The Contest between Apollo and Pan

Entry

Correctly described as ‘The Judgement of Midas’ in the eighteenth century and in the Koninklijk Museum catalogue of 1809, the subject of this painting was given as the Contest between Apollo and the Satyr Marsyas in all the Rijksmuseum catalogues between 1903 and 1992. But it certainly does not portray the contest of Apollo and Marsyas which is briefly described by Ovid in Metamorphoses VI:382-86. Honders pointed out in a letter to the museum in 1985 (as was further elaborated by Smeets in 1991), that the scene illustrates Metamorphoses XI:146-79 which recounts how Midas, King of Phrygia, having been released from his wish that everything he touched be turned to gold, prompted a musical contest between the half-goat Pan, god of the woods and shepherds, and Apollo, the sun god. Pan wearing a wreath of pine needles, having played his pipes, gesticulates vaingloriously as Apollo, wearing a laurel crown and inspired by the goddess Minerva, plays not the lyre – as specified in Ovid’s text – but a viola da braccia. Wearing a crown of oak leaves, Tmolus, the judge and eponymous god of the mountain on which the contest took place, turns towards Apollo, as does Midas, who displays his stupidity by showing his preference for Pan’s playing. Apollo punished him by awarding him ‘the ears of a sluggard ass’ depicted growing up alongside his crown.²⁰

The Rijksmuseum picture was already recognized as a work of collaboration in the Van Heteren catalogue of 1752 – where the wrong [De] Clerck was mistakenly specified and the landscape was attributed to Jan Brueghel I – yet its authorship has only recently been established. In the modern era, while Hendrik de Clerck has been long associated with it, the identity of his collaborator – Denis van Alsloot (1570-1626) – was first hinted at by Smeets,²¹ and then accepted by Laureyssens.²² And indeed The Contest of Apollo and Pan is evidently the work of these two artists. The core, but not definitive number of twenty-one such joint productions, eight of which are dated 1608-12, was published by Laureyssens in 1967.²³ Noteworthy is Minerva’s helmet as it is set askew on her head.

The picture is likely to have been executed around 1610-15 as there are formal similarities with another work of the same subject, dated 1611, on the Munich art market in 1967²⁴ and with a Rest on the Flight into Egypt of the same date, on the London art market in 1990, which includes two angels similar to the putti about to endow Apollo with the victor’s crown.²⁵ However, in both these works the landscape is far more extensive and the figures are smaller in proportion. In this respect, the present picture is reminiscent of the two artists’ earlier collaborative efforts; that being so there is also an affinity in the rendering of the figures with those in the Four Elements of 1613.²⁶

De Clerck may have been inspired by Hendrik Goltzius’s (1558-1617) print of 1590,²⁷ where the muses are introduced as part of the enactment. De Clerck depicts only seven women, three of whom hold trumpets and one a book, so they might be identified as Euterpe (music), Calliope (epic poetry), Polyhymnia (heroic hymns), and Clio (history). But as there are not nine female figures, De Clerck’s intentions remain unclear; perhaps he may have introduced the seven for decorative reasons only. The three who hold trumpets might be doing so in readiness of celebrating Pan’s likely victory of which he had boasted, as McGrath has kindly suggested.²⁸

De Clerck’s composition is far more static than that of Goltzius, and it may be that, in this respect, he was influenced by Raphael’s Parnassus, as engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480-1527/1534), from whose print²⁹ De Clerck borrowed the pose of Apollo. It may be too that he was influenced by late maniera painting in Rome such as Jacopo Zucchi’s Coral Fishing (Galleria Borghese)³⁰ which was probably painted about the time when De Clerck was there.

Van Cauteren has suggested that in the personage of Apollo De Clerck intended an allusion to the Archduke, Albert of Austria (1559-1621), co-sovereign with his wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), of the Netherlands.³¹ Indeed the god is here endowed with an aureole and is thus configured as Phoebus Apollo, the sun god with whom sovereigns – the archduke being no exception – were often rhetorically associated. Apollo is advised in his successful conduct of the contest by his twin sister the powerful Minerva, goddess of wisdom. That the red and white plumes which decorate her helmet are the colours of the House of Austria may therefore not be fortuitous, but the meaning of the allegory, if such was indeed intended, still requires clarification.

The unusual use of gold leaf as a second ground has been so far detected in several seventeenth-century northern Netherlandish paintings on copper, the earliest of which are three Rembrandts executed before 1630 – the Mauritshuis Laughing Man, the Stockholm Self Portrait, and the Salzburg Artist’s Mother.³² The reason for it remains uncertain.³³ It seems unlikely that De Clerck invented this particular method of preparation in the southern Netherlands; other earlier examples may yet come to light.

Gregory Martin, 2022