WhatNitrous
Well-known member
- Messages
- 24,719
- Points
- 113
You are mythological creature a centaur
The Education of Achilles
1630 - 1635. Oil on panel.
Thetis entrusted the education of her son Achilles to the boy´s great-grandfather, the wise centaur Chiron, tutor of gods and heroes, who instructed him in the arts of medicine, music, riding and hunting. Rubens illustrated a riding lesson, for which the centaur, half-man and half-horse, was eminently well suited. A variety of objects allude to other aspects of Achilles´s education. The bearded male term portrayed with a snake coiled around a staff is Aesculapius, the god of medicine, whom several classical sources describe as having studied under Chiron. Homer refers to Achilles´s knowledge of medicine in the Iliad (IX, 631). The female term holding a lyre is one of the Muses, probably Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, but her attribute does not allow for a more specific identification. An ancient source states that Achilles offered a sacrifice to her in the hope that she would teach him music and poetry. The lyre in the tree is a second allusion to Achilles´s musical education. Hunting is symbolised by the two hounds in the landscape and the still life of hunting attributes in the foreground comprising a bow and arrows, a dead hare, a bird and two hunting horns. Rubens based his illustration of the riding lesson on a description of what was probably a fictive painting in Philostratus´s Imagines: Chiron is teaching Achilles to ride horseback and to use him exactly as a horse. The figures of Achilles and Chiron were predominantly inspired by a classical sculpture of the Centaur Tormented by Cupid (Paris, Musee National du Louvre), which had been excavated shortly before Rubens´s arrival in Rome. Rubens had made drawings of it from different angles when it was in the collection of Scipione Borghese.
I'm practically a scholar in greek mythology from cartoons and movies
Honestly I've always had an interest in those gods, unlike religion.
