Pyrame et Thisbé

La Hyre's treatment of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses, one of the most frequently illustrated texts in European painting, where the two Babylonian lovers meet their tragic fate through misunderstanding — Thisbe fleeing a lioness, Pyramus believing her dead, and each taking their own life in succession. The story was understood in the seventeenth century as a prototype of the Romeo and Juliet narrative of doomed love thwarted by family opposition, and its pathos made it attractive to painters working in both the dramatic and the more lyrical traditions of history painting. La Hyre's treatment is undated and now in the collection of an archdiocese, suggesting a religious context for what is a secular classical subject — perhaps a decorative programme for a canonical building that included secular literary subjects alongside religious imagery, as was common in chapter houses and episcopal palaces. La Hyre brings his characteristic landscape sensibility to the subject: the tragedy unfolds in a natural setting that both witnesses and outlasts the human drama, a compositional choice that aligns his approach with Poussin's philosophical landscapes in which nature and myth interpenetrate.

The subject requires La Hyre to manage a double tragedy — first the dying or dead Pyramus, then Thisbe's response — which typically involves two separate figure compositions connected by the shared landscape setting and the mulberry tree that mythologically marks the site. His landscape handling provides a natural theatrical space for the action, using tree masses and receding ground to create the kind of classical landscape setting he had refined over his career. The figure of Thisbe, if present in a discovery posture, demands the emotional expressivity that La Hyre typically modulates carefully.