Pan and Syrinx

Born into a wealthy Genoese family, Antonio Maria Vassallo trained under the Flemish-born painter Vincent Maló and later pursued a short, but prolific, career painting mythological and pastoral scenes. On the basis of firsthand examination, Anna Orlando considers this refined little copper to be a work from Vassallo's maturity, comparable to the paintings on canvas representing The Rape of Proserpina, Juno and Argus, and The Judgment of Paris (see A. Orlando, `Anton Maria Vassallo pittore universale tra committenza pubblica, collezionismo privato e mercato dell'arte', in G. Zanelli, ed., Anton Maria Vassalo. Un dipinto per la Galleria Nazionale della Liguria, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 2018, pp. 26-63, figs. 9-11). Here, the artist has chosen as his subject another myth taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses (I: 698-712): the son of Mercury and the nymph Dryope, Pan was born half man and half goat, and his bestial features were mocked by the nymphs who resisted his advances. He fell in love with Syrinx, one of Diana's chaste attendants, and pursued her one day as she returned from the hunt. Stopped by the water's edge and unable to run farther, Syrinx begged her father, the river god Ladon, to rescue her, and she was miraculously transformed into a marsh reed at the very instant of Pan's touch. The sweet sound made by the wind whistling through the reeds that Pan now forelornly embraced so charmed the god that he joined them together to make an instrument of seven pipes, the panpipes which to this day bear his name.