Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Nemesis.
The gallery
Nemesis
Alfred Rethel, 1837
A painting by the German artist Alfred Rethel depicting the winged goddess of retribution in pursuit of a fleeing murderer, vengeance following inescapably across an open, desolate landscape. The work casts the ancient goddess in the brooding moral key of German Romanticism.
Nemesis (The Great Fortune)
Albrecht Dürer, c. 1502
A copperplate engraving by Albrecht Duerer, among the most celebrated prints of the Northern Renaissance. The winged goddess balances on a sphere high above an Alpine valley, holding a goblet and a bridle, emblems of the reward and the restraint she dispenses. Duerer fused Nemesis with the figure of Fortune, drawing on the humanist Poliziano's Latin poem 'Manto'; this impression is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.