Jan Janssens, a native of Ghent, seems to have made a career out of copying paintings by Dirck van Baburen (c. 1594/95-1624) and Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656), works which he often signed fraudulently as the author. Janssens presumably met these two artists in Rome during the late 1610s, when both were establishing major reputations there. Van Baburen, for instance, received a number of important commissions from distinguished Roman patrons, among them, Pietro Cussida, Cardinal Scipione Borghese and Marchese Vicenzo Guistiniani. The present painting depicts Apollo flaying Marsyas, who unsurpriningly lost in a musical contest against one of the most important Olympian deities. There are a many versions of the myth –some said the contest ended in a draw, as Marsyas played the flute so well that he drove everyone into a frenzied dance and Apollo moved everyone to tears with his lyre; others stated that Apollo played his lyre upside down, and when Marsyas could not perform the same way with his flute, he lost. It was agreed prior to the contest that the winner could do whatever he wants to the other. Marsyas was thus punished for his hubris to challenge a god, as the present painting depicts Apollo, wearing a laurel wreath, beginning to flay him alive. In antiquity, literary sources often emphasized the justice of his punishment. The Roman poet Ovid had touched on this theme twice, telling the tale briefly in
2 Metamorphosis, concentrating on the tears shed into the river Marsyas, and alluding to it in Fasti, focusing on the flute-players rather than Marsyas. Judging from Janssens’s oeuvre, van Baburen was the main focus of his attention. From hishand one finds any number of works that constitute copies of, or variations upon originals by van Baburen. For instance, a Roman Charity (Madrid, Academia de San Fernando) is inscribed, IOANNES JANSENIUS GANDENSIS INVENIT ET FECIT.i Yet despite this confident assertion, it clearly copies a picture by van Baburen (York, The York City Art Gallery). Janssen’s proclivity to replicate van Baburen’s art has occasionally proven helpful as scholars have sought to identify now-lost paintings by the latter. A noteworthy example of this phenomenon is Janssens’s Annunciation (Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten), which repeats a lost composition by van Baburen that once likely served as an altarpiece.iiGiven Janssens’s habit of relying on van Baburen for compositional prototypes (and sometimes much more), it is reasonable to assume that the painting exhibited here relates to several representations of Apollo and Marsyas that can be associated with the latter painter. In 1972, Erich Schleier published a previously unknown painting of this subject by van Baburen (Schloß Bückeberg, Fürst Schaumburg-Lippe).iii He also theorized that our canvas, which had long been thought to be an authentic van Baburen, was simply a version of the Schloß Bückeberg picture. The other depictions of this subject by the Dutch master are now lost, but are presumed to be reflected in two drawings (on one sheet of paper; Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi) that were made by the painter, David de Haen (ca. 1585-1622), with whom he collaborated and once shared a house in Rome.iv The composition on the verso of this sheet approximates our painting in terms of the respective positions of the recumbent Marsyas and Apollo. Van Baburen adopted this compositional format for several history paintings executed during the last full year of his life, 1623. Moreover, at this time, the artist began to use landscape settings as a foil for the figures.v For these reasons, Leonard Slatkes plausibly suggests that the original painting by van Baburen that underlies that one exhibited here was probably executed around 1623.vi And our picture itself, according to Slatkes, was likely made in Ghent around 1630, based on drawings that Janssens had made in Utrecht some years earlier.vii Slatkes wisely opines that DzJanssens’ works belong to the same artistic context as the original van Baburen and thus partake of aspects of the model in a way that no ordinary copy can.
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