Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Taygete.
The gallery
The Pleiades
Elihu Vedder, 1885
Oil on canvas, 61.3 by 95.6 cm, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of George A. Hearn, 1910; accession 10.64.13). The American Symbolist painter Elihu Vedder shows the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione drifting in a luminous void, each holding a thread strung with a star. Taygete, the Laconian Pleiad who became the mountain-nymph of Mount Taygetus and bore Lacedaemon to Zeus, is one of the sisters in this celestial sorority; the cluster of stars they cradle is the constellation that bears the family's name. One star hangs dark and dimmed at the lower left, a quiet allusion to the ancient tradition of the 'lost Pleiad.'
The Dance of the Pleiades (Star Lore of All Ages, plate)
After Elihu Vedder, 1911
Published plate from William Tyler Olcott's 'Star Lore of All Ages' (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911), reproducing Elihu Vedder's vision of the Pleiades as a circling band of star-maidens. The engraved illustration appears in a chapter on the mythology and folklore of the Pleiades star cluster, presenting the seven sisters — among them Taygete, eponym of the Laconian mountain range and ancestress of the Spartan kings through her son Lacedaemon — as luminous dancers whose movement traces the rising and setting of the constellation across the night sky.
Study for "The Pleiades"
Elihu Vedder, c. 1885
Metropolitan Museum study for Vedder's Pleiades canvas: the seven star-sisters take shape in chalk and wash — among them Taygete, the Laconian Pleiad whose name clings to Mount Taygetus and the Spartan line through Lacedaemon.
The Rising of the Pleiades (illustration to Hesiod)
John Flaxman, c. 1817 (1910 plate)
Flaxman's outline drawing for Hesiod's Works and Days: the rising of the Pleiades marks harvest time — the star-cluster that is also the seven sisters, Taygete among them, written into the farmer's calendar and the night sky.