Apollo and Marsyas

The myth here is one of the cruellest the Greeks told. A satyr named Marsyas grew so skilled on his pipes that he dared the god Apollo to a musical contest, lost, and was flayed alive as his punishment. Most painters seize on that horror, the knife and the raw flesh. Liss, at work in Venice in the late 1620s, does something stranger. He lets the cruelty fade into a hazy, breathless hush, so the scene reads as a moment of silent, panic-struck excitement rather than an execution. The forms are soft and the warm colour blurs at the edges, a dreamlike sensuality that painting would not take up widely for another hundred years. It survives as one of only a small group of works he left behind.