Guided Pathway

It should not escape our notice that the internal organization of the images of Panel 70 itself makes a claim about the successful inheritance of antiquity’s “pathos formulae” by the northern Baroque. There are several “paths” through the panel along different axes, in other words, with a diagonal upper-left to lower-right trajectory (Savery, #1.1-3, to de Passe, #18.1 and #18.2) competing with a top-right to bottom-right vertical one (Struys and Tempesta, #2.1-2, to de Passe, #18.1 and #18.2) for the “reader’s” attention.