Prometheus Bound

Chained high on a crag in the Caucasus Mountains, the Titan Prometheus is so small you could miss him. He lies near the top of that golden peak just left of center, arms flung back, a pale smudge of a body against the rock. Thomas Cole painted him this way on purpose. The story comes from the Greek playwright Aeschylus: Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind, and Zeus punished him by binding him to a mountain where an eagle came each day to tear at his liver. Look toward the lower left and you can spot the bird, a dark speck gliding in over the ridge.

Cole, the English born painter who founded the Hudson River School, made this around 1846 and 1847, near the end of his life. He sent it to London's Royal Academy hoping it would finally win him serious attention in England. It was hung badly and barely noticed, which is a shame, because the painting does something clever with time. The single bright point in the purple sky is the morning star, Venus, which signals the coming dawn and, in the myth, the eventual arrival of Hercules to break the chains. Cole was less interested in the suffering body than in the enormous cold mountains that dwarf it, and in that one small pinprick of light suggesting the night will not last forever.