Pan and Syrinx

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Pan and Syrinx: Peter Paul Rubens

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Peter Paul Rubens Oil Painting - Pan and Syrinx

Keywords: Syrinx

Work Overview: Pan and Syrinx
Peter Paul Rubens
Date: 1617 - 1619
Style: Baroque
Genre: mythological painting
Media: oil, panel
Dimensions: 61 x 40 cm
Staatliche Museen, Kassel

This is a joint work by Rubens an Jan Brueghel the Elder for which Brueghel painted the landscape and Rubens the figures.

The painting represents a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The lustful shepherd-god Pan pursued the shy, virginal nymph Syrinx, who ran to a river to escape him, calling on her 'sisters of the stream' to turn her into a reed. Just as Pan attempted to seize the nymph, she was transformed and he was left holding not a beautiful maiden but a bunch of reeds. From these he made his pipes, ever since called the syrinx, whose lovely tones reminded him of his lost love.

Rubens, for whom Pan and the nymphs symbolise positive forces of nature, has based his Syrinx - modestly covering her loins with one hand and seemingly fending off the fast-closing Pan with the other - on the ancient Medici Venus, famous since the 16th century. Jan Brueghel the Elder, renowned for his life-like depiction of plants and animals, nestles the scene in a lively and luxuriant landscape.

THE NYMPH, Syrinx, nude to the waist wearing loose-fitting rose and white drapery flees from the lunging satyr, Pan, along the banks of the river Ladon. The landscape background recedes from right to left in a wedge shape to a distant horizon. The river is lined with tall reeds and filled with waterplants, flowers, ducks, herons, snipes, kingfishers, and other waterfowl.

The subject is drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses which recounts the tale told by Mercury of a chaste naiad who revered and even dressed like the virgin goddess, Diana, and who "Many a time /... foiled the chasing satyrs and those gods / Who haunt the shady copses and coverts / Of the lush countryside." Pan mistook her for Diana and chased her "To Ladon's peaceful, sandy stream and there / Her flight barred by the river, [she] begged her sisters, / The water nymphs, to change her; and when Pan / Thought he had captured her, he held instead / Only the tall marsh reeds, and while he sighed, / The soft wind stirring in the reeds sent forth / A thin and plaintive sound; and he, entranced / By this new music and its witching tones, / Cried 'You and I shall stay in unison!' / And waxed together reeds of different lengths / And made the pipes that keep his darling's name."

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