Conversation: Homer’s Odyssey in Art and Popular Culture

(audience chattering)

Good evening and welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Lisa Ayla Cakmak, and I am the Mary and Michael Jaharis Chair and Curator of the Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium here at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The last time I was in this room was to celebrate the opening of the department's epic exhibition, "Myth & Marble," which actually will make a small cameo in this evening's conversation. And so it seems like every time we get together in this room, we are here to celebrate some sort of significant, artistic, or cultural moment. And today, that moment is the "Odyssey." Now, of course, we knew that the "Odyssey" was gonna be the event of the summer the minute we all learned of the release date of Christopher Nolan's film.

Now, a little bit of business before we begin. I'd just like to remind you to silence your phones. You don't have to turn them off.

It's just so that they don't ring while Ginia and I are speaking. And I wanna acknowledge our sponsor. Today's program is part of the Boshell Family Foundation Lecture Series.

This lecture series is generously sponsored by the Boshell Family Foundation, with the goal of presenting programs designated to stimulate interest in the art and archeology of the ancient world. And seeing how many of you are in the audience today, I think we have checked that box. (audience laughing) (audience applauding) Joining me in conversation today is my dear friend and colleague, Ginia Shubik Sweeney, who is a Director of Interpretation here at the Museum.

Ginia works closely with teams across the Museum to present engaging narratives that connect visitors with works of art. Now, Ginia and I share a fascination with bridging the gap between ancient history and modern audiences. And tonight, we are not gonna focus too closely on any one retelling of the "Odyssey." Instead, we'll use this moment as a way into a much longer story, nearly 3,000 years of artists, writers, and audiences returning to Odysseus.

Across these centuries, the story has been told and retold in ways that often reveal as much about the artist's own world and time as they do about Homer's. Sometimes the references are concrete and recognizable, a ship, a one-eyed monster, a wandering hero. At other times, the "Odyssey" becomes more subtle, a reference that allows artists to explore the ideas of their own moment, with Odysseus as a common symbol enduring across time.

Now, of course, my specialty lies in antiquity, so I couldn't ask for a better conversation partner than Ginia to help us understand where the "Odyssey" pops up throughout our collection. But before I bring her on the stage, I want to begin with the foundation of it all. The Homeric poems were not originally encountered as silent texts on a page.

They belonged to an oral tradition spoken or perhaps sung aloud in Greek. So to bring us back to that beginning, I'd like to share the first lines of the "Odyssey" as they might have been heard and invoke the Muses. (Lisa speaking in foreign language) "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy" And I'd like to welcome Ginia to join me on stage.

Thank you. (audience applauding) Welcome, Ginia.

Thank you, Lisa. I'm so delighted to be here. And can you tell me what brings us here to talk about a nearly 3,000 year old poem?

I think it's a little film called the "Odyssey." In preparing for tonight's conversation, Ginia and I were doing some research. I don't know how many of you know this, but as of last week when I did the Google search, the "Odyssey" is the highest grossing R-rated film in history. It has brought in nearly $1.4 billion both in the US and internationally.

It has dominated the cultural discourse of the entire summer. And so we thought we should hop on that bandwagon. (audience laughing)

We wanted to talk about the influence of Homer a little bit on popular culture, but mostly on visual art. We're art historians after all, so this is our bread and butter. And there's just so much material to dive into.

So much. But also, we wanna reassure everybody, if you have not seen the film or if you have not recently read or reread the poem, you should leave. That's okay. (audience laughing)

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. They hate me when I make these jokes. It's totally fine.

Just sit back and enjoy the show. So, we love this line because I think it shows how far-reaching the epic poems of Homer are. So as just a quick reminder, Homer is...

Two poems are attributed to Homer, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." the "Iliad" is about the siege and the war at Troy, on the planes of Troy, and the "Odyssey" focuses on our hero Odysseus and his return. And it's just so embedded in our culture. It's sort of like in the air.

And we were joking, I think that we could probably play the game "Six Degrees of Separation" with Homer and literally anything else. (audience laughing)

And most of the works of pop culture that we've kind of compiled here are directly inspired by or retelling the "Odyssey," but there are so many other works that we could have put on here, like "The Wizard of Oz," "Cold Mountain," "Ulysses." Haven't quite cracked that one yet. (indistinct) (Ginia laughs)

But also things like "Dune," the Atreides family is directly lifted from Homer and ancient Greek mythology. So we could have done an entire program just on Homer in popular culture, but we decided we wanted to focus on Homer in the visual arts and draw on some of the things from our own collection, right?

As well as from other collections.

And to show that Homer is not just ripe material for illustration, but also how his language, his ideas, his themes and the genre of epic influence artists from the ancient past until today.

And remain really current. Yeah.

But let's back up a little bit. So who is Homer?

Homer is a poet, or a bard, and he was an author. Whether he was the author of the two poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," is anyone's guess. It's still debated.

