page_title: Andromeda (mythology)
section_title: In art
hierarchical_section_title: Andromeda (mythology) / Cultural references / In art
context_page_description: In Greek mythology, Andromeda is the daughter of the king of Aethiopia, Cepheus, and his wife Cassiopeia. When Cassiopeia boasts that she is more beautiful than the Nereids, Poseidon sends the sea monster Cetus to ravage the coast of Aethiopia as divine punishment. Andromeda is chained to a rock as a sacrifice to sate the monster, but is saved from death by Perseus, who marries her and takes her to Greece to reign as his queen.
  Her name is the Latinized form of the Greek Ἀνδρομέδα or Ἀνδρομέδη: "ruler of men", from ἀνήρ, ἀνδρός meaning "man", "husband", or "human being", and μέδω "I protect, rule over".
  As a subject, Andromeda has been popular in art since classical times; it is one of several Greek myths of a Greek hero's rescue of the intended victim of an archaic hieros gamos, giving rise to the "princess and dragon" motif. From the Renaissance, interest revived in the original story, typically as derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
context_section_description: Andromeda, and her role in the popular myth of Perseus, has been the subject of numerous ancient and modern works of art, where she is represented as a bound and helpless, typically beautiful, young woman placed in terrible danger, who must be saved through the unswerving courage of a hero who loves her: (see Gallery)
  Although ancient artists at first presented her fully clothed, nude images of Andromeda started appearing during Classical antiquity, and by the Renaissance the chained nude figure of Andromeda, either alone or being rescued, had become the standard, as seen in works by Titian, Joachim Wtewael, Cesari, Passerotti, Veronese, Rubens, Bertin, Boucher, van Loo, Moreau, Stanhope, and Burne-Jones.
  Rather than dwelling on Andromeda's physical beauty, artists such as Rembrandt, Fetti, Chassériau, Delacroix, Doré, Leighton, and (satirically) Vallotton, have focused on her terror and vulnerability as she awaits the monster.
  Some artists such as Piero di Cosimo, Jan Keynooghe, Jacob Matham, and Pierre Mignard, have shown Andromeda in relation to her parents and onlookers.
  Andromeda was a popular subject for artists especially in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, followed by a resurgence of interest in her myth in the 19th century, but since then artists have shown much less interest in this subject.
  Other Art Traditions Inspired by the Andomeda Myth:
  The legend of Saint George and the Dragon, in which a courageous knight rescues a princess from a monster (with clear parallels to the Andromeda myth), became a popular subject for art in the Late Middle Ages, and artists drew from both traditions. One result is the idea of having Perseus riding the flying horse Pegasus when fighting the sea monster (as seen in paintings by Matham, Passerotti, Cesari, Wtewael, Rubens, Mignard, Bertin, and Leighton below), despite classical sources consistently stating that he flew using winged sandals and connecting Pegasus to the hero Bellerophon's adventures.
  Ludovico Ariosto's influential epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516-1532) features a pagan princess named Angelica who at one point is in exactly the same situation as Andromeda, chained naked to a rock on the sea as a sacrifice to a sea monster, and is saved at the last minute by the Saracen knight Ruggiero. Artists were drawn to this subject for the same reasons they appreciated the Andromeda myth, and images of Angelica and Ruggiero (or Roggiero/Roger) are often hard to distinguish from those of Andromeda and Perseus
caption: Ingres, Roger Delivering Angelica (1819)
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