Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Lycaon.
The gallery
Lycaon Transformed into a Wolf
Hendrik Goltzius, 1589
Engraving from Goltzius's series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book I, plate 9), now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The plate compresses the whole myth into one charged moment: Jupiter, his eagle at his feet and the cannibal dish before him, has risen from Lycaon's table as the impious Arcadian king flees through his burning palace, his head already lengthening into a wolf's snout. One of the few complete printed cycles of the Metamorphoses, Goltzius's Mannerist line renders the metamorphosis with anatomical precision, turning Ovid's tale of guest-violation and divine vengeance into a study of the human body caught mid-transformation into a beast.
Jupiter and Lycaon (Júpiter y Licaón)
Jan Cossiers, c. 1636–1638
Oil on canvas (120 × 115 cm) by the Antwerp painter Jan Cossiers, made after a design by Peter Paul Rubens for the Spanish court and today in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. The Baroque composition stages the climax of Ovid's first metamorphosis: Jupiter, attended by his eagle and hurling lightning, blasts the palace of King Lycaon, who had tested the god's divinity by serving him human flesh. Lycaon recoils as his form begins to twist toward the wolf's, the swirling drapery and storm-lit sky giving Flemish drama to the punishment that, in Ovid, prompts the great flood of Deucalion.
Jove Turns Lycaon into a Wolf
Georg Andreas Wolfgang the Elder, 1665
Etching on laid paper (15 × 14.6 cm) by the German printmaker Georg Andreas Wolfgang the Elder, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The small plate illustrates the same episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses: enthroned Jupiter unleashes his thunderbolt over the table of the Arcadian king Lycaon, whose body contorts into lupine form as his house collapses around him. A characteristically dense seventeenth-century narrative engraving, it folds the banquet, the divine wrath, and the transformation into a single frame as part of an illustrated Ovidian series.
Lycaon
Virgil Solis, 16th century (c. 1563)
Woodcut/engraving by the Nuremberg printmaker Virgil Solis (1514–1562) from his widely copied illustrated edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book I, lines 209–243). The compact image captures the metamorphosis of the Arcadian king Lycaon into a wolf as punishment for his cannibal feast: Jupiter presides while Lycaon, half-man and half-beast, flees the scene. Solis's broadly disseminated Ovid plates served as a visual model for later painters and engravers across Europe, making this one of the most influential early depictions of the Lycaon legend.