Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Iris.
The gallery
Iris Carrying the Water of the River Styx to Olympus for the Gods to Swear By
Guy Head, c. 1793
Painted around 1793 by the English Neoclassicist Guy Head and now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, this canvas shows Iris in full flight, her great wings spread and her drapery streaming as she races across a turbulent sky bearing an ewer of the sacred water of the Styx — the river by which the gods swore their unbreakable oaths. As the swift winged messenger of the Olympians, Iris is the divine courier who runs the errands of heaven; the storm-grey clouds and the goddess's headlong momentum embody her role as the speeding bridge of light between Olympus and the world below.
Iris
Guy Head, c. 1793
This study of the rainbow goddess by Guy Head, held by the National Galleries of Scotland (NG 2756), isolates Iris as a winged figure poised in motion against an open sky. Daughter of the Titan Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, Iris personifies the rainbow itself — the shimmering arc that the ancients saw as her path between the realm of the gods and that of mortals. Head renders her with the buoyant grace of a herald caught mid-descent, the iridescent atmosphere around her standing for the prismatic colours of her sign.
Iris as Messenger in the Realm of Hypnos
Giulio Carpioni, c. 1650–1660
This Baroque canvas by the Venetian painter Giulio Carpioni, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (GG 1608), illustrates the episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Juno dispatches Iris to the shadowy cave of Hypnos, god of Sleep. Iris glides in upon her luminous rainbow, her wings and bright drapery cutting through the dim, dream-haunted realm to deliver the goddess's command. The painting captures Iris in her defining function as the gods' winged messenger, the radiant courier who descends on a bridge of coloured light to carry Olympus's will into the farthest corners of the cosmos.
In play
Rainbow
Iris remains the rainbow's messenger — the bridge of colour between gods and mortals still carries her name in poetry and science.
Iris (plant)
The iris flower took the goddess's name for its spectrum of petals — Hera's messenger blooming in gardens worldwide.