WHAT MARSYAS MAY HAVE MEANT

Zdravko Blažeković, Andrea Schiavone’s Symbolism of Musical Instruments

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1. Andrea Schiavone, Orpheus. Split, Galerija Umjetnina.

Music in Art XXVI/1-2 (2001)

31© 2001 Research Center for Music Iconography CUNY

WHAT MARSYAS MAY HAVE MEANT TO THE CINQUECENTO VENETIANS, OR

ANDREA SCHIAVONE’S SYMBOLISM OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ

City University of New York, The Graduate Center

The opening paragraphs of many essays on the Croatian Renaissance mention the Ottomans and the Serenissimain the same sentence, qualifying them together and both equally as the menace of Croatia. However, as soon as such anintroduction is completed, the text goes on about the Humanistic influences spreading from the Italian centers to townsof the Croatian coast, about extensive commercial and cultural ties between Dalmatian and Italian ports, about Schiavoniwho played, composed, and printed music in the Serenissima, maintaining there their art workshops and supportedfraternities which were centers of rich artistic endeavors. This menacing Serenissima provided opportunities and freedomfor artistic work to a continuous stream of Schiavoni who stayed there, or through the Laguna continued their trips onto the other Apenine centers. Unlike the Serenissima, the vast Ottoman lands had very little to offer to the Croatianartists; the respect that Schiavoni received in the Laguna was not offered to Christians in the lands ruled by the Porte.

There is no archival document relating to Andrea Schiavone’s birthdate, but the current scholarship dates it to about1510,1 just over a decade before the battle at Mohács (29 August 1526), in which the victorious Suleiman the Magnifi-cent killed a large number of Hungarian and Croatian royals and nobles, soon to march into the heart of Europe and threeyears later appear for the first time under the walls of Vienna. The decades of Schiavone’s youth coincided with the timewhen the Ottomans came close to the Adriatic coast, continuously attacking the Croatian fortifications. This prompteda large number of Dalmatians to leave for more secure centers on the other side of the Adriatic. The exodus fromDalmatia to the Serenissima was at one of its peaks at this time, and it is hard to believe that all Schiavoni living aroundS. Pietro di Castello thought of Venice as a menace. Without their new home in the Serenissima and without their richand powerful patrons there, they would not be able to achieve the superiority in their artistry which they so often had.

One of these artists, who did not feel inferior for being a Schiavone in Venice, was Andrea Meldolla detto Schiavone(ca. 1510 – 1 December 1563). Although his family, who settled in Zadar from Meldolla in the Romagna, was not Sla-vonic by origin and he signed his prints with the initials “A.M.”, already Vasari identified him in his Libro de’ disegnias “Andrea da Zara pittor Schiavone”, and he remains identified as Schiavone in the collective mind of art historianssince. Collecting bits and pieces of Croatian cultural past, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski (1816–1889), in his enthusiasmabout establishing Schiavone’s Croatness, took the liberty of Croationizing his family name Meldolla to Medulić. Scho-larship outside of Croatia rejected such a revision, but his name became associated with his national affiliation in a dif-ferent way and, ironically, his origin became in it even more prominent than Kukuljević could ever desire. More thanany other Schiavone, he became a personification of the archetypal Dalmatian cinquecento artist who found in the Sere-nissima his artistic milieu.

On the most general level, Schiavone’s paintings and prints are concentrated on two themes: sacred subjects andmythological stories. Among his works, there are no genre scenes showing life in Venetian squares or in palaces. Hisscenes usually show a small painted space, without a large amount of detail. Intricate mythological narratives, onceconsidered to be by him, now are reattributed to other artists.2 Rather than grasping large-scale epic scenes, he wasinterested in presenting the essence of the dramatic action through an expression of his figures at a single moment of thenarrative, when the dramatic tension of the story reached its climax.

One such composition is his Orpheus [fig. 1].3 In the darkness of the underworld Orpheus is sitting on a rock andplaying his lira da braccio. In the 1560s, the dark palette completely swept Venetian painting, but Schiavone was at the


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forefront of those who were experimenting with darkened overall tonalities in Venice as early as in the 1540s and wasthe pioneer at the time when it was still an artistic exception.4 His Orpheus is a true night scene. With brown undertones,he transformed the Cerberus guarding Euridice into a simple remark, the beast is nearly indistinguishable in deep dusk,and the trees are impressionistically evoked and can hardly be seen. All that he felt important to express was theloneliness of Orpheus as he concentrated on his instrument and his music. One could say that the literary account of theOrpheus story requires a night scene here, since Orpheus was not allowed to look at Euridice until they had reached thelight of day, but the subject was rarely approached this way and it is not hard to argue that his reasoning here for a darkpalette was as much a part of the narrative of the story as the artistic style he was developing at the time.

In Schiavone’s entire output, the panel painting of Parnassus includes the largest number of instruments, althoughit is not his most characteristic work regarding the musical content [fig. 2].5 A comparison of the panel with Raphael’sParnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura shows substantial similarities, which become even more apparent in comparisonwith Marcantonio Raimondi’s etching of Raphael’s working drawings for the Vatican fresco (Bartsch 247; fig. 3). Herewe see the complete metamorphosis of the composition, from Raphael’s early ideas reproduced by Raimondi, toSchiavone’s oil panel.

