Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Penelope.
The gallery
Penelope and the Suitors
John William Waterhouse, 1911–1912
An oil on canvas (188 × 129.8 cm) by the English Pre-Raphaelite-influenced painter John William Waterhouse, now in Aberdeen Art Gallery (inv. ABDAG003035). The picture seizes on the central image of Penelope's long fidelity: seated at her great upright loom, the faithful wife of Odysseus works her weaving while a crowd of suitors presses in at the window, offering music, flowers and pleas. By day she weaves the funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes and by night unravels it, putting off her promise to choose a new husband and so keeping faith with the absent Odysseus through his twenty-year wandering. Waterhouse makes the loom a wall between her steadfast inward absorption and the importunate world outside.
Penelope recognizing the returned Odysseus (Roman fresco from the Macellum, Pompeii)
Unknown (Roman wall-painter), Before AD 79
A Roman fresco from the Macellum, the central food market of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The scene depicts the climactic homecoming of the Odyssey: Penelope, long besieged by suitors, confronts her husband Odysseus, who has returned to Ithaca disguised as a ragged beggar. The painting belongs to a popular Hellenistic-Roman repertoire of Odyssey episodes, prizing the moment of testing and recognition between the cautious queen and her unrecognized husband. It survives as one of the better-preserved ancient images of Penelope in the act that defined her in myth — the wary, intelligent wife who will not yield until she is certain.
Penelope (drawing after an antique vase)
Adolphe Yvon, Second half of the 19th century
A drawing by the French academic painter Adolphe Yvon (1817–1893), held in the Département des Arts Graphiques of the Louvre, rendering Penelope in the classical manner as 'a seated woman after the antique.' Yvon reprises one of the oldest visual formulas for Penelope, known from fifth-century Attic vase painting: the queen seated with her head bowed and a hand raised to her cheek in the attitude of grief and patient waiting, her loom nearby. The pose became the canonical image of mourning faithfulness, embodying the wife who endured Odysseus's twenty-year absence. Yvon's nineteenth-century copy testifies to the long afterlife of the ancient Penelope type in the academic tradition.
On screen
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Joel and Ethan Coen
The Coens' Depression-era Odyssey gives Penelope a Mississippi double: Penny, the waiting wife who will not remarry until her wandering man comes home — loyalty restaged as screwball stubbornness.
The Odyssey
Andrei Konchalovsky
Konchalovsky's miniseries keeps Penelope at the loom and the bow-contest centre-stage — the Ithacan queen as the home the entire voyage is measured against.