page_title: Polyphemus
section_title: Artistic representations
hierarchical_section_title: Polyphemus / Odysseus and Polyphemus / Artistic representations
caption_attribution_description: English: Catalogue Entry: Eckersberg spent 1811 to 1812 in the studio of David, practicing life drawing and history painting. One of a series of subjects from the Odyssey, this is perhaps the most compelling. The giant Polyphe­mus in his cave looms over a sheep, searching for Ulysses and his companions, who blinded the one-eyed monster. The men have escaped beneath the bellies of the flock; Ulysses, at the end, prepares to join his companions. The Mediterranean light is dazzling. We viewers remain imprisoned in the tenebrous foreground as Ulysses slips away. Eckersberg’s study of the eloquent contours of Greek vase painting is put to good use here. Although the Danish artist was in Paris to learn from David, the most revered teacher in Europe at the time, his ambivalence can be read in some of the anti-classical tendencies seen here. The disjunction of the large-scale giant Polyphemus and the small Ulysses is true to the story, but disturbing, while the extremes of dark and light add to the monster’s menace. Eckersberg was the citizen of a French ally in the Napoleonic Wars, but as a protégé of the king of Denmark, who underwrote his studies in France and later travels to Italy, and with whose heir he carried on a friendly correspondence, he may well have had mixed feelings about David, a regicide who had cast his vote for the death of Louis XVI. Eckersberg’s letters show he found Paris and its conventions an uncomfortable fit. Although David considered Eckersberg talented and encouraged his studies, this raw and frank history painting expresses a sensibility different from that of his more stylish French students. Gallery Label: This is one of a series of paintings and drawings that Eckersberg made in Paris, depicting episodes from Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses and his companions have blinded the giant Polyphemus, who had been holding them captive in his cave; Ulysses, the last to escape (by tying himself to the underside of a sheep), dismounts and prepares to run away. Eckersberg studied first in Copenhagen and then in Paris with the eminent painter Jacques-Louis David, and this work reflects study of the nude in the life-drawing classes that were the primary focus of David’s training. It also showcases Eckersberg’s interest in perspective, his acute observation of nature, and his nuanced treatment of light. After his stay in Paris, Eckersberg spent three years in Rome before returning to Copenhagen, where he influenced the next generation of artists and became known as the Father of Danish Painting.
context_page_description: Polyphemus is the one-eyed giant son of Poseidon and Thoosa in Greek mythology, one of the Cyclopes described in Homer's Odyssey. His name means "abounding in songs and legends". Polyphemus first appeared as a savage man-eating giant in the ninth book of the Odyssey. The satyr play of Euripides is dependent on this episode apart from one detail; for comic effect, Polyphemus is made a pederast in the play. Later Classical writers presented him in their poems as heterosexual and linked his name with the nymph Galatea. Often he was portrayed as unsuccessful in these, and as unaware of his disproportionate size and musical failings. In the work of even later authors, however, he is presented as both a successful lover and skilled musician. From the Renaissance on, art and literature reflect all of these interpretations of the giant.
context_section_description: The vivid nature of the Polyphemus episode made it a favorite theme of ancient Greek painted pottery, on which the scenes most often illustrated are the blinding of the Cyclops and the ruse by which Odysseus and his men escape. One such episode, on a vase featuring the hero carried beneath a sheep, was used on a 27 drachma Greek postage stamp in 1983.
  The blinding was depicted in life-size sculpture, including a giant Polyphemus, in the Sperlonga sculptures probably made for the Emperor Tiberius. This may be an interpretation of an existing composition, and was apparently repeated in variations in later Imperial palaces by Claudius, Nero and at Hadrian's Villa.
  Of the European painters of the subject, the Flemish Jacob Jordaens depicted Odysseus escaping from the cave of Polyphemus in 1635 (see gallery below) and others chose the dramatic scene of the giant casting boulders at the escaping ship. In Guido Reni's painting of 1639/40 (see below), the furious giant is tugging a boulder from the cliff as Odysseus and his men row out to the ship far below. Polyphemus is portrayed, as it often happens, with two empty eye sockets and his damaged eye located in the middle on his forehead. This convention goes back to Greek statuary and painting, and is reproduced in Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein's 1802 head and shoulders portrait of the giant (see below).
  Arnold Bocklin pictures the giant as standing on rocks onshore and swinging one of them back as the men row desperately over a surging wave (see below), while Polyphemus is standing at the top of a cliff in Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting of 1902. He stands poised, having already thrown one stone, which barely misses the ship. The reason for his rage is depicted in J. M. W. Turner's painting, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829). Here the ship sails forward as the sun breaks free of clouds low on the horizon. The giant himself is an indistinct shape barely distinguished from the woods and smoky atmosphere high above.
caption: Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Ulysses Fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus, 1812, Princeton University Art Museum
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