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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.3 (2004) 485-501


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Ganymede Agonistes

Stephen Orgel

Though this essay is not directly indebted to Alan Bray, it has been in every way enabled by his work. He kindly read an early version of it and urged me on ("Be more outrageous," he said). I sadly dedicate it to his memory.

Ganymede figures in one of a large number of contingent narratives about love and lust interpolated by Ovid into the story of Orpheus in books 10 and 11 of the Metamorphoses. They include some of the best-known Ovidian myths: Pygmalion and the statue, Venus and Adonis, Atalanta and Hippomenes, Apollo and Hyacinthus. The narratives are contingent in the sense that they are interrelated, and for the most part interdependent, often family histories, and they explain how love, such as that of Venus and Adonis, came to be normatively, if not inevitably, tragic. But the stories are not presented simply as histories. They are also the archetypes of poetry, the songs the archpoet sings; they constitute the eloquence that so ravishes the animals and woods and stones that they stop their own lives to listen to him. They do this because these stories of cosmic lust speak directly to the passions of the world of nature: these are the songs that tell us—all of us, people, animals, trees, rocks—what we are, and they say that our essence is desire; we are our lust.

For the Renaissance, the stories in this group that are most often depicted by artists are those of Orpheus himself (particularly of his journey to hell, his singing to the animals, and his death), the love of Venus and Adonis, and the story of Ganymede—surprisingly, not the story of Pygmalion, though it would seem a natural subject. I am framing my discussion with an especially interesting and, despite its great popularity at the time, not very well known Ovidian iconology engraved by Johann Wilhelm Baur, published between 1639 and 1641, and then copied and adapted many times throughout the seventeenth century. Figure 1 is Baur's version of Orpheus in Hades. The Orpheus story starts where love stories usually end, with a marriage. Orpheus summons the wedding god Hymen at the opening of book 10 to celebrate his union with Eurydice, but the ceremony is ill [End Page 485]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Johann Wilhelm Baur, Orpheus in the Underworld, from Ovidii Metamorphosis (1639-41)

Click for larger view		 Figure 2
Eurydice disappearing among the shades (detail of fig. 1)

omened and the bride is dead scarcely ten lines into the book. Orpheus's story is about the power of love, but not in the usual sense: love here sends the bereft poet to hell, both literally and figuratively, in a vain attempt to reclaim his bride. His song of grief and longing moves the infernal powers to tears, but his own impatience, all too human, defeats him. He has been given an impossible stipulation: not to look back at the wife he loved and lost—impossible because it is inhuman, and Orpheus's passion is the condition of humanity. Baur's Orpheus story begins in Hades and focuses on Orpheus at the moment of Eurydice's disappearance back among the shades, or devils, as they appear to be here (fig. 2): she is, appropriately, as Baur imagines the scene, almost indiscernible. [End Page 486]


Click for larger view		 Figure 3
Woodcut illustrating the Orpheus story, from Bocace de la genealogie des dieux (1531), a French edition of Boccaccio's Genealogiae deorum

So Orpheus grieves, forgoing the love of other women because his Eurydice is irreplaceable and seeking instead the love of young men—he was, Ovid says, for the people of Thrace, the auctor, both founder and poet, of the love of men for tender youths. Very few iconologies acknowledge this part of the story, though it is essential. Figure 3 is an early example that does acknowledge it, from the fifteenth-century French Ovid, La bible des poetes, reused in the...

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