The work had for a long time been a special painting for me, exuding a quality that seemed transcendental. From whence derived this sense of magic? Was it down to the artist’s use of the brush, or was it something about the scene itself? It was this fascination that drew me on towards the discovery which I can say to the best of my knowledge was previously unrecognized.

In the same way that, in the picture, the wine god is shown emerging out of the Naxian forest, the discovery seemed to hover somewhere in the margin of my mind, between concealment and disclosure. In time, like Plato's initiate in the cave, I realized that, beyond reasonable doubt, the work contains this secret constellation-map scene, and even that this concept is fully traceable back to the Dionysian initiations of Classical Antiquity. Call me a romantic if you like, but the realization when it came seemed to me to be the birthing of the Idea that I had previously perceived as a pregnancy in the transcendent glow of the painting, and here we have gone for a moment from Art History to Art Theory. Is the Hermetic / Platonic / Classical wisdom correct? Is a painting more beautiful if it resonates with an ancient Idea, perceivable to the Eye of the Mind? But back to the Art History...

The question of how the discovery could have been missed for so long may perhaps best be answered by pointing out that there has been enough to keep art historians busy at other levels of appreciation. Of the great painters of the High Renaissance period Titian is often considered to be the supreme master of colour. In Vasari’s Lives of the Artists he was acknowledged by a contemporary as “the finest and greatest imitator of nature as far as colour was concerned.” Critical opinion has not changed to the present day. “Colours are applied as though they were precious stones,” writes Iain Dikson Gill in his book Titian. Even this consummate skill with colour, however, could not account for the numinous halo of magic I perceived as I stood gazing at this masterpiece in the National Gallery in London in December 2000. Surely there was there more to it. And yes, as we’ve seen, there was. But that was far from the end of it. The discovery had lead in me into more antique waters, shining a light into the nature of the older Dionysian Mysteries.

Yes, the Titian painting is a constellation-map...but hold on - the figures in the scene are traditionally placed like this, which means that the Titian painting has unravelled a mystery for us, initiating us into a maenadic vision by showing us a secret ancient conception of the sky! (Yet, as we shall see, Titian's painting must have been executed in full knowledge of this stellar scheme.) We find the figures in this kind of configuration carved onto an ancient Roman tomb in Ostia - a panther, Silenus, Aegipan following behind, and this also shows Hercules in the correct location for what had by then become (10)the Hercules constellation. All these figures are actually labelled. The configuration, once again, is the reflected kind but here I haven't flipped it, so that the inscribed labels can be read. (Hercules isn't in the Titian, but I'm counting him as (10) because he did become part of the scene for the Romans at some stage, as we can see.

We also see, on the same tomb, the young Dionysos holding the thyrsos staff and lead by the panther, and he is labelled consacratus for he has just been initiated, confirming that this constellation business was indeed connected with Dionysian initiation. For Plato initiation was a matter of ascending to the Realm of Forms, and in Phaedrus he describes how this can be achieved by following in the train of one of the twelve gods as they each ride in their chariot on their respective feast day to the top of the arch of the sky. More on this later.

Lucian in his story of Dionysos' return from India (the East, from where the Zodiac constellations appear) described the figures following behind the god - the Maenads serpent-girdled, Silenus on his mule, and "a shaggy-legged misbegotten fellow like a goat in the underpinnings". Lucian's description is very close to that of Catullus:-

   In another part of the tapestry youthful Bacchus was wandering,

   with the rout of Satyrs and the Nysa-born Sileni,

   seeking thee, Ariadne, and fired with thy love;

   who then, busy here and there, were raging with frenzied mind,

   while "Evoe!" they cried tumultuously, "Evoe!" shaking their heads.

   Some of them were waving thyrsi with shrouded points, 

   some tossing about the limbs of a mangled steer,

   some girding themselves with writhing serpents: 

   bearing in solemn procession dark mysteries enclosed in caskets, 

   mysteries which the profane desire in vain to hear. 

   Others beat timbrels with uplifted hands, 

   Or raised clear clashings with cymbals of rounded bronze: 

   many blew horns with harsh-sounding drone, 

   and the barbarian pipe shrilled with dreadful din.