What's interesting about Homer, whoever he was, is that he seemed to have the good fortune of having been born at a time when the Greeks had adopted a written alphabet from their neighbors, the Phoenicians. And so he really is sort of like the author of record of these poems. He's the one who sort of transcribed them.

But they exist before him, but he sort of gets the credit for penning them as it were. An interesting biographical detail that comes down to us from ancient historians is that he was also blind. And we were talking about this earlier, that is an interesting detail for several reasons.

But as it pertains to his authorship, I do find it interesting the idea that a blind bard is the one who's responsible for learning this new alphabet and putting pen to paper or stylus to wax tablet or papyrus, scroll in the 8th century.

But, really, this idea of Homer's blindness and blindness as linked to oral storytelling has really persisted throughout the centuries. And so you see the idea of the blind storyteller really throughout art history in something like Francisco de Goya's painting in the Prado, "The Blind Guitarist." So this centers on a kind of Homer-like bard who's traveling from town to town, conveying stories, and you can see all these people kind of gathered around him to hear the stories. And this is something that Picasso would have seen certainly visiting the Prado, and then he paints our painting, "The Old Guitarist," which is very much indebted to this Homeric tradition.

It shows a guitarist in tattered clothing. He has his eyes closed in a way that people throughout the years have interpreted to signal blindness, and he's seemingly transported by his art form.

And one thing I would also love to point out that connects these two pieces with the poem that I recited, I very specifically selected the translation by Robert Fagles, which is the middle one here. I cannot tell you how much preparation Ginia and I had to do for this. This is our little reading list, although ignore "Ulysses." We did not embark upon that.

But I specifically chose the Fagles because he translates the first verb of the poem as sing. And I think it speaks to the musicality of ancient Greek lyric poem, which I think you see-

Absolutely. In these two paintings. So whoever Homer was, whether he was the author of both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" or he wasn't, his was a name to launch a thousand headlines. (audience laughing) And this is just the New York Times.

This is just a selection of headlines in the New York Times. Why, Ginia? Why do you think he's so popular?

Well, as A.O. Scott put it, "We'll Help You Find Your Next Book. (Spoiler: It's the 'Odyssey.')" The "Odyssey" is all things to all people. It's a thriller.

It's an action story. It's a romance. There's grief. There's tragedy.

There's gore. There's sort of something for everybody. And so for the remainder of our conversation, we are gonna focus on the visual arts.

So you can imagine our absolute horror when this article was published by our friends at the New York Times on July 24th. "In Artwork Across The Ages, Odysseus' Myth Keeps Entrancing Audiences." I was like, "Way to steal our thunder, New York Times." (audience laughing) So they selected, they showcased a piece from the Met. I don't know if you've heard of that place, the MFA in Boston.

Another like... The Getty. Fine if you like earthquakes.

But if you scroll through, finally, the last piece that was featured is this cassone that is in the collection of the Art Institute.

[Ginia] And on view in the Deering Galleries.

[Lisa] Yeah. (indistinct) Go ahead.

[Ginia] So a cassone is an Italian wedding chest. This is from 1435 to '45. Bookmark that date.

It will be important. Yes.

[Ginia] So this is an elaborately decorated chest that would have been given to a couple on the occasion of their marriage, and then it would have been placed in a prominent place in their home where they would have used it to store important things like linens and the wedding trousseau.

So the date is important because it is the 15th century Italy. The first printed copy of the "Odyssey" in Greek is not produced until 1488. So prior to 1488, the way the "Odyssey" is being passed on and passed around is through handwritten manuscripts.

Illuminated manuscripts that themselves have... It's this long game of telephone. You start with fragments of ancient papyri.

So on the left, this is a fragment of the "Iliad" that's actually at the collection at the library at the University of Chicago that dates to the 2nd century CE. And so I think it's interesting in this moment in 15th century Italy to think about how do people know this story? Are they reading it? How literate are they? Do they have a copy? Or is it just sort of in the zeitgeist? Like I said earlier, is it just sort of in the air, people know the stories? So we thought we would kind of walk you a little bit through, do a little recap just in case, again, you haven't been taking care of your summer reading list.

And so one of the really interesting things about the "Odyssey" is it's actually a nonlinear narrative. It's told in this very twisty-turny fashion. And a lot of the episodes happen where Odysseus is later recounting them for people who are hosting him at court.

And similarly, the way that the narrative unfolds across the scene on this wedding chest is very kind of circular. It really unwinds across the scene.

We should also point out, if you search for Odysseus or Odyssey on our website, this object will not come up. I know this from experience because it is listed under his Latinate version "Ulysses." So, Ulysses and Odysseus are the same person. One is the Greek, one is the Latin.

