Greek and Roman myth in art

The Greeks and Romans called the same gods by different names. The National Museum of Korea sets the two sets of names side by side: Zeus is Jupiter, Athena is Minerva, Aphrodite is Venus, Dionysus is Bacchus. Centuries later, interest in antiquity became widespread in 15th-century Italy as all’antica, “in the manner of the ancients,” an Italian term for art that sought to bring back the style of the classical past. The National Museum of Western Art says its 2026 print exhibition traces how, in Renaissance Italy, the gods’ images came back to life and took many forms in court culture. Artists found their stories in ancient texts, and one major source was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Latin epic gathering Greek and Roman myths that was translated into several languages and printed in many countries during the Renaissance; the National Gallery notes that it contains episodes from the life of Apollo. In the 17th century the French Royal Academy introduced the term “history painting” for pictures drawn from classical history, mythology, and the Bible, and ranked it above portraits, scenes of daily life, landscapes, and still lifes. In such pictures a god is identified by signs. Jupiter holds a thunderbolt. Apollo is associated with the arts, shown at times among the Muses and at times in a blaze of light. Tate gives another case: a dove beside a woman points to Aphrodite or Venus, although what a sign means can depend on its context.

Find the figure with a sign that gives them away (a thunderbolt, a blaze of light, a bird beside them), then check the other figures for the same kind of sign.