                                                                        Catullus 64 (Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis)

The casket containing a mystery is basically the only element of the above not painted by Titian (maybe), but it is shown in the relief on the Ostia tomb shown above, as the Sacra born by an ass, and in a third relief from that same tomb where the box is labelled Mysteria. I very tentatively point out that in this region of the sky, just above Capricorn and Aquarius, the rhomboid asterism now sometimes known as Job's Coffin which makes up the major part of Delphinus is located just above Equulus, the Little Horse, asking whether this might perhaps be the sacred box born by the mule.

A similar group of figures turn up in Ovid's telling of the arrival of Dionysos before Ariadne in Naxos. Ovid, Catullus and Lucian are some of the least religious-minded writers of antiquity, and this may be why they weren't worried about coming close to revealing the Mystery. Or maybe it is that Bacchus appeals to those with a lighter take on life, those who prefer to let their hair down in good honest hedonistic style rather than get caught up in the austerities and dogmatic absolutes of orthodox religion.

Much earlier in Greece, the Paean to Dionysos by Philodemos records that the Delphic oracle gave an instruction for a statue to be made of Dionysos in a chariot pulled by lions, and ancient mosaics show such scenes. In short, there is no doubt that this constellation-map scene was an ancient idea.

What of this identification of Bacchus with Bootes? Here it starts to get more interesting still. We can understand now why Virgil in Eclogue V says that it was the ideal shepherd Daphnis who was the first to yoke tigers to a chariot, and to lead the local people in Bacchic dance carrying rods entwined with vine. A common view of Bootes is as the idealised herdsman or shepherd constellation, and indeed Hyginus tells us that some see this constellation, Bootes, as the shepherd Ikarios, who performed the same role for the Attic Greeks that Daphnis according to Virgil performed for the Sicilians, i.e. he received the gift from Dionysos and introduced the cult. When describing the apotheosis of Daphnis, it seems Virgil was actually describing Dionysian initiation, for the poem, known as Daphnis at Heaven's Gate, is about Daphnis ascending into the stars. His position in this Virgil eclogue on the chariot drawn by wild cats therefore gives us a clear literary precedent from antiquity for (11) Bootes, the shepherd constellation, as the chariot rider. To me, this is extraordinary. Not only do we have from Virgil the key piece of the puzzle concerning the Titian constellation map, but we also have, suddenly, a deep insight into this famous ancient poem by the Roman master poet. Nature in the eclogue celebrates the ascension into the stars of Daphnis because Bootes then (and still) returns to the evening skies in spring, getting higher as the season changes into summer.

Daphnis stands rapt before Olympus’ gate,

And sees beneath his feet the clouds and stars.

Wherefore the woods and fields, Pan, shepherd-folk,

And Dryad-maidens, thrill with eager joy;

Nor wolf with treacherous wile assails the flock,

Nor nets the stag: kind Daphnis loveth peace.

The unshorn mountains to the stars up-toss

Voices of gladness; ay, the very rocks,

The very thickets, shout and sing, ‘A god,

A god is he...’

We have revealed a strong seasonal aspect to the vision of Dionysos led by the wild cat. The Athenians had celebrated Dionysos' return from the Underworld in Spring, and this formed a major event in their calendar. More confirmation of this seasonal aspect is to be seen in a wonderful Roman sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum of New York known as the Triumph of Dionysos and the Seasons, shown here below. Here the four standing figures flanking Dionysos on the lion are the Four Seasons, and Dionysos on the lion is located between Spring to the left and Summer to the right.

Bacchus with Lion Progressing from Spring to Summer

on a beautiful Roman Sarcophagus

Winter to the far left holds a bare vine, that of Spring has sprouted leaves, and Autumn is surrounded by images of fruition. The sculpture is exquisite, and its content is in harmony with the theory here expounded, because as I've said the ascent of Leo and Bootes into the evening sky occurs through spring and summer. In addition, it allows us to tie together the themes of initiation, marriage and the seasons. In the space of a year Dionysos, the vine, is born and grows to maturity. Initiation is a passage into adulthood, and the young man, a man passing from the Spring to the Summer of his life, reaches marriageable age.

Various writers from Philodemos to Lucian via Ovid, Cattalus and Virgil were able to paint scenes with words which integrated with this idea, but none of them was explicit about the connection between the underlying scheme and the constellations; this tells us it was a Mystery, something to be kept secret. The presence of the Aquarius figure in the Titian, however, does not as far as I am aware have an ancient equivalent, and nor does Crater, and this is fascinating because it shows us that the painting was devised in full knowledge of the ancient scheme, namely that it was a map of the constellations of the Summer Sky. In other words, because they (Titian and any advisors he may have had) knew the scheme, they were able to expand upon it. Had they not been in the know, this would have been impossible. If they had simply painted from the description in the old texts without knowing the underlying constellation map scheme, the result would have been more like the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne of Carraci, shown below, where the figures are not in the correct locations and where we do not see any additions fitting with the scheme such as the Aquarius and Crater images which we see in the Titian.