It was not unusual for Schiavone to take works by other artists as a starting point for his own compositions, recastingthem to suit his own ideas. Schiavone had never been to the Eternal City and had not seen Raphael’s 1511 fresco abovethe window looking out into the Cortile del Belvedere, but engravings by Raimondi (1470/82–1527/34) were widelycirculating at the time and readily available to him.6 On Raphael’s fresco, Apollo is sitting on a rock and, surroundedby the Muses, playing the lira da braccio. In the left-hand group Calliope is seated and holding a thyrsis; behind areEuterpe, Clio, and Thalia. On Apollo’s right are Melpomene, Erato, Terpsichore, Urania, and Polyhymnia. On either sideare included the most important Greek, Roman, and contemporaneous poets as their consorts.7 Raimondi preserved theoverall composition, but the details are different, possibly reflecting Raphael’s early ideas which were either amendedor rejected in the final execution. The Muses are differently organized: Calliope holds a long straight trumpet rather thana thyrsis, and Apollo plays a stylized ancient lyre rather than a lira da braccio. Five putti are flying above the Muses,holding laurel wreaths.

2. Andrea Schiavone, Parnassus. Oil on panel, 29,5 × 70,2 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, no. 40.


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Schiavone’s modification of Raimondi’s design is of importance in demonstrating his methods of reworking othermasters. Here, he made a very loose interpretation of Raimondi, placing his rocky hilltop of Mount Helicon in a land-scape which opens up in the background, showing a valley in which – in the earthly landscape – mortals are walking intheir fields and a castle is in the distance. With this change Schiavone achieved a new effect, emphasizing that Parnassusis a mountain, high and unreachable by common people. While Raphael’s Parnassus is an abstract space and cannot belocated, Schiavone’s is placed in a visual context which appears real and specific. He was able to introduce this revisioninto his composition since all of the many poets and men of letters that Raphael and Raimondi included are reduced toonly one group on the far left, what opened a new prospective. In front of the blind Homer, with his face raised to theheavens, is a seated youth holding an open book and writing down Homer’s words. Dante and Virgil are standing behindHomer on either side. Schiavone turned Raphael’s and Raimondi’s three groups of trees into three single trees, definingwith them the inner space of Helicon, where Apollo and the Muses mingle.

Here, the Muses exchanged places and instruments again: Calliope is holding a straight trumpet, Euterpe is sittingholding an S-trumpet, Melpomene behind Euterpe has a dagger in her right hand, Urania is pointing toward the stars,Polyhimnia (turned with her back toward the viewer) is holding a syrinx. As in Raimondi’s version, Apollo is playingthe ancient lyre. From Raimondi’s print, Schiavone retained the putti holding laurel wreaths, although he is placing themdifferently in the space. On the right-hand side Schiavone added a player of a stylized cornu. It is obvious that Schiavoneused instruments to pinpoint his composition in antiquity. The two quasi-lur-shaped trumpets on his Birth of Jupiter(Richardson 325) [fig. 4],8 which comprise the single element identifying the temporal context of the painting’s content,have the same function.

3. Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Parnassus. London, The British Museum, Print Room.


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In looking for representations of musical scenes in Schiavone’s paintings, one should not try to find organologicallyaccurate instruments or real scenes of music making. His instruments are reserved for symbolic situations and used asattributes of the featured protagonists, among whom Apollo remained the most prominent throughout his artistic opus:Apollo’s encounters with Daphne or Cupid, his contests with the Phrygian satyr Marsyas or with Pan, or ApolloMusagetes sitting at Parnassus.

As for Apollo’s musical contests, there were in ancient mythology two stories; in both Apollo was the winner. Onestory describes his competition with Pan. Here, Apollo showed his superiority in lyre-playing over Pan’s performanceon the syrinx and the mountain god Tmolus, who judged the competition, easily decided that the god of fields and woodsfrom Arcadia was not equal to Apollo. The only casualty of this event was King Midas, who happened to be present atthe competition. Disagreeing with Tmolus’s verdict he offended Apollo, who rewarded him with a pair of ass’s ears, theemblem of brainless judgment.

The other legend, which had a tragic outcome, was the contest between Marsyas and Apollo. This story, oftenconfused with the fable of Pan, begins when Pallas Athena invented the pipes. She became very good at playing themand used to entertain other Olympians. But when Hera and Aphrodite started making fun of her cheeks, puffed up fromplaying, she threw the instrument away in a Phrygian wood. Marsyas found the pipes, which were cursed by Athena,

4. Andrea Schiavone, The birth of Jupiter. Oil on panel, 30 × 32,4 cm.Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, no. GG1991.