But, ultimately, the "Odyssey" is the story of Odysseus's 10-year long journey after the conclusion of the Trojan War back to his home in Ithaca. And he encounters a lot of roadblocks along the way. Some of them are not his fault, some certainly are his fault.

So let's just look at a few of the details here. On the left is the famous scene of the sirens. These are the women who sing so beautifully that you throw yourself on their rocks and die.

So, yeah, that's a roadblock not of his making, I think.

And so throughout most of the scenes on the wedding chest, Odysseus is recognizable because he is wearing this incredible guilt outfit. And so... He's not wearing that, however, in the scene on the upper right, which is his rescue at sea by the sea nymph Ino.

And so this is actually a really minor episode in the "Odyssey." It really takes only a few lines in book five. And so we were speculating that perhaps it's included on the wedding chest because she uses a magical scarf to give him immortality while Poseidon is trying to thwart his journey home.

[Lisa] Yeah, so he doesn't drown, essentially. I would like that magical scarf.

[Ginia] Yes, same. He has to return it at the end.

But we though there was also something very interesting about the inclusion of such a small episode on an object that probably would have held valuable textiles and linens, and if there was maybe a reference to the contents of the cassone. And then at the bottom, I'm gonna test Ginia, we have a feast. And this is a very, it illustrates a very big theme of the poem.

And also in the film, for those of you who saw the film, that they call Zeus' Law. And in the Greek, do you wanna try?

[Ginia] It's called Xenia.

Xenia. Okay, close enough.

And Xenia is this idea that you have to be welcoming of strangers because you never know who the stranger might be. It could be a god in disguise. And so at the lower right, we have an episode that Nolan actually has completely cut from the film, which is his stay at the Court of the Phaeacians and with the Princess Nausicaa.

And this is held up in the poem as sort of the gold standard of Xenia and how welcoming they are. On the cassone, we have also illustrations of the opposite.

Yeah, so the whole left side of the scene is the kind of encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. And Lisa and I both love this. This is so vividly represented.

And so if you look in the Cyclops's mouth, he has these little legs coming out. And so he's really showing the opposite of this hospitality because he actually eats his guests.

Yes. Yeah. (audience laughing) But to his credit, I guess, Odysseus isn't actually the exemplar of the kind of Greek model behavior either because he breaks into Polyphemus' home, he steals his food.

Steals his cheese. He blinds him. Yeah, drugs him. And then, ultimately, he makes this daring escape on the underside of one of his rams.

And so that's actually what we're seeing in the image on the right here. And this is a sculpture from over a thousand years before the painting, which we had on view last year in our exhibition of the collection of, the Torlonia Collection of Roman marbles.

And we wanna pause here because my job is firmly rooted in the past. And so let's just do a little bit of timekeeping. The poem and Homer date to the 8th century BCE.

The cassone... Excuse me, the Roman sculpture dates to the 1st century CE. So that's already, at that point, the poem in its written form is almost a thousand years old.

And then you get to 15th century Italy, and the poem now is nearly 2,000 years old. And today we're still talking about the "Odyssey," and it is 3,000 years old. How many other things do you talk about on the regs, as the kids say, that are 3,000 years old? And I think that's part of what is so amazing and what Ginia and I love so much about these poems, is just how long lasting and accessible and entertaining they are.

There are a couple of more snippets we wanted to show you from the cassone. These two on the left is another closeup from the cassone. On the right is actually a tapestry fragment from 17th or 18th century England that both show the witch, Circe.

Circe is another one of these figures who sort of subverts the concept, the idea of Xenia because she turns Odysseus's... She turns his crew into pigs. As one does.

I mean, you can read so much into that. We're not here for that today, but I'm just saying. (audience laughing) But what I think is interesting about this snippet here is what's left out, right, Ginia?

[Ginia] Yeah, I mean, Odysseus stays with Circe for a year. They actually have children together. And then meanwhile, back in Ithaca, his long suffering wife, Penelope, is waiting faithful the whole time.

She has a trick of her own, so she's weaving the funeral shroud for Odysseus' father, Laertes. And she has told all of the suitors who have broken into her home, they've tried to steal her riches and they've tried to usurp Odysseus as her husband. And she's told them she can't choose another husband until the shroud is finished.

And then each night, she unpicks all of the weaving. So, here, we see her at work, and we actually see on the right a scene of Odysseus's return home before she realizes that it's him. He's in disguise.

So one of the things that we think Penelope helps illustrate is why the "Odyssey," a tale about this wandering hero of many twists and turns, was selected to be depicted on the cover of a wedding chest. And we think some of that has to do with the ideas of fidelity, and Penelope is the exemplar of the faithful, industrious, and clever wife. I think this is something that Nolan maybe gets...

He doesn't explore as much as I think I would've liked for him to do in the film, but you definitely see this in the poems. Penelope is Odysseus's match. She is as clever and she is the only one in the poem who elicits an angry reaction from him by trying to trick him.

