The Flaying of Marsyas

This fresco was the last thing a visitor saw on leaving the Stanza di Apollo, a room in the garden pavilion that Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, built behind his villa at Frascati, outside Rome. The room held a fountain shaped as Mount Parnassus, where a hidden water organ made statues of the Muses seem to play, and ten scenes from the myths of Apollo ran round the walls. This one, the only wide scene, was over the door. The satyr Marsyas had challenged Apollo to a music contest and lost, and the god flays him alive, tied to a tree. For the Aldobrandini, Apollo stood for reason and the half-animal satyr for the passions it has to master. Domenichino designed the cycle, and assistants did most of the painting. In his drawings, though, the kneeling satyr is still standing, a change that suggests he worked on this wall himself. The detached fresco came to London in 1958 from the Lanckoronski collection in Vienna.