The larger images I've used here above, both the Titian painting and a portion of a Renaissance star-map, are reflected, as if in a mirror, because I prefer it this way, since this is the orientation we see looking upwards from the Earth. Thinking of it this way round helps us transpose the mythic scene onto the sky while actually star-gazing, something I'd recommend and encourage. The ancients, on the other hand, conceived the constellations as being themselves on a sphere and often showed them how they would be seen from outside this sphere, as if one had ascended: "Daphnis stands rapt before Olympus' gate, and sees beneath his feet the clouds and stars."

An example of the heavens shown as a sphere is to be found in the globe supported by the Farnese Atlas, a Roman work from around AD 150, copied from an older Hellenistic sculpture. Here too the constellations are shown from the outside of a conceived sphere. To the right is seen a celestial sphere produced as a copy of the Farnese Globe. Notice that we see Taurus facing to the right, with Aries to the left, and Pisces to the left of that. This is the reversal of what we see looking up into the sky from the “inside”.

SECRET KNOWLEDGE?

So...they knew. Whether it was down to Titian, the artist, or Alfonso, his patron, or Equicola, the scholar who at some point the duke consulted, or indeed someone else, there was knowledge of the ancient Mystery conception of the sky. How is this possible? Surely the Dionysian initiations in the more institutionalized sense weren't still being conducted in Titian's time, were they? It seems highly unlikely. If somehow they were, surviving various inquisitions and wars, the initiation rite must surely have been preserved in a semi-secular setting, as part of the entry into some guild of artisans for example, for in a more purely religious setting they would have been considered too pagan. The builders of theatres had their own guild in late antiquity, the Artesans of Dionysos (or Dionysian Artificers as they are sometimes known - these were a historical reality), and the construction of theatres continued well into the Christian period in places like Byzantium and Merovingian France. But before we jump to such wild conclusions, let us ask if there is some simpler explanation.

In Florence there was a carnival in early summer every year. Carnival songs were sung by masked actors riding on the floats, and one of these songs, attributed to Lorenzo himself around 1475, tells us that one of these floats was a triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. One verse of Lorenzo's song, entitled The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, runs:

Here are Bacchus and Ariadne,

Handsome, and burning for each other:

Because time flees and fools,

They stay together always content.

These nymphs and other gents

Are ever full of joy.

Let those who wish to be happy, be:

Of tomorrow, we have no certainty.

And there are two reasons why I find this particularly fascinating. I learnt from Andrew Graham-Dixon's BBC documentary on the Medici that they had cheetahs in their menagerie that were actually lead in procession during the Florence carnivals, going right back to the earlier half of the 15th century. And for me even more interesting is the fact that Lorenzo's poem describes the Bacchus and Ariadne episode as an apotheosis, a becoming eternal, escaping from fleeting time. "Here are Bacchus and Ariadne....they stay together always content." In the old myths there is little distinction between becoming eternal and being made into a constellation, and this is what the song refers to, because in the myth Dionysos does lead Ariadne up into the stars giving her a place sitting under her crown, the Corona Borealis. On balance, it seems to me that this together with the live cheetahs used in the processions makes the Florence Carnival link perhaps the most interesting possibility of all at the moment as a source for the "insider" knowledge displayed by Titian's painting. Lorenzo’s court was filled with great luminaries and mysterious Hermeticists tracing their school back to Plethon, and Lorenzo himself was a life-long brother of the society known as the Confraternity of the Magi, who crop up again lower down this essay.  

             3b) Of the theories that have come to mind, the most juicy and outlandish that is all the same just about conceivable, included here really just for fun, runs as follows. We know that in Southern Italy in antiquity Dionysian initiation was conducted in private localized societies centred on an aristocratic family. How would such a family have reacted to the outlawing of non-Christian cults? Connected by blood to the families that had once ruled glorious Rome, they may have considered themselves above such matters. They may have continued their initiation traditions, secretly, within the family. Possibly.

