944 - Fiammingo, Paolo (eigtl. Pauwels Franck) - Umkreis

Fiammingo, Paolo (eigtl. Pauwels Franck) - Umkreis Anntwerpen 1540 - Venedig 1596 119 x 163 cm Pyramus and Thisbe. Oil/canvas, relined. The tragicomic tragedy surrounding the Babylonian lovers Pyramus and Thisbe probably owes its origins primarily to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The ill-fated couple, forbidden to be together (due to their parents’ enmity), arrange a secret meeting at the edge of the forest. Thisbe is the first to arrive at this secluded spot, but is immediately forced to flee from a lioness who, with a bloodstained mouth (from freshly killed livestock), is drinking from a spring… She loses her veil, which is now stained with the lioness’s blood. Thus Pyramus finds his beloved’s bloodstained veil, believes her to have been torn apart by the beast, and, in his despair, throws himself upon his sword. When Thisbe returns, she realises what has happened and, overcome by grief and love, kills herself with the sword still warm from Pyramus’s blood. Rarely has this final (curious) scene been set so monumentally against a landscape backdrop. On the right, cutting into the edge of the picture, is a beautiful terraced Renaissance fountain adorned with a water-spouting dolphin; on the left, at the edge of the forest, the tiny lioness disappears into the thicket; lush foliage, with its rich dark green, frames the scene here, whilst the robes of the group of figures are dominated by the typical colours of the period: pink, golden yellow and carmine red, dominate in a bold triad. The viewer’s gaze is led down a brightly lit path into a wide valley, which is entirely occupied by the city of Babylon with its temples and towers, all reminiscent of Italian cityscapes. A broad river, behind it a mountain landscape stretching far into the distance, set against a dramatically flashing, cloud-shrouded stormy sky. Whilst the woodland, the trees and the foliage are reminiscent of Flemish painters such as Coninxloo, and the city and river landscape shimmering on the horizon even evokes the early paintings of Joachim Patinir, one cannot help but recognise an Italian, indeed Venetian, influence, at least in the figure of Thisbe. Paolo Fiammingo was equally at home in both schools of painting, the Flemish and the Venetian. Born in Antwerp in 1540, he later became a master in the Guild of St Luke and produced works for the Fugger family in Augsburg; in 1573, he moved to Venice, where he became a pupil of Jacopo Tintoretto. One of his most important patrons, however, was Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia and Hungary, and patron of the resplendent artistic centre of Prague. By the 1580s at the latest, with numerous commissions - including those he carried out for the Fugger family - Fiammingo presumably had a large workshop with numerous assistants, which made it possible for him to undertake this work.