Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Myrrha.
The gallery
Myrrha and Cinyras
Antonio Zanchi, c. 1665–1670
Zanchi's Baroque canvas in the National Museum in Warsaw stages Ovid's darkest incest: Myrrha and her father Cinyras. The Cypriot princess's crime — and the metamorphosis that will birth Adonis from the myrrh-tree — is painted as a night scene of desire and doom.
Myrrha
Auguste Rodin, c. 1886–1889
Rodin's sculpture isolates Myrrha as a body caught between woman and tree — the Ovidian metamorphosis made flesh. The Cypriot princess who asked to vanish from both life and death becomes a study in shame, desire and wooden transformation.
Myrrha and Cinyras
Virgil Solis, 1563
Solis' woodcut for Ovid's Metamorphoses illustrates the Cinyras–Myrrha episode that ends in the myrrh-tree. Sixteenth-century book illustration carries the Cypriot myth into print — the crime, the flight, and the bark that will open for Adonis.
The Birth of Adonis
Nicolas-André Monsiau, c. 1790s
Monsiau's neoclassical scene shows Adonis born from Myrrha already half tree — midwives and deities receiving the child from the bark. Ovid's metamorphosis becomes a birth tableau: the princess of Cyprus as living wood and mother in one body.
Birth of Adonis
Benedetto Montagna, c. 1515–1520
Montagna's engraving in the National Gallery of Art shows the infant Adonis delivered from Myrrha's transformed trunk. Early Renaissance printmaking fixes the Cypriot princess as the tree that both punishes and preserves her — bark as womb.