“Quis et me miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, Quis tantus furor?
Jamque vale—!”
STEIN PHOTO.] [PLAQUETTE IN THE MUSEUM, BERLIN
20. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
The other version of this same subject to which Peter Vischer the younger returned apparently in later years is still more finely conceived and finely executed. The artist by this time, about the year 1520 let us say, had found his own soul and strength, and dared to be more himself. The Berlin plaquette, which passed from the Nagler collection to the Berlin Museum in 1835, is a great improvement upon the old theme. The composition is in all respects much more rhythmical and harmonious. Orpheus has been stepping quickly forward, playing as only Orpheus with his lute could play, playing for life and love and happiness, when suddenly the irresistible fear has come upon him that she, his half-regained Eurydice, may not be following him. He has, under the spur of that doubt, flung round his head quickly to reassure himself. And she, even in that instant, begins to turn again towards those shadowy regions whence his music and his faith, so far maintained, had drawn her. Reproachful, sorrowing, in the agony of her love and her despair, she gazes at him with one long last look. Here the artist has turned the back-fluttering veil to a new and beautiful motive, and, like the arrangement of the hair and the treatment of the feet, it has been fittingly and carefully thought out to illustrate the two movements in which the tragedy of the moment lies. The style is essentially Italianate, and the device of the two spiked fish in the corner of the plaquette proclaim the authorship of it. Orpheus, it will be noticed, is not provided with the lute of antiquity but with a violin. This is not surprising, for there was a general tendency both in Italian and German art to furnish mythical personages with modern musical instruments. Lübke reminds us, for instance, of the Apollo in Raphael’s “Parnassus.”
Of the other two plaquettes to which we have referred, one is to be found in the Hamburg Museum, and the other was, till 1807, in St. Blasien in the Black Forest, but is now preserved in the institution of St. Paul in Carinthia. They are almost exactly the same with the Berlin copy. But the latter has a poetical inscription above on the upper edge which is absent from the example at St. Paul.
The inscription, which a recollection of the fondness evinced by the young Peter for the study of poetry inclines us to attribute to his pen, runs as follows:
ORPHEA CVM SILVIS FLVVIOS ETSAXA[[TN1]] MOVENTĒ
GRECIA LAETEOS FERT ADYSSE LAVIS
EVRYDICN̅̅ ILLIC VITAE REVOCASSE PRIORI