Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Tityos.
The gallery
Tityus
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 1548–1549
One of Titian's celebrated 'Furias' painted for Mary of Hungary, this canvas depicts the eternal torment of the giant Tityos, the earth-born son who assaulted the goddess Leto and was struck down by her children Apollo and Artemis. Cast into the underworld, the colossal nude is stretched across a rocky outcrop while a vulture (in some accounts an eagle) tears endlessly at his liver, which regrows each day so the punishment never ends. Titian's writhing, foreshortened body and the dark Tartarean gloom make the picture a meditation on hubris against the gods; it hangs today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Tityus
Jusepe de Ribera (after the original by Ribera), 1632 (this copy after Ribera's original)
Jusepe de Ribera's harrowing treatment of the punished giant, of which this version belongs to the Museo del Prado in Madrid. With the unflinching tenebrist naturalism for which the Spanish-Neapolitan master is famed, Ribera shows Tityos chained on the floor of Hades as a great bird sinks its talons and beak into his side to devour his ever-renewing liver. The painting was conceived as a pendant to Ribera's 'Ixion', both illustrating the legendary sinners whose insolence toward the Olympians earned them perpetual torture in the underworld described by Homer and Apollodorus.
Tityus Punished in Hell
Cornelis Cort, after Titian, 1566
An engraving by the Netherlandish printmaker Cornelis Cort reproducing Titian's painting of the tormented giant, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The print disseminated Titian's image of Tityos across Renaissance Europe, showing the earth-giant pinned in Tartarus while a bird of prey gnaws at his immortal liver. Engravings such as this carried the cautionary myth — of the brute who violated Leto and suffered an everlasting penalty at the hands of Apollo and Artemis — to a wide audience beyond those who could see the original canvas.