Primaticcio painted the end of the Odyssey as a talk

Primaticcio did not paint Ulysses' revenge, or the bow, or the hero standing over the dead suitors. He painted the two of them, Ulysses and Penelope, lying in bed, talking, in a stillness that barely seems to belong to the same story.

What Primaticcio chooses not to paint

In Book XXIII of the Odyssey, after twenty years, the marriage of Ulysses and Penelope still has to pass its last test: a test built around the couple's bed, carved from a living olive tree that only the two of them, and one servant, knew about. Only when Ulysses describes that secret of the bed does Penelope recognize him, and the couple is finally reunited (Odyssey, Book XXIII; verse checked against the Portuguese edition of Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014). A less attentive painter would have illustrated the slaughter of the suitors that comes before it, or the victorious hero, bow in hand, over the fallen enemies. Francesco Primaticcio, an Italian who went to work at the French court of Fontainebleau, chooses something else entirely.

The scene he paints

In "Ulysses and Penelope", dated to around 1560 and today in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, the two appear in bed, in profile, in low light. Ulysses holds Penelope's chin in a gesture of affection, while she, according to the museum's own reading, lists the suitors she kept at bay during the twenty years of waiting. There is no sword, no blood, no throne. There are two still bodies and a conversation.

The scene reproduces a larger composition: it was part of a series of 58 frescoes on the Odyssey that Primaticcio painted on the walls of the Fontainebleau palace, the so-called Gallery of Ulysses, destroyed in 1738. The Toledo Museum's painting, in a style now called Mannerism, with elongated figures and poses that prize the painter's invention over the exact imitation of nature, is one of the rare surviving records of that entire cycle devoted to Homer.

It is worth noting the moment when Primaticcio painted this scene: around 1560, when Mannerism had already shifted European painting's interest away from the exact imitation of nature and toward the elegance of invention, the studied pose, the restrained theatrical gesture. It is this repertoire that lets the painter concentrate the entire emotional force of the scene in a single small gesture, the hand on the chin, instead of in a composition full of action.

Why the talk is the return

Homer tells us that, after the scene of the bed, the two of them stay awake all night, telling each other about the twenty years apart: she first, telling what she endured inside the house; he afterward, telling of the sea. The poem even says that the goddess Athena holds back the coming of dawn just to give this conversation time (Odyssey, Book XXIII). Ulysses' return does not end in revenge. It ends in finally having someone to tell his whole story to, someone who also has a whole story to tell back.

Crossing the world to have someone to talk to

This is the scene Primaticcio chooses to make eternal, and that is why the painting unsettles in a good way: because it resists the obvious temptation of the victorious hero and chooses the quietest, and truest, image of what it means to come home after twenty years. Ulysses crossed the entire world to end up, at last, with someone to talk to.

It is this encounter between Homer's text and Primaticcio's painting that closes the Nous class on the Odyssey, at the moment when the poem decides that a man's return is only complete when someone who knew him before listens, in full, to the story of who he became.

Continue: The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Penelope and the test of the bed, in the Odyssey · Starting over after losing everything: the Odyssey's answer · Mark Antony's speech
Source class (YouTube): Odisseia, de Homero