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Niobe.
“The Mater Dolorosa of Antique Art.”

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“To stone the gods have changed her but in vain;

The sculptor’s art has made her breathe again.”

—Greek Epigram.

STORY.
A FROZEN TRAGEDY.

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Niobe, Queen of Thebes, was the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, who was the most famous of mythological musicians. She was the mother of seven sons and seven daughters. She became jealous of the Goddess Leto and commanded the Theban women to cease their worship of her, explaining that she considered herself far superior to Leto, who had but two children, while she had seven times as many. This so angered Leto that she commanded Apollo and Diana to kill all of Niobe’s children. The father, Amphion, overwhelmed by this calamity, destroyed himself. The proud mother, thus bereft of husband and children, wept continually night and day, until Jupiter turned her into stone; yet tears continued to flow; and borne on a whirlwind to her native mountain, she still remains a mass of rock from which a trickling stream flows, the tribute to her never-ending grief.

“And now in Sipylus, amid the rocks

And lonely mountains, she, though turned to stone,

Broods over wrongs inflicted by the gods.”

—Lewis Morris.

INTERPRETATION.

Niobe is the personification of winter, and the myth signifies the melting of snow and the destruction of its icy offspring under the rays of the spring sun.

ART.

This statue is attributed to Scopas. It was disinterred in Rome in 1583 and is now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

It is part of a group composed of seventeen figures—Niobe and fourteen children, a pedagogue and a nurse. The figure of the mother clasped by the arm of her terrified child is one of the most admired of the ancient statues. It is the highest instance in sculpture in which the body, itself exempt from pain, so wonderfully reflects the tortured soul. It ranks with the Laocoon and Apollo Belvedere as a work of art.