An unconcerning pageant

How Charles Lamb made me look again at Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne

Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–3), by Titian. National Gallery, London.

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When I visit a museum, I never rent an audio guide and don’t read much about the paintings I’m going to see. I generally prefer to let the works speak for themselves, speak to me, and then, if I am interested enough, fill in the gaps later with the views of critics or scholars. Indeed, with few exceptions—TJ Clarke is one—I actually find it hard to read long discussions or descriptions of a painting. 

But recently, I came across a description of a painting that made me drop my Kindle with a thud on the breakfast table in astonishment. 

I was reading Charles Lamb’s “Elia” essays and came across one called “Barrenness of the imaginative faculty in the productions of modern art (1833).” Frankly, it was an unpromising title. Did I really want to read a two-hundred-year-old complaint about “modern” artists?

But as this was Lamb, who often surprises the reader and whose titles rarely convey even a fraction of the content of the essay, I persevered. 

I’m glad I did. 

After a few lines about the lack of imagination of contemporary painters, the essay began to warm up with this:

Is there anything in modern art — we will not demand that it should be equal — but in any way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the “Ariadne,” in the National Gallery?¹

This painting by Titian is one I've seen many times on my visits to the National Gallery. It’s a gorgeous painting, but not one I’d read much about. My interest was piqued. 

Warming to his theme, Lamb flung these magnificent lines around me, gripping me in his writerly embrace: 

Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect.

Lamb’s energetic language—precipitous, rout, fury, flings—emphasises the dramatic action of the painting. The sheer energy of the passage had me reeling, while Lamb’s neat formulation of time present and time past in the painting was helping me to see its story unfold in a way I hadn’t before. This was art criticism worth reading, I thought. 

Then came this:

With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant — her soul undistracted from Theseus — Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.

This sentence, for all its unorthodox, twisting syntax, set my pulse racing. It’s a Spanish galleon of a sentence, laden with treasure, barely able to make it to shore with all its stolen loot of gold and silver—those mad cymbals—and fragrant spices. With his pirate imagination, Lamb has plundered Titian’s masterpiece of its riches and sent them sailing to us in the wonderful vessel of his prose. 

It was as if he’d conjured an entire Greek or Roman drama in one astonishing sentence.

Most beautifully of all, Lamb’s energetic language was sending me back to the painting, towards Titian’s beautiful treatment of time and action, story, and character.

I found my eyes directed towards Ariadne, whose startled movement and ambiguous gaze capture the viewer’s attention, as, according to Lamb, she all but ignores Bacchus’ “unconcerning pageant.” 

*

My interest stirred, I found myself looking into the background of Titian’s painting. I checked out the National Gallery website² and found a short lecture on the painting by one of their curators, Matthias Wivel. It seems Titian was aware of two sources in Roman literature for the story, one by Ovid and one by Catullus, which he would have read in translation.

Allowing myself to slip further back in time and into poetry and myth, I checked both sources. It’s been a matter of scholarly debate, it seems, which source was more important to Titian. But what struck me was how cursory Ovid’s treatment of the episode was. In my old Penguin Classics version by Mary M. Innes, it is reduced to this:

Ariadne, left all alone, was sadly lamenting her fate when Bacchus put his arms around her and brought her his aid. 

Not a lot for a painter to work with there, I’d say. In this text, Ovid’s main focus was on Bacchus’ transformation of Ariadne’s crown into a consolatory constellation, the Corona Borealis (which you can see in the top left-hand corner of the canvas). 

Catullus, on the other hand, makes Ariadne’s reaction one of fury, which he dwells on at considerable length:

Henceforth let no woman believe a man’s oath, 

let none believe that a man’s speeches can be trustworthy.

She then cries out to the deities to wreak their revenge:³

 but even as Theseus had the heart to leave me desolate, 

with such a heart, ye goddesses, may he bring ruin upon himself and his own!⁴

It’s been claimed that Catullus’s ultimate aim in telling the story of Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne was to rebuke the rulers of Rome for their carelessness towards the wellbeing of others as they followed their own passions and ambitions.

I think it’s plausible to claim Titian was depicting Ariadne’s anger at her lover’s treachery. But it would, of course, take centuries before the story was finally recast, giving true agency to Ariadne,⁵ whose ingenious use of thread had allowed the ungrateful Theseus to escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth. 

Lamb’s account of Ariadne’s gaze towards Bacchus suggests some self-possession on her part. But I’m not sure I’d see it as some kind of proto-feminist account.⁶ He doesn't mention her achievement in overcoming the minotaur, and her dismissal of Bacchus, as he sees it, is because she’s still thinking of her treacherous lover, Theseus, rather than being intent on forging her own fate.

But at least, and rather splendidly, Lamb does make Ariadne the centre of attention and give her a mind of her own. And he brings poetry and pathos to her plight as she paces the shore and loses sight of Theseus over the horizon. 

*

I then looked at a contemporary artist’s reworking of the story: Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1822). The Gros version initially struck me, for all its pretty brushwork, as lacking grandeur and looking insipid compared to the Titian. On this showing, Lamb was right to be disappointed with contemporary painting, I thought.

Bacchus and Ariadne (1822), by Antoine-Jean Gros. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

But then I looked closer at Ariadne’s face in the Gros version. Perhaps there was a little more to this painting after all. Here, is Ariadne simply yielding to the male gaze and passively accepting her fate? Or does her own gaze suggest she’s planning her next move, even an act of revenge, as in Catullus’ poem? I find it hard to decide.

*

Ultimately, Lamb may have been wrong about Ariadne and just as wrong about contemporary art⁷. But he gives Titian’s painting the full blaze of his attention and a verbal tribute that stands as a thing of beauty in its own right. Still savouring Lamb’s prose as I finished breakfast, I found myself wondering, What more could an artist ask for?

1. You can read Lamb’s essay here: https://www.angelfire.com/nv/mf/elia2/art.htm. My quotes are taken from: Lamb, Charles; Lamb, Mary. Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

2. As far as I’m aware, Lamb never left England. The turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, his duty as a clerk at the East India Company, and his lack of money had made travel impossible to him, and therefore most of the wonders of Renaissance art were generally inaccessible to him. The Titian was purchased by the National Gallery in 1826, seven years before this essay was written 

3. And indeed, Theseus carelessly causes his father's death by forgetting to hoist the right-coloured sails as a sign that he is all right (an ancient version of failing to text one's parents), and his father, in despair, jumps to his death: https://ancient-literature.com/catullus-64-translation-2/

4. https://ancient-literature.com/catullus-64-translation-2/

5. See for example, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250773586/ariadne

https://www.polyesterzine.com/features/why-are-so-many-new-books-feminist-retellings-of-greek-myths

6. Intriguingly, Wivel, the curator from the National Gallery, describes Ariadne’s look as one of love at first sight. After reading Lamb, I find it hard to agree with that view.

7. And was Lamb actually an unreliable narrator? Writing in 1833 to Wordsworth: “Inter nos the Ariadne is not a darling with me, several incongruous things are in it, but in the composition it served me as illustrative.” Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, p. 1498.

It’s possible that Turner’s 1840 painting of the same subject was in response to Lamb’s essay: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-bacchus-and-ariadne-n00525