Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Iapetus.
The gallery
The Fall of the Titans (the Titans cast into Tartarus)
Cornelis van Haarlem, 1588–1590
A large oil painting by the Dutch Mannerist Cornelis van Haarlem, now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. It depicts the Titans, the generation of Iapetus and his brothers, hurled down into the abyss of Tartarus after their defeat by Zeus and the Olympians, a writhing mass of falling bodies shown in dramatic foreshortening. The painting is a showpiece of the Haarlem Mannerists' fascination with the nude in violent motion.
The Fall of the Titans
Peter Paul Rubens (workshop / after), c. 1630s
A Rubensian Fall of the Titans in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium plunges Iapetus' generation from the sky. The father of Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius belongs to this defeated host — the Titan whose line bridges gods and mortals, cast into Tartarus with his brothers.
The Battle Between the Gods and the Titans
Joachim Wtewael, c. 1600
Wtewael's crowded Mannerist battle stages the war in which Iapetus and the elder gods fought Zeus. Lightning, twisting nudes and falling limbs turn Hesiod's Titanomachy into a jewel-like chaos — the generation of Iapetus still fighting before the fall.
In play
Iapetus (moon)
Saturn's two-toned moon took the Titan's name — Iapetus as a world half light and half dark, father of mortal lineages among the rings.
Iapetus
Hesiod's Iapetus endures as the ancestor of humankind through Prometheus and Atlas — the Titan whose line bridges gods and mortals.