Atlas Turned to Stone

Atlas Turned to Stone, painted in 1882 and now at Southampton City Art Gallery, depicts a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Perseus, carrying the severed head of Medusa, shows it to the Titan Atlas and turns him to stone — the mythological explanation for the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. Burne-Jones's interest in the Perseus myth ran deep and resulted in his ambitious Perseus series, a large-scale cycle of paintings begun in the late 1870s and never entirely completed. Atlas Turned to Stone belongs to this constellation of Perseus-related works, occupying a position in the myth's narrative arc between Perseus's decapitation of Medusa and his rescue of Andromeda. The Southampton canvas shows Burne-Jones at work on the classical mythological subject matter that occupied his mature years alongside his Arthurian and medieval sources.

The transformation of Atlas from living Titan to mountain rock requires a compositional language of arrested movement — a figure caught in the process of becoming stone. Burne-Jones exploits this through rigid, geometric treatment of the figure's surface and a cooler, greyer palette that distinguishes petrified rock from warm living flesh. Perseus, shielded from Medusa's reflected gaze, is handled in warmer tones.