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and he was able to play divine music, greatly pleasing with it his Phrygian compatriots who considered him to be evenbetter than Apollo. Marsyas’s pride in his musical skills enraged Apollo and he challenged Marsyas to a contest in whichthe winner was allowed to impose any penalty he chose upon the loser. The judgment was this time passed by the Museswho, needless to say, favored Apollonian beauty. Declared the victor, Apollo tied Marsyas to a pine tree and flayed himalive. Some ancient accounts of the story say that the River Marsyas in Phrygia originated from Marsyas’s blood, whilethe others say that the river was formed from the tears of satyrs, nymphs, shepherds, and his pupil Olympus.

The story describing Apollo’s attempt to demonstrate his divine perfection through the music of his lyre has auniversal and timeless meaning which has fascinated artists from antiquity to the late sixteenth century, when it fadedaway and was replaced by the more light-hearted motif of the competition between Apollo and Pan. But, as Winternitzpointed out, “it was not before the close of the quattrocento, however, with the vogue of great solo performers andimprovisers, that the Marsyas myth as a musical contest recaptured the artistic imagination”.9 At that time it became astandard scene which many cinquecento Venetian artist attempted to produce.10 Although he never approached thesubject as a single narrative, depicting the entire story in the frame of the same painting – as for example, Bronzno didon his famous Hermitage panel once attributed to Correggio, or Bonifazio Veronese on his painting at the Accademia– Schiavone was repeatedly returning to the key elements of the story rendering it both as drawings and as paintings.As he had always done, in choosing only one dramatic fragment for each work, he was able to intensify its dramaticaction to the fullest extent.11

For the drawing of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas [fig. 5]12 Schiavone’s starting point was, as with Par-nassus, a chiaroscuro woodcut of Ugo da Carpi (ca. 1502–1532) which was, in turn, a variation on a drawing by Parmi-gianino (1503–1540), now at the Pierpont Morgan Library [fig. 6].13 Although it was a double copy, Schiavone broughtemotion and expression to the drawing. It would be wrong to deny a certain emotional power to Parmigianino’s drawing,but it appears neutral and distanced compared to Schiavone’s. In the latter, one can almost recognize the moment whenApollo bowed his last stroke on his viola. While Parmigianino’s Marsyas seems confused, Schiavone’s is a contempla-tive wise man. Having completed his performance, Apollo has a questioning look – expecting Marsyas’s judgment –while contemplative and critical Marsyas seems to be approving his performance. This is a contest between equals. Thereis no outside judge present in the picture who could cast an opinion of those who are truly great. Would it matter whois seen a better musician if both are genuine artists? After all there has always been doubts whether this agon was reallywon by the better musician.

Schiavone returned to Parmigianino’s Marsyas series one more time. In the Windsor Royal Collection [fig. 7,R.208], there is his incompletely preserved copy of Parmigianino’s flaying from the same Marsyas series. Parmigianino’soriginal has been lost but, on the basis of Antonio Fantuzzi’s etching after the same drawing [fig. 8] – which includesa syrinx on the ground below Marsyas’s head and a lyre next to Apollo – one can make a guess what instruments mighthave been depicted on the model and where. However, one has to be cautious here about making quick assumptions,because the etched copy of Parmigianino’s contest (the other drawing from the series), shows that Fantuzzi added to hiscomposition a lyre on the side of Apollo and a tambourine near Marsyas, which do not appear in Parmigianino’soriginal.14 Schiavone’s drawing has no instruments present. Apollo is identified only by the bow and quiver, his rareidentifiers in the context of the contest with Marsyas. Still, it would be too risky to argue that Schiavone used such anidentification of Apollo with a certain idea in mind – as, we will show later, was possibly the case with his LouvreMarsyas [fig. 11], where several elements introduced from outside the canon might have their raison d’être in the con-temporaneous social situation – and purposely excluded the instruments.

Schiavone’s Judgment of Midas from 1548–50, is his largest known mythological painting [fig. 9].15 The numberof participants is widened here to all of the protagonists of the event but, again, Schiavone is showing a single momentof the story, frozen in time. The narrative is transformed into a polyphony of psychological characterizations of theindividuals. The self-centered Apollo is focused on his music and nothing can distract him from it. Marsyas is the onlyone interacting with Apollo, looking straight at him and seemingly confident that he can play just as well. Midas, sittingin a melancholic pose, is wrapped in his own thoughts; a Tintorettoesque Tmolus is conferring with Pallas Athena. Thearchetypal Venetian landscape, with its cream-white clouds and blue sky combined with strong shadows, appears almostpastoral, and in some of its elements borders on an impressionistically conveyed ambiance.16

In both of these scenes – the competition between Marsyas and Apollo and the Judgement of Midas – Apollo’s in-strument was brought up to date and his ancient lyre was replaced with the viola da braccio. The instrument has a some-how elongated shape – a long neck and a short, small rounded body – which was totally consistent with his artistic style.Schiavone’s interest in the accuracy of the form was secondary. He favored elongated forms, and often distorted hisfigures in accordance with his overriding ideal of rhythmic grace. One need not go further than to look for such elongatedfigures on his drawing of the Flaying of Marsyas [fig. 11]. On the other hand, Marsyas is holding his ancient syrinx, andin this respect Schiavone followed the mythological story, not replacing the syrinx with some contemporary wind


