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| Pelagio Palagi Medea killing her Children ca. 1810-15 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
"This magnificent large-scale drawing on multiple sheets of paper is attributed to the neoclassical painter Pelagio Palagi, who worked in Bologna, Milan, and Turin. Its size and complex technique indicate that it was intended as a cartoon (or cartone, a large piece of paper) that the artist could use as a guide when painting a work of the same size. Although the drawing cannot be connected to any specific work, and there are no signs that the image was intended to be transferred to another surface, it can be dated stylistically to 1810-15, when Palagi produced similarly dramatic frescoes of literary and mythological subjects. Here, Medea grips a dagger and raises her arm in the midst of the scandalous act of killing her children."
– from curator's notes at Princeton University Art Museum
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| Francesco Bartolozzi after Giovanni Battista Cipriani Medea murdering her Two Children 1787 engraving Yale Center for British Art |
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| Thomas Thornycroft Medea 1846 marble Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Langenheim, Loud & Company Statue of Medea in front of the Admiralty, St Petersburg ca. 1864 stereograph Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Moses Haughton Jr. after Henry Fuseli Jason stealing the Golden Fleece while Medea pours sleeping potion onto the Dragon 1806 stipple-engraving British Museum |
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| Henry Fuseli Jason stealing the Golden Fleece while Medea pours sleeping potion onto the Dragon 1806 oil on paper British Museum |
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| Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini Jason rejecting Medea ca. 1711 oil sketch on paper, mounted on canvas Northampton Museums and Art Gallery |
The Photos
My sister in her well-tailored silk blouse hands me
the photo of my father
in naval uniform and white hat.
I say, "Oh, this is the one which Mama used to have on her dresser."
My sister controls her face and furtively looks at my mother,
a sad rag bag of a woman, lumpy and sagging everywhere,
like a mattress at the Salvation Army, though with no holes or tears,
and says, "No."
I look again,
and see that my father is wearing a wedding ring,
which he never did
when he lived with my mother. And that there is a legend on it,
"To my dearest wife,
Love,
Chief"
And I realize the photo must have belonged to his second wife,
whom he left our mother to marry.
My mother says, with her face as still as the whole unpopulated part of the
state of North Dakota,
"May I see it too?"
She looks at it.
I look at my tailored sister
and my own blue-jeaned self. Have we wanted to hurt our mother,
sharing these pictures on this, one of the few days I ever visit or
spend with family? For her face is curiously haunted,
not now with her usual viperish bitterness,
but with something so deep it could not be spoken.
I turn away and say I must go on, as I have a dinner engagement with friends.
But I drive all the way to Pasadena from Whittier,
thinking of my mother's face; how I could never love her; how my father
could not love her either. Yet knowing I have inherited
the rag-bag body,
stony face with bulldog jaws.
I drive, thinking of that face.
Jeffers' California Medea who inspired me to poetry.
I killed my children,
but there as I am changing lanes on the freeway, necessarily glancing in the
rearview mirror, I see the face,
not even a ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved's wallet.
How I hate my destiny.
– Diane Wakoski, from Emerald Ice (1988)
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| Jean-Honoré Fragonard Medea slaying her Children ca. 1761 drawing National Gallery of Canada |
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| John Hayter Madame Pasta in Medea ca. 1827 lithograph Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Corrado Giaquinto Medea ca. 1750-52 oil on canvas National Trust, Hinton Ampner, Hampshire |
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| Jean-François de Troy Jason and Medea in the Temple of Jupiter ca. 1745 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jean-François de Troy Jason swearing Fidelity to Medea ca. 1742-43 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Anonymous French weavers after Jean-François de Troy Jason swearing Fidelity to Medea 1784 wool and silk tapestry Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Charles-Antoine Coypel Medea ca. 1715 pastel Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner Vision of Medea 1828 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| John William Waterhouse Medea mixing Potion with Jason looking on 1907 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Frederick Sandys Medea 1868 oil on panel Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (West Midlands) |
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| Herbert James Draper The Golden Fleece 1904 oil on canvas Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford (West Yorkshire) |
"The image of the powerful femme fatale makes her most dramatic appearance in Draper's ambitious large canvas The Golden Fleece, which is certainly the most histrionic of his paintings. As a passage attached to the painting when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy explains, Medea throws her brother into the sea to drown so that her father will slacken his pursuit long enough for her to escape with Jason and the golden fleece."
– curator's notes from Bradford Museums