Time and the Trionfo di Afrodite

In the documentary O, Fortuna, Carl Orff’s third wife, Luise Rinser, recalled their visit to Greece in the 1950s when the composer stood atop the walls of the Heroic Age site of Mycenae on a gloomy day. “This was his world,” she recalled, “a dark world full of shadow.” With its percussive and ritualistic quality, the Trionfo di Afrodite sounds as if it had come from Orff’s reflections upon those shadows. Was he a man out of time?

Like a medieval stonemason mining ancient ruins for building blocks, Orff composed Trionfo di Afrodite out of parts: mostly a wedding hymn by the Roman poet Catullus, some fragments by Sappho, and a segment from Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus. Narrating a marital procession in which the bride and groom advance in ceremonial fashion to their nuptial chamber, the title invokes the ancient Roman convention of the triumph.

When Roman generals vanquished foes of the empire, some were granted the honor of parading into the Forum with the spoils, captive rulers, and stolen gods that would add glory and power to Rome. In medieval Italy, triumphal processions served religious ends, sacralizing the city by carrying miracle-working relics and icons of the Virgin. The urban space thus became a site of both spectacle and control, where the civic body turned out to celebrate the social order that would assure the blessings of God. In the fourteenth century, the poet and humanist Francesco Petrarch wrote I Trionfi, where he used the Roman triumph as a motif to parade allegorical figures representing a hierarchy of Christianized human values: from the base passions through chastity, death, fame, time, and eternity. I Trionfi soon became a popular subject for art.

These traditions merged in a curious example of Renaissance art mirroring Renaissance life in elaborate nuptial pageantry. In Florence in particular, the marital cortege became a civic ritual to cement patrician alliances, display wealth, and demarcate neighborhood enclaves. Not only was the bride in fine raiment paraded through the streets like a trophy, but luxury goods from the trousseau were held aloft. For very wealthy families, this might include an elaborate wedding chest, or cassone, that could be adorned with painted panels featuring subjects drawn from ancient myth and legend. The horizontal format made them ideal for depictions of triumphal processions with instructive meaning.

One Renaissance cassone panel, the Triumph of Venus, from around 1500 (fig. 1) shows this well. Aphrodite’s Roman cognate, Venus, is enthroned atop her triumphal car dressed in dawn-sky blue. She offers her girdle to a forbidding attendant who then further binds the humbled Cupid kneeling at her feet. The subject teaches how sanctioned marriage tranquilizes lust and directs passion toward its proper end: lawful and generative union that brings honor to the family and the city.

Fig. 1: The Triumph of Venus, style of Francesco Granacci (Italian, 1469-1543), ca. 1500. Tempera and oil on wood panel. The Walters Art Museum.

Along with his choice of an Italian title for Trionfo di Afrodite, Orff adopted the formal convention of the Renaissance marital procession infused with Greek and Roman sources. The work follows a sequence ordered to show appropriate social sanction for the match — the assembly of the wedding party, the arrival of bride and groom, the invocation of Hymen, and the celebration of the couple in chorus-like fashion. Yet Orff’s use of these conventions can barely contain the archaic, unrestrained force his music unleashes. The culminating moment — the apparition of Aphrodite — feels less like a they-lived-happily-ever-after resolution than a Bacchanalian rite. Here, Orff reveals himself to be hardly a man out of time, but instead profoundly of his moment: for what could be more distinctly 20th-century modern than the slipping of the mask of civilization to expose the surging impulses beneath?

An art historian by training, Robert Colby lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he consults with nonprofits on strategy and branding.