Ariadne1.0096_Kauffmann

Ariadne1.0096_Kauffmann

Sotheby's site
Ovid Met. 4.605-11
Ovid Heroides 10
alt URL for Ov. Her. 10 in Loeb
Catullus, 64.50-201

Apollod. Libr. 2.2-4

Domenico Parodi, attributed, 1672-1742, "Ariadne on Naxos," oil on copper, ca. 1705, sold at Sotheby's 28 January 2000, lot 62 (as Marcantonio Franceschini).

Ariadne, as often depicted by painters, sleeps obliviously and Theseus departs (extreme right). The Minoid here dreams blithely still on the bed where she and the Athenian have spent the night. Dionysos will soon arrive with his retinue and solve the problems she doesn't even know she has. Sebastiano Ricci's fully nude Ariadne (ca. 1705) seems a precise contemporary of this work. John Vanderlyn's Ariadne, the first American female nude, comes a century later.

The image at right is in the public domain and protected by Creative Commons.

For attribution of this picture to the little known Domenico Parodi, one should see the Sotheby's site. The essay there states that this work was previously attributed to Marcantonio Franceschini, 1648-1729, but that "a secure attribution for this sensual depiction of Ariadne has thus far eluded scholars." Fracheschini is credited in OGCMA with two items in DionysusAriadne, 1.0110 and 1.0111. Because I am uncertain of those works, I chose to state this present work as "not in Reid".

OGCMA entries for Ariadne are not utterly demarcated from usages of "Ariadne" (sola). It would seem that depictions of the Minoid immediately after her abandonment qualifies as "Ariadne" while usages treating her rescue by Dionysos go in as "DionysosAriadne".

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.