It is one of the single most beautiful images that's ever been made.
Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne,
you don't forget it once you've seen it.
It's one of the most perfect paintings.
It doesn't look like it's been painted,
it looks like it's been carved out of gemstones.
This painting is so special because everybody at heart is a romantic.
I'm Matthias Wivel, the
curator of 16th century Italian paintings at the National Gallery.
So we're looking at Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne.
Titian painted it between 1520 and 1523
for the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso I d’Este. Titian is here telling
the story of the mortal woman Ariadne and how she fell in love with the god
of wine Bacchus, or Dionysius as he's called in Greek.
That happened on the island of Naxos.
Ariadne is abandoned by her lover
Theseus, whom she's previously saved from the Minotaur in the labyrinth at Crete.
And you see his ship on the horizon at the left side of the picture.
Then suddenly behind her, she hears this rumble and noise
and she turns around and she sees Bacchus arriving at the head of a train,
having returned from a triumphant visit to India.
And he's accompanied by all these revellers.
And what Titian
then gets at, is the moment where they see each other and fall in love.
I'm Gail Trimble and I'm a university academic specialising in Latin literature.
Titian is, I think, looking at two poetic
sources in Roman literature for this moment.
And one is Catullus 64.
But from Ovid too, Titian has
clearly been reading the Ars Amatoria where Ovid has a version of this
story. And there he's got sort of the cheetahs that are drawing Bacchus's
chariot - Ovid actually says tigers, but you know more or less the same!
And he's got from both sources the fact, which is very important in this picture,
I think, that Bacchus is jumping down from the chariot; Catullus says flying,
Ovid says leaping.
Hi, I'm Jacob, and I'm a Young Producer at the National Gallery.
It's like a scene from a movie, really.
It's, you know, it's completely just frozen there. It's like pressing pause on this moment.
There's something before, and there's going to be
something after.
And I think there's something quite universal there, in terms of love,
because I think with all of us, when you - I mean, hopefully, we all hope -
but when you go into a situation
like this, when you meet somebody else, you take your past with you.
I'm Theresa DiDonato.
I'm an associate professor of psychology at Loyola University, Maryland.
And my expertise is in romantic relationships.
What Titian did so beautifully here,
I think, is he shows this pull or this
magnetic force that Ariadne is having on him.
His mouth is open almost in awe.
And his eyes are so wide and he is just staring at her.
Love at first sight is something that usually happens more often for men.
He's leaping towards her with this emotion and this energy.
It makes me think a little bit about how we make grand gestures.
Look, I'm leaping from a chariot,
so that I can be closer and see you.
I'm Chisato Minamimura.
This is my sign name:
Chisato.
I'm a deaf performance artist
and a BSL art guide.
I'm delighted to be involved in the discussion of the painting:
Bacchus -
and this is the sign I'll be using for Bacchus -
and Ariadne -
and this is the sign I'll be using for Ariadne.
Now, I'd like to explore the movement of the painting.
We see the central character of Bacchus, mid-leap.
Now, should Bacchus be a mortal,
surely this perilous leap would lead to injury.
But perhaps Titian is leading us to believe that his divine properties will
allow him to land safely in the arms of his new found love.
I'm Shahidha Bari.
I'm professor of fashion cultures and histories at
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London.
I think the conventional way to read this
image is as a coup de foudre, a thunderbolt moment, the ultimate romance.
And I think it might be for Bacchus,
but if I were Ariadne, then I wouldn't be so sure.
She's generally described as being deeply in love with Bacchus.
But she is kind of on the rebound.
Because how would you feel if your lover had abandoned you, as Theseus has?
You have to read the clues, and I think her clothes are clues.
I think that she has had barely any time to register her feelings.
So her gown is just falling off her shoulder in this almost postcoital disarray.
And you can see the voluminous blue robes
that are gathered in her hand and that are catching under her feet,
they've become twisted in her haste.
And the one thing that I always notice is the red spiral of the scarf that's wound
around her feet and her arms and her neck, which I often think
burns really brightly and it looks like a bloodied snare.
The composition of the painting reminds me
of a stage. Roughly speaking,
Titian divides the canvas into two large triangles, perhaps enticing the viewer
to see two theatrical scenes played out there.
I'm Mark Forsyth, I'm the the author of A Short
History of Drunkenness. On the right hand side, right hand downwards side of that diagonal,
you have the frenzied train of Bacchus and they're all
throwing around animal parts like some crazed barbecue.
And Silenas is there in the background.
He's kind of passed out.
When I look at this, it actually reminds me a bit of a nightclub.
Everybody's gone a bit raucous.
So over there, you've got all the sort
of the downside or the bestial side of drunkenness.
And then on the left - and this is the
main thing you see when you see that painting - is that beautiful shade of blue,
one of the greatest blues in the world, and Ariadne's out on the side in the blue
and she's turning away from that whole train of madness. And she's looking
upwards towards the northern crown in the top left, which is the constellation
she will eventually be turned into.
And so she's rejecting, as it were,
the whole of the dark side of being drunk.
The blue is very striking in this painting.
And that's because Titian has used a lot of of ultramarine
lapis lazuli, which is a very fine blue pigment.
One of the most expensive pigments at the time.
There's just so much detail.
If you look at the realism of the animals -
the cheetahs clearly -
a leopard is really what is associated with Bacchus.
And these are not leopards, they're cheetahs,
so that's probably because Alfonso I d’Este,
the patron, he had a menagerie, a little zoo in Ferrara.
He was kind of an eccentric nobleman.
I'm Professor Sarah Durant,
and I'm the acting Director
of Science at the Zoological Society of London.
So these look very much like Asiatic
cheetahs to me. It's before they were officially described -
they weren't officially described until the 18th century.
Now the Asiatic cheetah is just confined
to Iran, and there's only less than 40 individuals left.
In terms of their speed,
they're a good choice for chariot pullers, because they're the fastest animal on land.
Presumably there would be some divine guidance that might get them
running in the same direction and potentially following orders.
Just think of herding cats!
Hi I'm Kevin Much.
I am a Canadian visual artist, and graphic novelist and digital compositor
and I designed the cover of the second Crash Test Dummies album,
God Shuffled His Feet,
and superimposed the band into a famous Titian painting, Bacchus
and Ariadne, from the National Gallery in London.
So I started thinking, well, what would be
an image from art history that would be suitable for Crash Test Dummies?
I found the original page from
a book called High and Late Renaissance in Venice.
Page six hundred, which I,
I'm embarrassed to tell you,
I cut it out of the book.
I butchered this book.
So this is the actual image that I came across in the book.
What I liked was the fact that Bacchus is wearing a red cape.
Just as in the famous Crash Test Dummies
song, the first big hit single Superman Song.
So these are the original photographs that were scanned in to make that cover.
Personally, I've always described Titian as a little bit pornographic.
There's this tremendous sexiness and fun to it.
And for a pop record, you know,
which in effect - this became, I think they sold six million of these -
you know, it's appealing to have something
like that where you can have your cake and eat it, too,
because you're having this kind of like popular culture and buying
you know, this record that you heard on the radio and it's great fun.
But, you know, you can also feel that you have at least some
shred of intellectual appeal.
There's so many different parts of this painting.
You can connect to each part of it and every time you look at it with a new emotion,
whether you're you know, you're feeling sorrow or whether you are
in love, you will see something a bit different.
It is this whirling vortex of limbs and chaos and noise.
And it is a love story.
And it is also the opposite of a love story.
It's an abandonment story.
It has absolutely everything in human nature.
That's Titian's great gift, is to allow you all
of those possibilities, compressed in this tiny moment, in this one image.