Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Philoctetes.
The gallery
The Wounded Philoctetes
Nicolai Abildgaard, 1775
Painted in Rome during the artist's formative years and now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, this monumental canvas is the defining image of the suffering archer and a landmark of Danish Neoclassicism. Abildgaard isolates Philoctetes in stark anguish, his snake-bitten foot drawn up beneath him and his powerful body twisted in pain as he clutches the bow of Heracles - the weapon that both sustains him on desolate Lemnos and makes him indispensable to the fall of Troy. Stripped of all narrative incident, the figure becomes a heroic study in physical agony and proud endurance, the very theme of Sophocles' tragedy distilled into a single tormented form.
The Isolation of Philoctetes on Lemnos
Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond, 1818
Held in the Musee des Augustins in Toulouse, this Neoclassical landscape sets the marooned hero within a sweeping, desolate seascape that gives visual form to his abandonment. Wounded by the venomous snake and left ashore by the Greeks on their way to Troy, Philoctetes survives by hunting birds with Heracles' bow and the Hydra-poisoned arrows. Remond, a celebrated painter of historical landscape, subordinates the small human figure to the brooding emptiness of the island, making solitude itself the true subject - the years of festering exile that precede the embassy of Odysseus and Diomedes sent to fetch the bow without which Troy cannot fall.
Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos
Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, 1798
In this Neoclassical composition by the French painter Guillaume Guillon-Lethiere, the abandoned hero is shown amid the rocky wilderness of Lemnos, his wounded foot a constant torment and the great bow of Heracles ever at his side. The painting captures the long, bitter exile dramatized in Sophocles' tragedy: bitten by a serpent and cast off by his own comrades, Philoctetes endures alone with the weapon he received for kindling Heracles' funeral pyre on Mount Oeta. Lethiere emphasizes the pathos and dignity of suffering, the lone archer whose Hydra-poisoned arrows are destined to bring down Paris and decide the fate of Troy.
In play
Philoctetes
Sophocles
Sophocles' tragedy keeps the abandoned archer on Lemnos — the festering wound, Heracles' bow, and the ethics of persuasion.
Philoctetes
The bowman without whom Troy could not fall remains the type of the indispensable exile — marooned, then begged back.