Sleeping Ariadne

For almost three centuries this sleeping woman was taken for Cleopatra. The reason is a bracelet in the form of a snake, which viewers read as the asp the Egyptian queen let bite her. Pope Julius II bought the statue in 1512 from the Roman collector Angelo Maffei and set it up as a fountain in the Belvedere statue court, the figure lying above an ancient sarcophagus. Poets answered. Baldassare Castiglione, later the author of The Book of the Courtier, wrote a Latin poem in which Cleopatra herself speaks from the stone, and long afterwards the English poet Alexander Pope translated it.

In the late 1700s the archaeologist Ennio Quirino Visconti recognised her as Ariadne, the Cretan princess who helped Theseus escape the labyrinth and was abandoned by him as she slept on the island of Naxos, until the god Dionysus found her. She is a Roman copy of the 2nd century AD, after a Greek original of the 2nd century BC from the school of Pergamon. Her present niche dates from 1779, when the painter Cristoforo Unterperger decorated its back wall with Egyptian motifs, later covered over with a red wash.