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The Ghost of Clytemnestra Awakening the Furies

Artist: John Downman (British, 1750–1824)

Date: 1781

Medium: Oil on panel

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

Description

The subject of this painting is from The Eumenides, the final play in the Oresteia trilogy by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus.

In Greek mythology Clytemnestra was the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda the swan, the king and queen of Sparta. She was half-sister to Helen. Clytemnestra married Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, and they had children, one of whom was a son, Orestes. Agamemnon was brother to Menelaus, who married Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

When Helen was stolen away to Troy, Agamemnon went with his brother Menelaus to fight to get her back. Meanwhile back at home, Clytemnestra found a lover in her husband’s cousin Aegisthus, and together they plotted Agamemnon’s death. When Agamemnon returned, Clytemnestra trapped him in a net in the bath and Aegisthus slayed him with a double-sided axe. Orestes later avenges his father’s death by killing both Aegisthus and his own mother Clytemnestra.

In Aeschylus’ version of the story, Clytemnestra is angry about her own murder and summons the Furies to take revenge on her son. She is depicted here as the ghostly white figure calling on the nine Furies to do her bidding. The Furies then pursue Orestes until he goes mad. He flees and finally ends up on trial at the acropolis at Athens. Athena is the deciding vote who saves him.

Orestes and the Furies (based on a work by John Flaxman).

Orestes and Motherhood Ramble

One of the saddest parts in Eumenides is how much Orestes has erased Clytemnestra from his identity to survive.

In Libation Bearers, he was repeatedly told from Elektra, Pylades, and the Chorus to emotionally disown his mother to kill her, which makes his later "victory" more tragic; but by Eumenides, he argues that she was never really his parent at all:

"But do i share my mother's blood myself?" - Line 606

And he's backed by Apollo, his lawyer, who argues that children get everything from their fathers, with their mothers being well...:

"The person called the mother’s not the parent. She only nourishes the embryo planted by mounting her, and for a stranger she keeps the shoot alive—if no god blights it. And I can prove my claim: without a mother there can be fatherhood. For this we have proof here…the offspring of Olympian Zeus, not nurtured in the darkness of the womb: No goddess could give birth to such a child." - Line 658-665

He used Athena as an example—to which she agrees on later—that she sprang from Zeus motherless, but this ultimately erases Metis from her life.

Even more so that Apollo is diminishing his mother Leto after everything she's gone through for him and Artemis. Heck, Apollo is called the son of Leto several times in the Homeric works.

While the trilogy resolves the cycle of vengeance, something is lost in the transition from the old order to the new one:

Heart.