A figure of a satyr is seated and bound with his arms to a tree that has been cut down, the stump forming the seat; a single branch rises behind the satyr, breaking off behind the back of its head. The satyr lifts his right leg slightly, looks upwards and to his left. He has an erection, partly bowdlerized. The right horn is partly broken off. The edges of the seat are formed from two harpies, each in the form of a winged female torso, the body ending in a scrolled foot; the harpies’ wings join as scrolls at front and back, while the creatures’ chests morph into a male mask, with elephant trunk beards scrolled at their ends, the beard of the mask on the proper-left harpy not reaching the ground, but ending in a curl in mid-air. Blackish patination remains, and on the back of the tree trunk is the painted number “594.”

This well-modeled bronze figure is likely to be a fragment from a group, popularly if inaccurately known as the Chastisement of Pan. The most complete surviving version is the one in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig. 58.1), recorded in the Liechtenstein collection in the eighteenth century.¹ The Oxford group consists, in addition to the bound satyr, of a naked female nymph standing by the satyr and holding a bowl of flowers in her left hand, while to the right of this main group a small figure of Cupid strides forward, his right arm outstretched. On the ground formed by the circular base plate lies, at the satyr's feet, a small clothed boy, apparently in a drunken stupor, since he holds a drinking bowl with an overturned flagon lying next to him. The Oxford version is of modest quality. The cast may date from as late as the seventeenth century, although assessment is more difficult as it was worked over, probably in the early nineteenth century, when the group was set upon an anomalous lower section in the form of a tripod with crouching sphinxes. There is another, better, gilded version in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, formed from just the satyr and the nymph, also set on a circular base plate, with the figure of the drunken child.² In addition, there survive single figures of the bound satyr and of the nymph, which may be presumed to have originally belonged to groups. A version of the bound satyr is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art,³ and another is recorded as formerly in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, but now is lost.⁴ Noting that there was now no record in the museum of the latter bronze and that the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum was known to have deaccessioned objects in the years around 1930, Carolyn C. Wilson speculated whether that version might conceivably be identifiable with the one now in Houston.⁵ However, Planiscig’s statement that it was a “crude workshop replica” (Rohe Werkstattwiederholung) does not really chime with the Houston Bound Satyr, a bronze of reasonably good quality.

The four extant versions of the figure of the bound satyr are essentially similar, so may all be assumed to depend from the same model. There are nevertheless small differences in their details, notably in the form of the tree and in the tree-trunk seat with its harpy supports. In the Louvre version, the trunk rises a little above the heads of the protagonists, and a set of pipes hangs from one of the branches. There is a swag with a shell at the base of the tree stump, below the satyr’s legs. The Philadelphia version also has the swag, but the tree trunk is cut off just above the satyr’s hands; the Oxford version retains vestiges of the swag on the base, and the trunk rises to the height of the satyr’s head. If the latter version is compared with the Houston figure, the harpies’ fur is more clearly distinguished from that of the satyr’s legs, whereas the Houston satyr’s tongue protrudes, his counterpart in Oxford grimaces, showing his teeth. Of the four surviving examples of this figure, the one in the Louvre would seem to be the best, followed probably by that in Houston, rougher in its modeling than its more carefully finished counterpart in Philadelphia, but with a pleasing vigor more appropriate to the subject.

Planiscig gave the Oxford group the title of the Chastisement of Pan, by which it is generally now known, but the subject is puzzling. The presence in the Louvre version of the pipes hanging from the tree would seem to relate it to one of the cruellest stories from classical mythology, the flaying of Marsyas. The goddess Minerva had invented the flute but, angry at being laughed at when her cheeks bulged as she played it, she had thrown away the flute, laying a curse on it. The instrument was found by the hapless Marsyas, a satyr and follower of Bacchus, who became highly proficient at playing it. News of Marsyas’s skill enraged the sun god Apollo, who challenged the satyr to a musical contest, suggesting that the winner be permitted to impose on the other whatever penalty he chose. With his followers the Muses as the judges, Apollo inevitably emerged the winner, upon which he announced his intention of flaying Marsyas alive. As told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses (6.382–98), which recount a series of mythological transformations, it was not Marsyas’s blood that became the agent of change, but rather the tears of the human and mythological inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, which sank into the ground to form the river Marsyas.

A related bronze group from the circle of Riccio clearly depicts this subject. Formerly in the Schlossmuseum, Mannheim,⁶ it showed Apollo standing to the side of Marsyas and hanging his pipes in the branches of the tree, to which Marsyas, seated on the ground, is bound. A version of this group was in the seventeenth-century collection of Jacobus de Wilde in Amsterdam.⁷ Like the Chastisement of Pan, isolated examples of the seated and bound satyr from this group are to be found, some of which may have been conceived as independent compositions. Some of these also clearly identify the satyr as Marsyas, for example that in the Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna, in which Marsyas’s pipes are suspended from the tree and a tiny viol is attached to the back of the trunk,⁸ or the one in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, in which a larger viol is attached to the tree above the satyr’s head.⁹

While it would be tempting to identify the Houston Bound Satyr as a depiction of the satyr Marsyas, there is no evidence from the complete groups in Oxford and Paris of any place in the composition for a figure of Apollo, nor is there any mention in the legend of Marsyas of a nymph who succours the suffering satyr with a gift of fruit or flowers. But in these groups neither the nymph, identified by Planiscig as Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees because of the bowl of flowers which she carries, nor the energetic figure of Cupid, seem to relate satisfactorily to the figure of the satyr. The recumbent figure of the boy directly beneath the satyr’s feet likewise appears disconnected with the rest of the composition.

