What continues to hold me in Nicola Verlato’s Banned (2013) is not simply its virtuosity or its shock, but the way it stages a conversation between two of humanity’s most enduring narrative forms: mythology and science fiction. These modes of storytelling are often framed as oppositional, the one ancient and symbolic, the other modern and speculative, but Verlato’s painting insists that they are deeply related. The work suggests that science fiction is not a rupture from myth but its contemporary transformation, reshaped to meet a world governed less by gods than by systems.
Mythology arises from humanity’s earliest attempts to orient itself within a vast and incomprehensible cosmos. As Mircea Eliade argues, myth does not merely recount events but establishes “models for human behavior” by placing human experience within a sacred, meaningful order. Mythic figures—satyrs, gods, heroes—externalize human impulses and fears, giving them narrative form. The satyr in Banned belongs unmistakably to this tradition. His hybrid body signals instinct, sexuality, and nature uncontained by reason. He is excessive and vulnerable, but also legible. We recognize him. He belongs to a world where meaning is embodied and struggle is personal.
Science fiction, by contrast, emerges from a desacralized universe shaped by Enlightenment rationality, industrialization, and technological acceleration. Where myth explains origins, science fiction interrogates trajectories. As Darko Suvin famously defines it, science fiction operates through “cognitive estrangement,” presenting worlds that are different enough to unsettle us, yet rational enough to feel plausible. The hovering craft in Banned exemplifies this estrangement. It is not mystical but technological, not capricious but procedural. Its concentric rings evoke scientific diagrams, wave theory, and signal transmission. This is power rendered abstract: no face, no voice, no negotiable will.
Yet Verlato makes clear that this technological presence functions much like a god. It occupies the sky, dominates the composition, and exercises absolute authority over the human (or mythic) body below. In this way, Banned echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The difference, however, is ethical rather than aesthetic. Mythic gods, however cruel, are relational. They can be angered, appeased, loved, or deceived. The technological force in Banned is indifferent. Its power is not exercised against the satyr so much as without regard for him.
This indifference marks a crucial shift between mythological and science-fictional worldviews. In myth, humanity is small but significant; in much science fiction, humanity is small and increasingly irrelevant. The satyr’s nakedness intensifies this point. In classical art, nudity often signifies ideal form and moral truth. Here, it signifies exposure without protection. He has nothing to hide, yet visibility offers no salvation. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on modern power feel relevant here, particularly her concern that contemporary systems can “render human beings superfluous” not through overt cruelty, but through bureaucratic and technological abstraction.
The title Banned sharpens this reading. To be banned is not to be punished within a shared moral framework; it is to be excluded from the framework altogether. Mythological transgression typically results in exile, suffering, or transformation but always within a story that still acknowledges the subject’s role. In contrast, banning is administrative. It erases participation rather than condemns behavior. Verlato’s figure is not being judged for excess; he is being removed from relevance. This feels distinctly contemporary, resonating with experiences of algorithmic governance, digital silencing, and institutional exclusion.
And yet, despite this bleakness, Banned ultimately affirms the enduring power of story itself. Both mythology and science fiction arise from the same human impulse: the need to narrate what overwhelms us. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." It describes the present by exaggerating its forces, just as myth once did. Verlato’s painting participates in this descriptive function, using visual language to translate diffuse modern anxieties into a single, legible moment of confrontation.
What I find most compelling is that the painting itself becomes an act of resistance to erasure. Even as it depicts the classical body’s loss of authority, it insists on rendering that body with reverence and care. The story is not told from the perspective of the machine, but from the ground, from the flesh. In doing so, Verlato reminds me that while the forms of power change, storytelling remains a fundamentally human act. It is how we reclaim agency in the face of forces that feel inhuman.
In the end, mythology and science fiction are not competing narratives but complementary ones. Myth tells us who we have been; science fiction asks who we might become or cease to be. Both are attempts to wrest meaning from uncertainty. Banned stands at their intersection, insisting that even in a world governed by systems rather than gods, the human need to tell stories endures. Story is how we remember ourselves when the world threatens to forget us.