The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance.

Edith Wyss. Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1993. 182 pp. $69.50. ISBN: 0-87413-540-0.

The impetus of the book, drawn from Wyss's dissertation, was Titian's darkly moving "Flaying of Marsyas" and a desire "to understand Titian's voice as his audience had heard it four centuries ago" (13). Indeed, the closing chapter features the painting in the context of the accrued heritage of the myth and Titian's preoccupation with suffering and death. Wyss's response to the color and surface of the tortured Marsyas, an honest and affective response, enriches the discussion.

Concerned with Renaissance perception of the classical myth, Wyss traces its evolution through classical and medieval literature, noting a dominant Pythagorean/Platonic ideology in the varied meanings ascribed to the lyre, flute, Apollo, and Marsyas. Apollo-Helios and his seven-string lyre became musica mundana and celestial order and harmony; Marsyas and the flute were the necessary balance in musica humana and the lower musica instrumentalis. Plato's metaphor of the silene figurines and of Socrates as Marsyas, also contributed to Renaissance art. Sixteenth-century literati, led by the Florentine Academy, were clearly aware of the ancient meaning of the myth, and while dependent on Ovidian paraphrases and glosses, creatively adapted episodes and meanings appropriate to the political, intellectual, religious - and diversionary - interests of the Cinquecento and Seicento. Wyss shows that Pythagorean/Platonic thought guided central Italy until the mid-sixteenth century. Northern Italians depicted the myth with less idealism and favored more dramatic elements such as Apollo as executioner (present in literature but avoided in both the classical and central Italian Renaissance arts) instead of the knife-wielding Scythian intermediary. Tridentine suspicion of pagan studies weakened the hold of Neoplatonism and artists began to treat the myth lightly as a conflation of Pan, or presented Marsyas as a suffering victim at the hand of a cruel false god.

Wyss introduces Renaissance art with discussion of available classical works: sculptures, sarcophagi narrative reliefs, murals and ceiling paintings, and at least one important gem, the Naples carnelian whose image of the Victory of Apollo over a seated, bound silene spawned multiple depictions in all media extending into the baroque. The masters whose works contain representations of the fable include Perugino, Giulio Romano, Bronzino, and Jacopo Sansovino. Emphasis is on their interpretations of the myth, and Wyss studies the episodes, participants, and symbolic elements, frequently revealing new aspects of content and clarifying subjects. Raphael's Ashmolean drawing titled "Three Musicians" is convincingly shown to be the contest of Apollo and Marsyas before a muse. Analysis of the flaying scene in the Stanza della Segnatura vault, and its resonance with the adjacent Poetry and Theology lunettes, is particularly fine. The study of Parmigianino's delicate ink and wash drawings in the Louvre extends that cycle to eight episodes beginning with Mercury's seven-pipe syrinx and culminating with a grieving friend of Marsyas. Wyss also develops less familiar works that most interestingly or extensively employed the myth or had significant influence on other works. For example, the woodcut by Master "ia" for Bonsignori's "Ovidio metamorphoseos" of 1497, with five episodes of the myth, influenced later illustrators and painters, central and northern.

Titian's "Flaying of Marsyas," presented in color as the frontispiece, is regrettably the only color reproduction among the 116 illustrations, some of which are difficult to decipher. However, the print is remarkably easy to read and the general format and placement of figures are good. The book includes all examples of the myth found by Wyss exclusive of cut gems, majolica ware, and jewelry, with explanations of models, interrelationships, iconography, and contexts. An appendix to the illustrations provides pertinent data for each work. Wyss's bibliography includes references through 1993.

MARGARET FLANSBURG University of Central Oklahoma