Although these disjunctions have led some scholars to suggest that the Chastisement of Pan group is simply a pastiche of unrelated figures, brought together at some later date, this would appear not to be the case. The Venetian lawyer Ludovico Usper owned a bronze of this composition, or something very similar, recorded in an inventory of his belongings taken in 1601 as “a bronze satyr tied to a tree with Venus.”¹⁰ A very similar figure of a little drunken boy lies in the foreground of the print of the Satyr Family by the Master of 1515,¹¹ whilst another depiction of a small boy, in which the drunkenness is explicit, may be found in a painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, of c. 1500 of Putti with a Wine Press, by an Umbrian follower of Raphael.¹² Insofar as the Chastisement of Pan group has a theme, therefore, it is likely to have been conceived around allegorical notions of physical excess, especially the sins of lust or drunkenness.

Wilhelm Bode’s attribution of both the Oxford group and the single figures of Pomona and the bound satyr to Riccio was quickly adopted by other scholars, among them Leo Planiscig in his 1927 Riccio monograph.¹³ The attribution to Riccio or, more often, his workshop, has survived until quite recent times.¹⁴ It has become increasingly evident however that these bronzes, whilst they incorporate Ricciesque motifs, have little stylistically in common with his accepted autograph works. Ursel Berger and Volker Krahn suggested that the Oxford Chastisement of Pan and a figure of Venus in the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick are pasticcio compositions, products of a workshop which probably had access either to old models or to small bronzes.¹⁵ Krahn has subsequently discussed the Louvre group, suggesting that it was made in the second quarter of the sixteenth century in a Paduan workshop, perhaps that of Desiderio da Firenze (fl. Padua, c. 1532–45). In his important article on the mysterious Desiderio, a follower of Riccio who may have come into possession of the older sculptor’s workshop and models after Riccio’s death in 1532, Bertrand Jestaz argued emphatically for the attribution to him of the whole of this group of bronzes.¹⁶

In his essay, Jestaz painted a picture of Desiderio as a manufacturer of bronzes who shamelessly pillaged the models and compositions of other artists, making bronzes of classical subject matter that were conceivably principally marketed as genuine antiquities, especially to the many more or less gullible foreign visitors to Padua. Jestaz suggested that Riccio’s models would have been the main source for the Chastisement of Pan group, but the group in fact seems to reflect Riccio’s style only loosely. The figures of the satyr and the nymph conceivably have closer parallels with another Paduan maker of bronzes, Giovanni Fonduli da Crema, in so far as can be judged from the single documented example of his work known today, a partly gilt figure of a seated woman in the Wallace Collection, London, (fig. 58.2), signed “OPVS IO CRE.”¹⁷ The Wallace Collection seated woman has always been recognized as strongly reminiscent of the style of Riccio’s female figures, to the extent that Bode suggested that, had it not been signed, it would certainly have been attributed to him.¹⁸ He thought that Giovanni Fonduli might therefore have been Riccio’s pupil. However Fonduli, well documented as a sculptor in terracotta, was in fact a generation older than Riccio, so it is more probable that the relationship might have been inverted, with Riccio learning the art of terracotta sculpting and, perhaps, bronze sculpture in Fonduli’s workshop.¹⁹ Although the seated woman is the only bronze statuette that can be attributed with certainty to the artist, he must have had a good reputation as a bronze sculptor since in 1484 he received a commission for a bronze relief, of unspecified subject, for installation in the choir of the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua (the Santo). This relief was never executed. Attempts to attribute other bronzes to him have been isolated and generally improbable, excepting perhaps the recent attribution to Giovanni Fonduli of the bronze monument in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Padua, commissioned in 1492 by Niccolò de Castro in memory of his father, Angelo, and his grandfather Paolo, both noted lawyers in Padua.²⁰

Although the Wallace Collection seated woman is a production of an altogether higher order, a number of comparisons can be made with the Chastisement of Pan groups and its related single figures. These include the thick bull-neck, seen in the both the bound satyr and the standing nymph; the somewhat African features and the elaborate coiffure and tiara of the Pomona figures. The sphinx figures forming the base of the satyr’s seat may be compared with that supporting the proper left side of the woman’s seat. They reflect, as does the subject of the bound satyr, the interest in fantastical creatures from antiquity in Padua around 1500. The theorist and amateur sculptor Pomponius Gauricus (c. 1482–c. 1530) complained in his treatise De Sculptura, published in 1504, of how contemporary sculptors were ‘now so taken up with representing satyrs, hydras, chimeras, and other monsters that they have never actually seen, that they give the impression there is nothing else to be sculpted.²¹ The maker of such a consummate work of art as the Wallace Collection Seated Woman must surely have been highly experienced in the modeling and production of bronzes, so it would be very surprising if no further products of his workshop had survived. It may well be that the Chastisement of Pan group was reproduced in a secondary workshop such as that hypothesised for Desiderio da Firenze. There may at the same time be a case for considering whether the original model originated in Giovanni Fonduli’s Paduan workshop and whether, therefore, some of the better of the individual figures might be attributable to the workshop of this talented sculptor.

—Jeremy Warren