How Art and Artists Have Been Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey Long Before Christopher Nolan
Here are 10 depictions of one of the oldest and most beloved tales ever told
Humanity has been making depictions of stories from The Odyssey since before we have surviving payprus or parchment of the full text. Telemachus, Odysseus, Penelope, the sirens and the whole roster of human, divine, and monstrous entities dance their way across two and a half millennium in mediums from ceramic urns to painting to marble to paper. Here are ten major works from across the march of time.
The Siren Vase | The British Museum, London
The Odyssey was roughly as old as Hamlet is now when the anonymous Siren Painter, who was most likely Athenian, created the vase. It depicts one of the most famous scenes in the epic, in which Odysseus is tied to the mast of his ships to avoid being ensnared by the music of the sirens. The placid crew of rowers resists thanks to the beeswax thoughtfully jammed into their ears. Created using the red figure pottery technique, the work has an evocative linearity that makes its survival a gift.
Blinding of Polyphemus | Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Sperlonga, Italy
The Emperor Tiberias was accused by ancient historians like Tacitus of degrees of decadence that remain eye-popping today. But he demonstrated excellent taste when he commissioned a fabulous series of sculptures for his villa at Speralonga. Blinding of Polyphemus is one of four thematic groups that once stood in grottos reached by boat. It must have been an amazing dinner location for a select and fearful few. The sculptures were long ago destroyed by earthquake before being reconstructed by 20th century archaeologists.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer | Musée du Louvre, Paris
The 19th century had very different ideas from us about what made for greatness in art. Case in point, historical painting. The French Salon thought that large Ensemble paintings of people in history or from literature were possibly the painting. Ingres was a master of the form, although we now appreciate him more for his portraits. The Apotheosis of Homer shows the poet being crowned by artists and fellow writers from across time.
Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sometimes, it’s provenance and the sheer fact of preservation that make something special. This fragment of papyrus dates from the 3rd century B.C. and contains three fragments from Book 20 that do not occur in the standard text of The Odyssey.
Angelica Kauffman, The Sorrows of Telemachus | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The lady in The Sorrows of Telemachus is not circumspect Penelope, but the nymph Calypso, because the work that The Sorrows of Telemachus is based on is not The Odyssey, but a 1699 work called The Adventures of Telemachus by François Fénelon—or, in 2026 terms, a fanfic. In this work, Calypso’s nymphs bring sorrow to Telemachus by singing about his lost father. Born in Switzerland in 1741, Angelica Kaufman was one of two female painters among the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Francesco Primaticcio, Odysseus and His Companions Fighting the Cicones Before the City of Ismaros | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The 58-fresco cycle from the French Royal Palace at Fontainebleau that Francesco Primaticcio made this Mannerism-influenced drawing for is long since destroyed, but the surging activity of it is clear from the densely crowded battle scene here. Primaticcio chose a subject from very close to the start of The Odyssey, when Odysseus and his men attack a city on their way back from Troy.
John Flaxman, Ulysses at the Table of Circe | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
It’s less about Circe’s magic than about a psycyohological standoff. In spare contours rooted in the lines of the ancient vases and kraters, Flaxman (an influential Neoclassicist whose style anticipates Aubrey Beardsley) shows the moment where Circe invite Ulysses to eat with her despite her having turned his companions into swine.
Frederick Leighton, Nausicaa | Private Collection
Nausicaa is an eternally legible type: a teenage girl who required divine inspiration in order to do the laundry. Originally displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1878, the painting is now in private hands. It shows the young princess in a contemplative moment. She stands at a doorway literally for herself and metaphorically for Odysseus on his way home.
Giorgio de Chirico, The return of Ulysses | Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico,Rome
A small, toga-clad figure pilots a rowboat across choppy seas that have materialized within a furnished room. The return of Ulysses belongs to de Chirico’s late Neometaphysical period, when he returned to themes that had captivated him in his youth. The artwork focuses more on the idea of home than on precisely recording the manner described in the book.
Romare Bearden, Black Odyssey | Various Museums
Composed of 20 collages and watercolors, Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey cycle, which he created in 1977, retel The Odyssey with black protagonists. Bearden used the ancient story to look at themes essential in black history: exile, danger, migration and endurance.