The metaphoric content of this tale becomes a favorite example of human ungratefulness for Rennaissence commentators, including Natale Conti and Karel van Mander. When painters approached this myth, they likewise focused on Ixion's punishment and its moral implication.
Rubens, however, departs from this tradition by focusing on the deception of this mortal when he grasps the body of the "false",Juno while the "real" Juno, led by Cupid, departs towards Jupiter. Inherently difficult as a pictorial task, this moment of transformation represents one of the most enticing double portraits of Juno in Western art. More importantly, by this decidedly unusual narrative choice, Rubens turns the story of Ixion's hubris into a complex visual discourse -on the deceitfulness of vision that involves the beholder of his painting as well.
My argument for this reading centers on a particular
exegesis of this myth in Plutarch's
dialogue on heavenly and earthly love (De Amatorius),
where Ixion's grasp of Juno caused by the agency of earthly love (Eros)
is compared to the manner in which the rainbow (Iris) deceives the sight:
Seeing the radiance [Iris] in this way produces
in us the illusion that the thing we
see is in the cloud. Now the.devices and ruses
of Love's operations on noble souls
who love beauty are of the very same kind,
he [Eros] refracts their memories from
the phenomena of this world, which are called
beautiful, to the marvelous Beauty
of that other world, that divine and blessed
entity which is the real object of love
.... Probably this is the meaning of Ixion's
constant whirling and irregular course,
for the object of his desire and pursuit was
an illusion in the clouds, as if it were an
empty shadow ....
Unlike this1over seduced by the sensory world, the gaze of the true lover is turned towards "Beauty divine and intelligible." As Plutarch explains this further:
When he encounters beauty in a visible body,
he treats it as an instrument to
memory. He welcomes and delights in it, yet
the pleasure of its company only
serves the more to inflame his spirit. While
he is in this world and involved with
bodies, he is not content to confine his activity
to a wonder-struck yearning for the
illumination of visible beauty.
(De Amatorius, 764e-f)
More than any other text, this thoroughly Platonic debate on the "visible body" versus the "real object of love" approximates Rubens' conceit in Ixion, where two identical Junos present the beholder with a visual dilemma rivaling the self-delusion of its protagonist.
This dichotomy is, furthermore, thematized not only through the principal characters, but also through figures that appear as mere embellishments to the painter's invention, such as the mysterious female divinity that casts a red cloak over the embracing lovers. Though she is usually-identified as a personification of "Deception" because of the color of this garment and the fox draped around her shoulder, I posit that the faint rainbow arc behind her is just as important with regard to her full signification.
A standard attribute of Iris, the goddess of the Rainbow, it seems to confirrii ihe relevance of Plutarch's passage for the double portrait of Juno. Iris is, after all, Juno's handmaiden and favorite messenger. A "maiden seen of none," as Virgil refers to her in The Aeneid (V, 609-610), she appears to mortals in many guises, her variegated colors symbolic of her eloquence. In view of this interpretive tradition, one can see this oblique personification in Rubens' painting as an aspect of the persuasive powers of Iris, the true agent of Ixion's deception.
Ultimately, the thoroughly Platonic epistemology that informs Plutarch's reading of the myth of Ixion, as will as the co-presence of Juno and her cloud double, has an art heoretical dimension as well. With these two equally persuasive effigies of the Goddess that blur the border between "self" and "semblance," Rubens poses for the beholder the same dilemma that perplexes the lustful Ixion. Indeed, by asking us to distinguish between these near identical images, both of them wrought by his hand, he presents us with the ultimate paradox to judge not nature versus art, but the superiority of one artifice over, another.