How Classical is Ariadne's Parrot? Southall's Painting and Its Literary Registers

Abstract

In this article I suggest ways in which a gorgeously crafted, colourful, compelling 20th century painting of an abandoned Ariadne highlights both her tragic and comic presence in classical literary representations. Joseph South-all's 1925-6 workAriadne in Naxos(tempera on linen, 83.5 × 101.6 cm), reproduced below, can be viewed in all its glory in the Birmingham City Art Gallery (bequeathed by the artist's widow, Anne Elizabeth, in 1948) but it was featured to fine effect in the 2007 exhibitionThe Parrot in Art: From Dürer to Elizabeth Butterworth, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. It was in this psittacine (psittaceous?) context that I first encountered Ariadne's parrot so the bird perhaps loomed larger in the painting than it might as a stand-alone Southall on its home ground in the Gallery.