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#The Titans

The elder gods born of Ouranos and Gaia, overthrown by the Olympians.

A dark, teeming Mannerist canvas of the defeated Titans hurled from the sky. From a luminous break in the storm-clouds at the top, a mass of muscular nude figures tumbles headlong and foreshortened into the depths, limbs flailing and faces contorted in terror. They pile into a heap of straining bodies across the foreground, ruddy and pale flesh tangled together; one massive figure sprawls face-up at the centre, mouth open in a scream, his hair standing on end. At the lower left a standing youth grips a burning torch while a black hound's fanged head snarls beside him, and a few small butterflies and insects — the painter's emblems of the fleeting — rest on the fallen limbs.
Greek

The Titanomachy

For ten years the sky itself hung in the balance, until Zeus loosed the hundred-armed prisoners of the deep and the world caught fire.

8 minHesiod
A luminous creator-figure sits enthroned at the centre of the newborn cosmos, arms outspread to draw the concentric spheres of the world out of formless Chaos, while personified winds and elements billow in the four corners — an engraved frontispiece to Ovid's Metamorphoses Book I
Greek

The Birth of the Cosmos

Before there was a world there was only a gap, and out of that yawning dark the first gods came to be.

8 minHesiod