Before she was Queen of the Underworld, Persephone was Kore, the maiden.

In this portrait, I wanted to meet Persephone while she was still young, before the great events of her mythology had unfolded. And yet, as is so often true when we look backward at a life, the symbols of what she will become are already there.

Her arms cross gently before her. In her left hand she holds a narcissus, the flower she would one day be gathering when the earth opened beneath her. In her right, a pomegranate, still only a familiar fruit, though we know the extraordinary significance it will later acquire. Above her rests a crown of pomegranates, an emblem of a sovereignty she has not yet assumed.

The crossing of her arms is intentional. The narcissus appears to our left, the direction from which we instinctively read the past, while the pomegranate appears to our right, toward the future. Her body joins the two.

There is another duality within the gesture. Her left hand, associated in some symbolic traditions with the receptive, intuitive and feminine, carries the narcissus: beauty, attraction, mystery, and the flower that will draw her toward an unknown threshold. Her right hand, associated with the active and solar, carries the pomegranate: the fruit that will one day bind her fate to another world.

Ovid gives this detail particular poignancy. In his telling, Persephone does not eat the pomegranate as a conscious choice to remain in the Underworld. She plucks the fruit herself and eats its seeds, apparently unaware of what the act will cost her. Only afterward does the fruit become inseparable from her fate.

But this Persephone knows none of that yet.

She is simply a young woman holding a flower and a fruit. We, looking at her from the other side of the myth, know what they will become.

The narcissus foreshadows the opening of the earth. The pomegranate foreshadows her binding to the world below. And the crown above her hints at the destiny awaiting her: though she has not yet entered the Underworld, she will one day become its Queen.

Young Persephone is not yet descending, returning, mourning, or reigning. She stands before all of it, carrying the symbols of her future without yet knowing their meaning.