Bacchus and Ariadne: Titian's Leap into Myth

A Room of Paintings for a Duke

Bacchus and Ariadne is an oil painting on canvas by the Venetian master Titian, made between 1520 and 1523. It measures about 176 by 191 centimetres and today hangs in the National Gallery in London. The picture was not painted for a church or a public building, but for a small private room belonging to one of the most ambitious princes of the Italian Renaissance: Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara.

Alfonso was a soldier famous for his cannons, but he was also a passionate collector. In the passage that linked his castle with the ducal palace in Ferrara, he fitted out a study later known as the Camerino d'Alabastro, the "little alabaster room", because its walls were faced with carved marble reliefs. For this room he wanted a series of large paintings on scenes of ancient myth, each one based on a classical text, as if the painters were competing with the lost masterpieces of ancient Greece described by Roman writers. The programme was probably shaped with the help of humanist scholars at the Ferrarese court.

A Commission Passed from Hand to Hand

Alfonso aimed high. He first approached the most famous painters in Italy. Giovanni Bellini, Titian's old teacher, delivered The Feast of the Gods in 1514. Fra Bartolommeo in Florence was asked for a scene of the worship of Venus but died in 1517 after making only a drawing. Raphael in Rome was given the subject of a Triumph of Bacchus and received an advance payment, but he kept delaying and died in April 1520 without painting it.

Titian, then about thirty and already the leading painter in Venice, took over. He had just completed the huge Assumption of the Virgin for the Frari church, unveiled in 1518, and that altarpiece had made his reputation. For the Camerino he painted The Worship of Venus (1518–1519), then Bacchus and Ariadne, and finally The Andrians (about 1523–1526). He also later retouched Bellini's Feast of the Gods, repainting part of its landscape so that it would match his own pictures. The Ferrarese painter Dosso Dossi contributed to the room as well.

The work did not go smoothly. Letters from the duke's agents in Venice show Alfonso growing impatient as Titian kept him waiting, busy with other commissions. Titian began Bacchus and Ariadne in Venice and completed it in Ferrara itself in early 1523.

The Story: Love at First Sight on Naxos

The painting tells a story from Greek mythology. Ariadne, a princess of Crete, helped the hero Theseus escape from the Labyrinth after he killed the Minotaur. Theseus took her with him, but then abandoned her while she slept on the island of Naxos. When she woke, alone on the shore, the god of wine, Bacchus (Dionysus to the Greeks), arrived with his noisy followers. He fell in love with her at once, promised to make her his wife and, as a sign of his love, threw her crown into the sky, where it became a constellation.

Titian combined several ancient sources. The main ones are the Roman poets Ovid, who tells the story in the Metamorphoses and in his Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love"), and Catullus, whose long poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis describes Bacchus's wild companions in vivid detail. Rather than illustrating the poems line by line, Titian chose the single most dramatic instant: the moment when god and mortal first see each other.

What We See in the Picture

The canvas is divided into two halves. On the left, Ariadne stands on the beach in a blue robe with a bright red sash. She has been gazing out to sea after the distant ship of Theseus, which can be seen sailing away on the horizon at the far left, her arm still stretched towards the water, and now twists back in surprise and alarm towards the god. On the right, a whole procession pours out of a wood. In the centre, Bacchus, wrapped in a flying pink cloak and crowned with vine leaves, leaps from his chariot towards her, his body suspended in mid-air. His gaze meets hers, and the two figures are locked together by that look.

The chariot is pulled by two big cats, usually identified as cheetahs. They were probably modelled on animals in the duke's menagerie. Behind Bacchus comes his rowdy retinue:

• a powerful bearded man girding himself with snakes, a figure often compared to the ancient sculpture Laocoön, which had been dug up in Rome in 1506;
• maenads, the god's female followers, clashing cymbals and beating a tambourine;
• a satyr crowned with vine leaves waving a calf's leg, the remains of a sacrificial feast;
• the fat, drunken old Silenus, slumped on a donkey at the back;
• a little satyr child at the front, looking out at us as he drags a calf's head along the ground, while a small dog barks at him.

