The entire Odyssey in one painting | National Gallery

This Renaissance painting by Pinturicchio encapsulates the entire story of the Odyssey, which the epic poet Homer took 12,000 lines to do, and here we've got one painting that tells it all. Hi, my name is Dr Emily Hauser. I'm an expert in Homer and women in the ancient world. I've written a book called Mythica, a new history of Homer's world through the women written out of it, and I'm standing here today in the National Gallery visiting one of my favourite paintings of Penelope, which is Pinturicchio's painting of Penelope and the suitors, painted in 1509 for Pandolfo Petrucci, the ruler of Siena. He wanted this to be set up in his palace in order to commemorate the marriage of his son to the niece of the Pope. So what this story is telling us for Pandolfo Petrucci is the idea of a marriage, a faithful wife, we've got Penelope there, the ultimate symbol of a faithful wife, and in fact Penelope's story is one that is all about fidelity and all about her marriage. In the Odyssey she waits 20 years for her husband Odysseus to come home from the Trojan War. He spends 10 years in Troy, 10 years coming back to her, and she tries to send off about 100 suitors who are besieging her in the palace in her home in Ithaca, each of wanting to have her hand in marriage, and she manages to delay that by saying that she is not going to marry any of them until she has finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law. Penelope's weaving is her consummate trick and it's really symbolic of her cleverness, her cunning, and the fact that she is the equal of Odysseus. What they don't know is that secretly at night she's unweaving that web and so she never progresses. A couple of details I love about this painting that really drew my eye when I first saw it. The first one is of course the cat crouching down at the bottom of the frame there underneath the loom but very much in the centre of the painting. She's got her paw on a ball of wool. What I think this cat is doing is actually symbolising for us the weaving and unweaving of Penelope's web and could be a signal that in fact Penelope's weaving is not quite all it seems. At the same time another detail I really love is the fact that the figure that's standing in front of Penelope who could be her son Telemachus has his finger pointing upwards. Now in Renaissance art that's often an indication of speech and in fact Telemachus has a very famous speech to Penelope in the Odyssey but his finger is also pointing up towards the scene behind him and if you follow the trajectory of where he's pointing it actually points right to the mast of the ship where Odysseus has been tied up to avoid jumping off his ship and following the lure of the sirens. This is how you depicted a siren in the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The sirens in Homer are fantastical beasts who lure sailors into shipwrecks on the rocks beneath them by singing beautiful songs and in fact in this painting you can see a skiff where men are diving out of the boat into the water trying desperately to get towards the sirens and in that window or an aperture behind Penelope we've got all of the different scenes of Odysseus's travels or at least the key highlights. We can see him meeting the witch Circe who turned some of his men into pigs. He's standing next to her holding a staff, Circe surrounded by her pigs that are actually Odysseus's companions turned into swine. Above that you've got a palace that's representing the palace of the Phaeacians which is where Odysseus turns up in his final stop before he gets home. Then in the distance you've got a ship that's sailing into the horizon that's probably Odysseus's ship sailing off towards Ithaca in the west and then in the foreground not only have you got Penelope but she's also got around her the suitors who are dressed up very fancy there to try and get Penelope to marry them and sneaking through the door at the back of the suitors we've got the figure of possibly Odysseus himself. He's dressed up in disguise in the Odyssey he's been turned into a beggar by the goddess Athena and here you can see he's been aged with his beard, he's got clothes in red and blue and those match what's hanging on the wall behind Penelope which is a bow and a quiver of arrows. That bow is unstrung and that's important because what Penelope is about to do on the day that Odysseus comes back to Ithaca is to set an archery contest and the man who strings the bow will become her husband. Everyone recognises the power of the story of coming home. That word in ancient Greek is nostos, homecoming. It's where in English we get the word nostalgia from and it's something that would have been very pertinent to the patron who commissioned this painting. Pandolfo Petrucci had himself been exiled from his hometown of Siena and when he came home it's likely that this story would have been something that really resonated with him as someone who himself had experienced the pain of exile and the joy of coming home. What strikes me about this painting and what you cannot ignore is that this does not look like an ancient Greek Penelope and the suitors. If we have a look at the clothes that the suitors are wearing for instance queuing up in front of Penelope they are wearing quintessential fancy renaissance clothes. If we look out the window we can see Odysseus's ship that is absolutely a 16th century model of a ship. It's got the Petrucci coat of arms on it and the pigs that Circe has. They are in a local breed of pigs called the Cinta Tarnese. They are recognisable by the white stripe down their backs. I've kept coming back to the Odyssey again and again for over 20 years. It's a text that to me never fails to reveal new meanings. Every time I come back and read it I see something different. When I was an undergraduate and I was younger I was thinking through the lens of Telemachus, Penelope and Odysseus's teenage son who's very much trying to prove himself in a world that he hasn't quite entered into. Now that I'm older I see the Odyssey and Penelope through the lens of a mother and here we see Penelope as the mother figure very much dressed up as a renaissance Madonna. So the archetypal mother figure for a renaissance audience confronted perhaps by her teenage son who's struggling to become a man in the world and for me that very much resonates with my experience as a mother. So every time we come back to the Odyssey and we encounter it with our new experiences we can see something else, a new storyline, a new character, a new way to understand being. And you might think that Homer's epic the Odyssey which was written over two and a half thousand years ago doesn't have much more to be discovered but in fact all the time historians, literary analysts, archaeologists are uncovering new tools, new techniques, new fragments from the ancient world that tell us something new all the time and for me as a historian it's been one of the most exciting things to try and use new tools like ancient DNA to understand the fabric of women's lives and to look back into the reality behind women like Penelope. This is a very renaissance Penelope that we're seeing here. She is sitting at a renaissance floor loom as opposed to a loom that would have been recognisable to an antique woman who would have been weaving. And one of the amazing things that we can find when we pay attention to those seemingly mundane artefacts is that we can actually unravel a lot of information about what women were doing. We can find out for example by creating replicas of the kinds of tools that they were using how much time they were spending doing spinning and weaving like we see Penelope doing here and in fact it turns out that in order to weave for an hour at a loom they would have probably had to spin for seven or eight hours. So this is suggesting that this is an activity that in the But for me what's really exciting is seeing a woman doing what she does in her own quarters and at the same time doing something extremely clever that in the Odyssey will pass down her name for thousands of years. The Odyssey keeps being told because it is a story that has it all. It is a story of a hero, it's a story of a woman, it's a story of adventure and travel, it's a son growing up and it is a home in peril. What I love about this is that we are in a sense making and remaking the Odyssey for our times. This is something that we're seeing being done in contemporary retellings like Madeline Miller's Circe, like Clare North's Ithaca, as well as my own historical work in Mythica is something we're also seeing in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and perhaps what makes a classic is not the fact that it's fixed in time but the very fact that we keep turning back to it and remaking it anew. If you're interested in learning more about art click here or here and subscribe to our channel. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you again next time.