Catalogue Roberti Fine Art, TEFAF Maastricht 2026 (1) compressed - Flipbook - Page 82
Poelenburgh was one of the most distinguished Dutch Italianates of the early seventeenth century.
He travelled to Rome around 1617, where he remained for nearly a decade and absorbed the
classical landscape idiom circulating among Northern artists in the city. His small-scale mythologies
on copper, characterised by luminous flesh tones and pastoral refinement, quickly won favour
among an erudite, international clientele. After returning to Utrecht in the later 1620s, he
continued to produce cabinet pictures that synthesised Northern precision with Italianate
classicism.
Poeleburgh depicts the celebrated episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 452–567) in which Apollo,
inflamed by Cupid’s arrow, pursues the chaste nymph Daphne. Rather than choosing the climactic
instant of metamorphosis, so memorably crystallised by Bernini in his Roman marble, the artist
deliberately anticipates the transformation. Daphne has not yet begun to sprout leaves or
branches; the drama is suspended, psychological rather than physical, a restraint which remains
faithful to Ovid’s text and reflects a consciously literary conception of the mythological narrative.
The scene unfolds within a hilly landscape punctuated by rocky escarpments evocative of the
Roman Campagna, a setting closely associated with the artist’s Roman years. Figures and
landscape are held in careful equilibrium: the protagonists are integrated into their environment
rather than theatrically isolated, reinforcing the pastoral lyricism that was to define Poelenburgh’s
classicising vision.
Copper was a support much favoured by Poelenburgh for his most refined cabinet pictures
allowing him to produce an enamel-like finish where the flesh tones are rendered with luminous
subtlety, and the modelling is precise without rigidity. The calculated absence of Daphne’s
conventional attributes explains why works of this type have at times been recorded in earlier
collections as generic mythological or pastoral scenes, occasionally even misidentified as episodes
such as Atalanta and Hippomenes. As Sluijter-Seijffert observes (under Literature), this omission of
explicit narrative markers is a deliberate poetic strategy, entirely consistent with the artist’s
classicist and lyrical temperament, and firmly situates the painting within his Roman or
immediately post-Roman period.
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