Ulysses Transformed by Athena into a Beggar

The old man hunched over his walking stick was, moments ago, a king. Giuseppe Bottani painted the scene from Book 13 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus finally lands back on Ithaca after twenty years away and Athena meets him on the shore. Instead of a hero's welcome, she gives him wrinkles, a bald head and a beggar's rags, so he can slip into his own palace unrecognised and see who has been loyal to him. She stands beside him in her plumed helmet and rose-coloured gown, spear angled across the scene, looking rather pleased with the trick. He seems to be taking a first cautious step in his new body, testing whether his legs still work.

Bottani, born in Cremona in 1717, spent years in Rome absorbing the classical landscape tradition of Claude Lorrain and Poussin before settling in Mantua, where he ran the local academy. His taste shows here: the story occupies a small strip of ground while trees, cliffs and a pale bank of clouds over the sea take up most of the canvas. It is a very eighteenth-century way of telling a myth, closer to elegant scenery than high drama. Worth noticing is the strip of surf on the right, breaking against the rocks where the Phaeacian sailors have just left him sleeping on the sand along with all his treasure.