Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Schoeneus.
The gallery
Atalanta and Hippomenes
Guido Reni, c. 1620–1625
Guido Reni's celebrated Baroque masterpiece, now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, captures the decisive instant of the foot-race that Schoeneus, Atalanta's father, decreed: any suitor who could outrun his swift daughter would win her hand, while the losers would die. Here the runners are frozen in an elegant balletic crossing — Atalanta stoops mid-stride to snatch one of the three golden apples of Venus, while Hippomenes surges ahead, his red drapery billowing. Though the Boeotian king who set the race in motion is not pictured, the entire drama is his contrivance; the painting dramatizes the fatal contest that the Schoeneus tradition (Hesiod and 'some others' per Apollodorus, Ovid, Hyginus) makes the centerpiece of his daughter's legend.
Hippomenes and Atalanta
Nicolas Colombel, c. 1680
This French classical canvas by Nicolas Colombel, held in the Liechtenstein collection in Vienna, stages the race ordained by King Schoeneus within a sweeping Poussinesque landscape. Atalanta breaks her stride to gather the gleaming golden apples scattered by Hippomenes — the trick supplied by Venus that alone could defeat a runner no mortal suitor had bested. Spectators gather to witness the contest whose terms Atalanta's father had fixed: victory meant marriage, failure meant death. The serene architecture and measured grouping translate the violent stakes of the Schoeneus foot-race into the cool, ordered idiom of seventeenth-century French painting.
The Race Between Hippomenes and Atalanta (La Course d'Hippomène et d'Atalante)
Noël Hallé, c. 1765
Noël Hallé's eighteenth-century painting in the Louvre depicts the climax of the contest that Atalanta's father Schoeneus had imposed on all who would marry her. Atalanta, swiftest of mortals, halts to retrieve the third golden apple while Hippomenes races toward the goal; cupids and onlookers animate the open course. The work belongs to the Boeotian Schoeneus strand of the myth followed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, where the heroine is repeatedly named 'Schoeneis,' the daughter of Schoeneus. The king's lethal wager — frame for the whole episode — is the unseen premise driving the figures Hallé sets in graceful, decisive motion.