The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is a tragic story from Greco-Roman mythology. Orpheus was a celebrated poet and musician, and Eurydice was his dear wife. One day, during an attempt to flee the pursuit of Aristaeus, Eurydice was fatally bitten by a snake that she trod upon. Beside himself in grief, Orpheus journeyed to the Underworld to beg Hades to release his wife.
With the harmony of his lyre, the poet-musician successfully charmed the spirits of the Underworld. Hades and Persephone (goddess of the Underworld) agree to let Eurydice return to the living world on one condition: Orpheus must guide her out of the Underworld without looking back at her until they reach the world of the living. Then, in the moment that defines the myth, as Ovid tells it, close to the “margin of the upper earth … eager for sight of her … [Orpheus] turned back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths.”
Heartbroken once again, this time at the second and eternal death of his beloved wife, Orpheus wandered the Thracian wilderness in despair, lamenting his double loss with the melody of his lyre. During this period of mourning, Orpheus meets his own tragic fate at the hands of the Maenads, the female followers of Dionysus.
The very act of creation—be it in music, conversation, poetry, friendship, painting, or sculpture—is a process that engages with the relationship of loss and gain. The gesture of looking back, especially as it is dramatized in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is a pertinent metaphor for the work of an artist. When Orpheus turns to look back at Eurydice, he loses his wife but gains her image in his poetry.
Sacrificial Gestures
When I consider the gesture of turning, specifically the movement of looking back, the image that leaps to mind most vividly is that of Orpheus turning to look at his wife Eurydice. Near the threshold of the living world, her form slips into a mist. Although not explicitly mentioned in either Virgil’s or Ovid’s telling of the myth, I imagine a moment of eye contact between the lovers, wherein the shared knowledge of Eurydice’s impending demise is communicated just before her figure disperses, “like smoke mingling with thin air, vanished afar,” as mentioned in Book Four of Virgil’s “Georgics.”
In Virgil’s telling, this moment of suspension is long enough for Eurydice to utter four pitiful lines, whereas Ovid’s Eurydice internalizes these lines into a mere thought of tenderness for her husband, breathing only a barely discernible farewell. Orpheus’s backwards look reads: “He halted, and on the very verge of light, unmindful, alas, and vanquished in purpose, on Eurydice, now regained looked back!”
In giving up Eurydice’s flesh body in his moment of looking back, Orpheus gains a final image of his wife and the grief that this second loss evokes. This loss then generates his song, a beautiful and haunting lament that captures the attention of myriad creatures dwelling amidst the Thracian wilderness:
“Of him they tell that for seven whole months day after day beneath a lofty crag beside lonely Strymon’s stream he wept, and in the shelter of cool dales unfolded this his tale, charming tigers and drawing oaks with his song: even as nightingale, mourning beneath a poplar’s shade, bewails her young ones’ loss, when a heartless ploughman, watching their resting place, has plucked them unfledged from the nest: the mother weeps all night long, as, perched on a branch, she repeats her piteous song and fills all around with plaintive lamentation.”
Thus, echoing the first lament which moved the inhabitants of the underworld to give Eurydice another life, this second melodic weeping of Orpheus comes into being as a response to yet another death of the poet’s wife. The giving up of Eurydice (the receiving object of Orpheus’s passion, love, and desire) and the concomitant emergence of heart-rending song is analogous to the process all artists, regardless of medium, engage in.
Corot’s Composition
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s painting “Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld” evokes the ethereal by manipulating the features of oil paint. Corot chooses a palette of low-chroma grays, greens, and blues to describe the spirits of Hades and the surrounding thicket, leaving the sparse flesh hues for moments on the figure of Orpheus.
A benefit of oil paint is that its pigment-to-binder ratio can be regulated, meaning the density of mineral particles to the oil in which it is suspended can be adjusted and layered, convincingly simulating the effects of various textures. Technical analysis of cross-sections of Corot’s paintings, along with anecdotes from his students, reveal that the painter added resins (pine, copal, mastic, and fir balsam) and transparent pigments to his paints, altering the handling properties to achieve a glaze-like translucency in application.
Additionally, Corot often used a dry brush to convey the character of foliage, loading it with pigment and allowing its scratchy bristles to incise the daubs of paint. Thus, the somber aura “Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld” elicits is brought about by the careful manipulation of painterly materials. Virgil writes, “Stirred by his song, up from the lowest realms of Erebus came the unsubstantial shades, the phantoms of those who lie in darkness.” Corot expresses the poet’s verse in paint, modulating the value range of the spirits in the painting’s background, keeping them faded and low contrast, obfuscated in the haze beyond the portals of Dis.
