Ixion, condemned to forever turn on a burning wheel for attempting to seduce Hera, Zeus’ wife, is the only painting out of Titian’s legendary ‘Furias’ series which we have no surviving visual representation of. The series was initially composed of four paintings depicting Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion — four figures out of greek mythology whose slight against the gods led to eternal punishments. It was initially commissioned by Mary of Hungary in 1548 to decorate her palace at Binche, as she associated the subjects with the German princes who had rebelled against her brother, the Emperor Charles V, and whom he had defeated the year before at Mühlberg.
Titian’s accomplishment of monumental nude figures in complex orientations however soon became the threshold for demonstrating supreme mastery in art, and the subject was repeated by leading artists such as Rubens, Goltzius and Van Haarlem. Tragically two of the paintings were burnt in the Royal Alcázar fire in 1734, and where a sketch of Tantalus survives, no depiction of Ixion is available. However, by combining textual research and DALL·E 2, Oxia Palus presents the world’s first AI resurrection of Titian’s masterpiece, nearly 300 years after its destruction.
