Educational Series

Greco-Roman Origin Myths

From high above the earth, we look onto a dramatically lit scene with a man falling from a horse-drawn chariot in midair, surrounded by eleven women against a bank of clouds in this horizontal painting. All of the people have pale skin and are illuminated by a bright burst of sunlight streaming across the scene from the upper right corner. The man is covered only by a burgundy-red sash that wraps across his groin and around one shoulder. He careens headfirst from the U-shaped, golden chariot with his chest facing us, arms flung overhead and legs splayed, to our right of center. The tumble of bodies around him includes four horses, three ivory white and one gray, and the eleven women, who are either nude or dressed in robes of parchment white, tan, slate blue, butterscotch yellow, steel gray, or rose pink. The women all have blond or brown hair, and some have wings like butterflies, patterned with circles and stripes. They fall alongside the man or float above the wreckage, their robes and hair billowing. Some of the women hold the red reins of the horses, though some of the reins stop abruptly or are painted over so they appear as dark lines beneath the surface. The nickel-gray clouds surround and support some of the women in front of a hazy circular arch curving up the left side of the composition. Peeks of sky around the action are deep aqua blue, and vibrant orange flames lick up from the earth in the lower right.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of Phaeton, c. 1604/1605, probably reworked c. 1606/1608, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1990.1.1

Mythology is a powerful vehicle for teaching students about symbols and the ways people have sought to explain their relationships to nature and to each other. Teachers can use these lessons and works of art to introduce or examine the role of myths in explaining human customs, mysteries about nature, or the reasons why things exist in the world.

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We look across and down into a valley with a person sitting near a tall tree and a train puffing smoke beyond, all enclosed by a band of mountains in the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Closest to us, several broken, jagged tree stumps are spaced across the painting’s width. A little distance away and to our left, the person wears a yellow, broad-brimmed hat, red vest, and gray pants. He reclines propped on his left elbow near a walking path beside a tall, slender tree with golden leaves. The green meadow stretching in front of him is dotted with tree stumps cut close to the ground. Beyond the meadow, puffs of white smoke trail behind a long steam locomotive that crosses a bridge spanning a tree-filled ravine, headed to our left. The ravine creates a diagonal line across the canvas, moving subtly away from us to our left. The train has climbed out of the valley, away from a cluster of brick-red buildings. The most prominent structure is a train roundhouse, a large building with a high, domed roof to the right of the tracks. Smoke rises from chimneys on long, warehouse-like buildings, and a steeple and smaller structures suggest a church and homes to our left. Hazy in the distance, a row of mountains lines the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The sky above deepens from pale, shell pink over the mountains to watery, pale blue above. The artist signed the work in tiny letters in the lower left corner: “G. Inness.”

Educational Resource Series:  Art and Ecology

Artists are often particularly keen observers and precise recorders of the physical conditions of the natural world.

Educational Resource Series:  Afro-Atlantic Histories