According to most sources, Atlas was the child of Iapetus, a Titan, and either Asia or Klymene, both Oceanids (daughters of Oceanus).  This makes Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Sky) his grandparents through his father and his great-grandparents through his mother’s mother.  You’ll see why that’s relevant in a moment.  He is best known for the time Herakles tricked him into helping him retrieve the apples of the Hesperides.

Atlas fought against the Olympians with the other Titans and was defeated along with the rest of them.  Unlike the rest of them, he was not confined to Tartarus afterwards.  Instead, Zeus had him stand at the western edge of Gaia to hold Uranos on his shoulders and keep them apart.  In other words, he is perpetually stuck between his grandparents.

Most sculptures of him show him holding a sphere on his shoulders and some of them, like the one above, are used in fountains.  A lot of people think the sphere represents the earth, which it actually doesn’t.  If you look back to the myth, he stands on the earth, holding the sky on his shoulders.  It means the whole fountain idea makes a lot of sense, what with the water falling from the sky as rain.

I’m no art historian, but I’d guess that in that picture there the water falling out of the sphere, over Atlas, and onto the ground represents rain falling from the sky.  This particular statue, by the way, comes from the Villa Aldobrandini, built in the mid 1500s.  Rich people building gardens during what we call the Italian Renaissance liked to include references to Herakles and his encounter with Atlas because it allowed them to compare their own property to the Garden of the Hesperides.

Unsurprisingly, that reference is less common nowadays.  And no, those books full of maps are not named after him.  The Atlantic Ocean is, though.  And so is this:

I see what you did there.
[Atlas Van Lines, Source: 1stPix]

The columns are one of the first things I notice every time I walk into the Great Hall at Chicago Union Station. The decoration around the tops, known as a capital, marks these as Corinthian columns.  The leaves on the capitals are modeled on the acanthus plant, which mostly grows around the Mediterranean Sea.  The vertical grooves cut into the sides, known as fluting, makes them, and the whole room, look taller.

If you face the rest of the station and look up, you’ll see two statues over the archway, one on either side.  At first glance the one on the left looks like Athena, mostly because of her owl.  This leaves the other statue a mystery.  According to the station’s website, “one represent[s] day (holding a rooster) and the other represent[s] night (holding an owl), a recognition of the 24-hour nature of passenger railroading.”  A nice idea, but the whole thing still reminds me of the School of Athens.

All of these things call to mind a vague connection to Greek and Roman history, what we think of as the great and glorious ancestor to our own civilization.  The fact that the walls, ceiling, and columns are a pale golden color only helps bring to mind colors of their ruins.  Combined with the similarity to the School of Athens the space says two things to me.  First and more overtly, “We as a society are like them in learning and wisdom.”  More subtly, “We who designed this are educated men.  You should feel superior for getting the reference as we do for making it.”