Ganymede: Encyclopedia II - Ganymede - Renaissance and Baroque Ganymede

Ganymede - Renaissance and Baroque Ganymede

In Shakespeare's As You like It (1599), a comedy of mistaken identity in the magical setting of the Forest of Arden, Celia, dressed as a shepherdess, becomes "Aliena" ("stranger", Ganymede's sister) and Rosalind, because she is "more than common tall", dresses up as a boy, Ganymede, a well-known image to the audience. She plays on her ambiguous charm to seduce Orlando, but also (involuntarily) the shepherdess Phebe. Thus behind the conventions of Elizabethan theater in its original setting, the young boy playing the girl Rosalind dresses up as a boy and is then courted by another boy playing Phebe.

When painter-architect Baldassare Peruzzi includes a panel of The Rape of Ganymede in a ceiling at the Villa Farnesina, Rome, (ca 1509-1514), Ganymede's long blond hair and girlish pose make him unidentifiable at first glance, though he grasps the eagle's wing without resistance. In the version by Antonio Allegri "Correggio" (1439/1534),(Vienna), Ganymede's grasp is more intimate. Rubens' version (see illustration above) portrays a full-fleshed young country lad. But when Rembrandt paints the Rape of Ganymede for a Calvinist Dutch patron in 1635, the Classical erotic overtones are given a scathing twist: the dark eagle carries aloft a plump cherubic baby (Paintings Gallery, Dresden), one who is crying and urinating in fright. This is a pictographic formulation of the ancient condemnation of pederasts - that they prey on little children.

Vollmer's Wörterbuch der Mythologie aller Völker (Stuttgart, 1874) illustrates "Ganymede" by an engraving of a "Roman relief," showing a seated bearded Zeus who holds the cup aside in order to draw a naked Ganymede into his embrace. That engraving however was nothing but a copy of Raphael Mengs's counterfeit Roman fresco, painted as a practical joke on the eighteenth-century art critic Johann Winckelmann who was growing desperate in his search for homoerotic Greek and Roman antiquities. This story is very briefly told by Goethe in his Italienische Reise [2].

At Chatsworth in the 19th century the bachelor Duke of Devonshire added to his sculpture gallery Adamo Tadolini's Neoclassic "Ganymede and the Eagle" in which a luxuriously reclining Ganymede, embraced by one wing, prepares to exchange a peck with the eagle. The delicate cup in his hand is made of gilt-bronze, lending an unsettling immediacy and realism to the white marble group.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the topos of Ganymede's abduction by Zeus was drafted into the service of commercial enterprise. Adapting an 1892 lithograph by F. Kirchbach, the brewery of Anheuser-Busch launched in 1904 an ad campaign publicizing the successes of Budweiser beer. Collectibles featuring the graphics of the poster continued to be produced into the early 1990's.

A poem, "Ganymed",by Goethe was set by Franz Schubert in 1817, published in his Opus 19, no. 3 (D. 544).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Renaissance and Baroque Ganymede", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki