Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Tartarus.
The gallery
The Fall of the Titans
Cornelis van Haarlem, 1588–1590
Large Dutch Mannerist oil painting by Cornelis van Haarlem, now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. A tangle of muscular nude bodies tumbles through darkness as the defeated Titans are hurled into Tartarus, the abyss beneath the underworld — a virtuoso display of late sixteenth-century figure painting.
Sisyphus
Titian, 1548–1549
Oil painting by Titian from his series of the great sinners of the underworld, painted for Mary of Hungary and now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Sisyphus strains beneath the enormous boulder he is condemned to carry up the slope forever in the depths of Tartarus.
The Fall of the Giants
Giulio Romano, 1530–1532
Giulio Romano's illusionistic fresco in the Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua: Olympus crashes down as the Giants are smashed into the pit — Tartarus imagined as architecture collapsing on the rebels.
Olympus: The Fall of the Giants
Francisco Bayeu, 1764
Bayeu's Spanish Baroque canvas: the Giants tumble from Olympus toward the abyss — Tartarus waiting below as Zeus's lightning clears the mountain.
Ixion
Jusepe de Ribera, 1632
Ribera's Prado Ixion: the king bound to the fiery wheel in Tartarus — one of the great sinners whose eternal torment made the pit's name a synonym for punishment.