Pelagio Palagi – Hylas abducted by the Nimphs

Hylas abducted by the Nimphs • 1810 ca.

Oil on canvas, 170 x 215 cm

It seems to me that after the impressive publication of The Betrothal of Cupid and Psyche (to grace the Detroit Institute of Arts) on the part of K. Lankheit, a historian to whom, had it been better received, Palagi would owe a great deal, and further small contributions, my own included , there has never been such an important discovery for Palagi’s body of work. Now it is the turn of his painting of Hylas and the Nymphs, recalled by the author himself in his autobiography and highly regarded by the Roman entourage of the time, as Giuseppe Tambroni’s praise bears witness. Indeed, it is the most aesthetically pleasing pictorial work of art from Palagi’s early maturity and more problematically complex than has emerged to date. And the best not only by him, but perhaps in the entire and still in part obscure first decade of the nineteenth century in Italy, as the work so singularly closes. Moreover, it strikes me that the finding contributes in a definitive manner to consolidate the Bolognese painter at a high level.

The work is painted on a large horizontal canvas, luminous (and decorative) as a fresco, with a naked tangle of three young women and a young man in the centre. The figures are life size and cavort beneath a looming bank cut on a slant, recalling the popular stylistic feature, also dear to Mengs, of an underground space, albeit in the open air, in the image of an excavation site (not necessarily archaeological). Here a stone grotto opens out, while a patch of sky filters through the dense, prickly Holm oaks at the top left. In the foreground is an opaque pool of water, full of marshy vegetation, and giving only a suggestion of the soft submerged limbs through its slightly riffled surface. The moment portrayed from the myth (discussed below) is when the situation turns dramatic: the youth is poised to take water from a small cascade, when nymphs suddenly rise up out of the pool around him in what at first glance looks like a light-hearted game, with only the smallest hint of tragedy.

This painting turned up unexpectedly, and was entirely anonymous, something of a mute geographical map, but it immediately struck me because it expresses the very high quality of the hand of Palagi, an artist I consider the greatest painter in early nineteenth century Italy after Appiani (with whom he is sometimes mistaken from an antiquarian perspective, due in part to false signatures) if considered from a neoclassical point of view, and the greatest from a romantic perspective; which by the way explains and serves as prelude to his painting in the troubadour genre, in which he later also became the number one in Italy.

The painting material, fine and glazed like lacquer or Sèvres vase painting, brings an unrealistic lightness to raise the mannered tone, that is, making sublime the ancient tale, whose pathos always implacably returns, like fate in a fable. The most original idea is certainly that of the nymphs considered on a par with incarnations of earthly force: supple, unsettling animals with archaic gestures and an overbearing naturalness intruding on beauty. Equally suggestive is the untamed setting of rocks, grasses and trees, which we find today in the very same guise in any Lazio ravine, and especially in the fabulous pleasure gardens and grottoes that gape from beneath the famous waterfalls of Tivoli.

Browsing through the artist’s documents at the Archiginnasio of Bologna one immediately finds the work in the aforementioned Autobiography, appearing after his Sposalizio and before the Palazzo Torlonia frescoes, which is to say between 1809 and ’13, with the commissioner’s name included, a certain Andrea Berti. Tambroni confirms this, I recall, dating it after Mario a Minturno, which is 1809 or ’10.

If we then check the sequence of works in Palagi’s catalogue we find the chronology can be tightened further as it is clear our Hylas is from the same time, or better still, immediately after Leonidas and Cleombrotus (lost, but of which a study is conserved in the Raccolte Comunali of Bologna) – where relations to the style of Gaspare Landi are obvious – which was commissioned in 1808: while Julius Caesar Dictates his Commentaries (Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale, Editor’s Note), from 1812, in which there is a clear reference to Camuccini (that persists in all future evocations of ancient history, even anachronistic), would appear to come later. Knowing what we do for now, we might hazard a date circa 1809, in view of the fact that the slightly forced gesture of the first nymph to the left seems to coincide with that of a drawing by Hayez from that year (Jupiter and Thetis, Venice, Accademia).

