Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Orithyia.
The gallery
Boreas Abducting Oreithyia
Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, c. 1650
In this Italian Baroque canvas, the Viterbo-born painter Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610-1662) renders the abduction of the Athenian princess Orithyia, daughter of King Erechtheus, by Boreas, the winged god of the North Wind. Spurned in his courtship, Boreas sweeps the frightened maiden aloft on a gust of swirling drapery, his dark wings beating against a turbulent sky. Romanelli's blend of dramatic movement and classicizing grace, learned in the Roman circle of Pietro da Cortona, romanticizes a violent moment from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The painting is held in the Galleria Spada, Rome.
Boreas Abducting Oreithyia
Sebastiano Conca, early 18th century
The Neapolitan late-Baroque master Sebastiano Conca (1680-1764) stages the rape of Orithyia with theatrical élan: the muscular, wind-borne Boreas clasps the recoiling princess as the two are lifted into a vortex of cloud and billowing cloth. The North Wind had glimpsed Orithyia gathering flowers by the Ilissus near Athens and, finding entreaty useless, seized her by force, carrying her off to Thrace where she bore him the winged Argonauts Zetes and Calais. Conca's luminous palette and dynamic diagonals typify the decorative grandeur prized by his eighteenth-century patrons.
The Abduction of Orithyia
Francesco Solimena, c. 1730
Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), the leading painter of late-Baroque Naples, depicts the episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Boreas, god of the North Wind, abducts Orithyia, daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus, from amid her attendant maidens after she has refused his suit. Fluttering cupids attend the passion-driven flight, while Solimena's signature contrasts of flickering light and shadow heighten the maiden's distress. A version after the artist's compositions of the early eighteenth century, the painting is held in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Boreas Abducting Orithyia
Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615
Produced in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), this oil panel gives the abduction of Orithyia its fullest Flemish-Baroque vigor: the powerful, dark-winged Boreas hoists the Athenian princess skyward in a swirl of muscular bodies, fluttering cherubs, and wind-blown drapery. The North Wind's seizure of Erechtheus's daughter and her flight to Thrace was a favored mythological theme, and the Rubensian treatment emphasizes the storm-god's elemental force. The painting hangs in the Neues Palais in the park of Sanssouci, Potsdam, under the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.