AboutEssays2022Ariadne, again and again

See her once, and you’ll be haunted by her: that is the nature of Ariadne. In classical mythology, she was the Cretan princess who betrayed her father, King Minos, and her half-brother, the monstrous, tragic, terrifying Minotaur. Minos had had his court inventor, Daedalus, build the confounding, disorienting labyrinth at Knossos to house the creature, who loved to feed on human flesh. The king demanded that Athens – a puny city compared to his own mighty Crete – send him seven girls and seven boys at regular intervals, to be piled into the labyrinth as a feast for the creature. But one year Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to be part of the grisly sacrifice. Ariadne saw him, longed for him, and decided to help him; in return, he promised her love, marriage, and a home in Athens. She gave him a sword, which he used to kill the Minotaur, and a spool of thread, which he used to navigate his way out of the labyrinth. They fled Crete together on an Athenian ship, putting in overnight on the island of Naxos. The next morning, in that blissful state between waking and sleeping, she reached out her hand to feel her beloved and found no one and nothing. She had been lied to. She was abandoned and alone. The Athenian ship was already a speck on the horizon. She veered from disbelief and panic to rage. After a while on that deserted shore, she was spotted by the god Dionysus and his drunken friends. The woman and the god made love and at length she found her place among the constellations.

That moment of Ariadne’s waking – lying on her rocky couch, one hand pillowing her cheek, the other about to reach into a languorous stretch, eyes still shut – was an artistic subject on repeat in the Greco-Roman world. We see her, this Ariadne between sleeping and waking, carved into Roman sarcophagi. We see her as the larger-than-life subject of one of the sculptures most celebrated in the Italian renaissance: the ‘Vatican Ariadne’, as it’s now called. The sculpture, or something like it, was already known to the cognoscenti by 1499, when an anonymous author in Venice printed his dreamscape of a book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In it, a woodcut illustration shows her as if she is a statue of a sleeping nymph in a wood. She does not yet know that she is being lustfully observed, in that woodcut, by a priapic satyr – that she is continuing a long career of being gawped at lasciviously. That viewer, of course, is also us, who can shamelessly, greedily run our eyes over her limbs, undetected by the object of our attention. And yet she is about to wake: what will happen next? Her in-between state, her vulnerability, puts us on the spot as viewers. There’s a life-size Roman Ariadne very similar to the Vatican version in the museum in Antalya, Turkey. I once heard a guide there addressing the fact that her breast is showing. It is like this, he said firmly, only because she is asleep. We can tell she is asleep because look, here, the sculptor has carved a lizard by her foot – it would not have come so close had she been awake. She did not, he implied, mean to be such a shameless hussy. Funny how we so easily offload our anxieties on to insensate lumps of rock.

The Vatican Ariadne was bought in late 1511 or early 1512 by Pope Julius II. At the time she was thought to be Cleopatra: the snakey bracelet on her arm was assumed to represent the asp that the Egyptian queen used to kill herself. In her original setting in the Vatican, she was surrounded a water feature – making her not just a queen but a kind of nymph. (Visit Stourhead in Wiltshire, and you’ll see this fantasy made real again: an 18th-century version of the sculpture, commissioned by an enthusiastic Grand Tourist, sits in her own cool damp grotto, turned green by the endless drip of water.) Quickly, though, she made her way on to canvas: she’s the image through which Venice invented the female reclining nude; you see her in Giorgione, and over and over again in the work of Titian. Once you’ve got your eye in, the haunting begins, you see her everywhere. Velázquez painted some tiny, exquisite landscape paintings: in one of them, a view of the gardens at the Villa Medici in Rome, she is there again, as a sculpture on a plinth on a terrace, the colonnade above her framing views on to cypress trees. (The real sculpture was another ancient version of the Vatican Ariadne; it’s now in the Uffizi, Florence.) Sleep and death are close in metaphor and in sculpture: at times church funerary monuments have something of Ariadne about them, especially those of the 18th century, when the deceased are allowed to recline elegantly rather than lie stiffly prostrate. In the 20th century Giorgio de Chirico painted Ariadne over and over again, placing her in shadowed, colonnaded squares, often with a train chugging away in the distance, her plinth inscribed with the single word ‘Melanconia’. Later still she dissolves into abstraction: I see her, even, in Carl André’s Equivalent VIII, a sculpture owned by Tate, which is (deceptively simply) a flat arrangement of bricks on the floor.

Gavin Turk is haunted by Ariadne, too. You can see her in his sculptures The Swimmer and Cyclops. She comes to mind when you see his The Shining, a sculptural reimagining of the form of the Overlook Hotel’s maze from Stanley Kubrick’s film. (Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is the Minotaur of that story, the raging monster at the centre of the labyrinth.) She is there in his Rough Sleeper – an Ariadne at her most vulnerable yet, curled up in a sleeping bag in a shop doorway, perhaps. He has placed Ariadne at the centre of Cambridge’s Station Square, a curiously anonymous, colonnaded space beyond which the trains chug, just as they do in so many of those de Chirico canvases. In this work, titled Ariadne Wrapped, the sculpture is trussed up in what appears to be canvas and string. She could be trapped. Or perhaps she is in transit, coddled against the rigours of a journey. Maybe the string will help her find her way. Perhaps, under her chrysalis, she is on her way to changing, transitioning between states yet more profound than sleep and wakefulness. At any rate, we cannot look at her. For the moment, she has found a way to be unobserved.