The singer Arion, thrown into the sea for his money, is saved by a dolphin sent by Jupiter who was enchanted by his song. Here he is, in this delightfully comic image, paying for his ride with music.
The painter, Francesco Bianchi Ferrari, was ostensively inspired by an extract from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and yet could there be something more to this image? To depict Arion as a child is highly unusual and yet Love or Cupid is often shown as a boy riding a dolphin.
With its fantastically strange approximation of the dolphin this possibly private love message is an image I’m constantly intrigued by.
Arion might have been returned safely to the shores of Corinth but the painting itself has washed up closer to home – in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