"Why don't we move the bed out of our room and set it up in the hallway?" And what happens? And Odysseus, he has actually carved their marriage bed from a living tree, so it's immovable. And the only two people who would know that are Odysseus and Penelope. And he says, "What are you talking about? We can't move the bed." And so that's her final test of how she reveals his identity.

And so I very much like to read into this, and I do not propose this as an actual sort of formal art historical interpretation, but this idea of Penelope's cleverness is something that a young Florentine bride could read into this and think, you know, Penelope is more than just her work and more than just her fidelity. She's also a match for Odysseus and incredibly crafty. So as Ginia mentioned, just next to it on the cassone, we have the scene of recognition.

We have actually two scenes of recognition happening, right, Ginia?

Yeah, so the first one, so we see Odysseus, he is now disguised as a beggar. He has returned to Ithaca. And Penelope has instructed Eurycleia, who is an enslaved woman, to wash his feet.

Now she's been working in the household for decades, Odysseus's entire life. And so she knows well that he has a scar on his ankle from a youthful trip to Mount Parnassus. And so as she's washing his feet, she recognizes the scar.

And even before Penelope knows that it's him, she recognizes him. But who else recognizes Odysseus?

We also have Argos, the dog. So here on the cassone, he's shown rather spry. He's running towards Odysseus.

But in the poem, it is probably one of the most moving stories from the poem where Argos is, he's neglected. He's on a dung pile. He's cast out by the suitors of the palace.

And he recognizes Odysseus through his disguise and he wags his tail, and then he dies. And it's just the sweetest symbol of recognition and fidelity. And so I like to think of Argos when I'm walking through the Jaharis Galleries and looking at the Byzantine mosaic of nice puppy.

How many of you have pets at home, and you've come home at the end of a long day, and your dog or your cat or your pig or your mongoose is sitting at the door, waiting for you and so happy to have you back home?

So one of the interesting things about this 15th century painting that we've been looking at is that it's very much set in the present-day. That is in 15th century Italy. So the clothing is contemporary to the time it was painted, the architecture.

But now we're looking at the same scene of Eurycleia washing Odysseus' feet in a very different mode. And that is a mode that emphasizes the classical aspect of the story. So this is an illustration, a drawing in our collection by the British artist, John Flaxman, from sometime in the 18th century, where he's really emphasizing the sort of ancient aspect of this story.

[Lisa] And this is an illustration. Flaxman was illustrating Alexander Pope's translation of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," or, in this case, the "Odyssey." And it really is sort of Pope's translation that I think sort of freezes us in time until today. And in our minds, I think when many of us might picture ancient Greece or the stories from the "Odyssey" or the "Iliad," we think of these sort of neoclassical settings.

Yeah, and so Pope, he actually... I mean, it's more of an adaptation than a translation because-

Yeah, he's not true to the language.

He has put it into this format of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. And so that's actually a format that he had mastered himself in his own writing. So he is the author of this 1711 poem called "An Essay on Criticism." And so this is where a lot of kind of famous sayings are coined from.

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

"To err is human."

"To forgive divine." And so he has such success with these rhyming couplets in his own writing that he actually sets out to translate both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into the same format.

And it becomes such a part of, to keep repeating the word zeitgeist is annoying me, so it must be annoying you, but that it is Pope, and by extension, the Flaxman illustrations really sort of set off neoclassicism as an artistic movement. So, when we were looking through some of the Flaxman drawings and illustrations in the collection, Ginia did the work, and I looked at the pictures. And I was like, "Huh, Ginia, that one reminds me of the guy in that French painting that's, like, standing and he's kind of like, is he swearing something?" And she was like, "You mean David, the 'Oath of the Horatii'?" And I was like, "Yes, that one!"

In the Louvre. In the Louvre. Really, really famous painting. And I think you can see just the formal similarities between the oath takers in David's painting and the posture of Odysseus.

[Ginia] Absolutely. And so all of these artists, Pope, Flaxman, David, they're all working to kind of codify Greek and Roman culture as, like, the ultimate paragon that we should emulate.

Yeah, and they've sort of frozen it in time. Now, Ginia was talking about the language of Pope, and he is not the only one who has translated or adapted the poem into iambic pantameter. We have the Wilson translation here from 2018, and she also uses iambic pentameter.

Can you tell us a little bit about why you think both of them selected that meter?

Yeah, so the original in the Greek is in dactylic hexameter. For Pope, he is really thinking about the language of Shakespeare. I mean, this is high culture.

And so he's trying to translate this into what he knows of as high culture. But it reads as very, again, it's very much an interpretation and not exactly true to the original text. Now, Wilson, on the other hand-

Yeah, Wilson is making some very different choices, but what they both have in common with the meter is that iambic pentameter is to English what dactylic hexameter is to ancient Greek. It is the natural sort of flow of the English language. And for Wilson, it was really important to her to keep the pacing of the poem.

