Selene and Endymion: eternal sleep in art, from Rome to Canova
The myth of Selene and Endymion in art: Roman sarcophagi, Guercino's Endymion with a telescope, Girodet's Sleep of Endymion, Canova and the poem by Keats.
A young shepherd asleep on a mountain, a goddess who comes down every night to gaze at him: the myth of Selene and Endymion is one of the most frequently depicted lunar love stories in Western art. From Roman sculptors to seventeenth-century painters, through Neoclassicism and Romanticism, the theme gave artists the chance to portray sleep, the beauty of the body and moonlight as a force of love.
The myth of endless sleep
Ancient sources tell the story in different versions. According to the most widespread, Endymion was a shepherd, or a king of Elis, who slept in a cave on Mount Latmus, in Caria. Selene, goddess of the Moon, fell in love with him and arranged for him to remain for ever young and asleep, so that she could visit him every night. Other versions attribute the eternal sleep to Endymion's own choice or to a gift from Zeus.
There was also a learned reading of the myth. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, records the tradition that Endymion was the first to understand the movements of the Moon: his love for the goddess would then be the poetic image of long nights spent watching the sky. This astronomical interpretation would have a curious echo in Baroque painting.
From Roman sarcophagi to Guercino
In the second and third centuries AD Selene and Endymion became a frequent subject on Roman sarcophagi. The goddess steps down from her chariot towards the sleeping youth, often accompanied by cupids and by the personification of Sleep. On a funerary monument the scene took on a consoling meaning: death appeared as a peaceful sleep, visited by a divine presence. A celebrated example, from the third century, is kept in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In the seventeenth century Guercino painted a Sleeping Endymion, now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, in which the shepherd holds a telescope. The unusual detail links the myth to Galileo's new astronomy and to the tradition of Endymion as the first observer of the Moon. Nicolas Poussin, for his part, depicted Selene and Endymion in a canvas now at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Girodet, Canova and Keats
In 1791, in Rome, the young French painter Anne-Louis Girodet painted The Sleep of Endymion, now in the Louvre. Selene does not appear as a figure: she is a ray of moonlight caressing the shepherd's body, while Zephyr, in the form of a winged boy, parts the branches to let it through. The work, shown at the Salon of 1793, was admired for its mysterious light, already close to the Romantic sensibility.
Antonio Canova carved a Sleeping Endymion between 1819 and 1822 for the Duke of Devonshire, who placed it in the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth, in England. A few years earlier, in 1818, John Keats had published the poem Endymion, which opens with a line that has become proverbial: «A thing of beauty is a joy for ever».
Across the centuries the myth of Endymion has changed meaning without losing its charm. A funerary consolation for the Romans, an astronomical allegory in the seventeenth century, an exaltation of ideal beauty in Neoclassicism, a Romantic dream in the nineteenth century: in every age Selene's light on the sleeping youth has expressed the longing for a beauty rescued from time.