Perseus and Phineus

Ovid starts Book V of the Metamorphoses by continuing the story of Perseus. Phineus, who had been betrothed to Andromeda, starts a fight at Perseus and Andromeda's wedding feast. In my post Perseus and Andromeda: the 17th Century I embedded part of a TV production of Lully's Persée. Here is Phineus' petrification scene from a sound recording of the same opera:



The picture shown to accompany the sound recording above is Luca Giordano's painting from the early 1680s Perseus Turning Phineus and His Followers to Stone, now in London's National Gallery.

Towards the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century, Sebastiano Ricci painted Perseus Confronting Phineus with the Head of Medusa, which is now in Los Angeles's Getty Center. Jean-Marc Nattier's 1718 Perseus, Aided by Minerva, Petrifies Phineus and His Companions by Showing Them Medusa's Head is now in Tours's Musée des Beaux Arts.