Sleeping Diana Watched by Two Fauns by Arnold Böcklin

A young woman lies asleep on a bank of mossy stone, one arm thrown above her head, and from behind a boulder two horned creatures lean forward to stare at her. Arnold Böcklin's Sleeping Diana Watched by Two Fauns (Die schlafende Diana, von zwei Faunen belauscht) is an oil on canvas of 77.4 × 105 cm, held by the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf under inventory number M 5561. The signature A Böcklin, painted on the rock at the lower edge of the picture, is followed by the year 1877. The museum itself dates the canvas 1877/1885, and its published entry offers no comment on the second date.

Arnold Böcklin, Sleeping Diana Watched by Two Fauns, 1877 (museum date 1877/1885), oil on canvas, 77.4 × 105 cm. Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, inv. M 5561.

The Swiss painter, born in Basel in 1827, made the work during his first years in Florence, where he settled in 1874. He had approached the goddess before. In 1862 he had painted her on a monumental scale for the Kunstmuseum Basel, drawing on motifs from Ovid; the Düsseldorf canvas, much smaller, reduces the theme to three figures and to an encounter that does not quite take place.

Composition: The Sleeper, the Boulder and the Mountain Landscape

Diana's body crosses almost the entire width of the canvas. Her head rests near the left edge on a deep blue cloth spread over the stone, and from there the figure descends along a shallow diagonal to the feet, shod in laced orange-red boots, close to the lower right. Rising behind her, a great block of rock covered with moss and pale lichen closes off the middle ground like a wall. It is over the rim of this block that the fauns appear. The picture therefore divides into two unequal territories: the lit, extended figure of the goddess below, and above her, pressed into the upper right, the crouching brown bodies set against the clouds.

Between the two, at the centre of the canvas, the hands almost meet. Diana's left arm stretches out along the rock, the fingers loose and slightly curled in sleep, towards the broad hand of the nearer faun, planted on the boulder's edge. The museum's description draws attention to this near contact, on which the whole design turns. The small gap of painted moss between the fingers gives tension to the two groups sharing the landscape.

Böcklin trained as a landscape painter, studying from 1845 to 1847 at the Düsseldorf Academy under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, who introduced him to intensive study from nature; from 1850 his travels took him to Italy, and in Rome he joined the circle of the so-called Deutschrömer, the German artists living there. That training, already evident in his early Campagna Landscape, is visible here in every part of the setting. A crag dense with dark conifers fills the left-centre background, a thin strip of bare, light-struck mountain showing beyond it at the far left. To the right the ground opens onto a pale, stony expanse where a few slender trees stand isolated against the horizon. Heavy grey-white clouds, broken by patches of blue, move across the whole upper zone. Lichen is painted in individual flecks on the rocks, and in the lower left corner a rectangular quiver lies tipped against the stone, the ends of its arrows protruding from the open mouth, an attribute identifying the sleeper as the huntress.

Diana's Head, the Golden Hairnet and the Diaphanous Dress

The detail of the head shows how carefully Böcklin distinguished textures within a narrow area. The eyes are closed under heavy lids, the lips slightly parted and coloured a dull red, the face pale with a faint warmth at the ear. Her dark, curling hair, gathered beneath a net of gold thread, carries a lattice picked out in small touches of yellow over the brown. Her right arm is bent above the head, the hand hanging loosely over the hair with the fingers half curled; the whiteness of the upper arm and of the shoulder, modelled with cool greyish shadows, lies directly against the blue cloth below.

Detail of Diana's head, with the gold-thread hairnet, the sheer yellow dress and its jewelled sash, and the age craquelure across the flesh.

The dress is short and golden-yellow, so thin that the body shows through it, its fine creases drawn with lines of darker ochre and its surface sprinkled with tiny pale dots like gold flecks. A narrow sash of a pinkish red crosses beneath the breast, set with a small green stone. The garment leaves the right breast uncovered. Along the edge of the blue cloth runs a fine golden border, and the cloth itself, darker in its folds, has the dense, light-absorbing quality of velvet. Across the flesh of the face and throat a network of age cracks is clearly visible in the detail, the craquelure running uninterrupted through the passages of skin and hair.

The museum characterises Diana as a champion of chastity and places the half-uncovered sleeper within the long tradition of reclining female figures such as the resting Venus. The tension Böcklin builds around that tradition comes from the circumstances. The goddess who in myth punishes those who see her is here asleep, partly unclothed, and unaware. That the canvas was included in 2016 in the Kunstpalast exhibition Hinter dem Vorhang, devoted to veiling and unveiling in art since the Renaissance, reflects how much of the picture's meaning resides in the transparent garment. The boots are another matter, sturdy and laced with ribbons, and their practical character sits a little oddly with the gauze of the dress, a reminder that she is a huntress, resting between pursuits.