High in the sky above Ariadne shines a ring of eight stars: the constellation of her crown, the Corona Borealis. Titian thus shows the beginning and the end of the story at once, the first meeting and the promise of Ariadne's future among the stars.

Colour, Movement and Technique

Bacchus and Ariadne is often praised as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the Venetian love of colour. The sky is painted with ultramarine, a deep blue made from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, which was more expensive than gold. Titian set this cool blue against warm reds, rosy flesh and orange-yellow tones, and he used the same intense blue for Ariadne's robe so that her figure sings out against the sea and sky. Technical studies at the National Gallery have also found unusual orange and yellow pigments, including rare arsenic-based colours, used for the draperies and the golden vessels.

The composition is divided along a diagonal into two triangles: in the upper left, a calm expanse of blue sky and sea, where only the two lovers are in motion; in the lower right, the crowded, noisy procession in greens and browns. Every figure seems to be in motion, yet the scene remains perfectly clear. Titian worked directly on the canvas, changing his mind as he went: X-ray and infrared images reveal changes he made to figures and details during the work. On a golden urn lying on a yellow cloth at the lower left, he signed the picture with the Latin form of his name, TICIANVS.

From Ferrara to London

The paintings stayed in the Camerino for only about seventy-five years. In 1598, after the last Este duke had died without a legitimate heir, Ferrara passed to the Papal States, and the papal legate, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, removed the pictures to Rome. The group was later split up. The Worship of Venus and The Andrians went to Spain in the 1630s and are now in the Prado in Madrid. Bellini's Feast of the Gods ended up in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Bacchus and Ariadne remained in Roman collections for two centuries. Then, like many Italian masterpieces at the time of the Napoleonic wars, it was sold, and in 1806 it was brought to England. In 1826 it was bought for the newly founded National Gallery in London, making it one of the museum's earliest acquisitions. Between 1967 and 1968 the painting was cleaned of old, yellowed varnish. The result revealed the dazzling blues and reds that visitors see today, but it also caused a fierce debate, with some critics arguing that the cleaning had gone too far. Some original paint was lost along with the varnish and had to be retouched, and opinions on the result remain divided to this day.

Why the Painting Matters

With the Camerino pictures, Titian helped to invent a new kind of painting: large, sensuous scenes from ancient poetry, painted with a freedom and energy that rivalled the sculptures and literature of antiquity. This line of work led directly to the mythological poesie he painted three decades later for King Philip II of Spain, such as Diana and Actaeon, where he again turned Ovid's stories into dramas of sudden, fateful encounters.

The Ferrara bacchanals had a long afterlife. In the seventeenth century, when The Worship of Venus and The Andrians could still be studied in Rome, artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolas Poussin and Anthony van Dyck copied them or learned from them, and Rubens painted his own versions. Bacchus and Ariadne itself has inspired painters, poets and musicians ever since. Scholars have suggested that the English poet John Keats, who knew the picture, drew on it in his verses about Bacchus and his procession, and for generations of artists who visited the National Gallery it has remained a touchstone of Renaissance colour.

Lesser-Known Details

• The calf's head dragged by the satyr child and the calf's leg waved above the crowd refer to the wild rites of Bacchus's followers, who in ancient legend tore animals apart in their frenzy, a detail taken from Catullus.
• The little dog in the foreground is a typical Titian touch; dogs appear in many of his paintings, from altarpieces to portraits.
• In Ovid's poems Bacchus's chariot is drawn by tigers or lynxes, so Titian's cheetahs are his own change to the story.
• Because the Camerino was a private room, only the duke and his chosen guests would have seen the painting during Alfonso's lifetime. Today it hangs in the National Gallery, where anyone can see it free of charge.