Our watercolor, signed and dated 1797, depicts the Homeric scene of Ulysses and his crew’s departure from Circes’ island. This is a companion piece to another of Kniep’s watercolors, and also belonging to the Galleria Paolo Antonacci, which depicts the episode of Ulysses and Calypso.

Other two of his watercolors, dated 1805, that resemble our two 18^th century Homeric scenes, can be found at the Staatliche Museen  in Berlin. One of them depicts the same subject of our painting and had been wrongly linked to the other Homeric episode where Ulysses bids farewell to Nausicaa.

C. H. Kniep, Ulysses and Circes, 1805, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen

Recently, in occasion of the edition of the catalogue of Kniep’s works edited by Georg Striehl, the aforementioned early 19^th century watercolor was re-interpreted to Ulysses’ farewell to Circes.

By comparing our version to the one exposed in Berlin, what emerged is that Kniep had initially inserted a tame lion, which he then substituted with a snake in his re-elaboration.

The presence of the lion next to the woman and not far from the lambs is an additional element that gives credibility to Strielh’s interpretation. It in fact recalls a Homeric passage in which the magical setting of Circes’ fauna is thoroughly descripted:

Deep in the wooded glens they came on Circe’s palace built of dressed stone on a cleared rise of land. Mountain wolves and lions were roaming round the grounds— she’d bewitched them herself, she gave them magic drugs. But they wouldn’t attack my men; they just came pawing up around them, fawning, swishing their long tails— eager as hounds that fawn around their master, coming home from a feast, who always brings back scraps to calm them down. So they came nuzzling round my men—lions, wolves with big powerful claws—and the men cringed in fear at sight of those strange, ferocious beasts.

(Odyssey, X, vv. 210-219)