Europa
The reference is to the story of Europa, who was abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull. But I was interested, at the time, in the observation that the emergence of Greek philosophy itself eradicated Greek mythology and it’s religious systems. Although he continued to profess a belief in the gods, Plato came to the conclusion that the stories of Homer and others should be banned. This provoked a shift in Greek focus from nature religion to a moral system in which nature became secondary. It was precisely the reported immoral behavior of the gods that Plato objected to, being as he felt it left them bereft of the morality that he would have preferred for them to be examples of.So this is a depiction of a dead religion. I also had in mind the use of the bull as a symbol of the world, and how Neo-Platonism came to view the world as, essentially, dead. Although I recognized that the viewer would very likely not recognize these ideas, my initial view of the subject was from an attempted Platonic perspective. Not only is Europa engaged with the dead bull, she is also trapped in it.