“…to be torn apart by Scylla’s hounds...” Medieval Scylla
Scylla, the nymph turned enraged sea monster in Homer’s Odysseus, was generally pictured with one fish tail or two, and dog heads around her waist, in ancient art. In medieval art, however, both her depictions and what she represented, was a lot more varied. Let’s take a look.
Scylla was used as an allegory by Christian theologians, but what she represented was different depending on the writer— and likely if they were more familiar with Homer’s Scylla, the deadly sea monster who attacked Odysseus’ ship; or Ovid’s version, where she was an unlucky nymph, pursued by Glaucus. For example, this image shows the moment when Scylla steps into the bath that Circe cursed, and begins transforming into a monster:
Scylla rejects Glaucus, Ovid, 1479. Netherlandish School. Ms 324 f.137
She tended to represent greedand her sea dogs become the hounds of hell. As St. Jerome wrote, “monstrous beasts (animalia portenosa) that by their sweet and deadly song hurled sailors to be torn apart by Scylla’s hounds...”
Vat. Gar. 123, A commentary on Job. 12th century. From the Vatican Library. A single tailed Scylla with two dog heads emerging from her torso is paired with a winged centaur. Scylla and centaurs were linked in ancient writing, as being near the entrance to Hades.
She’s part of a prayer, attributed to St. Augustine:
"Graunt to us O Lord, that wee may hold soe even away, betweene Sylla, and Caribdis, that haveing escaped the daunger of them both, wee may securely arryve, in the port, with our ship, and our adventure safe."
Scylla mural, St. Stephen and Vitus (Corvey), Germany. Church built in 9th century. Photo by Tsungam, Wikipedia.
Other writers get even more graphic in her violence:
“And should a painter draw her picture, he would not; one things, err in fashioning her after this sort; a woman with the form of a beast, savage, breathing flames, hideous, such as the heathen poets depict their Scyllas. For with ten thousand hands she lays hold of our thoughts and comes on unexpected, tears everything to pieces, like those dogs that bite slyly.” — From St. Chrysostom, “Homily IX”
Two-headed Scylla, left, with bird sirens. Flemish, Ghent, about 1475. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu. I've never seen Scylla with two heads before.
Some writers speak of Scylla in the plural, such as Sidonius, writing around 450 CE.: “Such fame as I have, should be to me an anchor cast in the haven of safe repute. I ought to be content with it after the envious snarls of all the Scyllas which my ship has passed.”
Fish-tailed woman with bird feet and a club, either Scylla or a saw-fish. Doorway of church, Remagen, Germany. 12th century. Photo from Flickr.
It was also likely that she was mixed up with sirens, the far more famous women that Odysseus encountered right before Scylla’s attack. For example:
“On one side of the strait the Charybdis of self-indulgence engulfs our salvation; on the other the Scylla of lust, with a smile upon her girlish check, lures us on to make shipwrecks of our chastity,” wrote St. Jerome around 350 CE. Giving the vengeful Scylla such sexual characteristics is likely a mixing up of the sirens’ and Scylla’s stories. Isidore of Seville also gets this wrong when he writes “as that Scylla lived not as a sea-hag, but as a seaside-dwelling woman, not girded by dogs, but as someone rapacious and inhospitable to visitors.”
Here's Scylla girded by dogs (full post here:)
Scylla transforming into a monster, Glaucus watching. Folio 351. Ovide moralisé, par Chrétien Legouais Publication date : 1301-1400. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (bnf). This is an unusual depiction of Scylla with many tails, and the dog's heads on the ends of her tails.
Some writers even pair up the sirens and Charybdis, forgetting which femme fatale was paired with the whirlpool. Writing about musical theory in the fourteenth century, Arnulf of St. Ghislain states:
“So it is that these women—goddesses, or indeed rather earthly Sirens—enchant the bewitched ears of their listeners and they steal away their hearts... and having snatched them and made them subject to their will, they then enslave them and lead them, shipwrecked by the beauty, alas!, of their prison, into an earthly Charybdis in which no kind of redemption or ransom is available."
Tablemen are ivory carvings, used as game pieces, made in the middle ages. Image via Mann 1981.
Mann, Vivian B. “Mythological Subjects on Northern French Tablemen.” Gesta, vol. 20, no. 1, 1981, pp. 161–71. JSTOR.
For more information about the Scylla of Corvey fresco, see: Hanfmann, George M. A. "The Scylla of Corvey and Her Ancestors." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41, no. Studies on Art and Archeology in Honor of Ernst Kitzinger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (1987): 249-60.
See also: McClendon, Charles B. The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005.
For more information and the Romanesque Scylla, see page 36 in: Pendergast, Carol S. "The Cluny Capital of the Three Headed Bird." Gesta 27, no. 1/2 (1988.)
St Jerome quote: from Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. "Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages." In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 16-51. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006, page 29.
The prayer: Schuldiner, Michael. “The Christian Hero and the Classical Journey in Edward Taylor’s ‘Preparatory Meditations. First Series.’” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, 1986, pp. 113–32. JSTOR.
For both Chrysostom’s quote and Sidonius’s see: Sachs, Eleanor B. "Some Notes on a Twelfth-Century Bishop’s Mitre in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club 61 1 & 2 (1978): 69. Page 11.
For St. Jerome’s quote, see Letter XIV, page 39: Jerome, St. Select Letters of St. Jerome. Translated by F. A. Wright. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
For Isidore, see Seville, Isidore of. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A.; Lewis Barney, W. J; Beach, J.A.; Berghof, Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. page 79.
For the Siren and Charybdis quote, see pages 189-190 in Leach, Elizabeth Eva. "Feminine Birds and Immoral Song: The Song of the Sirens." In Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages, 259-71. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
For Scylla and siren symbolism in Christian thought in general, see: Rahner, Hugo. "Odysseus at the Mast." In Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, 328-86. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963.
