Arachne

In Ovid's story, Arachne was the mortal weaver who dared to challenge the goddess Athena at the loom and ended up as a spider. In 1893 Carlo Stratta gave her name to a modern young woman at home, and he surrounded her with cloth. Behind her a fabric patterned with herons seems to take flight in a tangle of necks, beaks and wings, and the Turin gallery's catalogue reads the birds almost as thoughts rising from her golden head. The room is full of the exotic fashions of the 1890s, a little Moorish table that recalls the furniture of the Milanese designer Carlo Bugatti, a Japanese rice-paper lantern, a curtain used as a screen. Nature and artifice blur in that enveloping décor, and in the middle of it she looks straight out at the viewer, steady and questioning, almost in challenge.