Fig. 1 John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 201 x 99 cm
John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) was an influential and highly acclaimed British painter of historic and antiquarian subjects. He was especially attracted to Classical mythology, painting various scenes from Homer, including his Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, 1891, and scenes from the Argonauts (Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896), among others.
The above painting, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, is derived from a Greek vase in the British Museum (below), (1) which it both faithfully echoes while radically changing the flatter line of sight of the vase into a deeper perspective where viewers can see into the boat and with Odysseus (Ulysses is his Roman name) tied to the ship's mast in the opposite direction than in the vase scene. The literary narrative of which this is an ekphrasis - a visual rendition of a literary text, like its earlier Greek precedent - is taken from Homer'sOdyssey 12.165-217 where Odysseus risks his own and his crew's lives by sailing so close to the Sirens (Seirenes, Σειρηνες). Earlier, the sorceress Circe has told Odysseus exactly how to survive if she cannot talk him out of his adventure, since he is adamant to hear the Sirens and live (12.37-58). He repeats her instructions to his men:
"You must bind me with tight-chafing ropes
so I cannot move a muscle, bound to the spot,
erect at the mast block, lashed by ropes to the mast.
And if I plead, commanding you to set me free,
then lash me faster, rope on pressing rope." (2)
Perhaps the most haunting modern literary retelling of a siren's power is Lampedusa's magical story, Il Professore e la Sirena, the compelling tale of the Siren named Lighea (Ligeia in Greek) who loves a scholar, so unforgettably divine that he finally jumps ship as an old man, a very different twist than imagined here. (3) Even her ancient name recalls a Greek word λιγεια for "clear, shrill sound". Waterhouse depicts a mostly realistic Greek ship with its protective apotropaic pair of eyes guarding the boat stern and the one on the side of the bow (bottom right), paralleling the eye on the ship's side in the original Greek vase painting. Where the Greek vase places Odysseus slightly left of center in the boat image, Waterhouse has placed Odysseus slightly off center to the right. Waterhouse has also made interesting allusions to Greek archaeological artifacts on his ship. In one interesting example, Waterhouse uses Archaic period Greek temple lion head roof rainspouts for the ship's oarholes, where they might also function protectively along with being visually powerfully decorations.
Fig. 2 Archaic temple lion-headed rainspout, Archaeological Museum, Agrigento, Sicily, stone, 6th c. BCE
Close to steep cliffs where danger lurks as Homer describes, "just offshore as far as a man's shout can carry" (Fagles), the Sirens would lure ships into rocks after maddening sailors overboard with their ecstatic songs. Only Odysseus can hear the Sirens because his men's ears are stuffed with beeswax just as Circe commanded. Odysseus strains at his ropes tied to the mast because he intends to survive the experience. This same detail is naturally found on this Greek vase (below) that inspired the painting, showing the influence of Greek literature on Greek art as vehicles of myth narrative, especially the Odyssey (4) where at least one siren swoops low around the sailors while they chatter away to each other, oblivious to the enchantments of the eerie music that would be more than they could handle if their beeswax earplugs were not there. In Waterhouse's vision sailors have added head wraps covering their ears. Also in the modern painting paralleling the Greek vase, one siren hovers directly over a sailor in midship, her face only inches from his. Odysseus proves the strength of his mind and will in that he does not go completely crazy even though his mind is taken to the very edge of sanity and perhaps temporarily beyond by the otherness of the music. The Greek vase also shows Odysseus straining at the ropes, but a detail lacking in Waterhouse's powerful image seems present in the much older vase painting: the Greek image of Odysseus shows his head thrown back, and not looking at a siren or anything in particular. This may be ambiguous but is a realistic portrayal of ecstasy, which same iconographic clue Greek artists often depict in trancelike moments of dance and related divine madness.
In Greek myth, the Sirens were the daughters of the Muse Terpsichore by the river god Akheloos; other myths associate them with Persephone prior to her abduction by Hades. Their usual abode was near the Straits of Messina between mainland Italy and the island of Sicily. (5) The original Homeric idea of a siren was not this "bird woman" but mythological femmes fatales nonetheless lying as monstrous lures on rocky shores. (6)
Fig. 3 Odysseus and the Sirens, Greek Red-Figure Stamnos Vase, c. 480-460 BCE, British Museum (7)
Fig. 4 Greek siren, National Museum, Athens, marble, 4th c. BCE
Although arguable, many mythographers consider the visual source of a Greek siren to derive from the East, notably Egypt, like other iconographic myth creatures, where an early borrowing probably took place in the form of the ba bird. The Egyptian ba bird was a part of funerary motif, representing various ideas still not completely understood, something akin to an animated manifestation of the deceased person, able to fly through tombs and elsewhere to reunite with the mummy whenever necessary, and "often appearing above the head of the deceased". The example from the 13th c. BCE Papyrus of Ani shows one of its more typical forms. The Egyptian ba was identified with mobility of the human personality at death, among other things, but a mostly non-physical manifestation, hence its mobility was emphasized in a winged, birdlike body with a human head. (8) At times the ba appears to be rendering a stylized sparrow hawk (Accipiter nisus) or a small falcon (Falco peregrinus), but is usually so generic as to not refer to any one bird, only its mobility. That the ba has an association with death or funerary ideas is perhaps one tenuous reason why the Greeks identified its image for a siren with danger.
Fig. 5 Ba bird, Papyrus of Ani, XIXth Dynasty, Thebes, circa 1250 BCE. British Museum Papyrus BM 10470
In Waterhouse's version of Odysseus confronted by sirens, a half circle of sirens forms an open mouthed choir with wind-whipped hair around the listening hero, who leans forward for his unparalleled experience of their beguiling "high thrilling song" (Fagles) or "beautiful" voice or song (Murray and Dimock, McCrorie, Lombardo) or as Homer describes their song in καλλιμον (kallimon) (Odyssey 12.192) or elsewhere λιγυρην (from Greek ligura) (Odyssey 12.183) as "sweet, clear-toned, shrill" and thus variously translated above.
While some have criticized Waterhouse's mythological subjects as being "too pretty", Treuherz defends Waterhouse for those who often "overlook the brutality of his female protagonists (Hylas and the Nymphs)". (9) These sirens only look harmless, underscoring the danger of underestimating their deadly effects on men by their voices, not their hybrid looks.
Odysseus faces toward the rear of the boat, and its sails billow with heavy wind that also causes whitecaps on the waves, just as Homer tells it, their oars "churning the whitecaps stroke on stroke" (Fagles). There is an urgency throughout the painting as his men pull hard on their oars, a tautness in this dramatically imagined scene that the Greek vase lacks, only because its intention seems to be showing Odysseus in a moment of madness he will survive, straining in ecstasy at which any other human, less heroic, could only wonder. This is the moment both the Greek painter and Waterhouse chose, a tantalizing image of musical madness that ravished the soul until the body gave in and men threw themselves overboard, often to drown in churning seas. Odysseus is rapt, internally safe from their "honeyed voices" (Fagles) only as long as the external ropes hold him tight:
"So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air
and the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer." (10)
Notes:
(1) Anthony Hobson. J. W. Waterhouse. London: Phaidon, [1989] 2007 repr., 45, 46, 49, Plate 30.
(2) Homer. The Odyssey. Robert Fagles translation. London: Penguin, 1996. Introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, 12.175-180. Also see Homer, Odyssey, tr. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000, 182-3; Homer, Odyssey. A. T. Murray and George Dimock, tr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Loeb Classical Library, 1998, repr., 450-53, 461-63.
(3) Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Siren (Il Professore e la Sirena) and Selected Writings. David Gilmour, ed., Archibald Colquhoun, tr. London: The Harvill Press, 1995, originally written in 1957, 57-94.
(4) Dyffri Williams. Greek Vases. London: British Museum Press, 1999, 2nd ed., 91; Lucilla Burn. Greek Myths. London: British Museum Press, 1990, especially Odysseus, 34-6, 38-40, 43-58; Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), Bildlexikon der Antiken Mythologie, Forschungsstelle der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, BAND I-VIII, "Odysseus", "Siren"; Beazley Archive, Oxford, #202628, see "Siren".
(5) Richard P. Martin. Myths of the Ancient Greeks. New York: Penguin/New American Library, 2003, 222, 306-7. Illustration by Patrick Hunt, 306; I. Aghion, C. Barbillou, F. Lissarrague. Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity. Flammarion Iconographic Guide. Paris: Flammarion, 1996 ed., 272-74.
(6) Seirenes Σειρηνες, see H. J. Rose. A Handbook of Greek Mythology. Routledge, 1990, 6th ed., 245, 252 note 55; Homer, The Odyssey. Edward McCrorie, tr., and Richard Martin, intro and notes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 386.
(7) British Museum GR 1843.11-3.31, Vase E440.
(8) Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, eds. The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. New York and London: Harry Abrams / British Museum, 1995, 47; Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer, eds. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 5th impr. 1997, 65, 90, 97, 106, 215; Philippe Gremond and Jacques Livet. An Egyptian Bestiary: Animals in the Life and Religion of the Land of the Pharaohs. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001, 132ff., 166-72, 196.
(9) Julian Treuherz. "J. W. Waterhouse (Groningen, London, Montreal Exhibitions)" The Burlington Magazine CLI 1279 (October, 2009), 718-19.
(10) Odyssey 12.208-09 (Fagles tr.)
Photo Credits: Fig. 1, in the public domain; Fig. 2, courtesy of Archaeological Museum, Agrigento, Sicily; Fig. 4, courtesy of National Museum, Athens; Figs. 3 & 5, courtesy of British Museum London.
Copyright © 2009 Dr. Patrick Hunt
Stanford University
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