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instrument as, for example, Tintoretto did in his Judgment of Marsyas changing it to a shwam (Wadsworth Atheneum,Hartford). In looking through the cinquecento Marsyas compositions, giving Apollo a contemporary viola or lira dabraccio appears to be a common feature and only a few artists gave him the ancient lyre. As Winternitz demonstrated,the lira da braccio was used since the Renaissance for the accompaniment of singing or recitation and it was often consi-dered to be of ancient origin; therefore, the ancient lyre and the lira da braccio became interchangeable.17 With Marsyas’sinstrument the situation was different. His instrument in antiquity was the aulos, either with two reeds or the single flute.In modern iconography he is normally shown with the syrinx. In this way, the sophistication of Apollo was underscoredby the contemporaneous instrument used by distinguished courtly Italian poet-musicians to accompany their improvisedrecitations of lyric or narrative poetry, in contrast with Marsyas’s syrinx, seen as a rural instrument which probably noone in Venice played at the time.

5. Andrea Schiavone, Apollo and Marsyas. Pen, brown ink, brown wash, white heightening on blue-grey-green prepared paper,27,3 × 26,4 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Janos Scholz collection.


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As was mentioned earlier, the organologically accurate shape of musical instruments or, for that matter, of any otherdepicted object, was not Schiavone’s concern. In the drawing, Marsyas’s syrinx is shown only with an outline; withoutknowing Parmigianino’s or Carpi’s models, one might even miss it. For Schiavone, instruments had primarily symbolicsignificance, often being nothing more than a descriptor or an identifier of the person holding it, such as in the case oftwo of his etchings of Apollo and Daphne (R.101 [fig. 10] and R.125). Apollo here holds his right hand upon a standinglyre, with his left hand stretching toward Daphne. The lyre is highly stylized and shown only as an outline. In the mythof Daphne, the instrument has no musical significance and it is placed here exclusively as an identifier helping one torecognize Apollo. In the third etching of this subject (R.100), Schiavone used the bow and quiver as Apollo’s identifiers,or on the etching of Mercury (R.71), the god was identified by his caduceus and a turtle, which became his symbol afterhe invented the lyre.

6. Il Parmigianino, The contest of Apollo and Marsyas. Pen, ink, and wash withheightening, on light brown paper. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, no. IV,44.


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In considering such a distinctly symbolic function of the depicted elements and the way Schiavone organized themin his compositions, it is particularly interesting to see the way he had imagined the end of the Marsyas story in thedrawing at the Louvre (R.146; fig. 11).18 This work has special significance because it was, together with St. John theBaptist and Others (R.147), once included in Libro de’disegni, a collection in which Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) assem-bled works by his predecessors and contemporaries. Vasari affixed the drawings to mounts which he then decorated withquasi-architectural drawn frames. It appears that Vasari was personally acquainted with Schiavone and, in 1540,commissioned from him a large canvas showing the battle, fought a short time earlier, between Charles V and Bar-barossa. In Vasari’s Vita, Schiavone did not get a full-scale biography but only (in the second edition of the work) a

7. Andrea Schiavone, Apollo overseeing the flaying of Marsyas. Fragment ofa composition. After a lost drawing by Parmigianino. Point of brush,wash, over chalk. Windsor, Royal Library. © Her Majesty QueenElizabeth II.


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paragraph at the end of Battista Franco’s biography, where Vasari said of him: “A good painter in our own day, in thatcity [Venice], has been Andrea Schiavone; I say good, because at times, for all his misfortunes, he has produced somegood work, and because he has always imitated as well as he has been able the manners of the good masters”.19

We will probably never know whether Schiavone produced this drawing specifically for Vasari’s Libro or, whetherwhen Vasari asked him for a piece of art, he gave him something already existing. In either case, its inclusion in Vasari’santhology makes it especially relevant, in addition to the fact that this drawing is Schiavone’s original composition ofMarsyas story rather than a copy of another artist’s work. As we mentioned earlier, the contest between Apollo and Mar-syas was a frequent cinquecento motif, but it appears that the flaying itself has usually been reserved for drawings andprints. S.J. Freedberg went as far as to say that “among easel pictures ... the flaying scene is almost never shown, as ifit made too strong violation of decorum”.20 It is hard to say whether or not Schiavone had this in mind, choosing to renderthis subject as a drawing, but this composition is more violent than most of the contemporaneous works of this subjectand, in some of its aspects, even created a precedent. There are only a few earlier images showing Marsyas hanginghead-downward, possibly the earliest being Giulio Romano’s narrative about Marsyas on the frieze in the Sala dei Meta-morfosi at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua (1527), which Titian used as a starting point for his well-known oil compositionfrom the 1570s.21 The principal influence for Schiavone, however, came from Parmigianino’s afore mentioned Marsyasseries and possibly also his red-chalk drawing Apollo Overseeing the Flaying of Marsyas at the Uffizi (ca. 1527–30; fig.12). With Marsyas hanging in the head-down position, the composition takes on a new quality and almost projects hisidentification with an animal. In Parmigianino’s sketchy (and possibly unfinished) Uffizi drawing, Marsyas is hangingin a position somewhat unnatural for an environment ruled by the laws of gravity, appearing as if he was initially meantto be shown on his feet and only later rotated. This is not the case with Schiavone’s Marsyas, who is firmly tied to theolive tree and lifelessly hanging on the mercy of Apollo.

