Chasing Lights

Pure beauty.

art-history:

John Vanderlyn 
Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos  1809-14 
Oil on canvas  68½ x 87 in 
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia 

In Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos (1809-1[4]), Vanderlyn drew on Venetian traditions of the nude to portray a woman from mythology abandoned by her lover. Ariadne, however, reaches beyond the grace and beauty of its Renaissance style to appeal to less refined sentiments. The painting offers and eroticized spectacle that flies in the face of the decorum and restraint expected of neoclassical art.

Vanderlyn’s American viewers were scandalized. They were unprepared for a nude female figure dominating a lush landscape. Vanderlyn himself had anticipated this response. In a letter written in 1809, he observed that the “subject may not be chaste enough for the more chaste and modest Americans, at least to be displayed in the house of any private individual, to either the company of the parlor or drawing room, but on that account it may attract a greater crowd if exhibited publickly [sic].” Vanderlyn believed that he would draw large crowds to his painting precisely because of the controversy it was likely to cause.

At one level, Ariadne embodies European traditions of high art. Ariadne’s creamy, voluptuous body derives from Italian precedents, linking Vanderlyn—and by association, American art itself—not only with the classical past, but with a cosmopolitan, transatlantic culture of refined taste. From this point of view, Ariadne was Vanderlyn’s way of showing that American art was not provincial. On the contrary, American painters could match anything Europe had produced.

At another level, Ariadne represents nature itself: innocent, unguarded, and voluptuous. She can be understood as an allegory of the American landscape. In her recumbent posture, she is as exposed and inviting as the New World, and like it, she invites conquest. Painted in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition (both achievements of the Jefferson administration), Vanderlyn’s painting translates continental expansion into a discourse on female availability.

But Ariadne also offers veiled eroticism. Ariadne’s lover, Theseus, disappears in the distant background, where he is about to join his ships and embark for Athens. With Theseus’s disappearance, the viewer is free to attend to the painting outside its mythic narrative. Despite its classical framework, the canvas’s emotional charge lies elsewhere: in the realm of the viewer’s unacknowledged desires. Although Ariadne’s style derives from high European art, the painting’s affect—its emotional jolt—appeals to a world of private tastes and hidden pleasures. 

Ariadne begins, then, where [Charles Willson] Peale leaves off. It offers a not-so-chaste vision of nature grounded in less rational principles than in a more subterranean realm of feeling and desire. Vanderlyn shifts the inner logic of painting from moral and civic uplift—the idea that art instructs its viewer—to something we recognize more familiarly today from advertising and television: images charged with an erotic undercurrent. Where Peale takes the “high road,” Vanderlyn swerves down the low, dressing up desire in the language of classical taste.

—Angela L. Miller, et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008)