Could you tell me about the artist's background?
Certainly. Arnold Bocklin, was one of the most celebrated and influential artists in central Europe, particularly Germany and Switzerland, in the later 19th century (even though he spent a great deal of time in Italy). He mostly painted scenes from Classical Mythology but depicted them in really imaginative, idiosyncratic and often dark ways. He is associated with Symbolism, a late 19th-century movement in art and literature that rejected the rationalism and materialism of modern life and the realistic description of the natural world in favor of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea through poetic language, symbolic images, and formal means like color and line. The femme-fatale, death, eroticism, the occult, the diseased and the decadent were popular subjects and themes.
What is the meaning of the small-scale human depicted in such an overwhelming landscape?
Many visitors and art historians have theorized that it may symbolize the vulnerability of humans and the awesomeness of nature. Although, this was originally intended to be a landscape with the myth of Pan chasing Syrinx Bocklin chose to omit those figures.