SATYR VS. GOD

Rarely allowed out of Czechoslovakia, Titian's late masterpiece The Flaying of Marsyas was seen by DAVID SYLVESTER

The myth is one of those stories about artistic rivalry, an especially savage one. Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest: satyr vs. god, flutist vs. lyrist, Phrygian vs. Dorian mode. Marsyas’ flute was one discarded by Athena and, being filled with the breath of a goddess, had a marvelous tone. But Apollo was the victor, of course. He proceeded to punish Marsyas for his insolence by skinning him alive.

In Titian’s picture of the flaying, Apollo appears (some scholars believe) in two different guises, the androgynous young man operating with a knife and the one playing the viol. The picture was probably painted in the 1570s, at the end of Titian’s life—he lived to be about ninety—and belongs to a group of late works, possibly unfinished, which dissolve away solidity and definition and make the world look as if it were at the bottom of the sea. In 1673 the painting, after a spell in England in the collection of the Earl of Arundel, was put into a lottery, found no buyer, and was then acquired by the Bishop of Olmiitz. Its home since then has been the archiepiscopal palace at Kromeriz, near Brno in Czechoslovakia. Last winter the painting was on loan to the Venetian exhibition at the Royal Academy, London.

Standing there, I often noticed squeamish characters steering clear of the work, murmuring disapproval of its gruesomeness. I don’t think they can have actually looked at it, even for a few seconds; they must have been behaving in accord with expectations formed by the nature of trie picture’s subject. For the picture itself is not horrific. The two figures using instruments to peel away the satyr’s skin look as if they are tenderly ministering to someone: Apollo bends to his task like a coiffeur grooming the hair of a cherished client; the bearded man behind him seems to be acting like a member of the medical profession carefully setting something right. The giveaway is the lapdog lapping up a little pool of blood—the blood that has been seeping and dripping out of the loser. But you can gaze at the picture for quite a time without remarking that vignette. And the whole atmosphere of the scene, the vibrations the painting gives off—and I know no painting that vibrates more tellingly across a room—has nothing to do with painracked anguish. It is far more like a balmy picnic by Bonnard, though that is going too far—it is more solemn and more purposeful. It has the feel of an enactment by twilight of some mysterious ritual celebrated slowly with a calm rapture.

According to the Greeks, the blood that flowed from Marsyas gave rise to the river that bore his name. The spilling of blood engenders the flow of life, and life can only go on through the spilling of blood. Apollo’s spite is redeemed through Marsyas’ acquiescence to serving as a sacrifice—an acquiescence which is visible in the expression on his face as well as in the compliance of his body, and which is surely the crux of the meaning of the picture. His trunk is the trunk of a tree that joins with those bits of colored material at the top to form a kind of Maypole, calling to mind the annual celebration of the sacrifice of nature gods whose resurrection in the spring meant the renewal of growth. The painting is full of echoes of Greek myth and tragedy. But the closest affinity of spirit is to that of plays composed soon after it, by Shakespeare: there is a certain all-embracingness they have in common. That little dog, that absurd dog—behaving as dogs do and licking up what it likes and thereby, with wonderful irony, being the comic point at which the tragic story becomes sickeningly real—is playing the same sort of role as the porter in Macbeth when there is a knocking at the castle gate. And then, spelling it all out, there are those lines in Lear:

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.

DAVID SYLVESTER