c. 1810

Telemachus Relates His Adventures to Calypso as Mentor Looks On in Disapproval

Italian, 1785 - 1822

Michele Sangiorgi was a little-known Emilian artist who died in Rome at the age of thirty-seven, cutting short a promising career and leaving behind few paintings. Most of his known surviving works are drawings, often large in scale and highly finished like this sheet. The subject is the Greek mythological figure Telemachus, son of the hero Odysseus, who becomes shipwrecked on the island of the nymph Calypso while searching for his long-absent father. When he tells the nymph of his trials and adventures, unaware that she has only recently been abandoned by the wandering Odysseus, Calypso transfers her love for the father to the son.