Capture of Ganymede 1620L.E. van Ohlbijn (1573-1621) Oil on copper, 7¾ × 7 in. (19.2 × 17.8 cm.) Although he is not best known as a miniaturist, van Ohlbijn puts his skills, modest though they may be, to finest use when working on a small scale, as we can see from this charmingly executed little scene, a curiosity among this curious collection. What strikes us first is the artist’s determination to avoid sentimentality – a determination the true result of which, some commentators believe, is a complete absence of sentiment, surely not the effect that was intended: a case, we may say, of throwing the bath-water out with the baby, or boy, in this instance. That doesn’t sound right. Van Ohlbijn has combined in this work the homely skills of the Dutch genre painter that he was, with some scraps of learning brought back with him from a winter spent in Venice and Rome in the early 1600s. We detect influences as disparate as Tintoretto, in the dash and dramatic pace of the piece, and Parmigianino in the curious elongation of the figures, while the almost vertiginous sense of elevation and dreamlike buoyancy anticipates the skyborne works of Gaulli and Tiepolo.
