ULYSSES ART AND MYTH

The new large exhibition at the San Domenico Museums in Forlì presents over 200 of the most significant works of all time. From the ancient to the twentieth century. Painting, sculpture, miniatures, mosaics, ceramics, tapestries and graphic works include Ulysses' journey as a journey of art.
Since ancient times, artists have not tried to illustrate the entire Odyssey in a purely didactic way. If the archaic age favors the episodes of Polyphemus, Circe, Scylla and the Sirens, the classical age adds the encounters and acknowledgments: the encounter with Tiresia, Athena, Nausicaa and Telemaco, the pain and deception of the canvas of Penelope, the recognition of the nurse Euriclea, the massacre of the Proci. Hellenism adds the domestic and moving encounter with the dog Argo, the embrace and recognition between Ulysses and Penelope, Roman art finally, in addition to repeating the previous models, depicts, as a consoling epilogue, the embrace between Ulysses and the father Laerte. Ancient art is not interested in staging the epic poem, as much as a man who through his multiple and painful experiences has learned to know himself.
Dante, who wrote 2000 years after Homer, uses the Latin authors who underline the qualities of Ulysses. So in canto XXVI of Hell he gives Ulysses a new and different centrality. Dante's Ulysses is not driven by nostalgia for the return, nor, like the Virgilian Enea, is driven by a mission, he is a traveler driven by ardor "to become the expert world / and of human vices and value ", And launches" for another open sea ", towards the" crazy flight ".