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Sleeping Ariadne

The Sleeping Ariadne, housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City, is a Roman Hadrianic copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of the Pergamene school of the 2nd century BC,[1] and is one of the most renowned sculptures of Antiquity.[2] The reclining figure in a chiton bound under her breasts half lies, half sits,[3] her extended legs crossed at the calves, her head pillowed on her left arm, her right thrown over her head. Other Roman copies of this model exist: one, the "Wilton House Ariadne", is substantially unrestored,[4] while another, the "Medici Ariadne" found in Rome, has been "seriously reworked in modern times", according to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway.[5] Two surviving statuettes[6] attest to a Roman trade in reductions of this familiar figure. A variant Sleeping Ariadne is in the Prado Museum, Madrid.[7] A later Roman variant found in the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, is at the Louvre Museum.

The Sleeping Ariadne, long called Cleopatra

Purchased from the Roman Angelo Maffei[8] in 1512 by Pope Julius II, it was immediately installed in the Belvedere Courtyard, which links the Vatican Palace with the papal casina called the Belvedere; there its neighbors were the recently discovered Laocoön and the Belvedere Apollo. Once she had been initially identified as Cleopatra[9] because of the snake bracelet on the upper left arm, which was taken for the asp by which she died, supportive narrative could easily be brought to bear: Ulisse Aldrovandi thought he detected that "she appears to have collapsed and fainted",[10] and a sense of fitful uneasiness has been ascribed to her by the modern viewer Sheila McNally (below).

The "Cleopatra" became the main model[11] through which a conventional pose signifying sleep,[12] with one elbow cocked above the head, was transmitted from Antiquity to High Renaissance and later painters and sculptors.

T.B.L. Webster noted the uneasy pose of the sleeper, between sleep and wakening, a Hellenistic innovation in the sleeping Ariadne motif long known from vase-painting, which now placed greater emphasis on the stress of Ariadne herself; perhaps, Webster suggests, it was reflecting a new, literary source that has not survived.[13] Sheila McNally detected in the sculpture a new "sense of unease that informs the whole" and "an effort to throw off some inner discomfort — a sluggish effort, restrained by a slumber that is more oppressive than relaxing. Her drapery bunches about her legs, imprisoning her loins."[14] Soon she may wake to threaten vengeance on Theseus, as in Catullus' description in "Peleus and Thetis".[15]

The Medici version of the Sleeping Ariadne[16] painted in the gardens of the Villa Medici, Rome, by Diego Velázquez, c. 1630 (Prado Museum)

Renaissance edit

 
Castings of Sleeping Ariadne vs Nymph from Fontaine des Innocents.

Michelangelo drew from the sculpture's wrapping of the arms around the head in his Night and Dawn.[17]

The Cleopatra, as it was then known, was set upon a Roman sarcophagus and fitted as a fountain in a niche at one end of the uppermost terrace of the Cortile del Belvidere, embodying in its setting the description of a Sleeping Nymph allegedly found by the far-off Danube, with a suitably Antique-sounding four-line Latin epigram beginning HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI... that was then making the humanist rounds. The epigram, which passed until modern times for a Roman one, was composed by Giovanni Antonio Campani, a humanist at the court of Pius II who moved in the academic circle of Julius Pomponius Laetus. But the Sleeping Nymph motif and the accompanying inscription applied to it became part and parcel of humanistic and fashionable recreations of paradisal garden spots with classical affinities— loci amoeni— right through the 18th century, all the while assimilated to the "Cleopatra", Leonard Barkan observes, "by a contagion among quite separate narratives that happen to converge in the enigmatic space of the signum/statue".[18] The niche, if it was not a grotto from the first, was redecorated as a grotto in the 1530s, when Francisco de Holanda made a drawing of it.[19]

In the 1550s, under the general direction of Giorgio Vasari the sculpture was reinstalled indoors in an adjoining long gallery, for which, still as a fountain in a shallow grotto niche, it served as the visual focus at one end; Danielle da Volterra provided the designs for the setting in what became known as the Stanza Cleopatra.[20] When the Museo Pio-Clementino was established, it received its similar new setting, set on a sarcophagus that bears a frieze of the Titanomachy.[21]

Since the Renaissance edit

 
Portrait of Charles Crowle by Pompeo Batoni, 1762 (Louvre): as "Cleopatra" the Ariadne often figured in Batoni's portraits of Grand Tourists[22]

