Satyr

Goat's ears, a ragged beard, a hide over one shoulder, and under his elbow a theatrical mask, the kind an actor would hold. The canvas is tall and narrow, just over 180 centimetres high and 68 across, and it tells no story. That was deliberate. Among the more than 60 paintings shipped from Antwerp in the late 1630s to furnish Philip IV's hunting lodge in the hills outside Madrid, a few were isolated figures like this one: a Fortune, a Mercury, a Reason since lost. For a long time the old face was taken for the philosopher Democritus. The hands come from an engraving by Hendrick Goltzius, a Dutch printmaker of the older generation. The Prado gives the canvas to Rubens and his workshop, and where most of the lodge paintings had a small oil sketch behind them, for this figure none is known.