Cesare Dandini, Four musical allegories with female figures

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

58 × 38.7 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-149611

Each of the four canvases in this series depict four female figures, or muses, holding instruments in accordance with their guise as allegories of music. Each figure is richly draped in coloured robes and wears a garland about her head, which is also haloed by light. The figures are arranged in two pairs on each canvas, one to the left and the other to the right, with a gap in between. The musicians are all standing in landscapes, two in a cave and two out in the open. These four canvasses depict music as one of the four quadrivium, or higher liberal arts. These were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The liberal arts were often allegorised in baroque painting to symbolise both cosmic order and human virtue. The idealised figures and the pastoral landscapes further emphasise the celestial, allegorical nature of the subject. The series depicts several early 17th Century Italian musical instruments and groups them in ways that would have been familiar to a contemporary audience. The first canvas shows a harpsichord, a Renaissance zither, a viola da gamba, and a theorbo. The second includes two violins, a harpsichord, and a lute. The instruments in these two pictures were most commonly used for chamber or domestic music. In the third canvas, the figures play a horn, a flute, and two different trumpets, symbolising ceremonial or processional music, and in the final picture we have a harp, a violin, a viola, and a lute. These stringed instruments perhaps represent lyrical or poetic music.