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Achilles Restrained by Athena in Agamemnon's Tent, from Iliad, Book I
Johan Tobias Sergel (Swedish, 1740-1814)
1765/66
- Medium
- Black chalk on cream laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 43 × 34.7 cm (16 15/16 × 13 11/16 in.)
- Culture
- Sweden
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This drawing by Sweden’s most important Neoclassical sculptor and draftsman depicts a scene from Homer’s Iliad, set during the Trojan War. Chryses, a Trojan priest of Apollo, prays to Apollo for help after Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army, has refused to return his kidnapped daughter. In response, Apollo inflicts a plague upon the Greeks. Agamemnon returns Chryses’s daughter, but demands Chryses’s second kidnapped daughter, who is held by Achilles, in exchange. Enraged, Achilles draws his sword on Agamemnon, at which point Athena intervenes, as seen in the drawing.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