Or possibly not.

Further Insight - the Marriage of Ercole and Eleanor

There are some more things to mention here which have a bearing on the aforementioned theories. (In the following few paragraphs I draw on some details given in an essay Elysium: a prelude to Renaissance theatre by Meg Licht.) The themes of several of the paintings of the studiolo of Alfonso D’Este, including Bacchus and Ariadne, are to do with love, romance and marriage (notable the Worship of Venus). Some have wondered whether they honoured the marriage of Alfonso and Lucretia Borgia, although others have taken the view that this is quite improbable given the number of years that had passed since the wedding by the time the paintings were begun. It has in fact been suggested that Alfonso and his bride have their wedding portraits in one of the paintings that hung with Bacchus and Ariadne in the studiolo, in the form of the figures of Neptune and Cybelle in Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, but leading scholars such as Charles Hope remain highly sceptical.

Even if the painting does not honour the marriage, we can note that it may have been from such events that Alfonso developed an interested in the Bacchus and Ariadne episode. As was the tradition for weddings of the children of noble families in Italy in that period, the marriage was accompanied by fabulously sumptuous spectacles and performances. The host for this wedding was Alfonso’s father Ercole, who had himself been married in similarly magnificent circumstances, and a certain detail of the celebrations of this earlier marriage between Ercole and Eleonora of Aragon is of great interest here. A description by Corio of the intermezzo performances on a stage between the courses of the banquet tells us:-

Then there was a presentation of Bacchus and Ariadne and many other very worthy things, all appearing to be very costly, but I won't write about them, partly because I have forgotten what they were and partly because it would take too long.

A letter written by Eleonora herself gives a little more detail:-

            After that came Bacchus and Ariadne who sang:

"Happy Bacchus now returns from the sweet-smelling Indies

And makes glorious these revels with his Herculean drinks.

Although the authorities prohibit that they should recline at table

He with beautiful Ariadne will celebrate your wedding bed.

Do you not sense the animation? Do you not feel the doubled joy?

Bacchus is a welcome lad here with his double-sized drinks."

So if the painting we have been discussing did use Bacchus’ triumphant return from India and marriage to Ariadne on some level as a theme suitable for honouring a marriage, this was not without precedent. This doesn’t itself tell us more about the source of the star-map knowledge, except that it does seem to lead us back to the Roman Academy of Pomponius. At this time of the marriage of Ercole and Eleonora, 1473, the Academy was pressing for an end to the Papal outlawing of performances of secular theatre.  Members of the Academy are known to have been involved in setting up the wooden stage and surrounding constructions for Ercole and Eleonora’s marriage celebrations, and when the secular theatre was reborn in Renaissance Rome a little later it was Pomponius who was credited with having brought this about. This doesn’t itself give much extra strength to the theory that the Dionysian Artificers, the builders of theatres in antiquity, continued in some form, but it does implicate the Academy as being involved with these celebrations that included an appearence of Bacchus and Ariadne.

But then as more information is included in the scope of the research we realize that still we cannot discount the influence of the scholars from Ferrara itself on the choice of the material performed at the celebrations of Ercole’s wedding. The earliest wedding orations of the Renaissance were in fact performed in this Este city of Ferrara by a certain Guarino Guarini da Verona (1374-1460), who had set up there (in Ferrara) a studium for the study of rhetoric and classical literature.  Of additional interest here is the fact that between 1446 and 1449 the Byzantine scholar Theodore Gaza also lived in Ferrara. This Gaza was the first to translate into Latin the precepts for the epithalamium (lyric ode honouring a bride and bridegroom) written by the ancient rhetorician pseudo-Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

Gaza taught Greek at the Ferrara studium and became the first rector of the University of Ferrara after it had been reformed by the Este duke Lionello. According to Deno John Geanakoplos in Constantinople and the West the address Gaza gave when taking this post indicates his closeness to both the duke and Guarino, and also that he had taught not only Greek but also on Greek literature.