Poems were dedicated to the sculpture during the 16th century, sometimes expressed as if in the statue's own voice, in the rhetorical device called prosopopoeia; Baldassare Castiglione wrote one of these, in the form of a dramatic monologue,[23] which Alexander Pope Englished in the early 18th century.[24]

The sculpture was one of a dozen selected by Primaticcio to be molded for plaster copies and then cast in bronze for Francis I at the château de Fontainebleau. In the process, the pose was slightly adjusted, and the sleeping nymph's limbs were gently lengthened, to accord better with French Mannerist canons of female beauty. From the bronze at Fontainebleau numerous copies and reductions were made.[25] In Rome Nicolas Poussin made a small wax copy of the papal sculpture to keep by him, which has come to be preserved in the Louvre Museum. Copies in marble were commissioned by Louis XIV. Pierre Julien sculpted a marble copy during his sojourn at the French Academy in Rome, 1768 to 1773, and shipped it to France to demonstrate the progress he was making, as was the expected gesture of the king's pensionnaires.[26] In Henry Hoare's picturesque garden at Stourhead, a lakeside temple contained John Cheere's whited-lead copy (1766) of the Vatican Ariadne with the suitably Antique-sounding verses beginning HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI.... In America, not very much later, Thomas Jefferson acquired a small marble copy of the Cleopatra, as he first knew it, for the sculpture gallery he planned at Monticello but which was never realised.[27] It was a gift from James Bowdoin, in 1805, and remains in Jefferson's hallway.[28]

Napoleon's agents in Rome naturally selected the Cleopatra to join the choicest antiquities to be taken to Paris, forming the short-lived Musée Napoléon; with Napoleon's fall, it was returned to Rome with the other treasures.

Reidentification as Ariadne edit

Previously, Johann Joachim Winckelmann noticed that the snake actually represented a serpentine-form bracelet, and that the sleeping figure had no reason to be called a Cleopatra; she was a sleeping nymph, he suggested, or a Venus.[29] Ennio Quirino Visconti made the secure identification as Ariadne, based on similar motifs in carved gems and sarcophagus reliefs. By 1816, Jefferson was declaring that his "Cleopatra" was Ariadne.[30]

Medici Sleeping Ariadne edit

 
The Medici Sleeping Ariadne

Another version of the sculpture that was so long identified as Cleopatra was in the collections at the Villa Medici, Rome. It was not removed to Florence until 1787, and some connoisseurs disputed whether it was not in fact finer than the pope's.[31] Today it is at the Uffizi Gallery.

