This drawing after a Hellenistic statue of Marsyas in the Louvre is an interesting pendant to the one after Houdon's Flayed Man on page 33 verso of this sketchbook (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-27b). One is seen from the back, the other from the front. One is a figure for scientific study, flayed to reveal the musculature, the other, a tragic figure in ancient myth, about to be flayed for having challenged the god Apollo. Yet neither seems to have interested Cézanne as a model of realistic anatomy; and in the drawing of Marsyas he was even less concerned with defining the forms of the torso and arms than in suggesting through soft diagonal strokes the varied tones of the shading and the cast shadows. Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 100.