I was describing this earlier. For me, reading Wilson was like eating a bag of Doritos. You don't realize that you finished it until the bag is empty.

(audience laughing) Reading this is just, it's so smooth, it's so quick. And I think the experience for some of the other translations is quite different. And one of the things that she also does and that people have commented on in response to the film is the actual vocabulary she chooses.

She does bring the meter in today's vernacular. So, yes, Telemachus does call Odysseus dad/daddy in her translation.

Yeah, and so while we saw the illustrations of Pope's version in Flaxman, Wilson has also inspired contemporary artists. These are not in our collection, but they're such an amazing example of kind of the inspiration of this epic. This is a work by the British artist, Chris Ofili, from 2019.

He did a whole series of paintings after reading Emily Wilson's translation. And what we're looking at here is his rendition of Calypso, who's a goddess who keeps Odysseus captive, maybe, on her island for seven years of the poem. And Ofili has said that one of the things that really inspired him about reading the "Odyssey" was just the rich visual world of the poem.

And partially, that comes through in his use of gold leaf throughout these paintings. And so throughout, especially the Wilson translation, there's so many mentions of things that are shimmering and shining and gold. And so he's translated that kind of very literally here.

I think it also is connected to the poem, to the language of the poem. If you have a friend in your life who doesn't know what a simile is and you wanna teach them, Homer is the best source material. He includes such beautiful similes and metaphors that it is a very visual poem without being a visual art form.

I actually remember I took a class... Freshman fall of college, I took a class on Homer. This is actually my college copy, which was, like, last year.

(audience laughing) And one of our assignments was to pick our favorite simile from either one of the poems and write, at the time this felt, like, so long, a five-page paper. I was like, "Oi." But I think that's one of the things that Ofili really captures really beautifully, is that sort of rich visual texture.

Absolutely. And here's another painting from that same series. This one is titled "Sleeper 2 (Odysseus)." So while in the previous work, we were looking at an immortal character, Calypso, here we're looking at Odysseus, and I was just so struck by how similarly he's represented them.

So they're both these sort of hybrid mercreatures. And Odysseus, he looks so relaxed.

So relaxed. He's kind of in repose. He's just so live. He has this just totally relaxed expression on his face.

And it shows what a... I mean, Emily Wilson famously called him a complicated man, and that was something that Ofili is really emphasizing here, is that complicated nature. I mean, Odysseus is a liar, and he's proud of that fact.

He sacrifices his men in order to ensure his own survival. He spends seven years on the island of this beautiful goddess. Held captive. (audience laughing)

And he's so miserable about it.

Right, but this is one of the things that I think is so interesting about this pair of Ofili works, is there is a lot of similarity between Calypso and Odysseus Here because Calypso has given him the option. She says, "I can make you immortal." And he chooses a mortal life, but we only know about his experience with Calypso from him. He's the one recounting the story.

And the way that he has been characterized and the way he acts throughout both poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," I don't know that he's a reliable narrator. I think it's easy to say, "Oh, I was held captive for seven years." I mean, it takes him 10 years to get home to Ithaca. Seven of those years are with Calypso and one of those years is with Circe.

And all of the other adventures fill up the next two years. So, I mean, he could have gotten home, like, maybe in time for dinner, you know? (audience laughing) Who's to know?

So I think, especially in these works, we see this tension between our notion of what a hero is and the Greek notion of what a hero is. So in the Greek conception, a hero is someone who's achieved a claim through great deeds, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're a good or moral person. And so Odysseus, he is really complicated.

Yeah, he's a tricky... As my eigh-year-old likes to say, "He is tricky, tricky."

But he does eventually make it home. And so that's the subject of this amazing collage by Romare Bearden that's in our collection. So Bearden was an American artist born in 1911 in North Carolina.

He was raised in Harlem, New York City, and he came of age around iconic artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. He had first looked to Homer as source material in the '40s, and then in 1977 turned his attention to the "Odyssey," and he made this amazing series of which this is part of 20 collages, which he exhibited to such great success that he then made watercolor renditions of the compositions, and then a print run of them. And so why would someone like Bearden turn their attention to this ancient narrative of the "Odyssey"? I mean, Bearden had stated that he saw the "Odyssey" as this universal story.

And when I think about it in the context of his other work, you can really see a lot of parallels with other subject matter that he had represented and his own life. I mean, his family had moved from North Carolina to New York as part of the Great Migration, which is this movement in the first part of the 20th century of Black Americans from the South to largely urban centers in the North. And this was also the subject matter of some of his work.

And so when you think about that idea of wandering, looking for home, I can't help but see the parallel to the "Odyssey."