Having established the cornerstones of attribution and chronology, and before passing to the painting’s interpretation, possibly setting out from the composition’s mental process, its antecedents and sources, to then consider its eventual success, we should now complete the general historical context from which it came.

Among the drawings in the Palagi archive at the Archiginnasio of Bologna there is a sketch that seems to constitute a primo pensiero enough to indicate the long process undertaken to arrive at the splendid final creation. Another pair of drawings, kept in the same place, and a couple of oils take up the theme of leaves growing near streams, that we find at the bottom left of the painting, with an insistence indicating a precise historical rapport with taste, naturalistic to the point of being scientific, of the Germans in Rome, from Hackert to Kolbe. These references fully confirm the fortunate intuition of Lankheit, who saw in Palagi a connection with Ph. Otto Runge, in other words with the greatest of the German romantics. Nonetheless, in this context our artist’s Italian nature also stands out, corresponding to a greater realism and lesser visionariness; and European receptivity is stressed in a more romantic sense than classicist. Namely a nod to the Primitives and to the Renaissance more than the Ancients, demonstrated by the reminiscences of the painting and Bolognese miniature painting of the trecento, and then Antonello da Messina (in Hylas’ face, which has the look of the Ecce Homo type), and Correggio (in the young woman to the left, who vaguely resembles Santa Caterina from the altarpiece of the same name in Parma), to Leonardismo (in the botany, as we detect at least a dozen morphologies, excluding the trees), to Giovanni Bellini (in the sweetness of a “pittura d’unione”) and so on.

It is Hylas’ counterpoise that most recalls antique statuary, in particular certain parts of the Laocoön, but nor should the influence of Reni be excluded. Tambroni perceptively linked Palagi with the name Domenichino and there is no denying a glimmer of his famous The Hunt of Diana at the Borghese, if not in the imagery, at least in the poignant breath of panic at the communion between creatures and nature.

Otherwise, the romantic aspect is noticeable above all in the choice and study of life drawing, where he clearly aimed for representations of naturalness, in fact I would go so far as to say, of a naïveté in which the illuminist myth of the “noble savage” is revived, along lines with which Francesco Peloso compares the rustic nymphs to the American Indians in the Ritorno di Colombo. In other respects, as a whole, the painting seems derived from the ancient typology of the subject: see the inlaid pavement previously in the collection of Cardinal Camillo Massimo and later Albani at Palazzo Del Drago in Rome.

The above will have shone some light on Palagi’s modern stylistic sources too. As far as the setting is concerned, the great story of the Roman neoclassical landscape recounted and praised by Tambroni is fundamental; for the figures, we look to Canova, as there is no doubt that one of the bathers recalls the model of the Sommariva Magdalene and it is she, incidentally, with her slightly mawkish expression, deriving from the seventeenth-century iconology of the Blessed Soul, who would return in Hayez’ Magdalene of 1825, witnessing a further link between Canova and Hayez, besides the direct one. Even the figure’s face brings to mind the expression of Canova’s first portrait of Récamier in the guise of Beatrice, albeit here she is hardly more than a young girl and the context of the tale is diametrically opposite. It should be added that the regressive portrayal of puberty in erotic fables is also, don’t let’s forget, a Canovian trope. And Canovian too is the motif of wet hair (from the Fainting Magdalene, for example), the modelling of the female nude seen from behind (from the Graces), and the hand laid on Hylas’ flesh as though on a clavier.

Emerging from all these elements is the personal style of the artist, which is original enough to be recognisable at a glance, not without traces of native cultural grounding, for example certain nudes by his fellow countryman Franceschini. Among the more unexpected things, and yet Palagian, is the hairstyle of the blonde naiad as a counterpoint to the beautiful gold pot, the silhouettes (somewhat recalling drawings by Flaxman) in rapport with the subtle variations of the pearly, pinkish and alabaster skin tones; while the spiralling gesticulations bring to mind ancient and modern vase painting.

