Note 170 — NUMERICAL CATALOGUE, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES (continued 8)

In a red-figured vase in the British Museum (E 477 in the Third Vase Room) there is a picture of this same subject. "The drawing," says Miss Harrison, "is somewhat coarse, and the painter seems to be struggling with a subject that is expressively too much for him. Procris sinks in death in an odd, ill-drawn attitude; her soul escapes in the form of a bird, Kephalos smites his head in despair, the dog Lailaps watches concerned. Erechtheus, the old king-father, is at hand to sympathise; the curt archaic symbolism of attitude, the utterance of mere gesture, is at fault here. The story was pregnant with modern suggestion. It had to wait, so to speak, for the delicate imagination of the Renaissance painter, Piero di Cosimo, to make us feel the contrast between the dead woman, over-sentient, passion-slain, and the shaggy faun, kindly perplexed, and the dumb, faithful dog; between the soft slack peace of the woodland and the terrible tension of humanity" (Magazine of Art, 1894, p. 61).