We have noted that Guarino and Gaza were linked to the Este court in Ferrara, and that the former wrote wedding orations inspired by the epithalamium of antiquity and that the latter was involved with the translation of such works from Greek into Latin, and that such works honour marriages, while Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne itself may perhaps have honoured the marriage of Alfonso d’Este and Lucretia Borgia. It should probably interest us therefore that the Catullus poem that describes Ariadne’s abandonment on the seashore where she meets Bacchus on his return from India is itself an epithalamium, and indeed in 1521 a book of Catullus was published in Venice with, posthumously, a commentary by Guarino. Later, in 1537, Ludovico Dolce translated a discussion by the Latin writer Juvenal of this epithalamium of Catullus, and he dedicated the work to Titian. In addition, "Dolce strays from the Latin text to include images suggested by Titian's painting [Bacchus and Ariadne]" - so we read in the section on Titian's letters by Giorgio Padoan in Titian : Prince of Painters published by Prestel. 

Nor is Catullus 64 the only epithalamium from antiquity to mention the god and his wife, and intriguingly I have even come across one (from Loeb and now in the public domain on the internet) which links this theme to the Bootes constellation. Claudian’s epithalamium to celebrate the marriage of Emperor Honorius and Maria contains the following consecutive lines, sung in the poem by the goddess Venus:-

If Bacchus, Ariadne's lover, could transform his mistress' garland into a constellation how comes it that a more beauteous maid has no crown of stars? Even now Boötes is weaving for thee a starry crown, even now heaven brings new stars to birth to do thee honour. Go, mate with one who is worthy of thee and share with him an empire co-extensive with the world.

Bearing these things in mind it begins to look more and more possible that Ferrara and Este ideas may have suggested the use of the theme of Bacchus and Ariadne as appropriate to the celebration of the marriage of Alfonso and Lucretia just as it had been performed at the wedding of his father and Eleonara. But does this shed any light on the question posed here: how was it known that Dionysos and his traditional train of followers is a mythic projection onto a series of the constellations of the night sky? Well, it does at least highlight a likely route which such a tradition took, namely, as suggested before, from Constantinople, in this case via Gaza.

What about that juicier but more outlandish Royal thiassos (Dionysian society) theory? If we were to chose this one, or ponder it for fun, then we could wonder whether the Bacchus and Ariadne knowledge came neither from Ferrara nor the Roman Academy, but from the royal family of Naples. This Eleanora of Aragon at whose marriage with Ercole d'Este the Bacchus and Ariadne story was performed between courses was the daughter of Ferrante I of Naples. In the previous century, the writer Bocaccio had very close links to the royal house of Naples, and there is a story in his Decameron in which two painters tell a doctor that they are enrolled in a secret society through which they have met many of the great queens of Europe. They tell the doctor that he may become enrolled through an initiation in which he will ride on a horned beast, during which he must not bring to mind God and the saints. As we read the tale we are lead to laugh at the doctor’s gullibility, and to suppose that such an idea was ludicrous, but still…can it really have been plucked by Boccaccio out of thin air? The writer was himself in love with a daughter of the king of Naples; this king was succeeded by his granddaughter Joan, who was at one point labelled a heretic and who opened a brothel for wealthy nobles as if she were some debauched domina of Ancient Rome. A lot more evidence than this would be required, but if this juicy third theory is the one then something seems to tell me that the Neapolitan family sound like they would start out as the prime suspects. But it is more an outline for a fantasy novel than a genuine theory. 

WHERE ARE THE OTHER EXAMPLES?

One of the questions that results from all this is that which asks where the other examples of Renaissance paintings incorporating constellation maps are. Surely it couldn't be a one off? More than three decades later another rich patron wanted mythological scenes for a private gallery. Titian painted for Phillip II of Spain modern reincarnations of the two paintings described in detail in the ancient novel Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, namely Europa being carried off by the Zeus bull, and Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the Seamonster. Both these are constellation-based scenes, although there is a difference between these two ekphrases in reverse and Bacchus and Ariadne in that everyone knew already that the former were constellations. The bull from the first of this pair of paintings ranks top of the list of who Taurus is in both Hyginus and Pseudo-Eratosthenes, and Perseus and Andromeda are just constellation names already, plain and simple, with the Seamonster widely known to be Cetus. They're also less comprehensive. In Andromeda more constellations could have been included, such as the parents Cassiopeia and Cepheus, but they weren't. In Europa it is somewhat interesting to note that the fish upon which the cherub is riding is correctly located for Pisces, but other than that there's Taurus and that's it. Besides, it's not my favourite Titian. Europa is caught in an ungainly pose, it seems to me, lacking the grace that Titian was capable of showing, and the bull looks father heiffer-like, not very bullish. A bit like when you see the movie of the film and it isn't at all how you imagined.

The Shepherds and the Virgin