Sts Paul and Barnabas Worshipped as Gods by the People of Lystra (Acts 14:6-20)

Entry

While preaching the gospel in Lystra, Paul and Barnabas cured a cripple, which led to their being taken for Mercury and Jupiter. The local priest of Jupiter brought oxen and garlands and prepared a sacrifice, which caused the apostles to rend their clothes and cry out in vain that they were not gods. In the present painting, one of them is seen rending his clothes while the other gestures to the priest of Jupiter to prevent the sacrifice.

Jacob Pynas painted two versions of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, the present painting, which is dated 1628, and a work now in New York, rightly considered by scholars to be earlier, and dated by Astrid Tümpel to 1617 (fig. a).⁴ Lastman’s two depictions of the subject from 1614 (fig. b) and 1617 (![fig. c][fig. c]) were the inspiration for both of Pynas’s paintings. As in Lastman’s representations, the drama unfolds in the two works by Pynas on a narrow foreground stage, with Paul and Barnabas shown elevated above the crowd. Lastman’s 1614 painting includes an extensive landscape background in which the sacrificial ox is led to the altar. His later painting of 1617 does not include such a landscape. There a sole ox is shown in the foreground, next to the altar. The fact that Pynas included extensive landscapes and processions with oxen in both his versions of the subject demonstrates that he drew not only from Lastman’s 1617 painting, but from Lastman’s earlier composition as well. Just as Lastman had done with his later version of the theme, Pynas reversed the direction of the action in his later painting, but in the opposite direction. Here, Paul and Barnabas are shown on the left as they are in Lastman’s 1614 work. The motif of one of the apostles rending his garments present in both of Pynas’s depictions follows Lastman’s second, 1617 version.

In general, Pynas’s approach to the theme differs from Lastman’s in that his main protagonists are on a slightly larger scale and their number is fewer. The compositional clarity one would expect this difference to produce is negated, however, by the twisted poses and frenetic drapery folds of Pynas’s figures. As opposed to Lastman’s solidly constructed figures, Pynas’s appear fragile, their hands with their long pointy digits wafer-thin. In the Rijksmuseum painting, Pynas has somewhat downplayed the twisted poses of his earlier version. On the whole, the later version shows a much greater degree of compositional clarity. The secondary figures have been banished to the background for the most part, and where they do occupy the foreground plane they have been made less conspicuous by being cast in shadow. The distracting secondary figures surrounding Paul and the high priest in the centre of the earlier composition have been expunged, and the curvilinear incense burners, which seem to grow out of the heads of the figures in Pynas’s first version, have been pushed into the background.

A greater sense of iconographic clarity has also been achieved in the Rijksmuseum painting. Here, the cripple who was healed by Paul and Barnabas is prominently shown with his crutch in the foreground. It was this deed that led the people of Lystra to mistake the apostles for Jupiter and Mercury and plan the sacrifice. In both Pynas’s earlier version and Lastman’s 1617 composition, the crutches are nowhere to be seen. Oddly, in the present painting Pynas did not show the apostle pleading with the priest pointing upward as he does in the earlier version. This gesture was clearly meant to allude to the apostles’ words in Acts 14:15, which reads: ‘We are also men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein.’ Another difference between Pynas’s two versions is the overall muted tonality of the present painting, as opposed to the use of local colours for the figures in his earlier work. It is this use of local colours in the New York version, in particular, that indicates that it was executed not long after Lastman’s one of 1617.

The fact that Pynas executed the present painting as much as 11 years after his first version and Lastman’s second version of the theme, and that he may have been living in a different town in 1628, suggests that he made extensive use of drawings. His figure types, too, are hardly distinguishable in the two versions. As Bauch has pointed out, the bearded figure type used for Barnabas was derived from works by Carlo Saraceni that Pynas would have seen – and probably would have copied in drawings – during his Roman sojourn.⁵

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. 250.