In Turner's painting, the giant is barely there

In the best-known painting of Ulysses' taunt against Polyphemus, the giant is barely there at all. What rules the canvas is the light, a golden and violent dawn, with a tiny ship in the middle of it. And it is exactly that disproportion that makes the painting such an accurate reading of the scene.

The moment Turner chooses to paint

In Book IX of the Odyssey, Ulysses blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus, escapes the cave tied under a ram, boards his ship, and, already safe, commits the act that will cost him ten years of travel: he shouts his own name back, along with his lineage and homeland (Odyssey, Book IX; verse checked against the Portuguese edition of Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014). It is this instant, the shout, that the British painter J. M. W. Turner chooses to depict in "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey", painted in 1829 and exhibited that year at the Royal Academy. The work, today in the National Gallery, London (NG508), entered the museum's collection in 1856.

Where the giant is

If you look for Polyphemus in the painting, you will have a hard time finding him. The Cyclops is a dark shadow high up in the composition, almost blending into the mountain and the smoke rising from it. What fills the entire canvas is something else: a golden and violent dawn, light spilling over the sea, and Ulysses' ship, small, in the middle of all that brightness. Turner, who over his career would become known as the painter who could turn light itself into subject matter, does not paint the monster. He paints the light in which the monster nearly dissolves.

Turner painted the picture near the end of his own career, after decades devoted to seascapes and to studying how sunlight behaves on water at different hours of the day. "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" gathers that entire study into a single mythological scene: the dawn is not scenery, it is the true visual protagonist of the painting, competing for space even with the hero who gives the work its name.

The disproportion the painting depicts

And it is this choice that turns the painting into a reading of the scene, not merely an illustration of it. Turner is painting disproportion: a tiny man, in a small boat, defying a force he himself cannot see in full and cannot measure. Polyphemus is the son of the sea god, Poseidon, and the reach of that lineage does not fit inside the eyes of the man shouting up at him from below. The painting shows exactly this: the gap between the size of the one who defies and the true size of what is being defied.

Defying what you cannot see in full

We almost never know the size of what we are defying when we defy it. Ulysses shouts out of vanity, or out of the need for someone to know of his own feat, and pays with ten years at sea for what, in the instant of the shout, felt like a victory already sealed. The seer had already told Polyphemus he would be blinded by a man named Odysseus, and the giant had expected a tall, mighty hero. Discovering he was defeated by someone small hurts more than the blinding itself, and it is that humiliation, not only the wound, that drives the curse he asks his father Poseidon to lay on the hero's way home. Turner painted that exact instant, between the courage and its price, and that may be why the painting unsettles more than any description of the episode: because it does not show the monster Ulysses defeated. It shows the size of what still stood behind the shadow.

It is this crossing between Homer's text and Turner's painting that the Nous class on the Odyssey follows, at the exact moment when Ulysses' shout becomes the turning point of the entire journey home.

Continue: The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Nobody is my name: Odysseus and the Cyclops · Metis: Odysseus' intelligence is not cunning · Where to start reading the pre-Socratics
Source class (YouTube): Odisseia, de Homero