“The Love of Antiochus with Faire Stratonica” in Art

Abstract

The story of Antiochus and Stratonice might well be called one of the outstanding moral tales of world literature. It appealed to ancient writers such as Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, Lucian, and Appian; to Petrarch and the novelists of the Renaissance; to French seventeenth-century dramatists such as Philippe Quinault and Thomas Corneille; and to a host of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century classicists including Winckelmann and Goethe. It was treated in a flood of opera libretti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And finally, it has left remarkable traces in paintings and drawings from the fifteenth down to the nineteenth century, when its pictorial treatment reached a belated climax in some of the most significant works of Jean-Dominique Ingres.