Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne shows the instant a god falls in love. Ariadne, a princess of Crete, has been abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, the hero she helped. Bacchus, the god of wine, sees her and leaps from his chariot toward her. He will marry her and place her crown among the stars. Titian painted it for Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, a city in northern Italy, and finished it in early 1523.
In the myth, Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to find his way out of the maze on Crete where the bull-headed Minotaur lived. He sailed off with her, then left her asleep on Naxos. His ship is a speck on the sea at the lower left of the picture. The crown of stars above her head is Bacchus's promise: it will shine in the night sky as the constellation Corona Borealis.
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The leap is meant to be kind. In the poem Titian read, the Roman poet Ovid gives Bacchus a reason to jump down from his chariot: so that Ariadne will not be frightened by the tigers pulling it. Ovid's god also promises her the heavens as a dowry and says she will guide anxious sailors by her Cretan crown.
Titian kept the leap, and Ariadne is frightened anyway. Her face reads as shock and fear, with perhaps some interest.
The duke who ordered the picture had asked other painters first, and Titian, the man who finally painted it, kept him waiting.
The two poets behind the scene
Titian took the wild crowd from Catullus, who wrote in the first century BC, and the meeting on the shore from Ovid, who came a few decades later. Both retold a Greek myth that painters kept returning to.
In a long poem on Ariadne, Catullus sends Bacchus rushing across the island with a dancing band of satyrs, the goat-legged wild men who follow the god. Some of them wrap themselves in writhing snakes. Others fling about the limbs of a steer or clash round brass cymbals.
Titian painted nearly all of it. On the right, a child satyr drags a calf's head along the ground while a small dog in a collar barks at him. Another satyr, wreathed in vine leaves, holds a calf's leg high. Behind them, drunken Silenus, the god's old companion, slumps on a donkey, and others beat tambourines and cymbals.
Ovid supplied Ariadne herself, wandering the strange sand barefoot, with her tunic unbelted and her yellow hair loose. Titian gave her a bright blue robe and a red sash, and turned her head toward the god in profile, as if she has just noticed him.
The satyr wrapped in a snake may owe something to an ancient marble, the Laocoƶn, which shows a Trojan priest and his sons crushed by sea serpents and was dug up in Rome in 1506. Titian sketched the Laocoƶn himself, so the snake may be his own borrowing from Rome.
The animals pulling the god's chariot are not the tigers of Ovid's poem.
What You'll Discover
Where the tigers went.
Who the duke asked before Titian.
How the picture reached London.
What the cleaning revealed.
What the picture started.