This week’s offering is the Perseus series painted by Edward Burne-Jones and featuring Maria Zambaco as model. In the first painting, Perseus receives his call from the goddess, Athena. It looks as if Maria was used as the face model for both characters.
Her apparent profile (as Perseus) is seen again in the next painting…
… and again in the next. Her face also appears on at least two (possibly all three) of the Hesperides (sea nymphs), for which she surely was used as the body model as well.
She seems also to have been a model for the Gorgon, Medusa, shown atypically without snakes in her hair. This approach of making a hideous figure hauntingly or morbidly beautiful adds poignancy to the next two paintings.
Maria is obviously Andromeda in the next sequence, in which Perseus finds her and rescues her from the sea serpent, Cetus.
Finally, we come to the last painting in the series. Andromeda is shown gazing at the head of Medusa reflected in a basin of water.
I covered this series in multiple posts earlier in my series, Mythology On Canvas. This was necessary because I gave more of the background for the actual myth, but I thought it would be good to visit this topic once again by showing all of the paintings together.
Next week: one more post on Maria Zambaco before changing topics.
The women do look very much alike. Were model expensive?
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I’m not sure, but I think it had more to do with the artist and model establishing a working relationship. As I have mentioned in earlier posts on this subject, that relationship was not always healthy or moral.
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I’m surprised that skilled artists would not make enough changes even with one model to give his characters a different look, along with which would indicate a somewhat different personality. Perhaps jealousy reigned supreme!
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I agree. I imagine his romantic involvement with his model was a major factor in this.
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