Bacchus and Ariadne

Ariadne had helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth, and he repaid her by sailing off while she slept on the island of Naxos. Giordano shows her abandoned on the shore, his ship already small in the distance. Bacchus arrives with his band of satyrs, and Cupid points the sleeping princess out to him, lifting the blue drapery that covers her.

This canvas and its companion, a Selene and Endymion, once hung in the Milan palace of the Archinto, a noble family whose ceilings the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo frescoed in 1730 and 1731. Those frescoes were destroyed when bombs struck the palace in 1943. The two canvases had left Milan long before, and they reached Verona through the collection of a local benefactor.