Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Iphimedeia.
The gallery
Diana between Two Giants (Diane entre deux géants)
After Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1620–1630
A French tapestry preserved at the Château de Chambord, woven after a design attributed to the court painter Toussaint Dubreuil. It depicts the goddess Artemis (Diana) standing between the towering twin giants Otus and Ephialtes, the Aloadae — the sons born to Iphimedeia by Poseidon. In the myth, the brothers grow with monstrous speed and resolve to storm Olympus, Otus desiring Artemis and Ephialtes desiring Hera. Artemis lures them to the island of Naxos and darts between them in the form of a deer, so that the hurled spears of the two giants strike each other dead. The hanging crystallizes the moment of the huntress framed by her would-be captors, the central episode of Iphimedeia's doomed and overreaching offspring.
Illustration to Homer's Iliad (the Aloadae and Ares)
John Flaxman, engraved by Tommaso Piroli, 1793 (drawing); 1795 (engraving)
A copper engraving by Tommaso Piroli after a 1793 outline drawing by the Neoclassical sculptor and draughtsman John Flaxman, from his celebrated linear series illustrating Homer's Iliad. The plate belongs to the episode of the Aloadae, the giant twins Otus and Ephialtes whom Iphimedeia bore to Poseidon. In Iliad Book 5 the brothers overpower the war-god Ares and bind him in a bronze jar, where he languishes for thirteen months until Hermes secretly frees him. Flaxman's spare contour style reduces the scene to pure outline, the signature manner that made these prints a touchstone of European Neoclassicism and carried Iphimedeia's overweening sons into the visual culture of the age.
The Giants — Inferno, Canto XXXI (Plate 65)
Gustave Doré, 1857
An engraving from Gustave Doré's monumental illustrated edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, accompanying Canto XXXI of the Inferno. Doré renders the chained giants who ring the lowest pit of Hell, among them Ephialtes — the son of Iphimedeia and Poseidon, doomed for his assault on heaven. Dante adopts the giants of classical myth as emblems of titanic pride punished, and Doré answers with a vision of colossal, half-glimpsed bodies looming through gloom, fettered for their rebellion against the gods. The image transmits Iphimedeia's son into the medieval and Romantic afterlife of the myth, where the Aloadae's storming of Olympus is reread as the archetype of impious revolt against the divine.