Join this exclusive tour led Art Historian Dido Powell.

The tour will focus on Mythology in Art: Pleasure, Punishment and Christian counterparts.

Since the Renaissance, Greek and Roman myths have been depicted by painters.

The myth of Venus enabled artists from Botticelli to the Surrealists to explore the naked female body, with moderated censure due to the suspension of time and place in the painted settings.

Objects associated with myths, such as bows and arrows, become signs for stories and appear concurrently in pagan and biblical stories, with religious references adding authority to pagan myths.

In the twentieth century ‘bows and arrows’ as symbolic tokens in art, acquired sado-masochistic erotic meanings.

We will investigate how artists, from across the centuries have explored pleasure, punishment, reward and religious morality through depicting and referencing ‘Myths’.