Clytie (also Clytia, or Greek Klytie, Klytia) was one of the oceanids, the numerous nymph daughters of the Titans Oceanus (or Okeanus) progenitor of--as his name suggests--the great bodies of salt water, the oceans, and Tethys, mother of freshwater bodies and watercourses.
In the understanding of the ancients, the waters under the control of the two Titans communicated via underground channels. This Turkish mosaic indicates the connection by placing a ketos, a water serpent, between the pair. Scholars generally see the ketos as a sea serpent, an attribute proper to Oceanus, and this identification plays a large role in the interpretations of the scene on one side of the Portland Vase (British Museum), a topic which may appear in a future Cameo Times article. However, here it emerges from Tethys headed toward Oceanus, and such creatures, in many depictions of Saturn (see the Days of the Week) draw the chariot of that subterranean lord.
While she may have brought his scorn upon herself, Clytie's tale is one of heartbreak and unrequited love. Her passion was for Phoebus Apollo, the Sun God, Helios. When he rejected her, she languished on the ground until turning into a flower of a type that always keeps its face toward the sun as it moves across the sky. In more modern times this has been assumed to be the sunflower, which does indeed follow the sun. The ancients may have had in mind heliotrope, which they believed, erroneously, to do the same.
A not entirely reliable late 19th century source consulted for this article wrote, under an entry for Clytie, that the forlorn nymph changed to a sunflower. In an entry for heliotrope, the same author wrote that this is the flower in which Clytie lives on. Ovid describes the flower as "violet', as heliotrope is and sunflowers most certainly are not.
This marble bust, now in the British Museum (and with many Parian Ware copies still in circulation), was brought back from his 18th century Grand Tour of Europe by Charles Townley. The lovely but downcast figure, with elaborately dressed hair and rising out of encircling petals, has generally been identified as Clytie, although Townley himself came to believe it was Isis rising from a lotus bloom, and modern scholars are inclined to see her as a portrait, possibly of Antonia the Younger, mother of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Nathaniel Marchant engraved her likeness on a gem that was incorporated into a gold necklace, now also in the British Museum. An impression of Marchant's work can be seen in Oxford's Beazley Archive.
Marchant's gem is closely followed by cameos such as these three. The left and center ones were executed by Filippo Tignani; the one on the right is unsigned.
The coiffure of this figure has much in common with the one Clytie wears. It differs in that the hair at the nape is not loose but either plaited or twisted into a tidy coil. Nathaniel Marchant carved another piece more firmly identified as Isis. (An Amastini impression can be found in the Beazley Archive.) That figure has her hair dressed similarly at the back; however, although quite elaborately braided in its own fashion, her 'do' is more like one seen on Roman empresses, not like the rather fanciful one on the nymph. The absence of any attributes proper to Isis--lotus blossom, crocodile, sistrum--or any feature that would link her to Egypt makes it probable this piece was based more on Clytie. Quite possibly the carver had models of both Clytie and Isis for inspiration and departed from there.