Epic

Félix Vallotton
Bust of Homer
before 1925
woodcut
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ
Homer the Blind Wanderer
(left panel, Odyssey - right panel, Iliad)
1881
oil on canvas
(exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882) 
Musée de Grenoble

James Pradier
Blind Homer with his Guide
1852
plaster
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Andrea del Sarto
Head of Homer and Study of Youth
ca. 1520-21
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist
Alexander the Great
preserving the writings of Homer
16th century
drawing
(after exterior fresco by Polidoro da Caravaggio)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Georg Pencz
Paris with his first wife, the nymph Oenone
ca. 1539
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Josef Kässmann
Paris with the Golden Apple
1824
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Pierre Courteys
Abduction of Helen
before 1586
enamel on copper
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Lucas van Leyden
Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar
ca. 1515-25
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Bartolomeo Cavaceppi
Head of Odysseus
ca. 1775
marble
(fragmentary antique head rebuilt by Cavaceppi)
Musée d'Art Classique de Mougins

Ludwig von Schwanthaler
Leukothea rescuing Odysseus from the Storm
1839
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Gerard Hoet
Shipwrecked Odysseus encountering Nausicaä
ca. 1690
oil on panel
Kunstmuseum Basel

Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff
The Witch Circe with Odysseus and his Shipmates
1493
hand-colored woodcut
(illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle)
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Luca Penni
Return of Odysseus
ca. 1545-55
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Johann August Nahl the Younger
Telemachus recognizing his father Odysseus
ca. 1810
oil on canvas
Schlossmuseum Weimar

Angelica Kauffmann
Telemachus and his Mentor on the Island of Calypso
(scene from Les Aventures de Télémaque by François Fénelon)
before 1784
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Narrative art is bound to lead to space and the exploration of visual effects, and the reading of these effects in their turn demands a different kind of "mental set" from the magic rune with its enduring potency.  But Plato was right when he felt that something had been sacrificed to this change: the timeless function of the potent image, the Pharaoh forever dominating his foes, had to be discarded in favor of an imaginary fleeting moment of time that might easily tempt an artist into triviality.  To us, the element of sacrifice that is involved in all naturalistic art has become somewhat obscured by the accident that the word "Geek art" conjures up for most of us a picture of sculpture rather than painting.  Yet it is in painting that the reduction to one moment of time and one angle of view will involve the more obvious loss.  We remember that this was one of the shortcomings that Plato held against the painter, who could not represent the couch as it is but only as it appears from one side.  If the painting is to make us into spectators of an imaginary scene, it has to sacrifice that diagrammatic completeness that was demanded by the earlier functions of art.  Pliny has preserved for us the remark of a Hellenistic critic who praised the skill of the famous painter Parrhasios in creating the illusion of roundness by the outlines of his figures.  This, we read, is the most subtle part of painting, "for the outline must go round and so end, that it promises something else to lie behind and thereby shows even what it obscures."  It is a passage which has aroused much puzzled comment.  But I believe that when we compare any conceptual figure of pre-Greek or early Greek art with the miracles of freely moving figures as we know them from classical wall paintings, we may gather wherein the triumph of Parrhasios lay.  His figures suggest what they can no longer show.  We feel the presence even of the features we do not see, and so he can show us a dancing maiden turning into the picture, an image that would have appeared senseless to any pre-Greek artist.  Imagine Pygmalion creating a figure with only one arm, or a head without eyes.  The figure in space can be conceived only when we have learned to see it as a sign referring to an outer, imagined reality.  We are expected to know that the arm must be there but that the artist could not see it from where he stood, and neither can we.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).