Sleeping Ariadne

Once she had been initially identified as Cleopatra[9] because of the snake bracelet on the upper left arm, which was taken for the asp by which she died, supportive narrative could easily be brought to bear: Ulisse Aldrovandi thought he detected that "she appears to have collapsed and fainted",[10] and a sense of fitful uneasiness has been ascribed to her by the modern viewer Sheila McNally (below).

The "Cleopatra" became the main model[11] through which a conventional pose signifying sleep,[12] with one elbow cocked above the head, was transmitted from Antiquity to High Renaissance and later painters and sculptors.

The epigram, which passed until modern times for a Roman one, was composed by Giovanni Antonio Campani, a humanist at the court of Pius II who moved in the academic circle of Julius Pomponius Laetus.

But the Sleeping Nymph motif and the accompanying inscription applied to it became part and parcel of humanistic and fashionable recreations of paradisal garden spots with classical affinities— loci amoeni— right through the 18th century, all the while assimilated to the "Cleopatra", Leonard Barkan observes, "by a contagion among quite separate narratives that happen to converge in the enigmatic space of the signum/statue".

[19] In the 1550s, under the general direction of Giorgio Vasari the sculpture was reinstalled indoors in an adjoining long gallery, for which, still as a fountain in a shallow grotto niche, it served as the visual focus at one end; Danielle da Volterra provided the designs for the setting in what became known as the Stanza Cleopatra.

Pierre Julien sculpted a marble copy during his sojourn at the French Academy in Rome, 1768 to 1773, and shipped it to France to demonstrate the progress he was making, as was the expected gesture of the king's pensionnaires.

[26] In Henry Hoare's picturesque garden at Stourhead, a lakeside temple contained John Cheere's whited-lead copy (1766) of the Vatican Ariadne with the suitably Antique-sounding verses beginning HUIUS NYMPHA LOCI....