Thursday, October 16, 2014

Three fragments from Ovid

A Calydonian boar hunt for Katherine of Aragon’s successful campaign against Caledonian invaders (Scots); find the boars, not to be confused with bears. 
Proserpina thinking twice before eating seeds from a pomegranate for the well read child Mary Tudor, taken away from her mother the princess from Granada. 
A Fall of Icarus for Henry VIII’s fall into a river. 
Hopefully these help to establish the date of the triptych. The comparison between Katherine of Aragon combating the Caledonians in the 1513 Battle of Flodden and Atalanta participating in the Calydonian boar hunt might have been made years earlier, but Mary Tudor was not born until 1516 and Henry VIII’s fall in the water was in 1525. It was reenacted in the television series The Tudors, season 1, episode 4.