Titian, 'Bacchus and Ariadne', 1520-3

Bacchus and Ariadne

Titian

Not on display

About the work

Overview

One of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne illustrates a story told by the classical authors Ovid and Catullus. The Cretan princess Ariadne has been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship sails away in the distance. Bacchus, god of wine, falls in love at first sight with Ariadne and leaps from his chariot towards her. Later, Bacchus throws Ariadne’s crown into the air, immortalising her as the constellation Corona Borealis, represented by the stars above her head.

This painting is one of a celebrated series by Giovanni Bellini, Titian and the Ferrarese artist Dosso Dossi, commissioned for the Camerino d‘Alabastro (Alabaster Room) in the Ducal Palace, Ferrara, by Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. All the pictures, completed from 1514 to 1525, are bacchanals – scenes of hedonism, drinking, music making and lovemaking. Titian shows off his great skill as a colourist, combining in this single picture all of the purest and most vibrant pigments available at that time.

In-depth

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne is one of the finest and most famous paintings in the National Gallery. The Cretan princess Ariadne has been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance, at lower left. Bacchus, god of wine, is returning from a triumphal visit to India accompanied by his rowdy throng of followers: music-making nymphs clash cymbals and tambourines, a satyr wreathed with vine leaves holds a calf’s leg aloft and a satyr child drags the calf’s head along the ground. Drunken Silenus rides behind, slumped on an ass.

Titian has captured the moment when Bacchus falls in love at first sight with Ariadne. The god leaps from his cheetah-drawn chariot; we see him suspended in mid-air in a way only rarely attempted by previous artists. Ariadne is initially afraid of Bacchus but he literally promises her the stars: in one version of the story, he later throws her wedding crown into the air, immortalising her as the constellation Corona Borealis, represented in the painting by the stars above her head.

The story of Bacchus and Ariadne is told in different versions by several classical poets, most significantly Ovid and Catullus. From Catullus, Titian took the description of Ariadne deserted on the shore of Naxos and the wild train of Bacchus; from Ovid the meeting between the desperate, dishevelled, barefoot heroine and the young god.

The painting is one of a famous series by Bellini, Titian and the Ferrarese artist Dosso Dossi, commissioned for the Camerino d‘Alabastro (Alabaster Room) in the Ducal Palace, Ferrara, by Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The Duke sent canvases of the right size to Titian in Venice so that the finished paintings would fit exactly in their intended location. It is not certain where exactly the Camerino was in the palace or how the works were arranged within it. However, it was probably a small room, and Bacchus and Ariadne is full of details which could be relished when the painting was examined closely. The landscape, the composition and its direction were calculated by Titian in relation to the other paintings in the room. Dosso’s Bacchanal with Vulcan is now lost; he also contributed ten oblong canvases depicting scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid that probably formed a frieze above the main canvases.

The scheme was probably devised by a humanist scholar in the service of the Duke of Ferrara, who in around 1510 tried to include Michelangelo, Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo among the contributors. Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (National Gallery of Art, Washington) for this room is dated 1514 and was later reworked by Titian, after he had finished his three paintings – The Worship of Venus (Prado, Madrid), Bacchus and Ariadne and the Bacchanal of the Andrians (Prado, Madrid) were painted 1518–25. Titian began Bacchus and Ariadne in Venice in 1520 or 1522 and finished it at Ferrara early in 1523.

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne was a substitute for a painting on a similar subject which the Duke had commissioned from Raphael, who had died in 1520. Titian self-consciously attempted to emulate, and perhaps outdo, Raphael by drawing inspiration from classical sculpture, and depicting authentically classical costumes. He based the figure tangled in writhing snakes on the recently discovered and instantly famous ancient Roman sculpture of Laocoön, excavated in Rome in 1506 (Vatican Museums, Rome).

Titian shows off his great skill as a colourist in this picture, combining in a single canvas all the most vibrant pigments available in Venice at the time. He didn't just use the finest quality pigments, but he also used them in their purest form, unmixed except with white to brighten them. He employed each pigment separately in large areas of colour, keeping them well spaced within the picture, and using them all at full strength to give the painting its rich, jewel-like quality. The ultramarine blue in the sky is the most intense colour and the purest pigment. The strength of blue in the sky varies as it does in nature, being more deeply blue overhead and brighter toward the horizon. The sky blue is differentiated from the slightly greenish blue of the distant landscape, painted with the pigment azurite.

