Charybde et Scylla

A pair of sea monsters rise from the waves on either side of the canvas — Charybdis, the whirlpool, and Scylla, the many-headed terror of the strait that every mariner had to brave, who snatches sailors from their ships. Ary Renan, a painter and poet who moved in the circle of Gustave Moreau, worked in the older master’s symbolist manner, conjuring myth through luminous, ornamental colour rather than narrative; he exhibited this canvas in 1894, near the end of a career cut short by his death in 1900. The painting is held in the Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris.