The Spider

Arachne, in the Greek myth, was a weaver who claimed she could out-weave Athena, and she was not wrong. The goddess could find no fault in the cloth, then saw what had been woven into it, the love affairs of the gods, and turned the girl into the creature that still carries her name. Gyzis painted her in 1884 at the moment before that change. She sits with her legs crossed and her arms raised, holding up the finished web, and the threads run off both sides so that the weaving seems to continue past the edges. Her look is fixed somewhere outside the picture. It is painted on wood rather than canvas, 71 centimetres high, and it reached the National Gallery in Athens through the bequest of Eleni Christomanou.