Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Procris.
The gallery
The Death of Procris
Piero di Cosimo, c. 1486–1510
Piero di Cosimo's celebrated panel, now in the National Gallery, London, gives the death of Procris its most haunting form. The young Athenian princess lies stretched along a quiet shoreline, mortally wounded by the unerring javelin she had given her husband Cephalus—struck down when he mistook her in the underbrush for game. A mournful satyr kneels tenderly over her body while a faithful hound, recalling the magical dog Laelaps that belonged to the couple, keeps watch beside her. The painter renders the tragedy with an almost still hush, the marsh birds and pale light underscoring the irony of a love undone by suspicion and a single careless throw.
Cephalus and Procris (The Death of Procris)
Joachim Wtewael, c. 1595–1600
In this Dutch Mannerist treatment by Joachim Wtewael, the catastrophe of the hunt is staged with theatrical anguish. Procris collapses in Cephalus's arms in a forest clearing, his fatal spear—the never-missing gift she herself had bestowed—still implicated in her wound. Wtewael twists the figures into the elongated, polished poses typical of his style, heightening the pathos of a wife who, having jealously spied on her husband, is killed by him in a tragic error. The dense woodland and dramatic gestures turn the Ovidian episode into an emblem of how mistrust between lovers ends in irreversible loss.
Cephalus and Procris
Paolo Veronese, c. 1580–1584
Paolo Veronese's lush Venetian canvas, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg, depicts the final embrace of the doomed Athenian couple. Cephalus, the master huntsman beloved of Dawn, cradles the dying Procris amid a richly wooded landscape, his hound nearby as a reminder of the hunt that brought about her end. Painted as a mythological pendant to his Venus and Adonis, Veronese sets the lovers' tragedy in a warm, golden glow, dressing grief in sumptuous color and graceful movement—a meditation on the fragility of love drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses.