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.