Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Gorge.
The gallery
The Death of Meleager
François Boucher, c. 1727
Painted by the young François Boucher around 1727 and now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this oil sketch stages the death of the Calydonian hero Meleager, who wastes away as his mother Althaea burns the fated brand that holds his life. Boucher fills the chamber with the stricken women of the house of Oeneus — the Meleagrids, the hero's grieving sisters. Among them are Gorge and Deianira, the only two daughters whom Ovid (Metamorphoses 8.542-546) says were spared transformation into birds; the rest of the sorrowing sisters were turned by Latona into guineafowl. Gorge is thus a constant, if rarely named, presence in this most painted of Calydonian scenes.
The Death of Meleager
Bernardino Capitelli, c. 1633
An elongated horizontal etching of about 1633 by the Sienese printmaker Bernardino Capitelli (1589-1639), held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The friezelike composition unfolds the climax of the Calydonian saga: the dying Meleager collapses while his mother Althaea destroys the brand on which his fate depends, and the women of the family lament around him. The mourning sisters gathered at the hero's side are the Meleagrids, the daughters of Oeneus and Althaea — Gorge among them, named by Ovid as one of the two siblings (with Deianira) who kept their human form when the others became birds. The print embodies the very grief that defines Gorge's place in the myth.
The Death of Meleager (Morte di Meleagro)
Domenico Fiasella, c. 1600–1650
A Baroque canvas by the Genoese painter Domenico Fiasella (1589-1669), now in the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti in Genoa. Fiasella renders the dramatic dying of Meleager, undone as the fatal log consumes itself in the hearth, with the lamenting figures of his household pressing close in chiaroscuro shadow. These mourning women are the sisters of Meleager — the daughters of Oeneus and Althaea, the Meleagrids whose unending grief is the engine of the episode's final act. Gorge, sister of Meleager and Deianira, belongs to this circle of mourners; in Ovid's telling she and Deianira alone escaped being changed into birds by their sorrow.
The Death of Meleager
François Boucher, 1727
A second 1727 treatment of the subject by François Boucher, preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes. The Rococo painter sets the death of Meleager amid swirling drapery and a crowd of attendants and grieving kin, the hero sinking as the life-bearing brand turns to ash. The clustered female mourners are the women of the Calydonian royal house — the Meleagrids, sisters of the dying prince. As one of these daughters of Oeneus and Althaea, Gorge participates in the scene that, in Ovid's account, very nearly cost her sisters their human shapes; she and Deianira alone were spared the metamorphosis into birds.