(Antwerp 1599–1641 London)
Amaryllis and Mirtillo,
oil on canvas, 118 x 155 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Germany

The present canvas is a workshop version of one of Anthony van Dyck’s most influential works, Amaryllis Crowning Mirtillo. The vivid colouring, intermingled half-dressed forms, and framing of the composition by silk drapery hung over tree bowers, exhibit the influence of Venetian artists such as Titian on van Dyck, while the episode shown here comes from Ferrarese writer Giovanni Battista Guarini’s 1590 tragicomedy il Pastor Fido. Commissioned in the 1630s by Frederick Hendrick, Dutch Stadtholder and Prince of Orange, van Dyck’s original entered the von Schönborn collection in 1711, where it remains today, hanging in Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden. Oliver Millar writes that ‘presumably copies were made in the Antwerp workshop before the original was shipped to The Hague and became in accessible’ of which the present picture is one (see S. J. Barnes, N. De Poorter, O. Millar, H. Vey, Van Dyck, A complete catalogue of the paintings, New Haven, London 2004, pp. 294-95).

The scene here unfolding has the nymph Amaryllis, in the arms of her suitor, the shepherd Mirtillo – here also disguised as a nymph in order to woo Amaryllis in a kissing contest. Guarini tells of how an oracle prophesised the demise of Arcadia, unless a descendant of Hercules, who unbeknownst to everyone Mirtillo was, and a descendant of Pan - the Nymph Amaryllis - were wed. Despite Amaryllis spurning Mirtillo’s advances, he disguised himself as a woman, and as depicted here, managed to seduce her, thus saving the kingdom. The two foreground figures on the right are adapted from a Venus and Mars by Titian, a sketch of which van Dyck made in his pocket book during his travels in Italy.

Van Dyck was the first artist to depict Guarini’s important drama in Northern painting, which consequently spawned a whole artistic sub-genre, with the Arcadian pastoral themes within it treated by playwrights and painters of different schools in the Northern and Southern Low Countries throughout the seventeenth century.