Guided Pathway

The Dutch Knüpfer’s painting is said to be based on a similar painting – also entitled “Il Contento” (1607) – by the German artist, Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), which illustrates an episode in the Spanish picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). In the novel, the worship of the god “Contento” (god of contentment and happiness) instead of the Olympians has angered Jupiter; he sends Mercury to abduct “Contento” and replace him with his twin brother, “Discontento.” Elsheimer turns “Contento” into a female goddess (Restorff).  In the Knüpfer version included in Panel 70, on the upper left, we observe the panic at what will follow at the precise moment of the abduction, the conversion of peace into war; the right of the image depicts the human suffering that will follow. Elsheimer was a known model for Rembrandt; given the dates, it must have been his version of “Il Contento” rather than Knüpfer’s that Rembrandt used, and we can see the realistic face of his “Contento” echoed in the later artist’s Proserpina – even if it may have seemed to Warburg that Rembrandt was citing the twisted body of Knüpfer’s “Contento” in his “Baroque” version instead.