In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated wth prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.
One of the earliest paintings to show the story of Dionysus and Ariadne is a fresco found in the ruins of Pompeii. The god stands with his thyrsus on his right, and the bacchante to his left is holding another in her left hand.
Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with leaves but without any tip.
In Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos from 1725, Dionysus is holding a spear wound with flowers and leaves as his thyrsus. This is more in keeping with the couple swooning in love, while other couples in the background are, well, coupling.
As you might expect from Jean-Léon Gérôme in his early painting of Anacreon, Bacchus, and Amor from 1848, the thyrsus being wielded by the infant Bacchus conforms to the stricter definition. It’s thin and tipped with a golden pine cone, and has a ribbon tied to it. This harks back to the secret rites of bacchantes invoking Anacreon, one of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets. The poet takes centre stage with his lyre at his shoulder. Dancing at his feet is the infant Bacchus, who looks to the left at a young woman playing the double pipes. To the right of Anacreon is Cupid (Amor), with his wings, bow, and quiver of arrows.
Despite Eugène Delacroix’s more painterly style in his Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63), one of the Hartmann Four Seasons, his thyrsus is classical in form, with a twist of blue ribbon below its tip.
As Émile Lévy’s Death of Orpheus (1866) shows, when necessary the thyrsus could be a deadly weapon. Lévy shows Orpheus knocked to the ground and stunned. Two maenads kneel by his side, one clasping his neck, the other about to bring the vicious blade of her ceremonial sickle down to cleave his neck open. Another wields her thyrsus like a club while pulling at the man’s left hand.
A Bacchante (1885) was the first of Henrietta Rae’s nudes to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. The alabaster-like skin and classical setting make it academic rather than erotic, and the classical thyrsus held in the left hand and bunch of grapes in the right seem to have made all the difference to the hanging committee. It still caused quite a stir, and she was offered unsolicited advice not to show such works in public again, which she thankfully ignored.
I finish with John William Godward’s Priestess of Bacchus from 1890, which is perhaps the clearest depiction of them all. There’s no doubt about the pine cone at its tip, and the broad blue ribbon decorating the shaft.