Niccolò dell'Abate, 'The Death of Eurydice', about 1552-71

The story of Eurydice and Aristaeus is told by the Roman poet Virgil (Georgics, IV) and was retold by the fifteenth-century Italian lyric poet Poliziano in his Orfeo. Niccolò dell’Abate has approached the composition as a continuous narrative – he has shown episodes of the story all together even though they occurred at different times.

In the far distance Orpheus, Eurydice’s husband, charms the animals with his music. A leopard, stag, boar, lion and even a unicorn have gathered to listen to him playing his lyre. In the central foreground, three nymphs are gathering flowers, unaware that the shepherd Aristaeus is pursuing Eurydice. She is bitten by a snake as she runs away. Slightly to the right, Eurydice – identifiable by her blue drapery – appears again, lying dead on the ground. In the middle distance, Aristaeus consults his mother Cyrene concerning the death of his bees. The male figure with the overflowing urn lying on the ground to the extreme right is the sea-god Proteus, who explained to Aristaeus that the disaster in the hives was a punishment for his pursuit of Eurydice.

This picture was probably painted in France, where Niccolò worked from 1552 onwards. Documents at the Royal Château of Fontainebleau, which was once owned by the kings of France, record that he painted several large landscapes for the king’s study. This painting is not specifically mentioned, although it may have been among the ‘eight large landscapes’ recorded in the 1692 inventory of the Cabinet of Paintings at Fontainebleau.

The landscape is truly spectacular. Golden clouds filter sunlight and shadow across a multitude of fantastic classical buildings, spires and columns to magical effect. The glassy surface of the sea is shrouded in mist in the distance where it meets the slopes of the snow-covered mountains. Clusters of houses nestle among thickets of trees and vegetation, which cling to the shore and sprout from rocky hillsides. Water, mountains, land, plants and buildings are combined harmoniously, bathed in streaks of warm golden sunlight or cast in deep shade.

The extensive landscape shows the influence of Dosso Dossi, who during the 1520s and 1530s painted delicate dreamlands lit by an unearthly light and populated by small mythological characters. The mythological paintings Niccolò dell’Abate produced in France marry the landscape with the figures in a way that expresses the emotional content of the story. Although this was an approach employed by earlier Italian artists, it was quite new in French art and anticipated the classicising landscapes of the seventeenth-century French artists Poussin and Claude.