A fine Flemish tapestry

Ceres and Cyane

Brussels or Antwerp, circa 1700

Woven in wool and silk with the Roman goddess Ceres depicted during the search for her daughter Proserpine. Ceres is shown here with a crown of wheat garlanding her hair and bearing a flaming torch as the nymph Cyane, seated on the bank of her eponymous pool in Sicily (the source of the river now called the Ciane), holds up Proserpine’s discarded sash as proof of her abduction by Dis, the god of the underworld. The subject is taken from Book V of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the translation here by A. D. Melville, Oxford University Press, 1986)…

‘…She showed the well-known sash which Proserpine / Had chanced to drop there in the sacred spring. / How well the goddess knew it! …’

Ceres’ resulting discovery of her daughter led to Jove’s decree that the girl should spend half of the year with Dis, and half with Ceres. This myth stood as metaphor for the sown crops remaining beneath the soil during the winter, with Proserpine’s return to the surface and her stay above ground coinciding with spring and summer, and the growing, flourishing and harvesting of the crop.

The design of the tapestry is likely to be that referred to by Guy Delmarcel in ‘Flemish Tapestry’, publ. Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 305, as part of a discussion of a set of eight tapestries with the name ‘Verdures with Figures from Ovid’. The list of the tapestries that made up the set includes ‘…where Ceres searches for her daughter Proserpine…’, and Delmarcel illustrates on the following page another tapestry from the set, ‘Eurydice Bitten by the Snake’, which has a border identical to that used for the present tapestry, with parrots and other birds, spaniels and snakes among acanthus leaves, fruit, and trailing flowers.

374cm (147¼”) high and 351cm (138¼”) wide.