Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Galatea.
The gallery
Acis and Galatea
Claude Lorrain, 1657
Claude's landscape sets the Sicilian love-story in golden light: Galatea and Acis at ease before Polyphemus' jealousy shatters the idyll. Ovid's narrative — the Nereid who turned her slain beloved into a river — became a favourite theme of seventeenth-century pastoral painting.
The Triumph of Galatea
Raphael, c. 1512
Raphael's fresco in the Villa Farnesina, Rome, shows the Nereid Galatea riding a shell chariot drawn by dolphins amid a swirl of tritons and cupids. Painted for Agostino Chigi, it is the High Renaissance's most famous image of the sea-nymph — beauty in motion, independent of Polyphemus' jealous gaze.
Acis, Galatea, and Polyphemus
François Perrier, c. 1645–1650
Perrier's Louvre canvas compresses Ovid's Sicilian triangle into one charged stage: Galatea and Acis slip away while the giant Polyphemus watches from the rocks. The Nereid is the luminous centre of a Baroque pastoral that knows the boulder is already waiting.
Polyphemus and Galatea (Boscotrecase)
Unknown (Roman), c. 10 BC
A Third-Style wall painting from the imperial villa at Boscotrecase, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Polyphemus sits among his flock while Galatea rides a dolphin across the bay. One of the earliest surviving pictures of the Nereid's Sicilian romance, painted for a Roman bedroom a generation before Ovid retold the myth.
The Cyclops
Odilon Redon, c. 1914
Redon's Symbolist oil in the Kröller-Müller Museum turns the myth toward Polyphemus' gaze: the giant's huge head rises over a hillside while Galatea sleeps nude among flowers below. The Nereid becomes the dream the Cyclops cannot possess — Ovid rewritten as modern longing and colour.