As was demonstrated above, Schiavone had an artistic dialogue with Parmigianino concerning Marsyas at least twoother times, and it is logical that at some point he attempted to create his own original composition of this motif. In thiscomposition, he departed from Parmigianino in three significant elements: his Marsyas has a fully human body ratherthan being goat-legged; in his doomed contest he obviously did not play a syrinx (as Parmigianino’s series suggest) oran aulos, but bagpipe which is left on the ground together with Apollo’s lyre; and, on the far right, is included Pallas

8. Antonio Fantuzzi after Parmigianino, Apollo overseeingthe flaying of Marsyas. Etching (ca. 1545). Paris, Bibliothè-que Nationale de France.


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Athena – usually a constituent part of the Judgment of Midas, but not the flaying scenes – standing and holding her spear.There is nothing in this drawing pointing to the fiction or the mythological context of the story, nothing indicating thatthis could not be a depiction of a contemporary event. The image is distanced from the viewer only by its incompre-hensible brutality, not by the unreality projected by an imaginary goat-footed martyr.

In the years since Schiavone left Dalmatia in search of a more inspiring artistic environment, the Ottomans appearedoften on the Croatian Adriatic shores: in 1512 they were near Skradin, in 1513 near Imotski, in 1514 they attacked Knin,Skradin, and Karin and in 1522 finally took over those cities; in 1524 Petar Kružić defended Klis and in 1525 Senj; in1532 he even liberated Solin, but in 1537 Klis was lost to the Ottomans and Kružić died in the battle. Andrea Schiavoneleft in Zadar his younger brother Marco Antonio, also a painter, and his father Simon. Although there are no documentspreserved indicating his contact with them, it is known that Andrea’s wife Marina de Ricis, in her will, bequeathed toher second husband “the properties in Zara left to me by my husband, Messer Andrea Schiavon”, which would indicatethat Schiavone kept an estate in Zadar during all his years in Venice.22 Even without the family connections, it is certainthat the news of the Ottoman attacks and cruelties committed by the Sultan’s troops in his homeland were buzzing amongthe Schiavoni anchoring their boats at the Riva degli Schiavoni.

As Winternitz pointed out, “the bagpipes are extremely rare in Renaissance illustrations of the Marsyas story” andhe was able to list only three works with them: the woodcut of the “ia” master included in the first Italian version of

9. Andrea Schiavone, Judgment of Midas. Oil on canvas, 165 × 195 cm. Hampton Court Palace, Royal Collection, no.175.© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.


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Ovid’s Metamorphoses volgare (Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1497), Benedetto Montagna’s series of woodcuts showingthe contest (ca. 1515–20), and in the painting attributed to Michelangelo Anselmi at the National Gallery in Washington(1525–50), which is a narrative deriving from the woodcuts of the master “ia”.23 Now we can add to this list theengraving attributed to Girolamo Fagiuoli, reproducing a lost design by Francesco Salviati (1539),24 Domenico Zaga’sceiling fresco, commissioned by Paul III Farnese for the Sala di Apollo at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and executedafter a design by Perino del Vaga (1540s), and a relief on the logetta of San Marco in Venice (1540– 45), attributed toGirolamo Lombardo.25 We also know now that all of these works descend from the woodcuts of Ovidio volgare, andhence it is logical that they follow the model in which Marsyas appears with the bagpipe.

Although Schiavone was most possibly familiar with this iconographical tradition and some of these works, hisLouvre drawing does not fit into the Ovidio volgare iconographic tradition, and the origin of Marsyas’s bagpipe pointsin a different direction. Knowing from his other works how Schiavone used instruments as identifiers for the depictedfigures, the question is whether or not the bagpipe is here a clue for the reading of this entire composition, transformingthe flaying of Marsyas into an iconographical metaphor for the contemporaneous Ottoman attacks on the other side ofthe Adriatic. As was Marsyas’s syrinx – a symbol of rural and pastoral life rather than an instrument from the Venetianurban environment – the mišnice was an instrument specific to the peasants of the Dalmatian hinterland, who were atthe time those most exposed to the Ottoman assaults. The pastoral ambience from his Judgment of Midas painting is nolonger present here. The cruelties of the Ottomans were not fiction but real events and therefore Schiavone’s sufferingMarsyas became a real person rather than a goat-footed Phrygian satyr. He could be from Schiavone’s old homeland orfrom anyplace afflicted by brutality. Athena, who usually sits silently in the Judgment of Midas scenes and is normallynot a participant of the flaying, in Schiavone’s drawing, is standing to one side and, despite having her shield and spearwith her, does not attempt to protect the suffering man. While the Ottomans were approaching the Croatian lands, themore powerful European armies waited for the military outcome on the Croatian battlefields on the sidelines.26

10. Andrea Schiavone, Apollo and Daphne, etching.


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11. Andrea Schiavone, The execution of Marsyas (bottom), red chalk, 25 × 24 cm; St. John the Baptist and others (top), pen and darkbrown ink, dark brown wash, white heightening on light blue-green prepared paper. The composition once belonged to Vasari’s Librode’ disegni. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, no. 5452.


