Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (37.1996)

andXenocrates34 and in the latter the hands of Xenocrates as well, distinctively
callused and swarthy.

Honthorst’s scenes of this kind show an indebtedness as well to the early work
of Caravaggio (and through its mediation also to Lombardian and Venetian
painting of the late sixteenth century) - with perhaps an even greater debt to
Bartolomeo Manfredi, and to Bolognese painting represented by Annibale
Carracci and Dominichino.35 They would soon cause him to desert the
Caravaggesque camp to become one of the initiators of the classicist trend in
Dutch painting. But in our painting the legacy of Caravaggio is still present in
strong, focused lighting, figures emerging from dark surroundings, with
attention concentrated on the shallow space of the foreground, a reduced
number of figures and accessories, and in the confined framing of the scene. The
main motif can also be defined as typical of followers of Caravaggio; suffice it
to mention Manfredi’s painting with Bacchus squeezing grapes into a glass of
one of his followers (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Corsini, Rome)
or Renieri’s Bacchus, crushing a bunch of grapes over a large shell (formerly in
a private collection in Berlin). Honthorst himself painted a similar picture at
approximately the same time as our Satyrs, limited to a torso view, namely

34 Ibidem, respectively cat. no. 168 and 103, Fig. 26 and 31; the latter painting was recently sold
in auction at Sotheby’s, London, December, 12th , 1990

35 Cf. J.R.Judson, Gerrit van Honthorst..., op. cit., cat. nos. 74-79, 89, 92-93.

13. Gerord von Honthorst,
Nymph and Satyr, 1623,
Schönborn Collection,
Pommersfelden

239