Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Tereus.
The gallery
Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636–1638
Painted for Philip IV's hunting lodge at the Torre de la Parada and now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Rubens's oil panel seizes the most violent instant of Ovid's tale. The Thracian king Tereus, who had raped his wife Procne's sister Philomela and cut out her tongue to silence her, recoils in horror as the two sisters thrust before him a platter bearing the head of his own son Itys—whom they have killed and served to him in revenge. Tereus surges up from the banquet table, overturning his seat and reaching for his sword, his face contorted with rage and dawning grief, while Procne and Philomela flee in a swirl of drapery. Rubens compresses the whole arc of the myth—lust, mutilation, infanticide, and the metamorphosis to come—into a single, theatrically charged moment of recognition.
Tereus and Philomela (from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI)
Virgil Solis, 1562
This finely cut woodcut by the Nuremberg printmaker Virgil Solis illustrated a sixteenth-century edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses and circulated widely as a model for later painters. It depicts the crime at the heart of the myth: Tereus, King of Thrace, seizing Philomela in the secluded forest hut to which he has carried her under pretense of escorting her to her sister. Solis stages the assault with the compact, narrative clarity of the emblematic tradition, identifying the figures so that the literate viewer reads at once the betrayal that will lead Tereus to silence Philomela by cutting out her tongue—and, in turn, to the sisters' terrible vengeance and his transformation into a hoopoe.
Procne and Philomela Showing the Head of Itys to Tereus
Johann Wilhelm Baur, 1703
Engraved by Johann Wilhelm Baur for an early eighteenth-century edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, this plate to Book VI presents the climactic confrontation in a crisp Baroque line. Tereus sits at his lonely feast when Procne and Philomela appear before him, holding aloft the severed head of his son Itys to reveal what he has unknowingly devoured. The engraving captures the king's violent start of horror and his pursuit of the fleeing sisters, the architectural setting and incised detail lending the gruesome revenge scene the measured composure of a printed cycle—an image that fixed the episode in the visual imagination of generations of readers.
Philomela and Procne Preparing to Kill Itys
Unknown (attributed to a follower of the Brygos Painter), c. 490 BC
This Attic red-figure wine cup (kylix), now in the Louvre, is among the earliest surviving images of the Tereus saga, painted nearly two thousand years before Rubens returned to the subject. It shows Procne and Philomela steeling themselves over the small figure of the boy Itys, the son of Tereus, as they prepare the murderous revenge that will be served to the Thracian king at his table. Though Tereus himself does not appear, the vase depicts the pivotal act against his bloodline—the killing of his only child—and testifies to how deeply the myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela was woven into Greek visual culture from the classical period onward.