Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Iasus.
The gallery
Atalanta and Hippomenes
Guido Reni, c. 1620–1625
Guido Reni's celebrated Baroque canvas freezes the decisive instant of the foot-race that decided the fate of Iasus' daughter. Iasus, the Arcadian king who exposed Atalanta because he longed for sons, set in motion the life that ends here: the swift, unbeatable runner stoops mid-stride to snatch a golden apple of Venus while Hippomenes surges past, his cloak streaming behind him. Reni renders the two nude figures as an interlocking diagonal of arrested motion against a darkened sky, a study in contrary impulses — her downward grasp, his forward flight — that is among the most admired treatments of the legend. Oil on canvas, now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (a near-identical version hangs in the Prado, Madrid).
Hippomenes and Atalanta
Nicolas Colombel, c. 1680
The French classicist Nicolas Colombel stages the same race that sealed Atalanta's destiny, the trial her father Iasus' tradition leads toward. Hippomenes, granted three golden apples by Venus, casts one aside to lure the running maiden off her course; spectators and a watchful goddess frame the contest in a luminous, idealised landscape. Colombel's lucid Poussinesque composition treats the myth as a moral drama of desire and stratagem, the apples a glinting fulcrum between flight and capture. Oil on canvas, c. 141 × 127 cm, in the Liechtenstein collection, Vienna.
Meleager and Atalanta
Jacob Jordaens, 1620–1650
Jacob Jordaens depicts the other great exploit of Iasus' daughter: the hunt of the Calydonian boar. Atalanta, the huntress reared in the wild after her father exposed her, drew first blood on the monstrous boar, and the smitten Meleager awarded her its hide — a gift that ignited a fatal quarrel. Jordaens fills the canvas with the muscular tumult and warm Flemish flesh tones characteristic of his circle, the heroine set among armed hunters and straining hounds. Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid.