Bacchus And Ariadne Poem by gershon hepner

Bacchus and Ariadne, Tullio Lombardo.
Ariadne’s lips like a tomato,
curvy, fleshly, plumped like pillows, juicy,
match Bacchus’s, that to her lips are noosey,
imbued with mystery in stone from which
they’re carved, though viewers’ hands may itch
to fondle Ariadne’s nipples and her breasts,
inviting them to be great Tullio’s guests.

Inspired by an article by Karen Wilkin in the WSJ, September 9,2009, on an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, “Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture” (“Tenderness Out of Stone”) , which I red while waiting to see a performance of Tracy Letts’s play “August: Osage County” at the Ahmanson Theater in LA:
It's all fascinating, but it's hard to get past Tullio's ¬dazzling high-relief busts—two single figures, two male-female pairs—iconic demonstrations of his ability to imbue stone with tenderness and mystery. All ¬depend on the contrast between silken flesh and heavy, seductively curling hair; all have elusive erotic undertones. The double busts are show stoppers. In the earlier (c.1490/1495) relief, from the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro, Venice, the woman is bare-breasted, the man clad only in a drape over one shoulder. Their shoulders touch, they turn slightly toward one another, but they gaze ¬upward, elsewhere. In 'Bacchus and Ariadne' (c.1505) , from the Kunsthistorisches Museum ¬Vienna, the heads of the beautiful young nude couple touch. In both reliefs, the upward-gazing expressions, lips parted in speech or song, seem at once eternal and strangely mobile, perhaps because of the suave carving or because each figure is so individualized. In both busts, the woman's face is a fleshy oval, with curving, pillowy lips; the man's is leaner, squarer, with a wider mouth. In the Ca' d'Oro relief, her ribbon-bound hair is a thick coil of incised ringlets; his curly crop is conjured up with deeply undercut spirals. Bacchus and Ariadne have ringlets of different densities, hers caught in a lace snood, his framing his face and crowned by a wreath of grape vines. In both sculptures, the cords of the man's neck are visible; the woman's neck is a smooth column above breasts borrowed from an antique Venus.
Tullio's double-figure reliefs are, in fact, intensely evocative of antique grave stele, but the voluptuous forms, the rich textures, and the ambiguity are his own. Were the double busts commissioned as portraits of young Venetians disguised as classical deities? We may never know, just as we may never discover the true subject of ¬Giorgione's enigmatic 'The ¬Tempest' (roughly contemporaneous with 'Bacchus and ¬Ariadne') . In the end, though, it's the fusion of emotional ¬intensity, classicizing discipline and Renaissance invention in Tullio Lombardo's sculptures that demands our attention—a lot from a small, concentrated show.


9/9/09