The Midwest Art Quarterly
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St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Bartolomeo Manfredi. Apollo and Marsyas. Oil on canvas. 1616-1620
The Apollo and Marsyas myth touches upon core artistic problems. Marsyas was such a great musician that the gods got jealous, and Apollo flayed him after a music contest. Who won? It doesn’t matter: the gods always win. The apparent moral is that human artists must never be too good at art, must never challenge the powers that be. Manfredi presents an analytical profile view of Apollo and Marsyas; the composition itself is Apollonian in its order and clarity. The god is artful, surgically precise — his eye is keen as he methodically removes skin from Marsyas’s arm, his undulating robe symbolic of the veil of dreams. Marsyas, no Laocoön, is not as tortured as one might expect. He seems unsurprised that Apollo is flaying him. In Apollo’s analytical gaze resides an allegory for viewing itself: the viewer as analyst. Though there was always something sadistic in the orderliness of this god — he represents a civilizing tendency — there is also, in Manfredi’s painting, something potentially progressive to him. One surmises that Apollo is not jealous, but rather keen to comprehend the artistic secrets of his Dionysian enemy. In dissecting Marsyas, perhaps Apollo could glea something of the satyrs’ immediate freedom which could be transposed into the dreamworlds the god creates. There, Marsyas’ immediate freedoms could truly be emancipated. Apollo is not just a stand-in for the viewer, but for the artist as well. In Manfredi’s painting, the god is an allegory for the artist’s role as researcher and physician. From this viewpoint, the death of Marsyas is less the vindictive punishment of a jealous god, and more a redemption of the satyr — a necessary sacrifice of the old world of immediate expression, made for the sake of living a freer life in more abstract and compelling dreamworlds. To some degree, every artist today has made this sacrifice for their art.
—Bret Schneider