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Quite possibly, Schiavone was not the only north-Italian cinquecento painter who might have seen Marsyas as ametaphor for Christians tortured by the Infidels. In the 1530s, north Italian representations of Marsyas began to deal withthe myth in new terms. The dominant factor in its artistic designs became the narrative and, at the same time, the designsinherited from ancient models faded away. The imagery became more realistic, but also more violent. In her extensivestudy of the iconographical tradition of the myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Italian Renaissance, Edith Wyssdemonstrated that several images from the third quarter of the sixteenth century insist on Apollo’s vengeance, such asthe two drawings by the Genoese Luca Cambiaso (ca. 1555–65), two drawings by the Veronese Paolo Farinati (1570sor 1580s), and a drawing by Lelio Orsi the court painter in Novellara.27 She argues that “the vigor, not to say viciousness,with which the god rips and tears the skin off his victim appears irreconcilable with the ideology of harmony that for solong had been associated with the myth. ... The images in which Marsyas appears as human are especially disturbing.”28

The diagonals which are so prominent in these compositions convey the impression of violence even more. In observingthis, Wyss does not offer any explanation for the expression of such brutality: “On the basis of the present knowledgeabout the discussed drawings and paintings – she continues – it is impossible to define the specific motivation for theviolent conception of Apollo. A political intention is not known for these images. It is difficult to believe that the defenseof ‘high’, learned art against ineptitude should have sanctioned such cruelty.”29

Although the political agenda or ideology of the patrons who might have commissioned those works is not known,one can see them along the same lines as Schiavone’s Marsyas. The concern about the Ottoman threat was universal,and the news about their cruelties in the conquered lands were everyday reality. It would be hard to imagine that thepsychosis caused by the proximity of the enemy troops played no role in the selection of artistic motifs, at least on asubconscious level. Let us not forget that only after the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet in the battle of Lepanto,on 7 October 1571 did the naval balance in the Mediterranean change in favor of the Christians. And even then, althoughthe immediate danger to the Mediterranean coastal towns ceased, the Ottoman menace was still present in the not sodistant continental lands.

12. Il Parmigianino, Apollo overseeing the flaying of Marsyas. Redchalk, partly outlined in pen and ink. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.


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When the Ottomans took over Cyprus on 1 August 1571, just about two months before the battle at Lepanto, thecommander of the Ottoman troops Lala Mustafa Pasha ordered the commander of the Venetian army MarcantonioBragadin to be flayed alive in the main square of Famagusta. First he was dragged around the walls, with sacks of earthand stones on his back, then tied onto a chair and hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship where he was exposedto the mockery of the sailors, and finally was taken to the place of execution in the main square, tied naked to a column,and literally, flayed alive.30 Supposedly, this event, when the news of it arrived in Venice, inspired Titian’s vision of thesuffering Marsyas. This composition was Titian’s very private meditation on the meaning of the martyrdom, agony, anddeath, in a painting which, most probably, had not been commissioned or intended for immediate sale. To paraphraseWinternitz again, it appears that the half-man half-god “has become an image of the silently suffering creature, clearlythe prototype of the crucified.”31 In more particular terms, one might see Marsyas as an iconographic metaphor for allSchiavoni suffering along the Dalmatian hinterland, as well as for all Christians martyred in the Ottoman persecutions.

13. Attributed to Peter Paul Rubens, Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. Drawing.New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, no. I,241.


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A subject parallel to the flaying of Marsyas in the Christian iconography is the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew andone might pose the question as to why this image, rather than that of Marsyas, had not become such a powerful metaphor;as a matter of fact, the flaying of St. Bartholomew has been a relatively rare iconographical motif. Bartholomew, oneof the twelve original disciples, was associated with the spreading of the gospel in Lycaonia, India, and Armenia, wherehe is said to have been martyred by being flayed alive and then, according to some hagiographies, crucified. Althoughthere is no historical certainty about any of this, his emblem remained a butcher’s knife, and this is how Schiavone toorepresented him in his two series of the twelve apostles. However, there are three other iconographic traditions of hisrepresentations showing him either being flayed, as a skinless man standing with his musculature revealed (the sculptureon the Milan Duomo), or carrying his skin in one hand or over his shoulder. While many compositions of Marsyas’s andBartholomew’s flaying could almost be interchangeable, Marsyas was never able to stand up with his skinless body andshow the stripped skin. Compositions such as, for example, Michelangelo’s St. Bartholomew included among the saintsenjoying a heavenly blessing in his Last Judgment at the Sistina, or an anonymous fifteenth-century illumination in theGlagolitic missal MS 162 of the Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica, Ljubljana32 cannot be misread and confused withMarsyas. On the other hand, the drawing of St. Bartholomew’s martyrdom attributed to Rubens [fig. 13],33 could easilybe confused with the flaying of Marsyas, up to the point that in the background, behind the bloodthirsty pagans, one canrecognize a statue of a god holding a lyre.

