Orpheus and the animals

In Greek myth, Orpheus was the Thracian singer whose music was so beautiful that wild animals would lie down at his feet to listen. Hans Leu painted that moment in 1519, but what he really cared about was the forest. Around these years painters in the German-speaking lands were beginning to treat wild woodland as a subject worth painting for its own sake, the way Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the so-called Danube School did, and Leu was among the first to bring that feeling for nature to Switzerland. So the Greek poet sits almost swallowed by a dense northern forest, ringed by deer, birds and other creatures drawn out of the trees. Leu worked in tempera straight onto unprimed canvas, a thin, quick technique closer to watercolour than to a polished panel, which lets the woods stay loose and alive. Down in a corner he left his mark, the linked letters H and L above the date.