Pyramus and Thisbe

This is one of the last paintings Niklaus Manuel signed, made around 1520, again in thin tempera on cloth. It tells the close of Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe, two lovers of Babylon kept apart by their families, who agreed to meet after dark by a spring. Thisbe came first, fled a lion and dropped her veil. Pyramus found it bloodied, believed her dead and killed himself, and when she returned to his body she followed him in death. Manuel sets the tragedy in a northern landscape of his own rather than an ancient east. The Basel collector Basilius Amerbach later drew it into the holdings that became this museum.