Titian’s juxtaposition of strongly contrasting colours intensifies them, and his use of oil-rich glazes gives his colours greater depth. Yet the overall effect is harmonious. The different flesh tones – from the pallor of Ariadne to the dark russet of the satyr with the snakes – are picked up across the picture, providing a unifying link. The orange-brown tree in the top right corner is painted in ochre (iron oxide) colours. It was always intended to be rusty brown even though this is not an autumn landscape – the iris, columbine and tender young vine shoots are more typical of late spring or early summer. Titian may have introduced the brown tree to provide a patch of warm contrasting colour at the top corner of the picture, and to continue the strong diagonal sweep through the earthy colours of the bodies down to the brown cheetahs, so drawing our eyes to Ariadne.

He also exploited the textural qualities of the paint itself to add interest and variety to the areas of pure colour. The folds of the pale yellow drapery beneath the urn on which he signed his name are modelled with the brushstrokes rather than painted shadows. Titian became increasingly interested in the textural possibilities of paint, culminating in late works such as The Death of Actaeon, in which differentiated colour plays a lesser role in the composition than the texture and dynamism of the brushwork.

Bacchus and Ariadne had an important influence on European art. The loves of the gods ceased to be a subject chiefly associated with furniture decoration and villa frescoes and became the most popular subject for gallery pictures, most notably in the poesie, the narrative paintings based on the Metamorphoses of Ovid, which Titian himself began to paint for King Philip II of Spain over 20 years later. Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto and the Death of Actaeon from that series are now in the National Gallery’s collection.

Key facts

Details

Full title: Bacchus and Ariadne
Artist: Titian
Artist dates: active about 1506; died 1576
Date made: 1520-3
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 176.5 × 191 cm
Inscription summary: Signed
Acquisition credit: Bought, 1826
Inventory number: NG35
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Previous owners: Thomas Hamlet
Frame: 16th-century Italian Frame

Provenance

Mentioned by Lomazzo (1584) as at Ferrara. Appropriated in 1598 and sent to Rome by the Papal Legate, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, when the state of Ferrara passed to the Papacy. Included in Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini’s inventory of 1603 and in those of 1626, 1682 and an undated one (before 1665). Recorded in 1638 as in the Villa Aldobrandini, Rome, and subsequently (as in the same place) by (?) Bellori (1664), Scaramuccia (1674), Rossini (1693) and in Roma Antica e Moderna (1765). During this period the ownership had varied with the dynastic changes. The heir of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (d. 1621) appears to have been Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini (son of Pietro’s sister, Olimpia, who had married another Aldobrandini, Gianfrancesco) on whom, according to Litta, all the riches of the Aldobrandini family had devolved. Cardinal Ippolito, the last surviving Aldobrandini male of the main branch, died in 1638, entailing the estate and leaving as heir his niece, also called Olimpia (daughter of Ippolito’s brother, Giorgio) and then her second son (by her second marriage—to Camillo Pamfili) who had to take the name Aldobrandini. When this line too became extinct (in 1760) most of the Pamfili property passed to the Doria Landi while the Aldobrandini inheritance became the subject of a law suit between the Colonna and Borghese families, won by the latter in 1769. The judgment on that occasion was that the Aldobrandini fortune and title should be held by the second son of the head of the Borghese family. The confusion presumably prevailing over the inheritance between the years 1760 and 1769 may account for Volkmann’s statement (published in 1770 but presumably referring to some time before) that no. 35 was at the time of writing in the Palazzo Pamfili (i.e. Palazzo Doria). Contrary to what is often stated no. 35 appears never to have hung in the Palazzo Barberini. It was back in the Villa Aldobrandini by 1787 and sold from there, probably in 1797 and certainly before May, 1803, when it was in the hands of Alexander Day. Day seems to have been in partnership with the brothers Camuccini. Bought by Irvine for Buchanan, Rome, May, 1806, who had it sent to England and sold it to Lord Kinnaird, 1806 or 1807. Sold to Basely by Delahante, who had apparently purchased it privately before the Kinnaird sale (5th March, 1813). In the possession of the jeweller, Thomas Hamlet, by 1816, who lent it in that year both to the R.A. for copying and to the B.I. (11). Purchased from Hamlet, 1826.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Cecil Gould, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools’, London 1987; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Bibliography

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2004

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2004

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2004

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2004

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2005

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2005

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2006

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2006

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2006

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2007

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2007

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About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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Curator of 16th-century Italian Paintings, Matthias Wivel talks through Titian's Renaissance masterpiece 'Bacchus and Ariadne', a work inspired by Ovid's Classical poem.

