Collection: Mythology & Allegory

Mythological and allegorical painting carried the central ambition of European art for nearly five centuries, from the Italian Renaissance to the late nineteenth century Salon. The classical mythologies of Ovid, Homer, and Virgil, together with biblical narrative and the dense system of allegorical figures inherited from late antiquity, gave painters the largest, most demanding subjects available. History painting, the academic hierarchy's highest genre, drew most of its raw material from this stock.

The Renaissance reopened the field. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera made mythology again a respectable subject for serious panel painting after a thousand years of Christian dominance. Titian set its Venetian standard for sensual handling and complex multi figure composition, and Peter Paul Rubens brought the language to Counter Reformation Antwerp at unprecedented scale.

The nineteenth century gave mythology a final great theatre in academic Salon painting. William-Adolphe Bouguereau built a career on idealised classical figures, and John William Waterhouse in late Victorian Britain folded mythological subjects into a Pre-Raphaelite descended idiom that proved enduringly popular. Symbolism then carried allegory into a more private psychological mode at the end of the century.

The prints gathered here include engravings after major mythological paintings, illustrated editions of Ovid and Homer, and the long tradition of allegorical figure plates that decorated books, fans, ceiling designs, and architectural ornament. The collection sits between the gallery's Renaissance holdings, where mythology re-entered serious painting, and the Pre-Raphaelites & Symbolism selection, where the late nineteenth century reworked the same stock with a new psychological inflection.