Inevitably, faced with a work of art like this, one might let oneself go with considerations that sound outlandish, but aren’t, because they only originate from the absolute newness, not déjà vue, of the image. Take for example the angles of the heads. That of the nymph on the left, although very slightly turgid (for narrative reasons) is tangibly defined and as a whole, of a somatic type that, isolated from the context, might be datable, because still in fashion twenty years later, between late Nazarene taste and Biedermeier. Equally, that of the young man has almost nothing strictly neo-classical about it but could be given a much vaguer dating than 1810, it could be a decade before or after: their faces almost bring to mind Hänsel and Gretel from the famous fairy tale. The two figures to the right seem more datable: we’ve mentioned one already; as for the other, the more anxious, her Empire hairstyle makes her the only figure of a specific era. Beyond the postures, which in some respects give us their living models’ particular features in which the artist has certainly given us something to indulge, there is also the beauty of the landscape, so rich in mood and colour, and so well arranged that it could stand alone, without figures. In that too, it’s hard to know whether to appreciate more the palpable fiction of the imagination’s ideal place, the classical datum, or the varied manners in which it is painted, going from distinct drawing of bushes and foliage, with the keenness of the pages of an herbarium, to a picturesque smudge, all flair and motion, seeking to transmit the damp and atmospheric vibration of nature, and its silent breath.

Turning now to the painting’s fame, too scarce in truth, on the iconographic side it is clear that a fine, large drawing by Bartolomeo Pinelli, from 1824 (Museo di Roma), makes use of a similar prototype, although in a classicist key (and philologically less correct, because in Palagi, quite rightly only Hylas is wearing a chlamys) and in a sense trivialised by the almost too ingenuously illustrative erotic content. On the stylistic side, it is not hard to see how the painting of Hayez at the time of his Rinaldo and Armida, from 1813, shares the same model although his type of landscape seems that of papier-peint, while ours is still “real.”

The subject is important, because it concerns the general problem of the debt of Hayez (who also painted a Hylas, now lost) with regard to his older and more established colleague, which I have discussed elsewhere. Besides, as we know, with the work now in Detroit, Palagi also created a significant precedent for Ingres’ Jupiter and Thetis. It was Palagi himself who invited Hayez to collaborate with him at Palazzo Torlonia, later confirmed by a canvas lunette I found. To return to our painting’s legacy, we also know of a Hylas by Podesti, however, whose whereabouts are not known. Whereas Sogni’s very beautiful version is known, although coming much later than our painting, while another capital work by this artist, which is to say Adam and Eve, from 1838, shows, especially in the figure of Eve, how much Palagi’s Hylas had been of influence.

A few words about the emblematic aspect of the ancient fable, a metaphor for the good death, although Palagi, focussing on the implicit facts, gives it a painful meaning too, combining it with the theme of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (another erotic-fluvial fable), in other words impossible love: which makes the drama seem ambiguous and is undoubtedly subtle on a cryptic level. The myth certainly says the young man loved by Hercules disembarks from the ship to seek water for the Argonauts. And that the involuntary trap set by the naiads of the place, who, lusting after him, cause him to fall into the pool and drown. Palagi adds the motif of the androgynous youth’s natural reticence towards the female embrace, as well as that of fear (by the suggestion of the youth’s precarious equilibrium), of the nightmare (through the slowed and therefore obsessive analysis of the actions), of the presage of death (through the image of pouring, symbol of oblivion), in a sort of congested “amorous wilderness.” Which, besides recalling the classicistic-erudite still dominant in the Betrothal of Psyche, succeeds in its entirely modern elegiac and indeed romantic essence.

Gian Lorenzo Mellini

Text published in “Labyrinthos” (12, 1987, pp. 54-71) with the title “Hylas and the Nymphs” and Other Things by Pelagio Palagi.

Bibliography: “Pelagio Palagi artista e collezionista”, exhibition catalogue, Bologna 1976, p. 25; S. Rudolph, “Giuseppe Tambroni e lo stato delle belle arti a Roma”, Rome 1982, p. 57; C. Poppi in “Pelagio Palagi pittore”, Milan 1996, pp. 35-36, 260-261.