Last updated The Sleeping Ariadne, long called Cleopatra
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.
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]
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
Portrait of Charles Crowle by Pompeo Batoni, 1762 (Louvre): as "Cleopatra" the Ariadne often figured in Batoni's portraits of Grand Tourists
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
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
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
↑ 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.
↑ 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 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.
↑ 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" Representations44 (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 Antiquity4.2 (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 Rome13 (1966:22-31) pp 29-31.
↑ 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 Magazine88 No. 516 (March 1946:54-61, 63); Steegman discusses Batoni's use of such cultural props.
The Apollo Lyceus type, also known as Lycean Apollo, originating with Praxiteles and known from many full-size statue and figurine copies as well as from 1st century BCE Athenian coinage, is a statue type of Apollo showing the god resting on a support, his right forearm touching the top of his head and his hair fixed in braids on the top of a head in a haircut typical of childhood. It is called "Lycean" not after Lycia itself, but after its identification with a lost work described, though not attributed to a sculptor, by Lucian as being on show in the Lyceum, one of the gymnasia of Athens. According to Lucian, the god leaning on a support with his bow in his left hand and his right resting on his head is shown "as if resting after long effort." Its main exemplar is the Apollino in Florence or Apollo Medici, in the Uffizi, Florence.
The Apollo Belvedere is a celebrated marble sculpture from classical antiquity.
The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Ares, a fine 2nd-century copy of a late 4th-century BCE Greek original, associated with Scopas or Lysippus: thus the Roman god of war receives his Greek name, Ares.
The Belvedere Torso is a 1.59 m (5.2 ft) tall fragmentary marble statue of a male nude, known to be in Rome from the 1430s, and signed prominently on the front of the base by "Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian", who is unmentioned in ancient literature. It is now in the Museo Pio-Clementino of the Vatican Museums.
The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a 1.53 m tall Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st-century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Knidos, which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it outline the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is an ancient marble sculpture depicting Hermaphroditus life size. In 1620, Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted the mattress upon which the statue now lies. The form is partly derived from ancient portrayals of Venus and other female nudes, and partly from contemporaneous feminised Hellenistic portrayals of Dionysus/Bacchus. It represents a subject that was much repeated in Hellenistic times and in ancient Rome, to judge from the number of versions that have survived. Discovered at Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite was immediately claimed by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and became part of the Borghese Collection. The "Borghese Hermaphrodite" was later sold to the occupying French and was moved to The Louvre, where it is on display.
The Athena Giustiniani or Minerva Giustiniani is a Roman marble statue of Pallas Athena, based on a Greek bronze sculpture of the late 5th–early 4th century BCE. Formerly in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, it is now in the Vatican Museums.
The Crouching Venus is a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised at her bath. Venus crouches with her right knee close to the ground, turns her head to the right and, in most versions, reaches her right arm over to her left shoulder to cover her breasts. To judge by the number of copies that have been excavated on Roman sites in Italy and France, this variant on Venus seems to have been popular.
Pierre Julien was a French sculptor who worked in a full range of rococo and neoclassical styles.
The bronze Seated Hermes, found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum in 1758, is at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. "This statue was probably the most celebrated work of art discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century", Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny have observed, once four large engravings reproducing it had appeared in Le Antichità di Ercolano, 1771. To protect it from Napoleonic depredations, it was packed into one of the fifty-two cases of antiquities and works of art that accompanied the Bourbon flight to Palermo in 1798. It was once again in the royal villa at Portici in 1816.
The Hermes of the Museo Pio-Clementino is an ancient Roman sculpture, part of the Vatican collections, Rome. It was long admired as the Belvedere Antinous, named from its prominent placement in the Cortile del Belvedere. It is now inventory number 907 in the Museo Pio-Clementino.
The Castor and Pollux group is an ancient Roman sculptural group of the 1st century AD, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Pliny the Elder records five bronze statues of Amazons in the Artemision of Ephesus. He explains the existence of such a quantity of sculptures on the same theme in the same place by describing a 5th-century BC competition between the artists Polyclitus, Phidias, Kresilas, "Kydon" and Phradmon; thus:
The most celebrated of these artists, though born at different epochs, have joined in a trial of skill in the Amazons which they have respectively made. When these statues were dedicated in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, it was agreed, in order to ascertain which was the best, that it should be left to the judgment of the artists themselves who were then present: upon which, it was evident that that was the best, which all the artists agreed in considering as the next best to his own. Accordingly, the first rank was assigned to Polycletus, the second to Phidias, the third to Cresilas, the fourth to Cydon, and the fifth to Phradmon.
The Furietti Centaurs are a pair of Hellenistic or Roman statues in grey-black marble from Laconia (Greece) sculptures of centaurs based on Hellenistic models. One is a mature, bearded centaur, with a pained expression, and the other is a young smiling centaur with his arm raised. The amorini are missing that once rode the backs of these centaurs, which are the outstanding examples of a group of sculptures varying the motif.
The sculptures of Hermes Fastening his Sandal, which exist in several versions, are all Roman marble copies of a lost Greek bronze original in the manner of Lysippos, dating to the fourth century BCE. A pair of sandals figures in the myth of Theseus, and when the painter-dealer Gavin Hamilton uncovered an example in the swamp ground called the Pantanello at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli in 1769, he hesitated between calling it a Theseus or a Cincinnatus. Jason's myth also involves a lost sandal. When Augustus Hare saw that sculpture in the Ball Room of Lansdowne House, in Berkeley Square, he noted it as "Jason fastening his sandal."
The Pasquino Group is a group of marble sculptures that copy a Hellenistic bronze original, dating to ca. 200–150 BCE. At least fifteen Roman marble copies of this sculpture are known. Many of these marble copies have complex artistic and social histories that illustrate the degree to which improvisatory "restorations" were made to fragments of ancient Roman sculpture during the 16th and 17th centuries, in which contemporary Italian sculptors made original and often arbitrary and destructive additions in an effort to replace lost fragments of the ancient sculptures.
The Resting Satyr or Leaning Satyr, also known as the Satyr anapauomenos is a statue type generally attributed to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Some 115 examples of the type are known, of which the best known is in the Capitoline Museums.
The Meleager of Skopas is a lost bronze sculpture of the Greek hero Meleager – host of the Calydonian boar hunt – that is associated in modern times with the fourth century BC architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros.
The marble Cupid and Psyche conserved in the Capitoline Museums, Rome, is a 1st or 2nd century Roman copy of a late Hellenistic period original. It was given to the nascent Capitoline Museums by Pope Benedict XIV in 1749, shortly after its discovery. Its graceful balance and sentimental appearance made it a favourite among the neoclassical generations of artists and visitors, and it was copied in many materials from bronze to biscuit porcelain. Antonio Canova consciously set out to outdo the Antique original with his own Cupid and Psyche of 1808
The Diana of Gabii is a statue of a woman in drapery which probably represents the goddess Artemis and is traditionally attributed to the sculptor Praxiteles. It became part of the Borghese collection and is now conserved in the Louvre with the inventory number Ma 529.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
