The Satyr and the Peasant

Johann Liss's Satyr and the Peasant, painted probably between 1623 and 1626 during his Venetian years, takes as its subject one of Aesop's fables: a satyr encounters a peasant who blows on his cold hands to warm them and then blows on his hot soup to cool it, and the satyr, confused by the double use of breath, departs. The fable was a favourite emblem of inconsistency and duplicity, and Liss transforms it into a scene of vivid physical comedy and Caravaggesque close-up drama. Working in Venice after periods in the Netherlands, Paris, and Rome, Liss had absorbed an extraordinarily wide range of European painting, and his mature Venetian works combine the earthy directness of Flemish genre painting with the warm colour and atmospheric freedom of the Venetian tradition. His early death left this synthesis frustratingly incomplete.

Liss brings the figures close to the picture surface in the Caravaggesque manner, the satyr's rough-featured face and the peasant's domestic setting rendered with warm, energetic brushwork. His loose, fluid handling of paint — texturally generous in the lighted areas — gives the scene a spontaneous vitality.