MASP

By Luciano Migliaccio
The statue Sleeping Bacchante illustrates the text attributed to Greek poet Anacreon, (Heller, n. 46) and etched on its base: “When Bacchus with his ivy wreath besieges me, I lay down. It is better to lay inebriated than dead”. Modern critics question the text’s authenticity. The image of the Bacchante carries with it an ancient tradition. Dionysus’ female companions were typically depicted by Greek and Roman artists when dancing and mystically entranced. Villareale, on the contrary, for the first time portrays the moment of abandonment that follows inebriation and ecstasy. The Bacchante, after having participated in the god’s orgiastic cortege, lies on the ground, abandoned on a panther skin as if she were dead, her head crowned with leaves. The chalice, still filled with wine, falls from her hand and spills over her skin and onto the ground. The woman surrenders to sleep and raises an arm, showing her body like the sleeping Venus found by the Satyrs in Luca Giordano’s painting that was, for a while, part of the Naples royal’s collection. The pose stems from representations of nymphs, or of Ariadne, found in the Dionysian sarcophagi, but appears for the first time in connection with the bacchantes in 16th – and 17th – century paintings: as can be seen, for example in the figures of the bacchantes in Poussin’s painting Midas Rendering Tribute to Bacchus in the Munich Alte Pinakothek, and above all in Titian’s The Bacchanal. The insightful parallel between sleep and death suggested by the Greek poem, originated in a text by Homer in which two divinities are depicted as children, daughters of the Night, may help us understand the reason behind such a radical change in the iconography. The traditional representation of the entranced Bacchante has given way to the theme of sleep. The latter is usually represented in sculptural art of Antiquity, by figures with their arm bent over the head. This attitude was taken up again by Michelangelo in the famous Sleeping Cupid which belonged to Isabela d’Este. Algardi created a black marble version based on this same attitude, for Marcantonio Borghese in 1635. The Borghese’s Collection also boasted the most renowned among ancient sculptures depicting sleeping figures: The Hermaphrodite. A version of this found in Florence portrays him lying on a skin-covered rock. Canova seems to have taken an interest in this prototype, as illustrated by the works intended chiefly for English clients in the period from 1815 to 1820. Surely the most remarkable example, thanks to its prestigious location, is the Naiad at Buckingham Palace (1815-17), which may have inspired Villareale’s vicious looting scene, or the Sleeping Nymph (1820), once part of the Landsdown’s Collection and currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum and manifestly inspired by the Roman Hermaphrodite. The Sicilian sculptor seems to focus on this particular moment of Canova’s career, highlighting the theme’s erotic innuendoes: sleep, after intoxication, becomes a petite mort. A typically interior sculpture, the Bacchante plays on references to literary texts, resuming the illustrative vocation of Baroque plastic art. At the same time, the evocation of Classical elements disguises a somewhat affected voyeur-inspired demeanor, typical of Boucher. Although taking a different approach, Villareale is a forerunner of the French neo-Baroque classicism of the 40s, which purports to find in Antiquity the sensual and Dionysian traits that lead it into a confrontation with truth. This can be seen, for example, in Jean Baptiste Auguste Clesinger’s famous Woman Bitten by a Snake from 1847, where the twisted figure is a moulage of Madame Sabatier’s body. Villareale arrives at this particular interpretation of Antiquity through his mastery of historical tradition, which allows him to blend the formal abstraction of Canova’s framework with a Baroque-oriented inspiration, very much like a restoration expert of the 17th century and brought out by the sharp contrast between the bright purity of marble and the rough surface of limestone. The almost animal-like sensuality, the vulnerable and oblivious gracefulness conveyed by the attitudes of the figures, and the smoothness of the anatomy that recreate, in a Jordaens inspired style, the goddesses of Rubens, replace the orgiastic, frightening, and Dionysian aspects of Antiquity with an idyllic mood, thereby producing a perfect figurative equivalency through the analogy between ecstasy, sleep, and death, referred to in the poem attributed to Anacreon, the favorite poet of the age of the fêtes galantes.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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