The gate of the year

Red-figure painting on an Attic vase from Vulci, dating to 480-470 B.C., and now in the British Museum, London. The image shows the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens, such as it is described in the XII chant of the Odyssey. Legendary creatures inhabiting the sea, the Sirens were able to bewitch with their chant everyone who heard them, and provoked the death of the sailors who came too close to their island, placed by Homer in the neighbourhood of Scylla and Charybdis. To escape the deadly seduction of the Sirens’ voice, Odysseus, advised by Circe the sorceress, had all of his sailors plug their ears with beeswax and him tied to the mast of the ship in which he was sailing. In Greek painting the Sirens are frequently represented as birds with a woman’s head, but sometimes they have a bearded head.
It is not always easy to distinguish in the iconography the Sirens from the Harpies; the latter were, perhaps, in origin deities of the windstorm, represented as winged female beings who abducted men and brought them in unknown places or in the Otherworld. The Sirens, too, were associated with the world of the dead: according to certain traditions, their function was to enchant with their voices the spirits of the dead and introduce them to the realm of Persephone.

[Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/

collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=7497&objectId=399666&partId=1]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Red-figure painting on an Attic vase from Vulci, dating to 480-470 B.C., and now in the British Museum, London. The image shows the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens, such as it is described in the XII chant of the Odyssey. Legendary creatures inhabiting the sea, the Sirens were able to bewitch with their chant everyone who heard them, and provoked the death of the sailors who came too close to their island, placed by Homer in the neighbourhood of Scylla and Charybdis. To escape the deadly seduction of the Sirens’ voice, Odysseus, advised by Circe the sorceress, had all of his sailors plug their ears with beeswax and him tied to the mast of the ship in which he was sailing. In Greek painting the Sirens are frequently represented as birds with a woman’s head, but sometimes they have a bearded head. It is not always easy to distinguish in the iconography the Sirens from the Harpies; the latter were, perhaps, in origin deities of the windstorm, represented as winged female beings who abducted men and brought them in unknown places or in the Otherworld. The Sirens, too, were associated with the world of the dead: according to certain traditions, their function was to enchant with their voices the spirits of the dead and introduce them to the realm of Persephone. [Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/ collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=7497&objectId=399666&partId=1]