Photographer Page

Image courtesy of Scala

“Saint Paul Writing” was painted by Dutch artist Jacob Adriaensz Backer.

The legend of Dionysus turning Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins is depicted on a kylix, a shallow drinking cup, from 530 B.C., now in the State Collection of Antiquities in Munich.

The graphic death of the mythical King Pentheus of Thebes is depicted in this fresco from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. In The Bacchae, Euripides recounts how Pentheus was dismembered by a group of maenads—including his own mother, Agave—while the women were in the throes of an ecstatic Dionysian frenzy.

Pregnant with Dionysus, Semele perishes after demanding to see Zeus in all his glory in this 17th-century oil painting by Luca Ferrari.