Hector - Bertini

Hector - BertiniA print of Bertini's Hector a 19th century Italian reproductive engraving of the Trojan prince, the moral centre of Homer's Iliad and the hero whose death brings the poem to its close. Hector, eldest son of Priam, is the defender of Troy, the man holding the city together while his brother Paris who began the war by carrying off Helen sits it out behind the walls. The Iliad is the story of his loss of life and of Achilles' loss of meaning. His

to distinguish him from the "lesser" Ajax son of Oileus — is

A print of Marchetti's Perseus Triumphant — a 19th century Italian reproductive engraving of the Greek hero standing victorious with the severed head of the gorgon Medusa

in which several colours are inked onto a single copperplate and pulled in one pass through the press

Fetching three of the apples was the eleventh labour of Heracles — and the image of the nymphs

What is certain is that the opening line has been memorised by Greek schoolchildren for two and a half millennia — and that its compression (muse

turns the usurping king Polydectes to stone

the measured geometry of the grouping reads most clearly — the play of three near-identical figures held in subtle differentiation

and David (Left Hand)

Hercules — on the trail of the golden apples of the Hesperides — seeks out Proteus because the sea god alone knows the way

Alternative angles of this sculpture: Hexe 2

turned inward: a break with the frontal heroic poses of the earlier Greek canon

The fragment itself has a late-classical and Romantic charge