Circe with companions of Ulysses changed into animals

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
Italy
1609 – 1664

Circe with companions of Ulysses changed into animals
1650-51
etching on paper
Place made
Rome
Medium
etching on paper
Dimensions
21.8 x 31.0 cm (plate)
31.0 x 46.3 cm (sheet)
Credit line
V.B.F. Young Bequest Fund 2009
Accession number
20096G56
Signature and date
Signed engraved in plate l.r., "G.BENED. CASTILIONUS/ GENOVENSIS IN Pin". Not dated.
Catalogue raisonne
B.XXI.21.22; Percy (1971) E.23; TIB 4602.022.S1
Media category
Print
Collection area
European prints

  • WALL LABEL: A Beautiful Line: Italian prints from Mantegna to Piranesi, 2012

     

    This etching of a woman seated amongst ruins and surrounded by animals is a work of strikingly originality. Its subject has recently been interpreted as representing an episode told in Homer’s Odyssey. For the figure of the sorceress, Castiglione drew on a tradition of depictions of melancholy. Circe points with her wand to a pile of armour belonging to Ulysses’s men, whom she has changed with a magic potion into beasts. In Homer’s story the men have been turned into pigs, yet Castiglione depicts a variety of animals including a sheep, dog and a peacock, perched on a wall.

     

    Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs

  • A beautiful line. Italian prints from Mantegna to Piranesi

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 20 August 2010 – 31 October 2010
  • [Book] Percy, Ann. 1971. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.
  • [Book] 1982. The Illustrated Bartsch 46 (Commentary). Italian Masters of the Seventeenth Century.
  • [Journal] AGSA Magazine.
  • [Book] Zagala, Maria. 2010. A Beautiful Line : Italian prints from Mantegna to Piranesi.
  • [Book] AGSA 500.