Although Orpheus and Eurydice are depicted before the moment the poet turns, the tragic ending to the story is foreshadowed by the atmosphere of the canvas as a whole: the narrow tonal range, painted as if inflected through a grisaille filter, overhangs the composition with a sense of imminent loss.
In his later paintings (of which “Orpheus Leading Eurydice From the Underworld” is one), Corot often left moments of his pale brown ébauche (underpainting) visible in his final composition, creating the illusion of depth by setting up the contrast between thinly and thickly applied paint. Orpheus triumphantly holds his lyre aloft in a gesture that conveys the victory of his art in touching even those in the depths of hell, as Ovid writes:
“As he spoke thus, accompanying his words with the music of his lyre, the bloodless spirits wept; Tantalus did not catch at the fleeing wave; Ixion’s wheel stopped in wonder; the vultures did not pluck at the liver; the Belides rested from their urns, and thou, O Sisyphus, didst sit upon thy stone. Then first, tradition says, conquered by the song, the cheeks of the Eumenides were wet with tears; nor could the queen nor he who rules the lower world refuse the suppliant.”
Rodin’s Rendition
Marble is a counterintuitive medium with which to convey a spirit, for the hard materiality of the stone goes against the wispy, smoke-like nature of the disembodied soul. In other words, the material does not instinctively lend itself to that which it seeks to visually express. Upon contemplating how a spirit could be successfully portrayed, one might summon up the textures of gauze, veils, gossamer, or mist—diaphanous textures that lend themselves naturally to articulation via a more forgiving medium than stone.
However, Rodin, in his marble sculpture “Orpheus and Eurydice,” successfully tells his own rendition of Virgil’s myth, rivaling Corot’s composition and reminding us of “paragone,” the debate of the Italian Renaissance in which sculpture and painting were each championed as the reigning art form.
Rodin uses the unfinished, textured block of marble just as much as the refined part of it to describe the forms of Orpheus and Eurydice on their journey up from the underworld. The back of Eurydice’s head has not freed itself from the stone from which she emerges, a small tuft of unfinished marble joins Eurydice’s left arm to her lover’s scapula, and a large chunk of textured stone remains between the legs of the couple, pressing up against Orpheus’s gluteus maximus and his wife’s quadriceps.
With the sacrifice of Eurydice, the object toward which Orpheus aims his love is elided; the poet then fills that gap with music. Thus, sacrifice of a beloved attachment (especially one which previously gave the poet identity and imbued his life with a sense of meaning) allows for the birth of art.
Waterhouse’s Portrayal
In his 1900 painting “Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus,” John William Waterhouse portrays a later part of the Orpheus myth, after the poet-musician’s death at the hands of Ciconian women. Two fair women perch on the banks of the Hebrus, gazing into the water at the decapitated head of Orpheus. Maenads (whose name comes from the Greek verb meaning “to rage,” “to be mad,” or “to be frenzied”), enraged by Orpheus’s spurning their advances and endlessly lamenting his loss of Eurydice, had stoned the poet and strewed his limbs about the Thracian wilderness.
The two naiads pictured in Waterhouse’s painting thus happen upon the poet’s head as it floats downstream with his lyre. Ovid described how the poet’s lifeless tongue still murmured, his drifting lyre still strummed, and the river banks, birds, and trees responded to his lament. Even in death, we can see that Orpheus is handsome, sharing the ideal features of the beautiful naiads.
Waterhouse’s composition is high-contrast, with the skin of the two nymphs and Orpheus’s head glowing against a moody, wooded backdrop. A thin strip of pale orange against the blue silhouette of mountains in the distance suggests that the scene is taking place at sunset. The naiad at right wears a lilac and rose colored dress and grasps a copper water jug as she peers into the water.
Her water jug intimates that she and her friend came to the river to wash their clothes or collect water, happening upon Orpheus and his lyre by chance. The naiad at left wears a blue dress with a red sash draped across her thighs, her left hand clutching a tree branch to steady herself while her right hand rests against the rocky ledge at the riverbank.
While Corot and Rodin chose to depict a different moment of Orpheus’s story, one in which Eurydice was still physically present, Waterhouse’s rendition of the myth evokes her presence just as strongly through her absence. Orpheus’ floating head is embraced by his lyre, the instrument that earned Eurydice’s second chance at life and that led to the poet-musician’s own demise as he grieved. Without the figure of Eurydice present in the painting, the feelings of longing and torment are ever-present. Corot and Waterhouse use oil paint while Rodin uses marble to tell the story of a poet whose art was born of his wife’s sacrifice and led to his own.
