Cydippe with Acontius’ Apple (Ovid, Heroides: letters XX and XXI)

Entry

The figure in this painting was interpreted as an enchantress and later as Pomona until 1981, when Mazur-Contamine convincingly identified her as Cydippe.⁹ The arcane subject is derived from an episode in Ovid’s Heroides, which relates how Acontius threw an apple at Cydippe’s feet while she was offering a sacrifice in the temple of Diana.¹⁰ The apple carried an inscription which, when read aloud, forced Cydippe to wed Acontius against her will. A painting by Bor in New York is stylistically similar to the one in the Rijksmuseum, and also shows a single female figure, a statue and an altar (fig. a). Mazur-Contamine’s identification of the figure in the New York painting as the disillusioned Medea, also based on the Heroides is also convincing, although her arguments seem needlessly forced.¹¹ In the Heroides Medea laments Jason’s abandonment of her for Creusa and relates: ‘My very incantations, herbs, and arts abandon me; naught does my goddess aid me, naught the sacrifice I make to potent Hecate’.¹² The statue on the left in the New York painting shows Diana with bow in hand and quiver strapped to her back. Mazur-Contamine points out that the goddess who does not aid Medea in the line quoted above from the Heroides is clarified as being Diana in the standard French translation of Ovid’s text.¹³ Why this should be the case is not readily apparent, although earlier in her letter Medea states that it was at the shrine of Diana where Jason first gave himself to her.¹⁴ A less complicated explanation for the statue of Diana is the conflation of that goddess with Hecate in antiquity. The melancholic woman holding a magician’s wand in the New York painting could very well be the disillusioned Medea, whose magical powers have abandoned her, and who has just concluded her failed sacrifice to Diana/Hecate. To equate, as Mazur-Contamine did, Medea’s exposed left breast in the painting with her literary counterpart’s rending of her garments, letting down of her hair and scratching of her face only weakens the argument.¹⁵

Scholars have been divided as to whether the present painting and the one in New York are pendants.¹⁶ The case against the view that these two single-figure renderings form a pair has been most comprehensively argued by Giltaij, who points out that they differ slightly in size and that the figures and objects do not mirror one another.¹⁷ Indeed, the New York painting is somewhat longer (4.6 cm) and not quite as wide (1.1 cm) as Cydippe, and the pronounced cusping at the top and bottom of the latter painting indicates that it has probably not been reduced in length.¹⁸ Nevertheless, the slight size discrepancy should perhaps not be made the deciding factor. With regard to Giltaij’s argument that the compositions do not mirror each other, account should be taken of the two paintings by Bor in Poznan showing Ariadne and Bacchus.¹⁹ Giltaij also questions whether these two works are pendants, although they have the same measurements, are iconographically related, and apparently have not been separated.²⁰ As is the case with Cydippe and Medea, the compositions of Ariadne and Bacchus do not mirror each other. Rather than dismissing the possibility that these works were conceived as pendants, one should perhaps consider whether Bor, whose iconography and figure style are so idiosyncratic, was not overly concerned about producing mirror-image pairs. Another possibility may be that these works were originally hung on opposite walls rather than side by side as contemporary exhibition practice dictates.

Bloch published the Rijksmuseum painting in 1949 as a work by Paulus Bor. The only scholars to doubt his attribution have been J.G. van Gelder,²¹ who considered Jacob van Campen to be the author, and Blankert, who assigned the painting to either Van Campen or Bor.²² Indeed, as Buvelot has pointed out, the figure of Cydippe has much in common with Van Campen’s female types in his paintings for the Oranjezaal.²³ However, while Cydippe lacks the ruddy complexion of Van Campen’s figures, her extremely broad face appears elsewhere in Bor’s oeuvre. The best example for comparison is a female figure on the left of the Descent from the Cross in Utrecht.²⁴ Although this painting is not signed and dated, as was once thought, there can be no doubt that it is from Bor’s hand. The figure in the related New York picture is almost identical to Pretiose in Bor’s signed and dated Pretiose, Don Juan and the Gypsy Woman Maiombe.²⁵ The handling of the drapery in both the New York painting and the Cydippe can also be closely compared with that worn by Pretiose, but has no parallels in Van Campen’s oeuvre. All three compositions also share a sense of calmness, which is foreign to Van Campen’s work.²⁶

This sense of calmness is one of the factors that make Cydippe with Acontius’ Apple, together with the New York painting, Bor’s most classicizing work. The antique props – the garlanded altar and the statue – contribute to this classicism in an obvious way, while the large scale of the figure, her pale complexion, the brilliant white and blues of her drapery, the smooth handling, and the ‘blond’ tonality of the setting are the stylistic ingredients. The similarities with the 1641 Pretiose, Don Juan and the Gypsy Woman Maiombe have prompted most authors to date the present painting toward the end of the 1630s or beginning of the 1640s.²⁷ Because the only other dated works in Bor’s oeuvre are a portrait of 1628 and two still lifes of 1630 and 1656,²⁸ it is very difficult to situate his history paintings chronologically. The sophisticated classicism in the Rijksmuseum and Metropolitan paintings, and the similar figure types employed by Van Campen for his Oranjezaal compositions (c. 1650-51) indicate that these works by Bor could be from as late as the end of the 1640s or the beginning of the 1650s.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 24.