Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Persephone.
The gallery
Proserpine
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874
Oil painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, modelled on Jane Morris. Proserpine stands in the gloom of the underworld holding the bitten pomegranate that binds her to Hades, while a stray gleam of light from the upper world falls on the wall behind her. The 1874 version belongs to Tate Britain, London.
The Rape of Proserpina
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1621–1622
Marble sculpture group by the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini, housed in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. It captures the moment Pluto seizes Proserpina to carry her down to the underworld; the god's fingers pressing into her marble flesh remain one of the most celebrated feats of Baroque carving.
The Return of Persephone
Frederic Leighton, 1891
Late Victorian oil painting by Frederic Leighton, now in Leeds Art Gallery. Hermes guides Persephone up from the darkness of the underworld toward the outstretched arms of her mother Demeter, picturing the annual return that brings spring back to the earth.
On screen
The Goddess of Spring
Wilfred Jackson
Disney's Silly Symphony retells Persephone's abduction as a musical underworld: spring stolen below, winter above, until the seasons bargain is struck.
Kaos
Charlie Covell
Netflix's dark myth comedy makes Persephone a central Olympian wife — the queen of the underworld renegotiating power, marriage and prophecy in a modern pantheon.
Blood of Zeus
The series keeps Persephone in the underworld's politics — the queen beside Hades as Olympus and the dead collide.
In music & on stage
Hadestown
Anaïs Mitchell
Mitchell's musical makes Persephone the seasonal wife who leaves Hades' industrial underworld each spring — the goddess as the show's weather and its conscience.
Perséphone
Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky's melodrama for Ida Rubinstein sets André Gide's Persephone — the goddess's descent and return spoken and sung as a modern ritual of seasons.
Proserpine
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Lully's tragédie en musique for Louis XIV stages Pluto's rape of Proserpine — Persephone's abduction as French court opera at full machinery.
In play
Hades
Supergiant Games
Supergiant's Persephone is the missing queen whose return remakes the House — mother to Zagreus, and the secret the underworld has been keeping.
Hades II
Supergiant Games
She remains central in the sequel as Melinoë's mother — the queen whose absence and return still shape the war on Chronos.
Lore Olympus
Rachel Smythe
Smythe's Webtoon retells the Hades–Persephone romance as a pastel underworld soap — the goddess as the series' heart and the webcomic's breakout myth reboot.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians
Rick Riordan
Riordan's Persephone is the seasonal queen of the underworld — pomegranate, throne and uneasy marriage intact in the demigod cosmology.