It’s a classic story of boy meets bird. The boy is Ganymede, a beautiful prince, and the bird is Zeus, father of the Greek gods. Zeus was captivated by Ganymede’s beauty, so he disguised himself as an eagle and abducted the boy to serve as the gods’ cup bearer on Mount Olympus. That’s the myth. But Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculpture suggests a more benign interaction as the boy stoops to offer the eagle a drink and the eagle peacefully leans forward to accept. The eagle’s beak hovers just above the boy’s drink, and the two figures—the human and the divine—are frozen mere seconds before touching. An unnerving love story is reconsidered, revising the relationship between gods and humankind.
The boy and the eagle are carved from two separate blocks of marble that were later put together. Thorvaldsen’s mastery can be seen in the precision with which the two figures fit together: the eagle’s beak rests just one-eighth of an inch above the cup in Ganymede’s hand.
The cup Ganymede holds in his left hand is modeled after a kylix, a kind of drinking cup used in ancient Greece. They were common at social gatherings or parties, its shallow shape making it easier to drink while reclining.
The eagle was sculpted with such zoological exactness—from the lifelike layering of feathers to the curved tips of its talons—that you expect to see the liquid in the cup rippling from its breath. Thorvaldsen created several studies of eagles in order to accurately depict one.
Ganymede has a pretty good poker face. You can’t tell if he’s enjoying his eagle experience or concerned. Thorvaldsen, like many artists of his time, felt that timeless art was grounded in universal human characteristics, like reason and intellect, more than individual differences like emotion. So he focuses on Ganymede’s interior experience rather than any exterior reaction.
The cap that Ganymede wears is a Phrygian cap, also known as a liberty cap. It was the hat of choice for French revolutionaries and sometimes crowns the head of Columbia, the female impersonation of the United States. It’s named for a region in Turkey, but our liberty-loving forebears were actually thinking of the pileus, a cone-like, brimless hat worn by freed slaves in ancient Greece as a symbol of their freedom.
Ganymede is feeding the eagle ambrosia, the “food of the gods” in ancient Greek mythology and often characterized as a fluid. Ambrosia was said to bestow immortality on anyone who drank it.