Donato Creti

A painter and draftsman of great elegance and refinement, Donato Creti was active in his native Bologna. Most of his drawings are in pen and ink. His distinctive graphic style is characterized by the use of short, choppy hatched strokes employed for modeling form and describing volume, combined with contour lines that are either hard and incisive, or rapid, fluid and searching.
A fine typical example of Creti's manner is this sheet of figure studies for a composition of Pan and Syrinx. Half-man, half goat, the rustic deity Pan appears at the center of the sheet, his arms flung outward around some illegibly sketched support. An unrelated, more abbreviated sketch of a running woman with outstretched arms is at the left. She is the nymph Syrinx, daughter of a river god, who, fleeing the advances of the lascivious Pan was turned into a reed by her sisters (one of whom is presumably the seated woman shown at the lower edge of the sheet, which was rotated 90 degrees for this sketch). Ripped out of the riverbed and cut into pieces by the infuriated god, the reeds, tied together, became his ubiquitous flute or Pan-pipes.
No painting of this subject by Creti is known, but the composition is evidently one to which he devoted considerable attention: this working drawing relates to a more finished black chalk study by the artist, also in the Morgan, showing the furry legged, bearded Pan peering through a parted sea of reeds at the unseen object of his passionate advances, that object being Syrinx, as the new drawing elaborating a narrative content established (inv. no. 1974.32).