#myth

It's the old Greek story — a princess chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster, waiting on a rescue that's supposedly on its way. They say the painter spent twenty-odd years working in nothing but charcoal black before he let colour in at all.

This was made to order as a ceiling for one of the Louvre's own rooms — a museum commissioning itself a giant tribute to the classics, more or less. The crowd is supposedly a roll-call of great names from across the centuries, all painted turning up to worship one man.

It's an old Greek story — a young man goes to fetch water and the nymphs pull him in, never to be seen again. In 2018 the gallery took this off the wall for a week, on purpose, to start a conversation about how women get shown in old paintings, and left the space open for visitors' notes. The notes mostly said put it back, they say. Back it went.