Deukalion and Pyrrha

Deukalion and Pyrrha, 1655, depicts the Greek myth of the sole survivors of the great flood who repopulated the earth by throwing stones over their shoulders, each of which became a human being. Castiglione painted this myth repeatedly, drawn to its parallel with the Noah story he also treated throughout his career — both narratives involve universal destruction, survival, and a new beginning. In the Berlin version, the recently re-formed humans emerge from the ground around the elderly couple, blending the mythological with the pastoral animal accumulation that defines the artist's style. The painting belongs to Castiglione's late Roman period, when he had absorbed fully the influence of Nicolas Poussin's classicising mythological landscapes.

The composition balances the elderly couple at left against the nascent human forms emerging from earth at right. Castiglione uses warm, dusty tones suggesting a sun-baked Mediterranean landscape. The emerging figures are deliberately incomplete — half-formed, merging with the soil — requiring the viewer to complete the transformation mentally.