The two iconographic motifs – Marsyas and St. Bartholomew – have one crucial difference in their metaphoricalmeaning and in their iconographical reception. Sinful man can only look up to a saint, but never achieve his perfectionor endure pain equal to his martyrdom. On the other hand, the universal quality of the mythological story, its primordialorigin and timelessness made it possible to turn it into a metaphor.

In his entire opus, Schiavone approached exclusively musical subjects only on rare occasions. With his many rende-rings of the Apollo stories, musical instruments were symbols included in the composition with the purpose of identifyingthe protagonists or of projecting the metaphoric contents of the composition. On many other occasions, even when musi-cians were elementary to the canon, he dropped them from his composition. Of all his nativity scenes or adorations ofthe Magi, only one includes a shepherd playing the shawm. This etching is produced however with a great clarity andrichness (R.6) and this is Schiavone’s most clearly rendered instrument. In his other few compositions with musicians,instruments are sketched with a single line without details34 or, on rare occasions, they are included to supply ambienceto the depicted motif.35

Schiavone had never considered instruments to be a part of a decorum, and when he included a musician or hisinstrument in the background of the composition, it was always an important element in the narrative. His interest wasthe representation of the story’s substance, without adding elements insignificant to the depicted event. The content ofhis nativity scenes, landscapes, and even mythological motifs are done with a realistic approach, and instruments are usedwhen needed as identifiers of the motif or a person. When the narrative of the composition did not call for the instrument,Schiavone generally did not include it. Uncovering this pattern and knowing the social psychoses present in a large partof the Mediterranean during his lifetime, it is hard not to associate Marsyas’s bagpipes with the mišnice specific to theDalmatian hinterlands. The Marsyas compositions, which were so prominent in Schiavone’s artistic opus either asreworkings of other painters or as his original compositions appear as his very personal commentary to the contemporarysocial and political situation in his old homeland.

Notes

1 The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Katharine Baetjer, EuropeanPaintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York: The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, 1995) and the Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,put his birthdate as late as 1522.

2 For example, the Judgment of Midas which has been reattributedto Bonifazio Veronese (Accademia in Venice), or six cassoni, showingbiblical stories, now credited to Tintoretto (Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna).

3 The cassone is at the Galerija Umjetnina in Split, and reproducedin color in Kruno Prijatelj, Andrija Medulić Schiavone (Zagreb: Jugosla-venska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti, 1952). The painting has notbeen included in Richardson’s catalogue of Schiavone’s works.Although Prijatelj’s study is listed in the bibliography of the catalogue,there is no reference in it to any of the paintings from the Zagreb andBelgrade collections, which Prijatelj listed in his article. Cf. Francis L.

Richardson, Andrea Schiavone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). TheOrpheus cassone was also reproduced in Duško Kečkemet’s entry aboutMedulić in the Enciklopedija likovnih umjetnosti (Zagreb: Jugoslavenskileksikografski zavod, 1964), vol. III, 433-434.

4 Cf. F. Richardson, op. cit., 45.5 The panel (29,5 × 70,2 cm) is at the Bayerische Staatsgemälde-

sammlungen, Munich, no. 40. – The painting Il concerto, with anequally large selection of instruments, which Adolfo Venturi attributedto Schiavone and reproduced in his essay “Andrea Meldolla detto loSchiavone” (Archivio storico per la Dalmazia VII/37, 1928, fig. 30),currently hangs at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona with the titleContesa tra le Muse e le Pieridi (inv.1562-1B102), was reattributed in1832 by Berenson to Jacopo Tintoretto.

6 For example, Schiavone’s contemporary Giulio Sanuto includedRaimondi’s group of Muses – albeit without Apollo – to fill the space inthe middle section of his 1562 engraving of the narrative about Apollo


46

and Marsyas which is, in turn, a free reworking of the painting attributedto Bronzino (St. Petersburg, the Hermitage).

7 For a detailed description of the fresco’s content cf. George L.Hersey, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter’s and the Vatican (Chicago;London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993) 138-141; and WalterSalmen, “Raffael und die Musik”, Freiburger Universitätsblätter 136(June 1997) 43-56.

8 Oil on a panel, 30 × 32,4 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Mu-seum, GG 1986.

9 Cf. Emanuel Winternitz, “The Curse of Pallas Athena”, Studiesin the History of Art (1959) 187.

10 The most famous among them were Cima da Conegliano (whoapproached the subject twice), Paris Bordone, Jacopo Tintoretto (whoreturned to it at least three times), Bonifazio Veronese, Titian, and An-drea Vicentino. Cf. also Ulrike Groos, Ars musica in Venedig im 16.Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms, 1996).