And with this illustration from the series in particular, we see Odysseus and Penelope, and it has made me question, is home Ithaca, the rocky island that in the Nolan film he wakes up and he doesn't even recognize, or is home Penelope and that they just happen to be the same thing? But I think that's part of what the appeal of the story is, is you do question, what is home? Is it a place? Is it a feeling? Is it a person? I think the other thing that is just remarkable about the Bearden work is it is a mini art history lesson waiting to be sort of unpacked. So if you look here... Yeah. He is directly emulating an early 16th century fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Pinturicchio.

So he has emulated everything from this geometric pattern on the floor, the little cat in the foreground playing with the ball of yarn, the kind of strange angle of Penelope's loom.

[Lisa] And even the colors. Look at the colors of the boots and Penelope's dress. That blue color.

But interestingly, he's actually made one major change here, and that's the identification of Odysseus. So in the Pinturicchio, all of the kind of male figures at the right side are the suitors. And so Odysseus is actually barging in through the door, and he's this relatively small figure.

He's wearing Pilgrim's garb, so he has a staff that makes him identifiable. And, again, it's this period where he's disguised with the help of Athena as a beggar. But in the Bearden rendition, he has made Odysseus into this heroic central figure, and he's making this amazing return home and he's declaring himself to Penelope, which, as we've kind of discussed, is not exactly how it happens in the story, but it shows sort of the artist's artistic license and his own interpretation of the story.

And, of course, there's one more very, very significant change between the Pinturicchio and the Bearden, which, of course, is the skin color of the characters. Bearden has chosen to make them all dark skinned, and that partially likely reflect his own experience as a Black man, but he was also influenced by artworks from Benin. This is a Benin bronze in our collection that you see on the right.

And these are sculptures that were made in the Kingdom of Benin, which is in present-day Nigeria in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so we can see Bearden honoring both this sort of Western Italian artistic tradition and also the African world artistic tradition in two very different ways in this illustration.

Yeah, that's a deliberate choice on his part. He said, "If a child in Benin or in Louisiana sees my paintings of Odysseus, he can understand the myth better."

Yeah. So, up until now, we've been talking, we've been showing you a lot of artwork that is very illustrative, which is my comfort zone. We are now moving out of my comfort zone.

Yeah, so I wanted to talk about an artist who kind of shows the influence of Homer and the Homeric poems in a kind of a less direct, more conceptual way. So, here, we're looking at a sculpture from 1995 by the American artist Cy Twombly. So Twombly is born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, but he actually spent much of his life in Italy, which is relevant.

And so on this sculpture, and I apologize, the photo of the inscription is kind of poor, but he actually inscribed at the top of the stepped portion in pencil "winged words." So, "winged word" both in Greek and in English. And so this is a phrase that appears in the "Iliad" and it appears in the "Odyssey" 30 times, both directly and through phrases like, "Then Athena spoke to him with words that flew like birds."

And I find this piece difficult, but what I am learning to love about it is it illustrates how influential the poem can be in many different ways. So you don't just need to be inspired by one of the vignettes, one of the stories, or one of the great grand universal themes. You can also take inspiration from the actual language, from the words, from the text.

Yeah, and you can use those words to evoke so much without illustrating it. And so in the next Twombly painting, this is another example where he's directly engaged with Homer. This is the central panel of a triptych called Ilium, which is another word for Troy, one morning 10 years later.

And so across the whole top of the canvas, he's inscribed the names of a number of the heroes of the Trojan War. And so here, you can see in the circle, he's written the name Odysseus. So I think it would be fair to ask what is he doing exactly by scrawling Odysseus's name on the canvas?

[Lisa] I mean, it's a fair question.

But he is using this name as a stand-in for all the immensity of the Homerian world, all of the mythology, that kind of oral storytelling, the zeitgeist around Odysseus. So when we as viewers see the name Odysseus or Agamemnon, or Achilles, which are also written on these canvases, we immediately have to think of our own associations, our own memories, and bring to bear our experiences while we're looking at the canvas. And so he's actually making it into this deeply personal experience.

And it's not necessarily easy because he's asking you to do a lot of work as you're looking at it. And he's taking these ideas from the past and making them undeniably present and personal. And I just wanna show one further example of what Twombly is doing here, and this is from our collection.

This is a canvas called, "The First Part of the Return from Parnassus." It's from 1961. So the title is likely a direct reference to a trio of English satiric comedies in the late 15th and early 16th century. However, there's a long history around Mount Parnassus.

So this is actually the place where Odysseus as a boy had gone on a bore hunt and ended up getting the scar- The injury and the scar.

That allows Euriclea to identify him. And just in mythology more generally, it's known as the home of the Muses. So it's the symbolic center of art, music, and literature.

And I think, again, it would be fair to say, what does this canvas have to do with that? And I think the answer is to look closely at the surface of the canvas so that you can really understand what he's doing. There's so much more going on than you can see in a flattened image on a projector. I mean, he's using pencil, he's using crayon, oil paint.

