The Myth of Ancient Greece in World Painting

The plot from Greek mythology about the abduction of Europe is one of the favorite subjects of world art. Thousands of artists have created canvases based on it.
According to the legend, Zeus, who had fallen in love with Europe, appeared to the princess and her friends walking by the sea in the form of a beautiful white bull with golden horns. The girls amused themselves by playing with the bull, decorating his horns with flower garlands (you can see fragments of this garland in the Serov picture).

But the bull in Serov’s painting is not at all white as he is supposed to be according to the legend, but of brown color and it looks more like a bull on ancient Greek vessels than a bull of ancient Greek myth. Why Serov deviates from the reliability of the facts? The artist as if playing with artistic memories: his abduction of Europe is not so much a representation of the myth as the creation of the emblem of the whole world of Greek art. For example, the diving dolphins remind him of the paintings of Dionysus cilicus by the 6th century B.C. Greek master Execius, the brown bull reminds him of the paintings of red-figure vases.

The unexpectedly lively and meaningful gaze of the Zeus bull emphasizes the stiffness of the motionless face-face of Europa, a mask of the archaic crust, a kind of symbol of all Greek art. One of the meanings of the name “Europe” – “wide-eyed”, which is surprisingly consonant with the image of the face of Europe, which gives Serov.
Serov performed several scenic versions of the Abduction of Europe, as well as the sculpture – a small statuette, repeating the composition of the painting. Why is this ancient Greek story so exciting to artists around the world, of all times and all nations?