Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pyrrha.
The gallery
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Rubens' Prado sketch for the Torre de la Parada shows the flood survivors casting stones that become a new human race — Ovid's Metamorphoses staged as Baroque energy after the waters fall. Pyrrha kneels beside Deucalion among wreckage while earth repopulates behind them; daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, she is the Greek Eve of the second creation.
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, 1655
Castiglione's Denver Art Museum canvas isolates the couple in a rocky waste as they throw their 'mother's bones' — the stones of earth — that rise as men and women. The Genoese painter makes Pyrrha's share of the oracle as visible as her husband's: she, too, must hurl the stones that remake humanity.
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Virgil Solis, 1562
Solis's woodcut for Ovid's Metamorphoses freezes the oracle's command: husband and wife hurl stones over their shoulders while new bodies form from the ground. The print carried Pyrrha's flood into countless Renaissance editions of the poem — the Hellenic survivor who repopulates the world beside Deucalion.
In play
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book 1 makes Pyrrha and Deucalion the survivors who repopulate the world from stones — the Greek flood told as Rome's foundational metamorphosis, with Pyrrha as equal partner in the second creation.
Pyrrha
Daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, wife of Deucalion — the Hellenic flood survivor whose name still marks the Deucalionid line through Hellen.