Apolo desollando a Marsias

In 1637, working in Spanish-ruled Naples, Jusepe de Ribera took up one of the cruelest stories in Ovid. The satyr Marsyas had dared to challenge the god Apollo to a music contest, pipes against lyre, and lost, and the price of losing was to be skinned alive. Ribera paints the exact moment the knife goes in. Apollo bends to the work with an almost gentle, blank face, while Marsyas, hung upside down, twists his open mouth toward us so that we become the ones he is begging. Up in the corner the pipes and the lyre hang where the music ended. Ribera was pleased enough with the design to paint a second version that same year, now in Brussels.