Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ixion.
The gallery
Ixion
Jusepe de Ribera, 1632
Ribera's Prado canvas binds the Lapith king to the wheel that never stops: a tormentor turns the rim while Ixion's body twists in tenebrist shadow — one of the surviving Furias of eternal insolence against Zeus.
Ixion, King of the Lapiths, Deceived by Juno
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615
Rubens stages the crime before the wheel: Ixion embraces the cloud-form of Juno while Zeus looks on — desire for the queen of heaven that will birth the Centaurs and earn the spinning punishment.
Ixion (from The Four Disgracers)
Hendrick Goltzius, after Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, 1588
Goltzius engraves Cornelis' foreshortened fall: Ixion plummets through air toward the wheel below — one of the Four Disgracers who insulted the gods and learned the measure of Tartarus.
The Torture of Ixion
Giovanni Battista Langetti, 17th century
Langetti's Venetian tenebrism locks the king to the fiery wheel — muscle and flame in the dark, the Lapith's eternal spin rendered as raw underworld theatre.
In play
Ixion
The Lapith king's fiery wheel remains the emblem of eternal spinning punishment — desire bound to a circle that never stops.
28978 Ixion
A large Kuiper-belt object took Ixion's name — the wheel-bound king carried into the outer solar system.
Centaur
Greek tradition makes Ixion father of the Centaurs by the cloud-form Nephele — the wheel-bound Lapith as the genealogical source of the horse-men.