Reflections on Minerva (C.244) introduced art-historical subject matter into Roy Lichtenstein's Reflection Series — the figure of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts, rendered in his graphic language and then fragmented by the diagonal silver bands. The choice of a classical subject was a departure from the comic-book and Pop imagery that dominated the series, placing the reflective treatment in dialogue with a much longer representational tradition.

Minerva had appeared in academic painting, in allegorical sculpture, and in the decorative programmes of civic and institutional buildings — the kind of neoclassical iconographic tradition that Lichtenstein had examined from a different angle in the Entablature Series. By bringing her into the Reflection prints, he connected two bodies of work that had approached the visual language of classical culture through different formal means. Reflections on Minerva (C.244) was the most art-historically allusive work in the series, the reflection motif adding a layer of self-consciousness to a subject already laden with the accumulated weight of Western iconography.

Roy Lichtenstein produced the Reflection Series at a moment of retrospective awareness in his practice. By 1990 he was one of the most widely exhibited and critically discussed artists of his generation, and the series reflected that position — a body of work that looked back across its own history, and across the history of art more broadly, through the formal device of the reflection. Reflections on Minerva (C.244) was the point in the series where that backward glance extended furthest, reaching past the twentieth century into the classical tradition from which so much of Western art had drawn its authority.
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