Notes edit

  1. ^ Wolfgang Helbig, Fürer durch die öffenticher Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, 1969 I:109f; the extent to which such copies are free pastiches is always an unknown.
  2. ^ The high reputation of the Sleeping Ariadne is sketched by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the lure of classical sculpture 1500-1900, 1981, cat. no. 24 (as Cleopatra):184-87.
  3. ^ The unobtrusive rockwork is restored.
  4. ^ "The Wilton House Ariadne, totally unrestored, is therefore of great importance in suggesting a more horizontal position than the Vatican figure" observes Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture: The Styles of ca. 331-200 B.C. 2001:331; the Ariadne is discussed pp 330-32.
  5. ^ Ridgway 2001 eo. loc..
  6. ^ In Providence, Rhode Island (pose reversed), and San Antonio, Texas.
  7. ^ Prado E-167, illustration.
  8. ^ The Maffei had already accumulated an extensive assemblage of sculptures, reliefs and inscriptions that had been unearthed on the properties.
  9. ^ Leonard Barkan, "The Beholder's Tale: Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives" Representations 44 (Autumn 1993:133-166) explores the rhetoric inextricably tied to decoding this image (ekphrasis) and providing a narrative for it, whether "Cleopatra", "Sleeping Nymph" or "Ariadne"; Peter Higgs, "Searching for Cleopatra's image: classical portraits in stone", in Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, Cleopatra of Egypt. From History to Myth, 2001, begins with the Sleeping Ariadne misidentification before moving to historical portraiture of Cleopatra.
  10. ^ Aldrovandi, Delle statue antiche, Venice, 1556, quoted in Barkan 1993:138 note 18.
  11. ^ The Barberini Faun was not found until the 1620s, by which time the convention had been thoroughly established
  12. ^ Sheila McNally, "Ariadne and Others: Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art", Classical Antiquity 4.2 (October 1985:152-192), esp. 170ff; Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, "A Story of Five Amazons", American Journal of Archaeology, 78.1 (January 1974:1-17), notes archaic representations of the dead and dying and briefly sketches the progression of the pose as it was extended to other figures; compare the sleeping pose of Endymion on sarcophagi and in post-Renaissance paintings.
  13. ^ Webster, "The myth of Ariadne from Homer to Catullus", Greece and Rome 13 (1966:22-31) pp 29-31.
  14. ^ McNally 1985:172.
  15. ^ Quoted by Webster 1966:30
  16. ^ Now conserved in the Museo Archeologico, Florence
  17. ^ Regoli, Gigetta Dalli; Gioseffi, Decio; Mellini, Gian Lorenzo; Salvini, Roberto (1968). Vatican Museums: Rome. Italy: Newsweek. p. 27.
  18. ^ "One of the words for 'statue' in Latin is, after all signum" (Barkan 1993:43).
  19. ^ Illustrated Barkan 1993:143 fig. 3.
  20. ^ Norman Canedy, "The Decoration of the Stanza della Cleopatra", Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, II (1967).
  21. ^ Haskell and Penny 1981:184.
  22. ^ For example in Batoni's portrait of Thomas William Coke of Holkham Hall, Norfolk (at Holkham), noted by Haskell and Penny, 1981:187, and also in portraits of Thomas Dundas and John, 3rd Lord Monson (at Burton hall), noted by John Steegman, "Some English Portraits by Pompeo Batoni", The Burlington Magazine 88 No. 516 (March 1946:54-61, 63); Steegman discusses Batoni's use of such cultural props.
  23. ^ Noted by Haskell and Penny 1981:
  24. ^ Pope, "On the Statue of Cleopatra, made into a Fountain by Leo the Tenth Translated from the Latin of Count Castiglione".
  25. ^ Sylvia Pressouyre, "Les fontes de Primatice à Fontainebleau", Bulletin Monumental 1969::223-39.
  26. ^ Illustration, at Versailles
  27. ^ Seymour Howard, "Thomas Jefferson's Art Gallery for Monticello", The Art Bulletin 59.4 (December 1977:583-6000 p 587, 592)
  28. ^ "Ariadne (Sculpture)", Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. Retrieved 7 June 2010.
  29. ^ Winckelmann's History, noted by Haskell and Penny 1981:186.
  30. ^ Letter of 20 September 1816, noted in Barkan 1993: note 64.
  31. ^ Haskell and Penny 1981:187.

External links edit

  • Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance
  • The Vatican: spirit and art of Christian Rome, a book from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Sleeping Ariadne

