Apollo and Marsyas

The canvas, a work by Luca Giordano dated immediately after 1660, depicts a popular 17th-century subject matter used in both painting and sculpture: the musical contest between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI, 382-400). According to the myth Marsyas accidentally found a flute, which Minerva had previously crafted and then abandoned in the woods, cursing it, because the unpleasant aspect of her puffed cheeks when playing it moved the hilarity of the other goddesses of the Olympus. By contrast, with the help of the flute, the satyr managed to enchant the peasants of Phrygia. Proud of this success, he decided to dare challenge Apollo, the god of music, famous also for his skilled virtuosity with the lyre, during a musical contest. At the beginning the contest, which was judged by the Muses, presented itself as an even fight but, in the final phase, the judges obliged the two competitors to play their respective instruments upside down.

Apollo obtained brilliant results even with the reversed lyre; Marsyas, however, found obvious difficulties. Consequently, and in order to punish him for his hubris, Apollo flayed the satyr alive in front of the other satyrs, fauns and the nymphs. These, by crying all their tears for the ferocious torture, gave origin to a river that passing through the entire Phrygia was indeed called the River Marsyas.

In the same years of this canvas – thus immediately after the 1660 and within the 1665/66 – Giordano depicted the same dramatic event, thus for a clear moral meaning and an evident didactic aim, also in other two famous compositions, one conserved in the Museo di Capodimonte and the other belonging to a private Neapolitan collection: both canvases borrow, with minimal variations and an identical compositional development, the celebrated version (this also in Capodimonte) realized by Jusepe de Ribera in 1637 for the Flemish merchant and collector Gaspar Roomer, who settled in Naples at the beginning of the fourth decade of the century.

In the present case the myth is represented, due to the smaller dimension if compared to the aforementioned versions as well as to a different iconographic solution and stringent compositional layout, in the climax of its dramatic tension: it is the very instant that precedes the heinous torture about to be inflicted to Marsyas.

This solution adopted by Giordano for this painting, although apparently less spectacular, more controled and less emotionally impactful, however turns out to be extremely effective thanks to the closer and more concentrated visual impact of the feelings and the physical and emotional reactions experienced by the two main characters of the tragic event. Indeed, despite the fact that the representation of Marsyas, who is lying down tied to a rock with open arms (evidently alluding to the Cross) echoes the very same solution adopted by Ribera in the 1637 canvas, nevertheless the solution chosen for the image of Apollo is different: here the god moves slowly and looks pensive, at traits troubled, he has a knife in his right hand and a tensed gaze at Marsyas, who in the meantime is screaming, frightened, and fears the arrival of ferocious and irreversible destiny of pain and death.

A climate of great psychic tension is in this canvas even enhanced by the chromatic thick strokes and the flaming shimmering tones. All this while giving us back – thanks to a more controled and studied composition of the single figures that are also constrained within the limited space of the small dimension of the canvas – the image of a highly dramatic mythologic event, that is at the same time human and true.

In this respect, not only for the concrete and almost tangible rendering of the epidermis and the anatomic details, the blond hair on the neck, the precious cape on the hips and shoulders but also for the focused expressive intensity, the figure of Apollo looks identical to The Fall of the Rebel Angels of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted by Giordano in 1666 (fig. 1) and to the Prometheus of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, especially for the insert of the same cape in precious silk and the same flaming atmosphere of the overall composition.

Beyond the three versions of the Apollo and Marsyas realized between 1660 and 1666, in a moment of his activity when Giordano was operating a renewed synthesis between the juvenile naturalistic experiences of the 1650-1655 and the new direction of Venice and Rubens, that he experimented with brilliant outcomes between 1657 and 1660, Giordano came back to the same subject finding different compositional and stylistic solutions, as evident in the immediately subsequent canvases of 1666 (Florence, Museo Bardini; Moscow, Pushkin Museum) and during the Spanish sojourn from 1692 to 1702 (El Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo; The Hague, Embassy of Spain, a small copy of which is conserved in the Reggia di Caserta)¹.