Lecture 1: Approaches to European Art
The joyous procession of Bacchus and his caravan of revelers was linked to
ancient fertility rites. The meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne is the love story
central to this myth. Leading his followers in his chariot, Bacchus discovers
Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. Instantly smitten, he
leaps—almost À oats—down in a trance of love to make her his bride and,
ultimately, to give her immortality as a constellation of stars, as already seen
in the heavens above her.Our next example is Apollo and Daphne (c. 1622–1625) by Bernini. If we
don’t know this myth of Apollo’s love for the nymph Daphne, as retold by
Ovid in his Metamorphoses, then what are we to make of our observation
that her ¿ ngers are changing into branches and her toes are taking root?
And if we guess, by her fearful expression or his apprehensive one, that her
transformation must have something to do with his pursuit, we still would
not know that she has prayed for this metamorphosis to thwart him. There
is a certain melancholy in her success, because she didn’t wait long enough
to learn that he was a god. The story is a memorable one, and the sculpture
is a magni¿ cent expression of it in intractable marble, in which such a
metamorphosis seems especially impressive. Knowledge of the myth—the
subject—is essential.That these two subjects were also interpreted by the artists is obvious even if
we had never seen other examples. For instance, Bernini could have shown
Daphne almost completely transformed into a laurel tree and Apollo seated
dejectedly on a rock.To explore interpretation, we’ll look at three versions of one subject: St.
Matthew. The New Testament begins with the accounts of the life of Jesus
written by the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It must be
understood that here, as always in our discussion of Christian art, we are
taking the accounts of the saints and the biblical narratives at face value,
because that is what the artists did. Each of the evangelists has a symbolic
¿ gure who accompanies him or stands in for him, and the symbol of St.
Matthew is a winged man, an angel. In art, the saint’s angel is often seen with
him while the evangelist writes his Gospel, as if inspiring or even dictating it
to him. But this simple subject can take many different forms.