Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Palamedes.
The gallery
Palamedes
Antonio Canova, c. 1804–1805
Canova's full-length marble of the Euboean prince — the wisest of the Greeks at Troy, inventor of letters and dice — stands in the Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo on Lake Como. The nude youth holds a sheathed sword whose grip is inscribed with Greek letters, a neoclassical emblem of the ingenuity that later tradition credited to Palamedes and that cost him his life when Odysseus framed him for treason. Modeled after Philostratus's description of a hero 'halfway between a heavy and a light athlete,' it is the canonical modern image of Palamedes.
Odysseus Feigns Madness
Unknown (early 17th century), early 17th century
This early-modern painting, now in the Ptuj Ormož Regional Museum in Slovenia, stages the Cypria episode that seals Palamedes's fate: Odysseus, feigning madness to avoid the Trojan War, plows the shore with salt while Palamedes places the infant Telemachus in the furrow, forcing the Ithacan to swerve and confess his sanity. The exposure earns Odysseus's lasting hatred and, in the epic cycle, leads to the planted gold and Palamedes's stoning. The canvas preserves the cleverest Greek as the man who saw through the trick.
Palamedes (Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum)
Published by Guillaume Rouillé, 1553
A woodcut bust from Rouillé's Renaissance portrait book Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum presents Palamedes in the imaginary antique mode of the mid-sixteenth century — bearded, helmeted, and labeled as the son of Nauplius. Though invented rather than archaeological, the print belongs to the early modern effort to give every Trojan-War hero a recognizable face, and it remains one of the few freestanding Renaissance images of the inventor Odysseus destroyed.
Reconstruction of the Nekyia of Polygnotus (with Palamedes among the dead)
Carl Robert and Hermann Schenck (after Polygnotus), 1892 (reconstruction of a 5th-century BC mural)
Carl Robert and Hermann Schenck's 1892 graphic reconstruction of Polygnotus's lost Nekyia mural in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi, described at length by Pausanias. Among the shades of the underworld Pausanias names Palamedes — the inventor destroyed by Odysseus — so the reconstruction restores him to the company of the Trojan dead. It is the principal modern attempt to visualize the classical painting in which Palamedes's afterlife was staged for Delphi's visitors.