He's going back in, he's drawing into wet paint. He's creating these three-dimensional areas of impasto. And, in general, he's created this palimpsest-like surface that echoes the layers and layers of history, of storytelling, of retelling all on top of each other.

So at the time that Twombly made this painting, he was living in Rome. And so I like to think about him kind of walking around the city. He's seeing the way that history was physically layered around him in the ancient fragments of architecture, in the modern graffiti scrawled on the walls, in walls that were made out of recycled stones.

It's really... He has embodied this, again, layered sense of history, of time, of ideas. He's taken these ancient stories and updated them for his present moment, which is kind of the mid-century.

I think what I see in these details and in my multiple conversations with Ginia also feeds into the non-linearity of the poem. He doesn't... Obviously, it has a beginning, middle, and end, but it doesn't unfold in chronological order.

And neither does... We cannot understand history in these very nice, neat, orderly. If anyone has ever been fortunate enough to work on an excavation, you don't get like, "This is the year 2000, and this is 1990, and then this is 1800." It's all mixed up, and you kind of have to make sense of it.

Yeah, history is messy. It is. And so is Odysseus. (audience laughing)

So to wrap up, we wanted to talk about another epic work of art that we have on view here at the museum, and that is Raqib Shaw's "Paradise Lost." Now, it's kind of an interesting choice to conclude because it's actually not a direct translation of Homer, really, in any way.

[Lisa] Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't think if you were to ask the artist, he would not say that he was looking to Homer.

But the connection is undeniable. And so just to give a little bit of background about this artist. So first of all, this painting, it's 100 feet long.

It's actually still in progress, so, at some point, he'll continue adding panels to it. And it's been underway for over 25 years. And so this tells a deeply personal story about the artist's life, but it's also, he says deeply, deeply universal.

And it's about all of the traumas that make us who we are. And fundamentally though, the story of "Paradise Lost" is one about the longing for home. So, really, with the same story as the "Odyssey."

And you can't make the reference to Milton's "Paradise Lost" without calling to mind Homer because Milton is responding to Homer in the creation of his Christian epic. He felt that there needed to be a Christian epic to counter the pagan epics of Homer. So even if Homer isn't a direct influence on Shaw, he's conjured up just by the reference to Milton.

[Ginia] Absolutely. And so here, we just see a few details, the very earliest part of the painting. Shaw was raised in Kashmir, the geopolitically disputed region between India, Pakistan, and China.

And as a teenager, he had to flee and has never returned. And so he calls upon his memories for this place that he thinks of as home and his longing for it. And so in the very earliest scene on the left, we see his depiction of these beautiful conifer trees in the Himalayan Valley, and that's actually a self-portrait as kind of this wolf-like character howling at the moon.

But eventually, after all of the travails that he goes through across the painting, he does find some semblance of peace. And again, it's that question of, "What is home exactly?" Is it a place? Is it a state of mind?

But then within that arc, there are these vignettes within the painting that use different colors, different characters, and with some references to ancient Greek mythology. There are centaurs and sirens and monsters. So, a little bit like the "Odyssey," you can really lose yourself in this painting.

And there's something for everyone in the Shaw, which you can see in the Alsdorf Galleries. And so with that, we just wanted to highlight the three works that we did talk about that are on view. And I think it's also interesting to see the Shaw and the cassone on the same slide.

And we would be happy to take a handful of questions. Thank you all so much. (audience applauding) I think someone from AIC staff will be wandering around with...

Yes, in the back, there's- We have a question in the far back.

[Audience Member] Hello, good evening, and thank you for the lecture. It was wonderful. One of the things I noticed having read the play, or excuse me, the poem, 30 years ago-

Sorry, where are you?

[Audience Member] I'm over here, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Okay, thank you.

[Audience Member] One of the things, as I watched Christopher Nolan's film, that I did not remember from the poem was the indemnity and strength put within women throughout the entirety of it. In fact, they steal the movie if you haven't seen it. But the idea being, for me, as you're talking about the art, I mean, we're hearing a lot about Penelope.

In your research and your preparation, how much more did you find from an artistic standpoint, visual or illustrative or however you'd like to categorize it, about the women within the poem?

I mean, I think you're right that the women steal the show. They are kind of every identity. They're villains, they're saviors.

There's Athena who has this tremendous role in the poem that's sort of downplayed in the film.

Yeah, well, sort of all the women are a little flattened, I think, in the film.

Fair. My opinion. I think Penelope is, at least in the artistic tradition, it really is largely images of Penelope, and then, of course, Athena, and Athena in all of her many different roles. But I think what's interesting about Athena in the poem is, she really loves Odysseus, right? Like, really loves him.

I'm hard pressed to think of another character from Greek mythology that she cares for as much. Maybe Herakles? But ish. I mean, and Herakles is part immortal.

