Quotation and Invention in the D’Aulaires’ Illustrations for their *Book of Greek Myths* (1962)

In print since 1962, issued in a special edition in 2017, and still among the top 2,500 bestselling books on Amazon.com, Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths has been a major gateway to classical mythology for several generations of Anglophone children. The d’Aulaires’ pithy retellings and more than 100 lithograph-style acetate prints have shaped countless children’s understandings of myth. The book has received little attention from classical reception scholars, however. This paper addresses the relationship of the book’s illustrations to ancient iconography. The d’Aulaires were artists who had trained under Henri Matisse (Edgar) and Hans Hofmann (both); in researching their books, moreover, they traveled widely to sites and museums. Their images in the Book of Greek Myths reflect a deep familiarity with art history as well as the artists’ own playful inventiveness. Many illustrations, this paper will show, quote famous Greek and Roman statues, vase paintings, frescoes, and mosaics. Others draw upon Renaissance and Baroque works, thus presenting antiquity through transhistorical intermediaries (per C. Martindale’s formulation of “the transhistorical” in Classical Receptions Journal 5.2 (2013)). Still others – especially monster figures – look altogether different from their ancient counterparts: more wild, expressive, or silly. The vividness of these departures from ancient models, I argue, renders the d'Aulaires' illustrations highly memorable and particularly appealing to children. This paper urges both children's educators and classicists to treat the Book of Greek Myths as a transhistorical work of art, one that engages with antiquity knowledgeably but also creatively.