The Two Fauns Behind the Boulder

Seen close, the two fauns are differentiated with an almost portrait-like attention. The nearer, whose skin is ruddy brown and whose shaggy mane and beard are pale gold, has long dark horns, one rising above his head, the other thrust forward horizontally across his companion's brow. His mouth hangs open and his eyes are directed downwards towards the sleeper. Behind him, half hidden by his shoulder, the second faun is darker, with black hair standing in damp-looking spikes and smaller curved horns. His brows are raised, his eyes wide; he has turned his head away from Diana and looks straight out of the picture.

Detail of the two fauns: the nearer leans towards the goddess while his companion, holding him back, turns his gaze towards the viewer.

Their bodies are furred, the hair rendered in stippled flecks of light paint over the brown, and at the left the hairy haunch of the nearer faun is visible behind the group. The limbs interlock. One large hand grips the nearer faun's upper arm from behind and another clasps his forearm, so that the pair forms a single knotted mass. The museum reads the scene as the rear faun holding his companion back just in time; the Kulturstiftung der Länder, which supported the painting's acquisition, describes one faun as gripped by voyeuristic excitement and the other as trying, startled and full of awe, to restrain him. The hands themselves carry this contrast with Diana: broad, heavy-knuckled, with dark nails, they differ markedly from the slender fingers resting on the moss a short distance away.

What gives the group its peculiar force is the outward glance of the darker faun. His wide eyes meet the beholder's, and whoever stands before the canvas looking at the sleeping goddess is thereby caught in the same act as the two intruders. The museum's text speaks of the appeal of forbidden looking, and the painting builds that appeal into its structure. The faces approach the grotesque without becoming caricature, a register that the Kulturstiftung identifies as characteristic of the style Böcklin developed in Florence, one that moved towards the fantastic and did not avoid the grotesque.

Colour and Early Renaissance Models in Sleeping Diana Watched by Two Fauns

According to the museum, Böcklin painted the picture under the influence of the colour effects of the Italian Early Renaissance, and the Kulturstiftung likewise sees in its composition the impact of brightly coloured Early Renaissance painting, regarding the work as the moment of the artist's breakthrough to maturity. The canvas bears this out in the way its colours are deployed. The principal hues are set down as clear, saturated areas of local colour: the deep blue of the cloth, the golden yellow of the dress, the orange-red of the boots, the small accent of green in the sash, each held within its own contour and scarcely softened by atmosphere. Around them the browns of the fauns and the dark greens of moss and conifer form a darker field, and the sky, grey-white and cool, acts as a pale foil for the upper group.

Light falls most fully on Diana. Her flesh is the brightest passage in the picture apart from the clouds, so that the eye returns to her from every part of the composition, while the fauns are modelled in warm, low tones that keep them in a different register of being. The opposition the museum describes, between goddess and creature of nature, purity and instinct, the sublime and the grotesque, is thus carried by colour and light as much as by the subject.

The museum regards Böcklin as a principal representative of nineteenth-century idealist and Symbolist art, and the Kulturstiftung notes that his work became an inspiration for Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. In this canvas the classical subject is entirely legible, yet the encounter between a sleeping deity and two half-human watchers in a real, carefully observed mountain landscape already moves beyond mythological narrative into the more ambiguous territory that later artists would claim. d:kult online

Provenance: The Behrens Collection, Linz and Restitution

The museum's collection record traces the history of the painting in detail. Around 1894 it entered the collection of the Hamburg banker Eduard Ludewig Behrens senior, who died in 1895; it then passed by inheritance to Eduard L. Behrens junior, who died in 1925, and to his wife Franziska Behrens, née Gorissen. In 1904 it was exhibited at the Kunstsalon Schulte in Düsseldorf. Between April 1935 and March 1939 the German Reich acquired it through the Munich gallery of Maria Almas, and it was designated for the museum planned at Linz.

After the war the painting was held from October 1945 at the Central Collecting Point in Munich, secured by the American military government, which in June 1949 transferred it in trust to the Minister-President of Bavaria. From 1966 the Federal Republic of Germany lent it, as former Reich property, to the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, the institution now known as the Kunstpalast, where it hung in the permanent collection. Restitution proceedings brought by the community of heirs of the Behrens estate ran from 2006 to 2010. The painting, returned to the heirs in 2010, was at the same time purchased for the museum, with the support of the City of Düsseldorf, the regional government of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW, the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The acquisition was marked that year by the small exhibition Spot On 5: Bleiberecht für Diana, and the museum lists the canvas in its permanent display from November 2023.