But I think the strength of the female characters in the poems sadly just isn't seen as much in the visual arts as we would like and as much as they deserve because they are... I mean, they are, pardon my French, they are very badass women in that poem.

We did come across a number of interesting depictions of Circe that didn't necessarily make it into the slideshow. And so I think she's a really interesting character and she's, of course, the subject of Madeline Miller's novel of the same name.

Any other questions?

On the right side, center?

I saw one down here.

Did you have your hand up?

I'm here. Yes. The question is just, "What's on view in the galleries right now?" Yes, it's just these three that are on view right now.

[Audience Member] I'm located here just in case you're wondering. Because this started out as an oral art, as so many civilizations had oral arts, would you classify this as a folktale?

I would have to dive into the academic literature of how we define a folktale. I think of it, first and foremost, as a poem, which I understand the two are not mutually exclusive. You could be a poem and still be a folktale.

I am not answering your question, but I... I don't...

I don't know that there's necessarily a meaningful distinction.

Yeah. It could be both.

Yeah.

[Audience Member] The reason I ask is because in studying various cultures and literature of those cultures, I don't know that I have studied or heard about Greek folktales. And so I was wondering if there was such a thing. And if so, is it distinctive from this?

You know, that's a really interesting point. And I think... My gut is saying no, because instead of calling them folktales, we call them myths.

But what's the difference between a myth and a folktale? But then also, if we travel back in time to ancient Greece, would they have called them myths? They believed in these gods. For us, a myth is something that is, it's not real. But for the Greeks, it was real.

So this is a very interesting set of questions that I am not answering with any kind of competence at all. That's okay, that's okay. I mean, I guess my thought was that folktales tend to relate more to the common folk, whereas mythology in Greece related very much to gods and to a realm above commonality. So that was the reason I was asking the question.

I think, especially in the "Odyssey," there's a lot of permeability between those spheres, which is one of the things that makes the poem so interesting. I mean, throughout, there are many descriptions of mortals as being godlike. Odysseus, Godlike Odysseus.

I mean, we talked about with the Ofili the sort of similarity between Odysseus and Calypso. And there's constantly, in the text, so much interaction directly between immortals and mortal beings.

Yeah, but I take your point. I think in the poems, it's a lot about these great men, and then enslaved characters. There are quite a few enslaved characters in the poems, but you don't really get the everyday sort of folk.

[Audience Member] Well, thank you for the comments. I do have one question. You've made me wanna read the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" again.

And, by the way, the presentation was fabulous.

Thank you.

[Audience Member] Whose translation would you recommend?

Okay. So, I got this question... I got this question earlier in the run through, and my answer was, it would be like asking which is my favorite child.

It depends on how they're behaving and what my mood is that day. So, I have some follow-up questions that I think you should ask yourself in picking a translation. So we just have three here.

We've got Wilson, Fagles, and Daniel Mendelsohn. The Wilson is a quick read. It's compelling.

It's like that bag of Doritos. You don't even realize how quickly it's going. And sometimes you're in the mood for a bag of Doritos, but sometimes you need to eat celery, and you gotta chew it.

And it's a harder thing to eat, but you enjoy it because celery is refreshing, especially if it has peanut butter on it. (audience laughing) And for that, you might wanna read the Mendelsohn or the Fagles. The reason why I selected, as I said, the Fagles translation of the proem is because he uses the word sing as his translation of the verb.

And what both Fagles and Mendelsohn have in common is that I think it is very true to the actual Greek manuscript. So if you have some knowledge of ancient Greek, Mendelsohn especially is very close to that language. And so close that he will, in his notes, which I suggest you also read if you opt for Mendelsohn, he will say, "The ancient Greek has alliteration with a theta in these three words.

And so I've tried to recreate that alliteration with this sound." It's really very, very close to the text. Whereas Emily Wilson, I think, is somewhat closer to Alexander Pope in that it's more of an interpretation. She is extremely grounded in the language.

She knows it, but she's making different choices with a different goal. Does that make sense? So, they're two very, very different books, and I really have a hard time recommending. It just sort of depends.

Like, I would categorize Wilson more as maybe, like, your beach read, and the Mendelsohn as sort of, "Okay, I really wanna dig into the language."

We'll take one last question over here.

[Audience Member] Thank you. I would like to throw out the suggestion that you read Stephen Fry. He's done a series, and they're quite fun to listen to even on an audio book basis, but I think they're a pretty good translation.

I have them in my house. I have all... I think there's four. Four of them, yeah.

Yeah. I just haven't read them yet, but they're on my list. I mean, do you see how much I read, sir? (audience laughing and applauding) I have two kids at home.

She has two kids at home. But point taken, I've heard that they are wonderful interpretations, so thank you for that suggestion. All right, I think that's it, right, Mel? Thank you all so much for coming.

(audience applauding) Thank you so much.