sleeping, ariadne, housed, vatican, museums, vatican, city, roman, hadrianic, copy, hellenistic, sculpture, pergamene, school, century, most, renowned, sculptures, antiquity, reclining, figure, chiton, bound, under, breasts, half, lies, half, sits, extended, l. The Sleeping Ariadne housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City is a Roman Hadrianic copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of the Pergamene school of the 2nd century BC 1 and is one of the most renowned sculptures of Antiquity 2 The reclining figure in a chiton bound under her breasts half lies half sits 3 her extended legs crossed at the calves her head pillowed on her left arm her right thrown over her head Other Roman copies of this model exist one the Wilton House Ariadne is substantially unrestored 4 while another the Medici Ariadne found in Rome has been seriously reworked in modern times according to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway 5 Two surviving statuettes 6 attest to a Roman trade in reductions of this familiar figure A variant Sleeping Ariadne is in the Prado Museum Madrid 7 A later Roman variant found in the Villa Borghese gardens Rome is at the Louvre Museum The Sleeping Ariadne long called Cleopatra Purchased from the Roman Angelo Maffei 8 in 1512 by Pope Julius II it was immediately installed in the Belvedere Courtyard which links the Vatican Palace with the papal casina called the Belvedere there its neighbors were the recently discovered Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo Once she had been initially identified as Cleopatra 9 because of the snake bracelet on the upper left arm which was taken for the asp by which she died supportive narrative could easily be brought to bear Ulisse Aldrovandi thought he detected that she appears to have collapsed and fainted 10 and a sense of fitful uneasiness has been ascribed to her by the modern viewer Sheila McNally below The Cleopatra became the main model 11 through which a conventional pose signifying sleep 12 with one elbow cocked above the head was transmitted from Antiquity to High Renaissance and later painters and sculptors T B L Webster noted the uneasy pose of the sleeper between sleep and wakening a Hellenistic innovation in the sleeping Ariadne motif long known from vase painting which now placed greater emphasis on the stress of Ariadne herself perhaps Webster suggests it was reflecting a new literary source that has not survived 13 Sheila McNally detected in the sculpture a new sense of unease that informs the whole and an effort to throw off some inner discomfort a sluggish effort restrained by a slumber that is more oppressive than relaxing Her drapery bunches about her legs imprisoning her loins 14 Soon she may wake to threaten vengeance on Theseus as in Catullus description in Peleus and Thetis 15 The Medici version of the Sleeping Ariadne 16 painted in the gardens of the Villa Medici Rome by Diego Velazquez c 1630 Prado Museum Contents 1 Renaissance 2 Since the Renaissance 3 Reidentification as Ariadne 4 Medici Sleeping Ariadne 5 Notes 6 External linksRenaissance edit nbsp Castings of Sleeping Ariadne vs Nymphfrom Fontaine des Innocents Michelangelo drew from the sculpture s wrapping of the arms around the head in his Night and Dawn 17 The Cleopatra as it was then known was set upon a Roman sarcophagus and fitted as a fountain in a niche at one end of the uppermost terrace of the Cortile del Belvidere embodying in its setting the description of a Sleeping Nymph allegedly found by the far off Danube with a suitably Antique sounding four line Latin epigram beginning HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI that was then making the humanist rounds The epigram which passed until modern times for a Roman one was composed by Giovanni Antonio Campani a humanist at the court of Pius II who moved in the academic circle of Julius Pomponius Laetus But the Sleeping Nymph motif and the accompanying inscription applied to it became part and parcel of humanistic and fashionable recreations of paradisal garden spots with classical affinities loci amoeni right through the 18th century all the while assimilated to the Cleopatra Leonard Barkan observes by a contagion among quite separate narratives that happen to converge in the enigmatic space of the signum statue 18 The niche if it was not a grotto from the first was redecorated as a grotto in the 1530s when Francisco de Holanda made a drawing of it 19 In the 1550s under the general direction of Giorgio Vasari the sculpture was reinstalled indoors in an adjoining long gallery for which still as a fountain in a shallow grotto niche it served as the visual focus at one end Danielle da Volterra provided the designs for the setting in what became known as the Stanza Cleopatra 20 When the Museo Pio Clementino was established it received its similar new setting set on a sarcophagus that bears a frieze of the Titanomachy 21 Since the Renaissance edit nbsp Portrait of Charles Crowle by Pompeo Batoni 1762 Louvre as Cleopatra the Ariadne often figured in Batoni s portraits of Grand Tourists 22 Poems were dedicated to the sculpture during the 16th century sometimes expressed as if in the statue s own voice in the rhetorical device called prosopopoeia Baldassare Castiglione wrote one of these in the form of a dramatic monologue 23 which Alexander Pope Englished in the early 18th century 24 The sculpture was one of a dozen selected by Primaticcio to be molded for plaster copies and then cast in bronze for Francis I at the chateau de Fontainebleau In the process the pose was slightly adjusted and the sleeping nymph s limbs were gently lengthened to accord better with French Mannerist canons of female beauty From the bronze at Fontainebleau numerous copies and reductions were made 25 In Rome Nicolas Poussin made a small wax copy of the papal sculpture to keep by him which has come to be preserved in the Louvre Museum Copies in marble were commissioned by Louis XIV Pierre Julien sculpted a