Death and the Maenad

Abstract

AFTER VISITING THE UFFIZI IN 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)made the following observations regarding a marble relief (fig. 1) from the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–88): “[There is] . . . a woman who appears to be in the act of rushing in, with disheveled hair and violent gestures, and in one hand either a whip or a thunderbolt. She is probably some emblematic person whose personification would be a key to the whole. What they are all wailing at, I don’t know; whether the lady is dying or the father has ordered the child to be exposed; but if the mother be not dead, such a tumult would kill a woman in the straw these days.” Both Shelley and the current opinion of his day were mistaken in assuming this relief was an ancient work. The poet was correct, however, in surmising that the tormented female figure storming onto the scene at the extreme right-hand side—gripping her hair, not a thunderbolt (fig. 2)—provided a key to the understanding of the composition as a whole.With her swirling hair and equally roiling, windswept drapery, as well as her emphatically “antique” costume, this agitated embodiment of extreme grief or panic clearly derives from the familiar antique model of the Maenad. Ancient artists characteristically depicted these female followers of Dionysus as engaging in frenetic, ecstatic activity, signified by the turbulentmotion of their hair and garments (see, e.g., figs. 3 and 4). Shelley was obviously familiar with the type, as we