Alice Schwarz: It's difficult for me to walk
past this piece and not stop and gasp every
time.
Try to position your face, pick up this exact
expression.
Particularly if you are visiting with a companion,
watch each other get into this facial expression.
Narrator: This sculpture is of Marsyas, a
figure from Greek mythology who has just lost
a musical contest to the god Apollo.
His punishment is to be flayed alive.
Wolfram Koeppe: You first look at the impression
of his face: the open mouth and the clinched
eyes and the pressure, below the skin of his
eyebrows, where you can see that, in his body,
he's desperate, and his expression is full
of pain.
And if we explore it closer, we see that already
part of his tongue is cut away, which was
part of the punishment.
So he can't even cry out to let the pain free.
The hair of Marsyas is depicted in an ingenious
artistic way--into curls that go up like flames;
the pain can emerge from the body like flames
from a fire.
The twisting head shows that the flaying has
already started, because the skin is so thin
that you see the flesh and the bone structure
under it.
You don't have one quiet point in the whole
sculpture.
Everything is moving.
Even if it is a mythological figure, he is
depicted like a human in pain, in desperate
pain.
