Procris
Anton Raphael Mengs·1761
Historical Context
Procris — from Ovid's myth of Cephalus and Procris, in which the hunter Cephalus accidentally kills his wife Procris whom he has mistaken for an animal in the forest — is a subject that had attracted painters from the Renaissance through the Baroque for its fusion of tragedy, erotic feeling, and classical narrative. Mengs's 1761 painting, now in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, belongs to his early Spanish period and represents his engagement with tragic classical mythology alongside the celebratory and devotional subjects that dominated his court work. The Danish National Gallery's holding of this Italian-context mythological painting reflects the wide dispersal of Mengs's output across northern European collections.
Technical Analysis
The Procris subject typically depicted the dying woman with the fatal wound, attended by the grief-stricken Cephalus — a composition that required Mengs to manage the specific visual vocabulary of dying or dead feminine beauty. His characteristic smooth flesh modelling found an unusual application in the pallor of a mortally wounded body.
Look Closer
- ◆Procris's wound — traditionally in the throat, from Cephalus's javelin — must be present but rendered with classical decorum, the cause of death visible but not grotesquely emphasised.
- ◆Cephalus's expression of horror and grief combines the expressive demands of tragedy with Mengs's theoretical preference for noble restraint over theatrical excess.
- ◆The forest setting, if rendered, provides spatial grounding for the mythological narrative while allowing landscape elements that create atmospheric depth.
- ◆The dying Procris's white or pale flesh is likely the compositional focus, her cooling skin contrasting with the warm blood of the wound — a technical challenge of representing life departing from an ideal body.
