Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Merope.
The gallery
Mérope (illustration to Voltaire's tragedy)
Antoine-Jean Duclos, after Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune), 1784
Surviving ancient art almost never depicts the Messenian Merope, so her image lives chiefly in the great early-modern stage tradition of her story. This engraving by Antoine-Jean Duclos after a design by Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune) was made for the 1784 edition of Voltaire's complete works (Oeuvres complètes, Theatre, vol. III), illustrating his hugely popular tragedy Merope. The play dramatizes exactly the myth recorded by Apollodorus and Hyginus: the widowed queen, forced toward the usurper, who at the climax all but kills her own disguised son before recognizing him. The print stages this tense recognition-and-revenge moment in neoclassical theatrical dress. Held by the ETH-Bibliothek, Zurich; public domain.
Portrait of Sophie Friederike Seyler as Mérope
Anton Graff, 1775
The Swiss-German painter Anton Graff portrays the celebrated actress Sophie Friederike Seyler in the title role of Merope, the Messenian queen whose grief and resolve made her a favourite heroine of eighteenth-century tragedy. Graff captures the actress in costume and in character, embodying the widow of Cresphontes who hides her infant son Aepytus and waits years for revenge on the murderer Polyphontes. Painted in 1775, the portrait belongs to the era when Voltaire's and Maffei's Merope dominated the European stage, and it is one of the most direct surviving images of the figure herself. Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Jean-Baptiste Brizard as Narbas in Voltaire's Mérope
Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, 1765
This watercolour-and-crayon drawing by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle records a Comedie-Francaise performance of Voltaire's Merope, showing the actor Jean-Baptiste Brizard as Narbas in Act III. Narbas is the loyal old servant who, in Voltaire's recasting of the myth, secretly raised Merope's surviving son far from Messenia and protects the family from the usurper Polyphontes - the dramatic counterpart of the guest-friend and the grandfather Cypselus who shelter the infant Aepytus in Hyginus and Apollodorus. The drawing is a vivid eighteenth-century witness to how Merope's revenge saga was staged for the living theatre. Executed in black crayon, sanguine and watercolour; later engraved by Jean-Baptiste Delafosse. Public domain.