Jacob Symonsz Pynas - Landscape with Architecture and the Story of Mercury and Herse

This work is part of a series dedicated to the love myth of Mercury and Herse. Legend has it that the god saw the girl during a procession and fell madly in love. Mercury then convinced one of Herse's two sisters, Aglauros, to secretly let him into her room in exchange for gold. Aglauros accepted the gold, but, overcome by envy, refused to respect the agreement. She was punished by Mercury's wrath, who transformed her into a stone statue. The myth was developed in Ovid's Metamorphoses with numerous side episodes, but there are different versions of the story that also involve the two sisters, Aglauros and Pandrosos. Specifically, this work shows the three sisters picking fruit. In general, cycles of the "Loves of the Gods" developed especially from the 16th century onward, particularly among Mannerist artists, who, in their search for ever-original and unusual themes, drew several subjects from the Metamorphoses. Later, within the 17th-century classicist movements, these mythological episodes were revisited in idyllic landscape settings, in keeping with the Arcadian atmosphere of contemporary literature. The work has been attributed to Jacob Symonsz Pynas, a Dutch painter who created a cycle dedicated to the stories of Mercury and Herse.

The work is a perfect and marvelous example of seventeenth-century classicism, or rather, that particular pictorial movement that saw the deeply idealized union of scholarly mythological themes and idyllic landscapes. Rome was a driving force in this movement, and its greatest exponents were foreign painters who settled in the capital, such as Nicolas Poussin and Adam Elsheimer. The formula, which we also see exemplified in this work, consists of setting the mythological episode within a broad landscape, in which the small figures move amidst an idealized landscape dotted with classical-style architecture. The entire composition, in full classicist spirit, reflects principles of harmony, balance, and clarity. The execution of the painting is also extraordinary, based on a perfect naturalistic rendering. All the landscape elements effectively convey the sensory information, which is inserted into the space with great coherence, thanks to the work's tonal unity.

The work has been attributed to Jacob Symonsz Pynas, a Dutch painter born in Haarlem around 1592 and who died after 1656. His trip to Italy with his brother Jan, during which he undoubtedly came into contact with Adam Elsheimer, was crucial to the formation of his classicist and landscape pictorial language. Upon returning to Holland, he worked primarily in Deft, The Hague, and Amsterdam, where he studied with the young Rembrandt.

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