In recent years, there has been a flurry of bestselling books reimagining the lives of unfairly damned women in Greek mythology. Madeline Miller’s Circe tackled the sorceress daughter of Helios and Perse, who could change humans into wolves, lions or pigs, while Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind reconsidered the snake-haired Medusa, whose gaze had the power to petrify. Both retell their myths from a feminist perspective and it’s no surprise they’ve done well. The epic tales and poems they refashioned were told by men, written down by men, and, until recently, translated by men, some of them spinning words and meanings to fit a certain narrative. For millennia, the myths have provided a constant inspiration for artists, who turned their most thrilling and pivotal moments into paintings or sculpture. But, like the translators, these artists often exaggerated and manipulated the narrative, perpetuating the idea that men are the heroes, women either temptresses or trophies.
Miller and Haynes have been rightly praised for their fresh approach. But what if there was someone who was doing something similar 250 years ago? This is what I find extraordinary about the show at the Royal Academy in London dedicated to Angelica Kauffman, a painter who defied all odds to rise to the top of the art world, in a society even more male-dominated than ours today.
