The tragic love story of Pyramus and Thisbeus inspired Shakespeare to write one of his most famous dramas: Romeo and Juliet. The story is recounted by Ovid, a Latin author and contemporary of the Emperor Augustus, in his Metamorphoses (Book IV). Pyramus and Thisbeus are young men who live in adjoining houses in Nineveh in Babylonia. Since childhood, they have exchanged friendly messages through a crack in the wall separating their gardens. Their parents prevent them from meeting. But their feelings get the better of them, and they decide to meet at night in a secluded spot by a fountain, near the tomb of Ninus, the city's founder. Their destiny takes a tragic turn when a lioness, prowling in the vicinity, catches and stains with the blood of its last victim the veil that Thisbeus lost when he arrived on the scene. Pyramus arrives and finds the veil, but is mistaken. He believes Thisbeus to be the victim of the wild beast, and in despair commits suicide. Thisbeus finds him and, in turn, takes his own life, imploring their respective fathers to bury them together.

The scene depicted here comes at the end of Ovid's story. On the right of the canvas, in the foreground, the lifeless bodies of the two lovers lie under a tree near the fountain. In the background, on the left, behind the trees, in a moonlit clearing, we can see the ghostly silhouettes of the parents expressing their grief with desperate gestures. The treatment of this detail, sketched in shades of white, evokes the backgrounds of Tintoretto's paintings. A ray emanating from the Moon - Sîn, the major Babylonian divinity - crosses the forest to reach the side of an ancient cinerary urn perched on a block of marble in front of the fountain. In a way, Sîn himself is telling the fathers to respond to Thisbe's exhortation and deposit her remains and those of her lover in this receptacle. This scene evokes both the denouement of the drama and the moral to be drawn from it.

The composition of the painting places the actors in the scene on two opposite planes, at either end of an oblique axis that orients the perspective from right to left. It implies a moral condemnation. The full exercise of paternal authority in opposition to the ways of nature leads to excess, contrary to reason, and is punished by the gods. The two bodies take centre stage, while the silhouettes of the parents take a back seat. The parents are the cause of the tragic epilogue to this love story, while the fate of the two unfortunate heroes is the consequence. The dark foliage under which the inert bodies of the victims are presented evokes the role of the dark forces that play on humans in Greek tragedies. There are echoes of the ominous chords that resound in the finale of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. The stage props, meanwhile, are borrowed from collections of antiquities built up from the Roman excavations of the Renaissance to those of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century. The skilful layout is inspired by the compositions popularised in Piranesi's engravings. However, the structure of the fountain, with its apse flanked by two atlatls, recalls the architectural elements of landscape compositions by Tintoretto and Veronese. In the eyes of the connoisseur, the painting's antiquisite scenography confirms the legitimacy of the lesson that can be drawn from the story of Pyramus and Thisbeus.

The themes running through this painting also foreshadow Romanticism. Nature is an actor in the drama played out in chiaroscuro. The thirst for freedom is confronted by patriarchal authority, she cannot escape fate and love triumphs in death.


Attribué à James FORRESTER (Dublin, 1729/1730 - 1775/1776, Rome), Pyrame et Thisbé
Oil on canvas
60,9 x 73 cm

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