Bacchus Finds Ariadne on Naxos

Entry

In this relief Adriaen de Vries (1556-1626) depicted a scene from the story of Ariadne and Bacchus that comes from the Eikones (Imagines) by Philostratus the Elder. He chose the moment when Bacchus, guided by a torch-bearing satyr, finds the sleeping Ariadne in her bed on the island of Naxos. The young, nude god comes racing out of the dark and pulls aside the bed curtain.

As he so often did, De Vries chose to depict the peripateia – the exciting turning point in the story. The discovery of Ariadne by the god was to lead to a profound love – an event to which the little cupid who sits by the bed is undoubtedly pointing. The owl beside him is the symbol of the night; Ariadne’s slippers are a symbolic reference to her female power. The choice of a bedchamber as the scene of the action rather than the open air is a notable break with the pictorial tradition. In fact, the sculptor reverted for this setting to a pictorial formula that was much employed by the northern Mannerists for some classical stories of the gods, such as Vulcan surprising the adulterous Mars and Venus in bed, Jupiter and Danaë or Amor and Psyche. Parallels can be shown with Hendrick Goltzius’s print Mars and Venus of 1588 (RP-P-1893-A-17928), after an invention by Bartholomeus Spranger. Ariadne’s pose, in contrast, is a subtle reworking of Giambologna’s reclining nymph.⁶ The relief’s overall composition bears a striking number of similarities to Correggio’s renowned Venus and Cupid with a Satyr painted for the Gonzaga family (c. 1528).⁷ The sculptor may have studied this work during his time in Italy.

The most important innovation that De Vries permitted himself with regard to his predecessors is the introduction of the dynamic Bacchus dominating the picture. His prominent diagonal position brings powerful baroque drama to the scene. This concentrates everything in the composition on the moment of the discovery of Ariadne.

The Amsterdam bronze can be dated to around 1611 on the grounds of stylistic similarities to the relief of Rudolph II as Patron of the Arts in Bohemia,⁸ which is dated 1609, and with the Forge of Vulcan in Munich, which dates from 1611.⁹ In terms of composition, the 1610 silver relief of Mercury and Argos by Paulus van Vianen (BK-NM-8338-B) and Nicolaus Pfaff’s ivory relief of Danaë, which must have been made before 1612, are closely linked to De Vries’s relief,¹⁰ although they lack the drama and dynamism of his bronze. Unclear is who influenced whom, although the probability is that the more complex composition by De Vries is based on that of his confreres. In any case, the similarities demonstrate the interest in compositions like these among court artists in Prague around 1610.

Even though the style, dating and erotic theme of the relief point to Emperor Rudolph II as the patron, the work does not appear in the inventory of the imperial Kunstkammer for 1607-11, or in later inventories. Leithe-Jasper suggested the possibility that the relief is identical to the Ain tafl von metal, so eine schlafende Venus (A plate of metal, a sleeping Venus) in the Prague inventory of 1619.¹¹ This is further supported by the recent discovery of the relief’s documentation in two inventories of the extensive art collection of Carl Gustav Tessin.¹² This count was married to Ulla Sparre, who had received works of art originating from Rudolph’s Kunstkammer – including several reliefs by Adrian de Vries – from her mother, Stina Lillie. Among these was the relief portrait of the emperor (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and the aforementioned relief of Rudolph II Protects the Liberal Arts in Bohemia (now in the Royal Collections, Windsor Castle).¹³ Lillie was the universal heir of Johan Gabriel Stenbock, who is known to have acquired a number of the pieces stolen from Prague via the Swedish crown.

The Amsterdam bronze dates from the same period as the Forge of Vulcan from 1611 in Munich. Because the two reliefs moreover stem from the same period and have a thematic connection – in both cases a Greek god and Amor play leading parts – we cannot rule out the possibility that they belonged to a single ensemble. That the two do not have precisely the same format does not need to be a drawback in supposing a relationship. The two large allegorical reliefs dedicated to Emperor Rudolph II also differ in size; in their day, however, they were nevertheless considered to be pendants.¹⁴ Finally, the compositional mirroring also supports the suggestion of a formal connection between the Amsterdam and the Munich relief – Bacchus, as it were, recurs in reverse in the right hand figure in the Vulcan relief, as a result of which both works are in a certain sense connected compositionally. If the two bronzes were indeed meant for a larger ensemble, it could have been a series of four or five reliefs devoted to classical gods as symbols of the Five Senses or the Four Seasons. Bacchus and Vulcan, for example, occur as representations of Autumn and Winter respectively on Van der Schardt’s gilt bronze table fountain that was made for Emperor Maximilian II around 1570 and later came into the possession of Emperor Rudolph.¹⁵

Frits Scholten, 2005 (updated by Bieke van der Mark in 2024)
This entry was originally published in F. Scholten, M. Verber et al., From Vulcan’s Forge: Bronzes from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1450-1800, exh. cat. London (Daniel Katz Ltd.)/Vienna (Liechtenstein Museum) 2005-06, no. 37