Classical mythology in culture

Among the best-known subjects of Italian artists are Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Pallas and the Centaur, the Ledas of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and Raphael's Galatea.

The myths, however, continued to provide an important source of raw material for dramatists, including those who wrote the libretti for Handel's operas Admeto and Semele, Mozart's Idomeneo, and Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide.

In Britain, it was a great period for new translations of Greek tragedies and Homer's works, and these in turn inspired contemporary poets, such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley.

[4] The Hellenism of Queen Victoria's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, was such that even his portraits of the quintessentially English court of King Arthur are suffused with echoes of the Homeric epics.

The visual arts kept pace, stimulated by the purchase of the Parthenon marbles in 1816; many of the "Greek" paintings of Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were seriously accepted as part of the transmission of the Hellenic ideal.