Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (5.1964)

Wolfgang Slechow

ADDENDA TO "THE LOYE OF ANTIOCHUS WITH FAIRE

STRATONICA"

1. Gerard de Lairesse (or after him), Poznań, Muzeum Narodowe

Nineteen years have passed sińce I rendered an acccunt of The Love of Antiochus withfaire
Stratonica in Art — an account in which I endeavored to throw light on Goethe's favorite
Geschichte vom kranken Kdnigssohn from the point of view of painting, literaturę and mu-
sie1. Today a picture in the Poznań Museum affords me the opportunity to return to the subject,
briefly to summarize my earlier findings and to add a few new points which have come to my
attention sińce 1945.

I hope I may be forgiven for ąuoting in fuli certain passages from two introductory para-
graphs of my former article.

„The story of Antiochus and Stratonice might well be called one of the outstanding morał
tales of world literaturę. It appealed to ancient writers such as Valerius Maximus, Plutarch,
Lucian, and Appian; to Petrarch and the novelists of the Renaissance; to French seventeenth-
century dramatists such as Philippe Quinault and Thomas Corneille; and to a host of late
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century classicists including Winckelmann and Goethe. It
was treated in a flood of opera libretti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And finally,
it has left remarkable traces in paintings and drawings from the fifteenth down to the nine-

1. ThrArlBullelin, XXVII, 1945, pp. 221-237 (herc quotcd as,,St").

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