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Portrait of Girolamo Fracastoro

Titian

Girolamo Fracastoro (1476/8–1553), a celebrated medical doctor, as well as an astronomer, mathematician and poet, proposed the theory of contagion and in 1530 wrote an epic poem that gave the name ’syphilis' to the virulent, sexually transmitted disease that was ravaging Italy in that period.Alth...

Not on display

The Aldobrandini Madonna

Titian

The Virgin and Child are accompanied by the young Saint John the Baptist and a kneeling woman, who cannot be clearly identified. She holds the infant Christ in her arms and gazes at him in adoration.It is not clear which, if any, New Testament episode is shown here. The shepherd and herdsman in t...

Not on display

The Death of Actaeon

Titian

The story of Actaeon is told in the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. In Titian’s earlier Diana and Actaeon, painted for King Philip II of Spain in 1556–9 and now jointly owned by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, Actaeon disturbs the goddess Diana and her nymphs at...

Not on display

The Holy Family with a Shepherd

Titian

This is one of Titian’s earliest surviving works. It shows the Adoration of the Shepherds – the flying angel in the distance announces Christ’s birth to them. Saint Joseph presents the infant Christ to a young shepherd, who kneels in reverence.It is unusual to find only one shepherd in attendance...

Not on display

The Tribute Money

Titian

The Pharisees (chief priests) ask Christ whether it is right to pay tax to the Romans, who rule Palestine. Christ, sensing a trap, asks whose likeness and name are on the coinage: ‘They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then he saith unto them, render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and...

Not on display

The Vendramin Family

Titian

This is Titian’s largest group portrait. The man in a red robe is probably Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552). The man holding the altar may be Gabriel’s brother, Andrea Vendramin (1481–1547), and the boys are his seven sons. On the altar is a reliquary of the True Cross that their great-great-grandfa...

Not on display

The Virgin suckling the Infant Christ

Titian

The Virgin Mary gazes at the infant Christ who feeds from her breast. The naked child is encircled in his mother’s arms and twists away from us. Our eye is drawn from the Virgin’s delicate fingers, up the line of Christ’s back and to the expression of devotion on her face.Titian appears to be cit...

Not on display

A Boy with a Bird

Titian or workshop of Titian

The infant cradling a dove to his cheek closely resembles Cupid in two versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, dating to around 1560, in Washington and New York. Yet the way in which the picture is painted and the range of colours used are characteristic of Titian’s work of the 1520s.This apparent...

Not on display

The Music Lesson

Possibly by Titian

A boy sings from a partbook while his music master beats time with his finger and perhaps sings along. A woman leans her arm against the teacher’s shoulder, her head tilted with a faraway look as if she is listening to the music. A youth accompanies the boy on a viol da gamba, while a young man b...

Not on display

Mythological Scene

Follower of Titian

Reminiscent of Titian’s style, this painting is typical of the kind of mythological scene made for learned, private patrons in Venice that he helped pioneer. Cupid, god of love, raises his arrow to pierce a woman embracing a youth who holds a golden apple.The central couple may be Hippomenes and...

Not on display

Venus and Adonis

Workshop of Titian

Naked Venus, the goddess of love, throws her arms around handsome young Adonis to stop him from going out to hunt. The story is told in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Venus falls in love with the youth Adonis when Cupid accidentally wounds her with one of his arrows. She goes hunting with Adoni...

Not on display

The Trinity ('La Gloria')

After Titian

This is a copy of Titian’s large canvas known as ‘La Gloria’ (The Glory) or The Trinity. Titian’s painting was commissioned by Emperor Charles V of Spain in 1551, and is now in the Prado, Madrid.The Emperor and Empress with their son Prince Philip and his sisters kneel in their burial shrouds bef...

Not on display

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