Myth is prevalent and vivid in art because it does what art does: like art itself, it resonates across time, metamorphosing into new forms and reinventing itself, while retaining a recognizable bone structure. Like art, it has the capacity to compress past and present. It abounds with splits and contradictions: is the Herakles who toiled through the twelve labours the same Herakles who went mad and killed his wife and children? Above all, myth requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer – it lulls us, or lures us, into a sense of complicity with its own fiction. It does so by being simultaneously incredible and true. Human folly and desire are refracted into an unbelievable tale – a boy flying on handmade wings, say – but they are no less recognizable for that.
James Cahill, ”This Thing of Darkness: On the Shifting Role of Myth in Art”
Flying Too Close to the Sun – Myths in Art from Classical to Contemporary, 2018.