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Less severe than the Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe is the Landscape with Orpheus and Euridice in the Louvre. Here the artist was dealing with a much less solemn subject, but even so the forms are rather hard. The whole has the feeling of having been put together in pieces like a jig-saw puzzle, rather than composed as a single entity as was the Diogenes, surely one of the most perfectly ordered but naturalistic landscapes ever painted.
Orpheus is a legendary Thracian poet, famous for his skill with the lyre. He married Eurydice, a wood nymph, and at her death descended into the underworld in an unsuccessful attempt to bring her back to earth.
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