Practice question · Multiple choice
Why do Renaissance mythological paintings use Roman rather than Greek names for the gods?
Hints
- Ask which texts painters and patrons could actually read.
- Ovid wrote in Latin and was the most-used source by a wide margin.
Show the answer
A. Their sources were Latin texts, above all Ovid, and Greek was far less widely read
Why
Because the sources were Latin. Ovid was available, readable and repeatedly translated; Greek was read by far fewer people, and Homer often arrived at second hand. The naming follows the transmission, which is why the pantheon of European painting is Roman even when the stories are Greek.
Practise Greco-Roman Sources I: the Gods and Their Texts
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Greco-Roman Sources I: the Gods and Their Texts
- Which are reasons patrons commissioned mythological subjects?
- Sort each attribute by the deity it identifies.
- The Ovide moralisé read the Metamorphoses as Christian allegory.
- How many books does Ovid's Metamorphoses contain?
- Complete the account of the classical sources.
- Match each classical text to what painters took from it.
- Arrange the steps of identifying a mythological subject, in order.
- Renaissance patrons commissioned depictions of pagan deities without compromising their Christian faith.…
- Homer reached most Renaissance painters directly in the original Greek.