Ulysses. Art and myth. San Domenico Museums

The greatest art journey ever told

How many Ulysses! And how many Odysseys! The protagonist of the Odyssey is the oldest and most modern character in Western literature. He casts a long shadow on the imagination of man, in all times. Art has constantly expressed and reinterpreted the myth. Telling about Ulysses has meant telling about ourselves, from every shore of time and telling about ourselves using our own symbolic alphabets, artistic form, attributing to ourselves the meaning of the historical moment and of our own system of values.

From the Odyssey to Dante’s Comedy, from Tennyson to Joyce and throughout the twentieth century, each and every time, Ulysses is the hero of human experience, endurance, intelligence, speech, knowledge, survival and deception.  He is “the man of many wiles and” many forms “.

After the Trojan War, when facing his adventures on the journey of the long return, he is already a famous person. But that journey is also the tiring reconquest of himself, of his own identity, through the narrative recovery of his story at the court of Alcinoo, through the memory of his return. Just as it happens to art, which narrates by narrating itself, which tells about the its object and its stylistic form.