marble copy during his sojourn at the French Academy in Rome 1768 to 1773 and shipped it to France to demonstrate the progress he was making as was the expected gesture of the king s pensionnaires 26 In Henry Hoare s picturesque garden at Stourhead a lakeside temple contained John Cheere s whited lead copy 1766 of the Vatican Ariadne with the suitably Antique sounding verses beginning HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI In America not very much later Thomas Jefferson acquired a small marble copy of the Cleopatra as he first knew it for the sculpture gallery he planned at Monticello but which was never realised 27 It was a gift from James Bowdoin in 1805 and remains in Jefferson s hallway 28 Napoleon s agents in Rome naturally selected the Cleopatra to join the choicest antiquities to be taken to Paris forming the short lived Musee Napoleon with Napoleon s fall it was returned to Rome with the other treasures Reidentification as Ariadne editPreviously Johann Joachim Winckelmann noticed that the snake actually represented a serpentine form bracelet and that the sleeping figure had no reason to be called a Cleopatra she was a sleeping nymph he suggested or a Venus 29 Ennio Quirino Visconti made the secure identification as Ariadne based on similar motifs in carved gems and sarcophagus reliefs By 1816 Jefferson was declaring that his Cleopatra was Ariadne 30 Medici Sleeping Ariadne edit nbsp The Medici Sleeping Ariadne Another version of the sculpture that was so long identified as Cleopatra was in the collections at the Villa Medici Rome It was not removed to Florence until 1787 and some connoisseurs disputed whether it was not in fact finer than the pope s 31 Today it is at the Uffizi Gallery Notes edit Wolfgang Helbig Furer durch die offenticher Sammlungen klassischer Altertumer in Rom 1969 I 109f the extent to which such copies are free pastiches is always an unknown The high reputation of the Sleeping Ariadne is sketched by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny Taste and the Antique the lure of classical sculpture 1500 1900 1981 cat no 24 as Cleopatra 184 87 The unobtrusive rockwork is restored The Wilton House Ariadne totally unrestored is therefore of great importance in suggesting a more horizontal position than the Vatican figure observes Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway Hellenistic Sculpture The Styles of ca 331 200 B C 2001 331 the Ariadne is discussed pp 330 32 Ridgway 2001 eo loc In Providence Rhode Island pose reversed and San Antonio Texas Prado E 167 illustration The Maffei had already accumulated an extensive assemblage of sculptures reliefs and inscriptions that had been unearthed on the properties Leonard Barkan The Beholder s Tale Ancient Sculpture Renaissance Narratives Representations 44 Autumn 1993 133 166 explores the rhetoric inextricably tied to decoding this image ekphrasis and providing a narrative for it whether Cleopatra Sleeping Nymph or Ariadne Peter Higgs Searching for Cleopatra s image classical portraits in stone in Susan Walker and Peter Higgs Cleopatra of Egypt From History to Myth 2001 begins with the Sleeping Ariadne misidentification before moving to historical portraiture of Cleopatra Aldrovandi Delle statue antiche Venice 1556 quoted in Barkan 1993 138 note 18 The Barberini Faun was not found until the 1620s by which time the convention had been thoroughly established Sheila McNally Ariadne and Others Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art Classical Antiquity 4 2 October 1985 152 192 esp 170ff Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway A Story of Five Amazons American Journal of Archaeology 78 1 January 1974 1 17 notes archaic representations of the dead and dying and briefly sketches the progression of the pose as it was extended to other figures compare the sleeping pose of Endymion on sarcophagi and in post Renaissance paintings Webster The myth of Ariadne from Homer to Catullus Greece and Rome 13 1966 22 31 pp 29 31 McNally 1985 172 Quoted by Webster 1966 30 Now conserved in the Museo Archeologico Florence Regoli Gigetta Dalli Gioseffi Decio Mellini Gian Lorenzo Salvini Roberto 1968 Vatican Museums Rome Italy Newsweek p 27 One of the words for statue in Latin is after all signum Barkan 1993 43 Illustrated Barkan 1993 143 fig 3 Norman Canedy The Decoration of the Stanza della Cleopatra Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower II 1967 Haskell and Penny 1981 184 For example in Batoni s portrait of Thomas William Coke of Holkham Hall Norfolk at Holkham noted by Haskell and Penny 1981 187 and also in portraits of Thomas Dundas and John 3rd Lord Monson at Burton hall noted by John Steegman Some English Portraits by Pompeo Batoni The Burlington Magazine 88 No 516 March 1946 54 61 63 Steegman discusses Batoni s use of such cultural props Noted by Haskell and Penny 1981 Pope On the Statue of Cleopatra made into a Fountain by Leo the Tenth Translated from the Latin of Count Castiglione Sylvia Pressouyre Les fontes de Primatice a Fontainebleau Bulletin Monumental 1969 223 39 Illustration at Versailles Seymour Howard Thomas Jefferson s Art Gallery for Monticello The Art Bulletin 59 4 December 1977 583 6000 p 587 592 Ariadne Sculpture Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia Retrieved 7 June 2010 Winckelmann s History noted by Haskell and Penny 1981 186 Letter of 20 September 1816 noted in Barkan 1993 note 64 Haskell and Penny 1981 187 External links editCensus of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance The Vatican spirit and art of Christian Rome a book from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries fully available online as PDF which contains material on Sleeping Ariadne nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sleeping Ariadne Vatican Museums Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Sleeping Ariadne amp oldid 1213327930, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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