‘Man carries all animals within himself’

Abstract

This article addresses Rubens’s perspective on the human-animal by focusing on the satyr as one of his favourite mythological characters. This profoundly liminal being appears in a variety of roles throughout his oeuvre, including several paintings that remained in his private collection. In some of them, the satyr is primarily a figure for unbridled lustfulness and sensuality. In many others, however, this hybrid creature appears to hold the key to some of the mysteries of nature itself. Another facet of this analysis concerns the long-standing connection between this mythological character and literary satire. Rubens’s satyr-themed images bear a number of salient qualities of this literary genre as one that destabilizes boundaries: between the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the comical, the sublime and the grotesque.