Cleópatra, Ninfa e Ariadne: uma biografia da escultura dos Museus do Vaticano

Abstract

This work focuses on a protagonist: the statue of Ariadne, currently housed in the Gallery of Statues — Vatican Museums. It is a roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture from the 2nd century BC that was purchased from Angelo Maffei by Pope Julius II in 1512 for the Cortile del Belvedere. It is the biography of the sculpture when recognized as Cleopatra or Nymph during the Renaissance. Literary and visual manifestations that have attributed value to her for representing concretely the power of Julius II and the poetic subject of the fountain nymph are analyzed. This refers to the ancient image of the fountain nymph, which has been circulating since the second half of the 15th century, as a Renaissance creation. The principles and modalities that follow the reception of this iconographic type, whose exemplarity has generated interference and contamination within the “labyrinth” in which the history of its image was composed over the centuries are now studied. A small image album that brings out the representative tradition of the myth of Ariadne is presented. Nachleben´s lines following the Warburg way of thinking regarding the iconographic type of the sleeping female figure were studied. It is an iconographic research that pointed to references to the dormant image of Ariadne as the permanence of its survival. In the organization of this image album, the two antagonistic sides of the myth image stood out: the melancholy of abandonment and the ecstasy