Rather than go into great detail, let me just point the gentle reader at an excellent essay on this image at http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/j-w-waterhouses-ulysses-and-the-sirens-breaking-tradition-and-revealing-fears-2/ on the Web.
Apparently the great furor back in the day was that horrors! Horrors! The artist was not slavishly faithful to Homer’s text! The biggie is that Waterhouse depicted the Sirens, not as lovely human women as was customary, but actually as Harpies—the half-human, half-avian monsters who pursue those who commit great evil, such as murder of a family member, and feed on the flesh of the offender. If you do a quick Google image search on Harpies and then on Sirens, you’ll immediately see which way Waterhouse went with his girls.
So why did he do that? Apparently he wasn’t interested in confronting Odysseus with lovely, seductive, pleasing women. He want to show him struggling with crazy lust for terrifying, brutal, almost inhuman creatures—only their faces are those of women; the bodies are those of gigantic birds of prey.
Of course, there’s a plot hole here; if these creatures have the habits of Harpies as well as their appearance, then Odysseus, bound to the mast and helpless, is a lunch, not a lover.
The other interesting classical connection Waterhouse lays into his image is to turn Odysseus, a stereotype of the male hero, into Andromeda, a woman bound and helpless, tied up as a treat for monsters.
With all that going on, it’s no wonder that Waterhouse was heavily attacked in the press of the day. You can read about that part of it in the article cited above.
Rather than go into great detail, let me just point the gentle reader at an excellent essay on this image at http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/j-w-waterhouses-ulysses-and-the-sirens-breaking-tradition-and-revealing-fears-2/ on the Web.
Apparently the great furor back in the day was that horrors! Horrors! The artist was not slavishly faithful to Homer’s text! The biggie is that Waterhouse depicted the Sirens, not as lovely human women as was customary, but actually as Harpies—the half-human, half-avian monsters who pursue those who commit great evil, such as murder of a family member, and feed on the flesh of the offender. If you do a quick Google image search on Harpies and then on Sirens, you’ll immediately see which way Waterhouse went with his girls.
So why did he do that? Apparently he wasn’t interested in confronting Odysseus with lovely, seductive, pleasing women. He want to show him struggling with crazy lust for terrifying, brutal, almost inhuman creatures—only their faces are those of women; the bodies are those of gigantic birds of prey.
Of course, there’s a plot hole here; if these creatures have the habits of Harpies as well as their appearance, then Odysseus, bound to the mast and helpless, is a lunch, not a lover.
The other interesting classical connection Waterhouse lays into his image is to turn Odysseus, a stereotype of the male hero, into Andromeda, a woman bound and helpless, tied up as a treat for monsters.
With all that going on, it’s no wonder that Waterhouse was heavily attacked in the press of the day. You can read about that part of it in the article cited above.
Thus endeth the Art History Moment for today.