“Let us tell an old story a new and we will see how well you know
Maleficent (Walt Disney Pictures, 2014)
Continuing on our series “Protecting Intangible Heritage” and as kick-off of the programs for the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage, the Italian Cultural Institute invites you to “Sleeping Beauty, from Ariadne to Walt Disney (and back)”, a lecture by Prof. Monica Centanni with an introduction by Dr. Christopher Celenza, Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University and Professor of History and Classics.
Ancient myths have a vital energy that, during the course of history, are ‘re-loaded’, revealing new forms and triggering new meanings.
After centuries of oblivion, during the Renaissance, together with other stories from Greek and Latin mythology, the myth of Ariadne resurfaces and gives birth to a series of new images. In the figurative arts, Ariadne reappears as the seductive figure of the “Sleeping Venus”, marking the beginning of an iconographic series that continues until today, in the form of the Sleeping Beauty who awaits the salvific awakening by a Prince Charming.
In music, we can hear Ariadne’s lament in the first opera ever composed, by Claudio Monteverdi, or in its modern adaptation by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in which we can read, behind the lines, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s own interpretation of Ariadne.