Phaethon

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the moment Phaethon loses control comes high among the constellations. He is driving the chariot of his father the Sun across the sky, the horses have already sensed a stranger at the reins and left their usual road, and then he sees the Scorpion, its curved sting dripping black venom. In terror he lets the reins fall. The runaway chariot sets the earth alight, and Jupiter, to save the world, strikes the boy down with a thunderbolt. Sargent painted that fall on a round canvas some three metres across, for a ceiling beside the museum's main staircase, where it was put up in 1925. He filled the sky with the signs of the zodiac where stars would usually go, and the Scorpion is among them. Phaethon hurtles down through the circle together with the chariot, his hair turned to flames, trailing smoke behind him.