Reject Modernity, Embrace Antiquity 🏺🏛️🧿

Greek or Egyptian rhyton with griffins

3rd - 2nd century BCE

A short summer break to move into my new place and get as much work done as I can. See you in August-September with lots of new things! ☀️❤️

➡️ READ "KOL, MY NAME" WEBCOMIC

close-ups under the cut

When We Were Young (Birth of the Sky) Ouranos and Gaia

I love drawing the primordials because I feel like I can go more abstract and elemental in design with them, same thing goes for certain titans. Since Ouranos is the personification of the sky, I think it's fun to portray him as various sky phenomena.

A Roman gold bracelet in the form of a coiled snake, it’s from Pompeii, circa 1st AD. 

Despite being a movie for kids made twenty years ago it has an inmense amount of love and care for the source material put into it (rosy-fingered dawn is mentioned several times, there's a joke about the Homeric question, it features characters rarely seen in most movie adaptations like Ino and Eupeithes...) and I recommend checking it out on youtube if you're interested (the automatic captions are far from perfect but they're not awful, though a lot of the very Spanish jokes can inevitably get lost in translation)

The references start with the intro, each character appears both in their puppet form and as a specific vase painting depicting them. I could not quite put my finger on what specific depiction of Penelope is shown here so if anyone has any idea do let me know!

Still in the intro, two rotating vases appear. On one of them we can spot the famous Achilles and Patroclus by the Sosias painter and Odysseus meeting Tiresias by the Dolon painter.

The city of Troy seems really accurate! It's clear the team behind the movie looked at reconstructions as inspiration. Menelaus' (the guy on the left in the two central images) shield is also a carbon copy of this hoplite's shield from a Corinthian vase! The general look of the soldiers seems to be inspired by this vase and similar ones too. (Top left recon. by Pablo Aparicio Resco) (Bottom left recon. by Archaeology Illustrated)

Armor that looks appropriately bronze-like! Yes! Like in the epics!

Odysseus' ship looks Greek! It even has eyes!!1 The shields feature designs such as the rooster and spiral from the vase on the previous section plus a gorgoneion and a bull head, as seen in vases such as the Chigi vase pictured on the right here. If you have any idea what specific piece of art the other shields could be referencing feel free to let me know.

The main area of the palace we see in the movie with an open ceiling could be inspired by Mycenaean megara like the megaron of Pylos, reconstructed here by Archaeology Illustrated. What is definitely a reference are the columns, which look basically identical to those built by Arthur Evans at the minoan site of Knossos, which are based on pictorical evidence (like the grandstand fresco shown here) despite being full reconstructions. The walls are also decorated with floral motifs which don't necessarily call back to any specific ancient Aegean fresco I could think of but still get the point that palace walls were decorated and not barren across!

In terms of costume I wanted to highlight these two. One of Penelope's servants wears a wrapped hairstyle commonly seen in Greek pottery. Circe's and Penelope's hairstyles also seem to be inspired by ancient iconography. Antinous wears a leopard's pelt around his shoulders, which could either be considered a luxury item or an indicator of the "wild", "uncivilized" nature of the suitors, both of which would be really appropriate for Antinous. Whatever the case, it's an artistic choice that has that homeric taste imo, calling back to people like Paris and Menelaus wearing leopard pelts in the Iliad.

“Zeus, great nameless all in all,

if that name will gain his favour,

I will call him Zeus.

I have no words to do him justice,

weighing all in the balance,

all I have is Zeus, Zeus —

lift this weight, this torment from my spirit,

cast it once for all!”

— Fagles (Penguin) translation

The harmonica’s spot on, nothing to say about the lyrics apart from the fact that I know every word by memory, jajajaj and the aesthetics of the scene are what I like best, honestly. Whoever designed this gets a 10 from me, I love the shields taken from Greek vases YUPPYYY