Artis: Moses Van Uyttenbroeck
tanggal: 1635
ukuran: 58 x 51 cm
Teknik: Oil On Panel
The subject of this painting has most often been identified in the literature as Pan and Syrinx from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I:686-715). In Ovid’s tale, Mercury relates how Pan mistook the chaste naiad Syrinx for the goddess Diana and chased her to Ladon’s stream. There she begged the water nymphs to transform her into tall marsh reeds. In 17th-century representations of this subject, such as a collaborative work by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder,4 Pan is shown in hot pursuit of Syrinx, who has just reached the river Ladon. A different painting by Wtenbrouck includes a personification of the river, with Syrinx in the process of changing into the reeds.5 It is unlikely that the Rijksmuseum painting depicts the same subject, as the female figure is not shown fleeing from the satyr, but rather reclines on a riverbank facing him. Moreover, in the background, another satyr is seen playing the pipes Pan fashioned from the reeds Syrinx had turned herself into. Weisner’s suggestion that the subject might be taken from Act 2, Scene 6 of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, which involves the nymph Corysca and a satyr, is equally unlikely.6 This theme was treated very rarely in the 17th century, and only once in northern art, in an etching by Bartholomeus Breenbergh.7 While the satyr does pursue Corysca in Guarini’s play, Breenbergh and others8 preferred to depict the satyr pulling Corysca’s hair (actually a wig) once he had caught her. The Rijksmuseum painting appears to show simply a satyr surprising a nymph at her bath, and as such is related to an etching etching by Wtenbrouck of a Woman Surprised at her Bath by a Shepherd (fig. a). Weisner placed the present painting among what he called Wtenbrouck’s ‘arcadian Dutch’ landscapes of the 1630s.9 Characteristic features of the works from this period include the painting’s vertical format and the spotlight illumination of the figures. The figures themselves no longer possess the Lastmanian robustness present in Wtenbrouck’s production from the mid to late-1620s, but are smaller in scale and less sharply defined. Wtenbrouck’s new figural style has been related by some scholars to the influence of Cornelis van Poelenburch.10 Also characteristic of Wtenbrouck’s landscapes in this period, but already present in some of his works from the 1620s, are the massive, gnarled tree-trunk on the left of the Rijksmuseum composition and the twisted, dead branches of the tree in the centre. As Chong has pointed out, Van Coninxloo and his followers would have been important examples for Wtenbrouck in this regard.11 Another feature of the present painting, and of the artist’s ‘arcadian Dutch’ landscapes as a whole, is the muted, glowing tonality, which differs dramatically from his use of primary colours in the 1620s. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 350.
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