MADRID.- As Christopher Nolan brings Homer’s Odyssey to the screen, the Museo Nacional del Prado is inviting audiences to explore how artists have imagined the ancient world across more than two millennia.
The Madrid museum has released a new video that brings together 24 paintings, sculptures and drawings inspired by classical mythology, the Trojan War and the perilous journeys at the heart of Greek and Roman storytelling. Set to Dinamita, a song by Spanish musician La Bien Querida, the sequence moves from the Judgment of Paris and the abduction of Helen to the burning of Troy, the travels of Aeneas and the ordeals of Odysseus.
Rather than offering a conventional art-historical lecture, the project creates an emotional and cinematic journey through the Prado’s collection. Images of storms, shipwrecks, desire, punishment and survival unfold to contemporary music, allowing stories that are thousands of years old to feel surprisingly immediate.
The video was created to coincide with the release of Nolan’s The Odyssey, an adaptation of the Homeric poem that recounts Odysseus’s long and dangerous journey home after the Trojan War. The Prado’s response broadens that story, showing how generations of artists repeatedly returned to the characters and conflicts surrounding Troy.
From the Judgment of Paris to the fall of Troy
The journey begins with Peter Paul Rubens’s The Judgment of Paris, a scene depicting the mythical beauty contest that ultimately led to the Trojan War. Paris’s decision to award the golden apple to Venus set in motion his abduction of Helen and the conflict that would consume Troy.
Tintoretto’s The Abduction of Helen and Corrado Giaquinto’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia continue the story, presenting moments shaped by desire, violence and impossible choices.
Francisco Collantes’s The Burning of Troy brings viewers to the destruction of the city itself. The Baroque artist created the painting for Madrid’s Buen Retiro Palace, where images of ancient battles carried meanings beyond their dramatic subjects. Such works decorated the royal residence while also serving as reminders of political power and the rise and fall of empires.
Odysseus appears directly in Achilles Discovered by Ulysses and Diomedes, painted by Rubens and his workshop. The myth tells how Achilles was hidden among women on the island of Skyros to prevent him from joining the Trojan War. Odysseus exposed him by presenting gifts that included weapons, revealing the young warrior when he instinctively reached for them.
Other figures associated with Homer’s world include Polyphemus, Circe, Telemachus, Hecuba and Aeneas. Together, their stories extend beyond the boundaries of The Odyssey and create a broader portrait of the ancient Mediterranean imagination.
The sea as a place of danger and transformation
Travel is one of the video’s strongest recurring themes. Jean Pillement’s Shipwrecked People Reaching the Coast and José Carlos de Borbón’s maritime scenes evoke the uncertainty of crossing the sea, where survival depends as much on fate as on courage.
Seen through the lens of Homer’s poem, these works become images of separation and return. They reflect the experience of travelers who lose their way, endure disaster and continue searching for home.
The Pillars of Hercules, depicted in one of José Carlos de Borbón’s seascapes, traditionally marked the edge of the known Mediterranean world. Their inclusion reinforces the sense of traveling toward uncertain territory, both geographically and psychologically.
The video also includes Pierre Guérin’s Aeneas Recounting the Misfortunes of Troy to Dido. The scene connects Homer’s world with Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojan hero Aeneas survives the destruction of his city and begins another journey that will eventually lead to the legendary foundation of Rome.
Gods, monsters and human vulnerability
The Prado’s selection reaches beyond adventure to explore the darker emotional territory of classical myth.
Titian’s Sisyphus shows the condemned king eternally pushing a heavy stone uphill, only to watch it roll back down. José de Ribera’s Tityus depicts another figure undergoing endless punishment, while Rubens’s Saturn Devouring a Son presents one of mythology’s most disturbing images of fear and power.
Leonaert Bramer’s The Grief of Hecuba shifts the focus from heroic action to the human cost of war. Hecuba, queen of Troy, became a symbol of grief after losing her city, her husband and nearly all her children.
These works introduce a note of tragedy that complicates the idea of the classical world as an age populated only by noble heroes and beautiful gods. In the Prado’s collection, antiquity is also a place of cruelty, loss, ambition and psychological conflict.
Classical stories through contemporary music
La Bien Querida’s Dinamita serves as the emotional thread connecting the works. Its themes of determination, desire, freedom and transformation echo the choices made by the figures depicted in the museum’s galleries.
Paintings such as Rubens’s The Birth of the Milky Way and Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan, along with a sculpture of Venus and Mars associated with Antonio Canova’s circle, bring the world of the gods into the sequence. They introduce moments of sensuality, creation and revelation amid the darker scenes of punishment and destruction.
The pairing of old master paintings with contemporary music is part of the Prado’s continuing effort to present its collection through new formats. Instead of treating classical mythology as a closed historical subject, the video shows how its themes remain embedded in modern storytelling.
Nolan’s film may have provided the immediate occasion, but the Prado’s project makes a larger point. Stories of departure and return, temptation and sacrifice, violence and survival have never entirely left contemporary culture.
By moving through the museum’s collection to the rhythm of a modern song, the video reminds viewers that the ancient world is not as distant as it may seem. Its gods and monsters may belong to myth, but its emotional conflicts remain recognizably human.
