Medea

Feuerbach's 'Medea' of 1870, now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is widely considered his masterpiece of mythological painting. The subject depicts the sorceress Medea at the moment she has killed her children to avenge Jason's abandonment — one of Greek tragedy's most uncompromising acts of passion and revenge. Feuerbach presents not the act itself but its immediate aftermath: Medea stands with her murdered children at her feet, her bearing regal and unnervingly composed, as Jason and his Corinthian bride flee to the ship in the background. The composition refuses easy moral condemnation, treating Medea instead as a figure of terrible grandeur, an alien woman destroyed by the culture that failed to accommodate her. Feuerbach worked on the subject for years, and the 1870 version — the fullest realisation — established him alongside Böcklin as the leading painter of mythological subjects in German-speaking Europe. The work was celebrated by critics as demonstrating that history painting on a heroic scale was still possible outside the academic establishment.

The pyramidal compositional structure places Medea at the apex against a Mediterranean sky, flanked by the bodies of her children and the retreating ship. Feuerbach employs a warm, saturated palette with deep crimson and burnt sienna dominating, evoking both Mediterranean heat and the violence just committed. The brushwork on the sky and sea is looser than on the figures, creating atmospheric depth.