ABSTRACT
There were many consciously constructed equivalents of the latent beauty of Ariadne in late nineteenth-century art. The sleeping Greek goddess purveyed by artists like Albert Moore was the badge of the ‘aesthetic’ movement. Although the classical, rather than Renaissance, ambience of these works was their defining characteristic, ‘aesthetic’ accoutrements became just as important. The Renaissance was, to their generation, about the revival of classical learning and its reconciliation with Christian virtues. Dramatic confrontation, drawing in emotions of love, fear or spiritual ennui, was, by the second half of the 1890s, the subject of numerous Academy pictures. The passionate dilemmas of star-crossed Renaissance lovers remained a consistent source of subject matter, particularly as contemporary taste moved back to the re-evaluation of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although preoccupied with documentary accuracy, for which Shakespeare provides the raw material, Abbey, an American expatriate, opened up to the imagination of the masses the grand spectacle of the national past.
