In classical antiquity stars in the
heavens were associated with the gods
and with eternity and therefore they
feature in classical myth.
In the Renaissance there's a renewed interest
among artists in depicting classical
subject matter, it is therefore not
surprising to find paintings that derive
from classical myth and prominently feature stars.
In Tintoretto's 'The Origin of the Milky Way'
we witness the episode wherein
Jupiter has given birth to a mortal son,
Hercules, and wants to grant him
immortality by having him drink the milk
of his divine wife, Juno. She's asleep
and Jupiter brings the infant Hercules
to her breast and he starts suckling and
because he's a very vigorous and strong kid,
she wakes up and is startled, and the milk
sprays everywhere. Some of its sprays on
the ground and from it sprout the lilies of the field
and some of it sprays into the
heavens and forms the Milky Way.
Not surprisingly, Juno the queen of the gods
is falling out of her bed, in shock,
because she's been woken up by
her philandering husband Jupiter who's
arrived with a child that is not hers
and is expecting her to suckle the child,
but what's quite wonderful about
the painting other than that shocking
story is that this is a creation myth of sorts
and whilst we today think of the
Milky Way as a galaxy with 200 to 400
billion stars in it, Tintoretto has
chosen to represent it with less than a dozen.
As always with Tintoretto, he goes for novelty,
he goes for dynamism, he goes for fun,
for entertainment value and it has that
beautiful juxtaposition of very
sort of symbolically depicted yellow stars and then
this stream of clouds in the back which
look like the Milky Way the way we see it,
which is sort of a misty trail across the heavens.
It's full of objects that can be quite
distracting in fact from the actual
central point of the story
and I find that in looking at Tintoretto's
'The Origin of the Milky Way' that the stars,
which essentially take us right to the heart
of this creation myth, may not in fact be
a detail that you do pick up on
for quite some time.
My favorite painting in the whole
National Gallery is Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne'
and in fact my favorite detail
of that painting is the crown or circle
of stars in the top left-hand corner of the picture.
The stars are depicted
against a wonderful blue sky, painted we know
with lots of semi-precious
ultramarine from lapis lazuli
and the blue really provides the wonderful foil
for the bright white stars.
Not only is it a real constellation,
the Corona Borealis or Northern Crown,
but it's also the perfect narrative device
for this particular story.
In one version of the story the wedding wreath worn by
Ariadne is placed in the sky by Bacchus
and becomes a constellation which we
know as the Corona Borealis.
In another version of the story
Bacchus's proposal to Ariadne is that she join
him in the heavens as an immortal and
therefore she is transformed into a
constellation of eight stars.
What I love is the sense of cinema or
theatricality in the way that this artist
has told this particular story.
One of the big challenges for artists is how to
convey something that takes place over
time in a single image and Titian does this
brilliantly. Below Ariadne is the before,
where her former lover, Theseus,
departs from the island leaving her alone there
and above her is the after
where we see the constellation of stars.
The central scene in the painting is the
moment of mutual cognition,
the love at first sight.