrrha the survivors who repopulate the world from stones — the Greek flood told as Rome's foundational metamorphosis.
Deucalion
Son of Prometheus, husband of Pyrrha — the Hellenic Noah whose name still marks flood myths and the Deucalionid line of Hellen.