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.