Circe and Odysseus (Mythological Scene)

The enchantress Circe holds out a cup to Ulysses, and the drink is meant to do to him what it has already done to his men, turn a human being into a beast. You can find one of them in the lower corner, a figure already caught halfway between man and animal. What Circe does not know is that the god Mercury is standing just behind the hero, slipping him an antidote so the potion will fail. Maffei painted this around 1650 as one of a pair. Its companion shows Perseus beheading Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone, so the two canvases hang on the same idea, a person on the edge of losing their human shape. Where the pictures spent their first three centuries is unknown. They reappeared together only in 1968, when the Italian state bought them from a private collection in America, and both now hang in Room 3 of the Accademia in Venice.