Orestes and Pylades Disputing at the Altar (Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris)

Entry

Lastman was the first artist to paint Orestes’s and Pylades’s dispute at the altar, and, unlike other themes he introduced into painting, he did not have any 16th-century prints to draw upon. The subject is based on Euripides’s play Iphigenia in Tauris. Orestes and his cousin Pylades are captured in Tauris, where they had gone to steal the statue of Artemis that was kept there. The officiating priestess, Iphigenia, offers to sacrifice Pylades alone if Orestes agrees to return to Argos with a letter from her. Orestes and Pylades both wish to die so that the other might live, but it is eventually agreed that Orestes will be sacrificed. When Iphigenia reads her letter aloud to Pylades, Orestes comes to the realization that she is the sister he had presumed to be dead. Together they try to trick Thoas, king of the Taurians, and escape with the statue. They succeed in doing so through the intervention of Athena.

In Lastman’s painting the two friends are shown disputing to the left of the altar as Iphigenia approaches on the right holding the letter. Sluijter has argued that Van Mander’s Wtlegghinghe, not Euripides’s play, probably served as Lastman’s source, as Iphigenia is not present during the two friends’ dispute in the play.¹⁰ Moreover, Thoas, whom Sluijter presumably identifies as the figure on the far left, only makes his appearance much later in Euripides’s play. Sluijter’s hypothesis, however, can definitely be ruled out, because Orestes and Pylades are shown by Lastman engaged solely with one another, as they are in Euripides’ play. In Van Mander’s version, Thoas asks which of the strangers is Orestes, ‘for he must die’, and both friends try to persuade the king that they are Orestes, and should therefore be sacrificed. In the Wtlegghinghe, moreover, Iphigenia is not present during Orestes’s and Pylades’s exchange, while it is her inclusion in the painting that led Sluijter to suggest Van Mander rather than Euripides as Lastman’s source. In the play, at the end of Orestes’s and Pylades’s discussion about who should return to Argos with the letter and who should be sacrificed Iphigenia re-enters with the letter. In Van Mander’s version, there is no mention of the letter.¹¹ Euripides’s play, therefore, must have been Lastman’s source. Lastman, however, clearly took some artistic liberties, and also added motifs not mentioned in the play. While in the play the purification of the victim with water in preparation for the sacrifice, and the sacrifice itself, are set inside the temple, in the painting a boy pours water into a basin and the altar is being prepared out of doors. Euripides makes no reference to the impaled heads carried in the procession, or to the method of sacrifice by way of clubbing; these Taurian customs are described in other classical sources.¹² Lastman probably had a learned adviser, given the variety of classical sources that inform the present painting, and the fact that the main source, Euripides’s play was only translated into Dutch for the first time more than 50 years after the painting was executed.¹³

As Broos has shown, Lastman’s compositions often incorporate elements recommended by Van Mander in his Grondt der edel vrij schilder-const.¹⁴ Van Mander, for example, stresses the use of plentiful and varied motifs in history paintings, an aspect of this and other works by Lastman abundantly praised in poems written later in the 17th century by Vondel and Oudaen, who considered Lastman a master of composition.¹⁵ The present painting is one of the earliest by Lastman to include a hilly landscape in the background. Van Mander recommended arranging the spectators above the action, for example on hills or clinging to columns; the toddlers perched on the hill in the middleground in the Rijksmuseum painting meet this criterion, as well as Van Mander’s recommendation to show figures of various ages.¹⁶ In other paintings by Lastman, children are shown clinging to columns.¹⁷ The procession descending from the hill is a compositional formula which Lastman would also repeat often, and one that would prove highly influential on artists in his circle. The composition is divided into a foreground stage with the principal figures, shown in brightly coloured garments, a middleground cast in shadow, and a lighter background plane. A corner of the altar divides the composition down the middle, its short side leading the viewer’s eye to Orestes and Pylades and its long side to Iphigenia, whose pose and costume were derived from a figure on the left in Goltzius’s engraving The Judgement of Midas (RP-P-OB-10.404, see fig. a).¹⁸ While the separation of the main protagonists is unusual in Lastman’s oeuvre, the prominently placed altar being prepared for the sacrifice, in addition to tying the picture together, is a primary vehicle for the creation of drama. The approaching crowd, the executioner standing at the ready with his club and Iphigenia approaching with the letter add to the sense of impending climax. Indeed, Lastman has depicted the cliff-hanger moment in the story.¹⁹

In the 1702 sale catalogue of Jan Six’s collection, the painting is listed after, and called a ‘weerga’ or companion piece to a Paul and Barnabas at Lystra by Lastman, probably the one also from 1614 formerly in Warsaw (fig. b).²⁰ Six already owned the Paul and Barnabas by 1648, when Vondel wrote a poem about it, and obtained the present painting some time after 1676, when it came under the hammer as part of Reinier van der Wolff’s collection. Earlier provenances for both works are not known, although the Paul and Barnabas might be the one listed in Lastman’s 1632 estate inventory.²¹ In his 1657 poem, Oudaen also calls the present painting a ‘weerga’ to Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, meaning most likely not that it was a companion piece to the other painting but simply its equal. The scholars who believe the two paintings were conceived as pendants point out that they were painted in the same year, have somewhat similar dimensions, and both show sacrificial processions and altars.²² The latter aspect, however, can equally be viewed as an argument against this hypothesis; Lastman, having conceived one painting involving the exploits of two friends in a foreign land and a thwarted sacrifice, was, perhaps, simply put in mind of a similar story drawn from a different kind of source.

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. 167.