Description
Between the whirlpool and the monster: that was the choice Circe gave Odysseus, and Homer’s sailors lost six men to make it. Ary Renan, son of the philosopher Ernest Renan and a painter of the Symbolist generation, paints the strait at night as a single heaving mass of blue. On the left, Charybdis is not a funnel but a wave with a body inside it, a grey shape rolling under the crest. On the right, on a spike of rock, Scylla is a woman with her head thrown back and her hair streaming, half drowned, half singing.
Renan painted it in 1894, in the decade when the Symbolists were turning Homer’s monsters into states of mind. There is no ship in the picture. The viewer is in the water, at the level of the waves, choosing. The painting belongs to the Musée de la Vie romantique in Paris. Our hand-painted reproduction is made in oil on canvas from the original, and the blues are built up in layers so that the sea keeps its depth.

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