Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Harpies.
The gallery
Phineus and the Boreads (Attic red-figure column-krater)
Attributed to the Leningrad Painter, c. 460 BC
On this Attic red-figure column-krater from Altamura, attributed to the Leningrad Painter, the central drama of the Harpy myth unfolds in archetypal form. The blind seer Phineus sits enthroned at the center while the winged sons of Boreas, Calais and Zetes, lunge in from either side with drawn weapons to drive off the Harpies, the storm-swift bird-women who had been snatching and fouling his food. The episode, set during the Argonauts' voyage to Colchis, is among the most frequently painted scenes in Greek vase-painting. The vase is held in the Louvre (inv. F 53), Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities.
Phineas and the Sons of Boreas
Sebastiano Ricci, c. 1695
The Venetian Baroque master Sebastiano Ricci renders the rescue of Phineus as a swirling, theatrical scene of rescue and flight. The winged Boreads sweep down through tumbling cloud and drapery, swords aloft, scattering the Harpies who scramble away from the seer's befouled table. Ricci's loose, luminous brushwork and dynamic diagonals turn the ancient deliverance myth into a piece of high Baroque spectacle. Oil on canvas, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession no. 1980.275).
Calaïs and Zetes Delivering Phineus from the Harpies
Unknown, 19th century
This French academic composition stages the same celebrated moment of the Argonautic saga: the Boreads, Calaïs and Zetes, on outstretched wings, drive the Harpies away from the suffering Phineus. The Harpies appear as winged female monsters in violent retreat, while the blind king is freed at last from the creatures who had kept him barely alive by snatching his every meal and leaving the remnants fouled with stench. The scene exemplifies the enduring appeal of the Harpy episode in post-classical European art.
The Harpies in the Wood of the Suicides (Inferno, Canto XIII)
Gustave Doré, 1861
Gustave Doré's engraving for his illustrated edition of Dante's Divine Comedy shows the Harpies nesting in the gnarled, blood-weeping trees of the Wood of the Suicides in the seventh circle of Hell. Dante drew the creatures directly from the classical tradition of the storm-winged snatchers who tormented Phineus, recasting them as the foul-winged tormentors who feed on the leaves of the damned. Doré's dramatic chiaroscuro fixed this haunting image of the Harpies in the popular imagination of the nineteenth century.