Mercury, Aglauros and Herse

You may remember from the story of Coronis that on its way to tell Apollo about Coronis's infidelity, the raven met a crow. The crow told the raven how she had similarly told Minerva about the disobedience of Aglauros, who persuaded her sisters to open a basket in defiance of Minerva's orders. The basket contained a child and a snake, or in other versions of the story, a child with a snake's tail, and the three sisters went mad and threw themselves off the Acropolis. In Ovid's version, however, although the tittle-tattle crow is punished by being turned black (before that crows were white), the sisters remain unscathed. But Minerva remembers.

Later Mercury falls in love with Herse, one of Aglauros's sisters. He comes for a visit, and meets Aglauros, who agrees to help him -- for a price. Minerva is horrified that this woman who disobeyed her will be in Mercury's good books and will be rich as well. Minerva goes to Envy and asks her to touch Aglauros, who then, envying her sister's good fortune, tries to bar Mercury's way. Mercury turns her to stone. Tony Kline's translation of Ovid's version of the story.



Let's look first at pictures of Aglauros and her sisters with Erichthonius (aka Erechtheus), the child with the snake or snake's tail. I haven't been able to find the whereabouts of the upper picture, painted in 1620 by Jasper van der Laanen, although it was sold at auction quite recently. The slightly later picture (1635-40) below it is by Jacob Jordaens (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna). Rubens also painted a picture on this theme just before van der Laanen (now in the Liechtenstein Museum).

The moment when Mercury, flying over Attica, first sees Herse has proved popular with artists. Jacob Pynas, who painted Mercury and Battus, also painted Mercury and Herse at around the same time in 1618 (painting now in Florence's Uffizi Gallery but not on their website). Thomas Blanchet's Mercury and Herse (1650) is now in the Portland Art Museum where its provenance is currently under investigation to see whether it was looted during the Second World War. Jan or Johann Boeckhorst also painted a Mercury and Hermes in the early 1650s (now in Vienna's Kunsthistorische Museum) Gerard Hoet's Mercury and Herse (1710) is now in Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum.

More unusually, Karel Dujardin painted this 1652 picture of Minerva visiting Envy (now in Vienna's Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildende Künste, but not as far as I can tell on its website).

Veronese painted a picture of Aglauros blocking Mercury's way to Herse in the late 1570s or early 1580s (now in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum). Carel Fabritius painted the picture on the right, which shows Aglauros blocking Mercury's way (1646, now in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts). (The two pictures above are in the public domain from wikipedia, the one on the right is also in the public domain and is from museumsyndicate)

Mercury and Battus

The story goes that Mercury stole Apollo's cattle, but was seen by an old man called Battus. Mercury bribed the old man to keep quiet with the present of a heifer. Battus said the stones would give Mercury away sooner than he would, but Mercury didn't trust him and approached him again in disguise. On being offered a bribe of two head of cattle, Battus gave the game away, and for his treachery was turned into a stone by Mercury. You can read Ovid's version of the story in Tony Kline's translation or in Derik Badman's strip cartoon version.

Artists who have painted Mercury and Battus include Jacob Pynas (1618), Francisque Millet (no date given for the picture but the artist's dates are 1642-1649) in a picture now in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Claude Lorrain (the only online version of the painting I could find was on this auction site -- picture undated, artist's dates 1600 - 1680). An even more obscure artist was Jan Claudius de Cock (1667 - 1735), the only copy of whose Mercury and Battus (no date or location of the painting given) was on this Dutch site with bilingual Dutch and English text (scroll down).

Coronis x 2

Ovid's next story (with a series of digressions) is the story of the birth of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. His mother, Coronis, was pregnant by Apollo, but had another lover. She was seen together with him by a raven, who told Apollo. Apollo then killed Coronis, but regretting what he'd done, at least managed to save the child by taking it from Coronis's womb and giving it to the centaur Chiron to bring up. (picture of crow from wikicommons used under GNU Free Documentation Licence)

Confusingly enough, but possibly to the original audience's amusement, the raven meets a crow on the way to Apollo. The crow, whose name we are not told in the Metamorphoses, was also called Coronis, and was a princess who had been turned into a crow by Minerva when she was trying to escape from the god Neptune who was chasing her. See Tony Kline's translation of Ovid's version of the story and Derik Badman's strip cartoon version.

Giulio Carpioni painted a picture of Neptune pursuing Coronis in the late 1660s, now in Florence's Uffizi Gallery, but not on their site. The contemporary artist David Lloyd has painted two versions of Neptune and Coronis (scroll down to see them).

Domenichino and his assistants painted Apollo Slaying Coronis (1616-1618), now in London's National Gallery. Another scene with Apollo and Coronis by Adam Elsheimer can be seen in this photo from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (note: if you have a slow connection, don't be surprised if you see another painting first). I haven't been able to track down the original painting, some sources say it is in London's National Gallery, others in Liverpool's Walker Gallery, but neither gallery's site has it.