Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Nyx.
The gallery
La Nuit (Night)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1883
An oil painting by the French academic master William-Adolphe Bouguereau personifying Night as a graceful female figure gliding through the darkened sky, her dark veil billowing about her. It belongs to a group of allegorical canvases Bouguereau devoted to the times of day, rendering the ancient goddess of night in the polished idiom of nineteenth-century academic painting.
Night and Sleep
Evelyn De Morgan, 1878
An oil painting by the English artist Evelyn De Morgan, now in the De Morgan Foundation collection. Nyx, the goddess of night, drifts across the sky drawing her mantle of darkness over the world, while her son Hypnos floats at her side scattering the poppies of sleep. The intertwined pair show De Morgan's debt to Botticelli and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Nyx, Night Goddess
Gustave Moreau, 1880
Moreau's Symbolist Nyx rises as a jewelled vision of primordial Night — dark wings, star-dust, and the hush before dreaming. The painting names the Hesiodic goddess directly rather than a generic allegory of evening.
Night
Edward Burne-Jones, 1870
Burne-Jones personifies Night as a solemn, draped woman drifting through a star-pricked void — Pre-Raphaelite stillness for the goddess who mothers Sleep and Death. Watercolour and bodycolour; a Victorian heir to the ancient Nyx.
Night
Michelangelo, 1526–1531
Michelangelo's marble Night reclines on the tomb of Giuliano de' Medici in Florence's New Sacristy — owl, mask, and poppies at her side. Renaissance allegory of Night that later ages read through the face of Nyx herself.
In music & on stage
In play
Hades
Supergiant Games
Supergiant's Nyx is the House's foster mother — Night herself raising Zagreus in the dark, cooler and kinder than the Olympians above.
Hades II
Supergiant Games
She remains a pillar of the underworld household in the sequel — Night watching Melinoë's war with the same quiet authority.
Persona 3
Atlus
Atlus makes Nyx the final cosmic threat — the primordial Night as the apocalypse the protagonists must face at the end of the school year.
Nox (mythology)
Rome's Nox is Nyx under a Latin name — Night as a goddess still listed among the powers even Zeus feared to anger.