u/SanctumHermeticum

Commissioned by Charles X to decorate a ceiling of the Louvre, the painting shows Homer enthroned before an Ionic temple bearing his name, receiving homage from, in the words of its original exhibition catalogue, all the great men of Greece, Rome, and modern times. The winged figure crowning him with laurel personifies Victory (Nike), though the same catalogue text alternately calls her the Universe, while the women reclining at his feet personify his two epics, the Iliad in red with her sword and the Odyssey in green with her oar. The assembled crowd, rising around him in a strict symmetrical pyramid, reads almost as a genealogy of Western letters and art traced back to a single root, Aesop, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great among the ancients, Dante, Raphael, Poussin, and Molière among the moderns, with Ingres painting his own likeness quietly into the scene behind Raphael, the whole pyramid set against an austere classical temple as a deliberate statement of Neoclassical order against the Romanticism rising around Ingres in 1820s Paris.

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Hermes is shown here in one of his most archaic symbolic forms, the Ram-Bearer (Κριοφόρος) a cultic epithet commemorating the ritual sacrifice of a ram and tied to a Boeotian myth in which Hermes saved the city of Tanagra from plague by ritually hoisting a ram around the border walls. This style became one of the most recognizable images of the god in Greek votive art emphasizing instead his role as savior and purifier, patron of shepherds, guardian of flocks, intermediary of thresholds, etc. The archetype outlasted pagan antiquity entirely, becoming the visual template early Christian theology and art later adopted for the Good Shepherd symbol, the salvific figure carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders.

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Sophia has built her house,
she has hewn her pillars, Seven.
She has slaughtered her meat,
has mixed her wine, also laid out her table.
She has sent out her young women,
calls loud from the city’s heights:
Whoever the dupe, let him turn aside here,
the senseless—she said to him.
Come, partake of my bread,
and drink the wine I have mixed.
Forsake foolishness and Live,
and stride on the way of discernment.
(Proverbs 9:1-6)

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Painted in the terra verde technique this fresco decorates a wall in the Chiostro Verde of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. At the center, Adam and Eve stand around the Tree of Knowledge while the Serpent winds around its trunk between them, the moment of temptation following directly after Eve's own creation shown in the same painting. The Serpent's head, sometimes identified with Lilith, was modeled on the one Masolino painted contemporarily in the Brancacci Chapel's Temptation, a design tradition that gives the serpent a human female face to make its deception more convincing. Beside the tree, Adam's raised hand marks the instant before the Fall, the hinge between the garden's innocence and the forbidden knowledge about to be taken. The scene continues into the cloister's wider Genesis cycle, part of a sequence of frescoes Uccello painted for the Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella that also includes the Flood and the Sacrifice of Noah.

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