11 Three paintings of the Judgment of Midas, once attributed toSchiavone, recent research has reattributed: the painting at the Paul DreyGalleries in New York (Richardson, D.359) is now attributed to SteranoCernoto; the painting at the Venice Accademia (D.370) to BonifazioVeronese; and the cassone formerly at the Loeser Collection, Florence(D.347), to Lambert Sustris.

12 Apollo and Marsyas (R.187), pen, brown ink, brown wash,white heightening on blue-grey-green prepared paper, 27,3 × 26,4 cm.New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection of Janos Scholz.

13 This Parmigianino drawing is a fragment of an eight-part series,produced in Bologna between the summer of 1527 and 1530/31, pre-senting the key elements of the story: Mercury assembling the syrinx,Mercury handing the syrinx to Minerva, Minerva playing the instrument,Minerva casting away the syrinx, Marsyas finding the pipes, the contestof Apollo and Marsyas, the grieving witness of the execution, andApollo overseeing the flaying of Marsyas. It is known that Schiavonecopied at least two fragments: the contest [fig. 5] and the flaying [fig. 7].

14 Cf. Edith Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art ofthe Italian Renaissance: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Images (New-ark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated UniversityPresses, 1996) fig. 79.

15 The Judgment of Midas (R.263), oil on canvas, 165 × 195 cm.Hampton Court Palace, Royal Collection, no. 175.

16 This painting had always a prominent place in Schiavone’sopus. In 1712 Simon Gribelin (1661–1733), the French engraver activein England, issued a series of six engravings among which was also in-cluded Schiavone’s Judgment of Midas: Six of Her Majesty’s Pictures,Drawn and Engrav’d from the Originals of Paolo Veronese, Jac. Tinto-reto, Old Palma, Jul. Romano, and Andr. Schiavone; in the RoyalGalleries of Windsor and Kensington: are most Humbly Dedicated toHer Most Excellent and Sacred Majesty Anne (By the Grace of God),Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c.,By Her Majesty’s Most Humble and Faithful Subject, Sim. Gribelin andSold by Him. 1712. Gribelin was a significant engraver in London at thetime, who five years earlier produced for the first time engravings ofRaphael's cartoons, then on display at Hampton Court. His designs hada significant influence on the development of printmaking in Englandand were still being reprinted in the 1750s.

17 Cf. E. Winternitz, op. cit., 189.

18 The Flaying of Marsyas, red chalk (25 × 24 cm). Paris, Muséedu Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, no. 5452.

19 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects,trans. by Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Everyman’s Library, 1996)II:515.

20 Sydney J. Freedberg, “Titian and Marsyas”, FMR 4 (1984) 56.21 Six preparatory modelli are preserved at the Albertina (one) and

the Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins (five). Cf. E. Wyss, op. cit. 96-98; andS.J. Freeberg, op. cit., 62.

22 Cf. F. Richardson, op. cit., 12.23 E. Winternitz, op. cit., 188. All three works are reproduced in

this Winternitz’s essay.24 One print is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha

Whittelsey Collection.25 All works are reproduced in E. Wyss, op. cit., figs. 55 and 56-

57.26 Two more known works representing Marsyas are attributed to

Schiavone: the cassone at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan representingthe flaying (inv.no.1080; 32 × 62,5 cm), which Richardson includedneither in the catalogue of the positively identified works, nor among thedeattributed works; and a painting sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London(11 October 1972). The Milan painting is traditional in its composition,showing Marsyas lying on the ground, with his right hand tied to a tree,and Apollo just beginning his gory work from the right foot. His syrinxis left in the middle of the composition and Apollo’s lira in the corner.The whereabouts of the painting sold at Sotheby's (R.338) is unknown,and the auction catalogue does not include its reproduction. Cf. Cata-logue of Old Master Paintings (London: Sotheby’s) lot 87. A further un-identified painting of this subject by Schiavone was also presented toKing Louis XIII of France. Cf. Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat, TheDrawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries (NewYork: Collectors Editions, 1970) 252.

27 All works reproduced in E. Wyss, ibid., 120-127.28 E. Wyss, ibid., 123.29 E. Wyss, ibid., 124.30 Cf. S.J. Freedberg, op. cit., 63.31 E. Winternitz, op. cit., 187.32 A facsimile of the page with this simple, although expressive,

image is included in Anđelko Badurina, Illuminated Manuscripts inCroatia (Zagreb: Kršćanska Sadašnjost, 1995) 84.

33 New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, inv.no. I,241.34 The trumpets in the drawing Worship of the Golden Calf (R.

161) at the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, and onestraight trumpet in the design for the embroidery Allegorical Coronationof Doge Grimani (R.175), at the British Museum.

35 The woman playing cymbals on the etching of the Bacchic Re-vel (R.123), or the two musicians playing shawms on the painting ofGiuditta ed Oloferno a Banchetto (Castello Sforzesco, inv.no. 42, not inthe Richardson catalogue). The two drawings attributed to Schiavone atthe Museon of Bassano del Grappa, which Richardson lists as “dancingor flying figures” (R.153) are very free sketches and some figures canjust as well be studies for angels rather than dancers.

Documents

WHAT MARSYAS MAY HAVE MEANT