Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pan.
The gallery
Pan
Mikhail Vrubel, 1899
Mikhail Vrubel's symbolist masterpiece transplants the Arcadian god of the wild into a Russian twilight landscape. A grizzled, blue-eyed Pan rises from the earth like a creature of the soil itself, his curling horns and shaggy goat-flesh dissolving into the birch grove and crescent moon behind him. In his gnarled hands he cradles the syrinx, the reed pipe he is said to have invented; the painting distils Pan's essence as a primordial spirit of nature, untamed, ancient and faintly unsettling — the deity whose sudden presence in lonely places gives us the word 'panic.'
The Magic of Pan's Flute
John Reinhard Weguelin, 1905
In this luminous late-Victorian watercolour, Weguelin imagines the spell cast by Pan's pipes. The goat-legged god sits enthroned upon a rock in a moonlit clearing, piping the syrinx, while nymphs are drawn helplessly toward him to dance in the silvery light. The scene celebrates Pan as god of shepherds, flocks and pastoral music — the inventor of the shepherd's pipe whose melody, in Arcadian belief, could be heard echoing from Mount Maenalus, the mountain held especially sacred to him.
Pan Reclining
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1610
Rubens depicts Pan in a moment of languid repose, the muscular, horned god of the wild stretched out amid the foliage of his woodland realm. The Flemish master renders the god's hybrid nature with characteristic vitality — the powerful human torso giving way to the rough goat-limbs below — capturing the sensual, earthy spirit of the Arcadian deity of fields, groves and untamed places. The work survives in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Pan teaching Daphnis to play the pipes
Unknown (Roman copy after a Greek original), c. 100 BC
This Roman marble group, copied from a Hellenistic Greek original, shows the goat-horned Pan leaning close to instruct the young herdsman Daphnis in the art of the syrinx. The sculpture embodies Pan's role as the divine source of pastoral music: it was Pan, the Arcadians said, who first discovered the music of the pipes at Melpeia on the Nomian Mountains, and the reed flute he invented passed from the god to mortal shepherds. The intimate, tender grouping reflects the bucolic charm prized in Hellenistic art.
In music & on stage
In play
Panic
English panic descends from Pan — the sudden terror said to seize flocks and armies when the goat-god's shout rolled through the trees.
The Great God Pan
Arthur Machen
Machen's horror novella turns the rustic god into a Victorian nightmare of transcendence and ruin — Pan as the force that shatters the thin veil of the everyday.
Pan flute
The syrinx of reed pipes still bears Pan's name worldwide — the god's pursuit of Syrinx turned into the instrument of shepherds and concert stages.