For the next 10 minutes, we'll be looking
at Cosimo Tura's 'Muse'.
We'll be looking at some of the very
rich details of this painting,
and we'll find out why exactly the muses
were considered to be very dangerous in
the 15th century.
According to classical mythology, the
muses were female embodiments of divine
inspiration for the arts.
Each muse, and it was generally thought
that there were nine of them,
represented inspiration for a different art.
And our muse is often identified as
Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
That is poems, like the Iliad, and the
Odyssey, that tell the stories of gods and heroes.
The painter Cosimo Tura was one of the
greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance,
and he worked at the courts in Ferrara,
in the north of Italy,
for the Este, who are the dukes of
Ferrara, and this painting
of Calliope probably is one of a series of paintings
made for the Este's hunting lodge at Belfiore,
in the outskirts of Ferrara, and if you
look very closely at the bottom left of
this painting,
you can see a man on horseback riding
along a winding road
through some rolling hills, perhaps
intended to evoke this countryside
around Belfiore, where the estate would
have hunted. Leonello d'Este
was the Duke of Ferrara who commissioned
this particular series of paintings
from Angelo da Siena, and the paintings
were intended to hang
in the private study, or studiolo, of the
dukes at their hunting lodge.
After Leonello's death in 1450 and the
death of Angelo a few years later, his brother
Borso, Leonella's brother that is,
took over the commission, and he brought
in Cosimo Tura to finish the series.
Her downwards glance tells us that this
painting would have hung rather high up
on the wall with the others in the series.
And these paintings would have formed
the backdrop to Leonello and later Borso's
private contemplation in the 15th century.
Humanist thinkers were becoming
increasingly interested
in the literature, art and culture of
Ancient Greece and Rome,
and these texts brought also a revival
of interest in
allegorical figures like the muses. So
this series of paintings was rather a
perfect backdrop for this kind of study,
this kind of reading.
Our muse is very richly dressed. You can
see she's wearing these beautiful red
and gold brocade sleeves,
lit from the right hand side, which bring
out that little bulge in her
elbow, and she's wearing these sleeves
under a blue
dress that's bound with a leather cord.
And you can see the way that cord is
just flying away,
as if she's just turned towards us, and
she's wrapped in a beautiful cloak,
red on the outside, green on the inside.
And we can imagine how that
texture of that fabric would have felt
against her bare skin.
Looking at the lower part of the
painting, you can see that she's almost barefooted.
She's got some rather fabulous gold
sandals, on but we can imagine that touch
of fabric on skin.
She's seated on a fantastical throne
made of red and green marble,
with these rather monstrous gold
dolphins, art historians called these
these this particular kind of sea
monster a dolphin,
with these rather sharp teeth, and
rubies for eyes,
with pearls sort of almost hovering
around their gills.
Above her head there's a green scallop
shell which seems to act almost as a
kind of secular halo,
and certainly other examples of
Cosimo Tura's work
use this scallop as a real halo, in
paintings of the Virgin Mary,
like the Roverella Altarpiece that we
have in the National Gallery's collection.
Here though, this is not a halo, and she holds
in her hand a sprig of cherries, which
seem to be almost
freshly plucked from the tree. You can
see the shine
on their rather downy skins, red and gold
almost matching the red and gold of her clothing.
These cherries are a symbol of justice,
and they're part of the reason
why people have thought that our
muse might be Calliope,
the muse of epic poetry. But identifying
the muses in this series has been made
rather more complicated by the discovery
of a letter
written by a poet called Guarino da Verona,
to Leonello, talking about this
commission, this group of paintings.
Guarino sets out his ideas of what exactly
these paintings should look like, and
what exactly the attributes of these
muses should be,
and his description of Calliope is very unlike
our painting. Guarino describes how
Calliope should actually have three
faces. She should have a face for the gods,
a face for the heroes, and a face for the
men. These are the three kinds of people
depicted in heroic poetry. Guarino
also wrote that Calliope should have an inscription
proclaiming that she gave the poets
their raw material
and resounding voice. When we look very closely
at our painting, we can see that some of
these attributes
might be suggested by details in the painting.
If we look very carefully at the lower
right of the painting,
you can see a blacksmith in his forge,
his arm high above his head
as he beats down on a sheet of metal at
his forge,
and we can imagine the sound that this
would make, a deep, resounding,
bell-like sound, perhaps suggesting
that resounding sound that poetry could bring
when inspired by our muse. The
fantastical throne itself
could be seen as a symbol of poetic
ingenuity and certainly those golden sea
monsters are a symbol of
artistic ingenuity, and great skill
and fantasy. The contrast between
the dolphins, and those cloth of gold
sleeves that our muse is wearing,
those also suggest a kind of artifice as well.
So, not only an invention but also an artifice,
and throughout this painting, Tura is
playing with the representation of
different kinds of material.
If we look at that upper part of the
painting again. Look at that contrast
between those
cherries, the rubies, the pearls,
and then that chain of coral and rock
crystal beads that is hanging
over the giant scallop shell. All of
those objects are about the same size,
they're all
tiny spheres, and yet Tura is very
carefully showing us that they are all
made of very different materials.
He's showing off his skill in oils
learnt from the great Rogier van der Weyden,
that master of the Northern Renaissance
who was working in the courts of Ferrara
around the same time.
So we can read this painting as a demonstration
of artistic invention, of poetic invention,
but also artistic artifice, and poetic
artifice. But Cosimo Tura's inclusion of
these golden sea monsters
is not just a demonstration of his own ability,
and a suggestion of poetic artifice, of
ornament and rhetoric.
These sea monsters also hint at a rather
more dangerous, rather more contentious
reading of the muses, which was prevalent
in 15th century Europe.
For a long time classical writers had
associated the muses with
the sirens, those very dangerous female creatures
who sang sailors to their deaths. The
sirens famously
sang on the cliffs to Odysseus and his men,
and Odysseus and his crew only escaped
because Odysseus had
instructed his men to stop their ears so
they couldn't hear
the song of the sirens. And this long
association between the muses and the sirens
had made the muses seem rather
more dangerous, rather more controversial,
among the writers of the of the Middle
Ages and the Early Renaissance.
'The Consolation of Philosophy', a poem by Boethius,
went no way to restoring the reputation
of the muses,
and in fact Lady Philosophy, who's the
kind of hero figure of that poem,
banishes the muses. She kicks them out
from Boethius's
study and calls them theatrical wh*res, essentially.
Writers in the early renaissance like
Boccaccio, like Petrarch,
had tried to restore the reputation of
the muses by
reinterpreting this famous poem,
but this was still a real point of
contention in the 15th century,
and it's therefore even more interesting,
I think, that
this painting includes these references
to the muse's associations with the sirens.
Those sea monsters, that green scallop
shell, those maritime details,
seem to emphasise that connection rather
than downplaying it.
But these paintings were intended for
the private study
of Leonello d'Este and later his brother Borso,
and it's worth thinking perhaps about
that setting that these
paintings would originally have been
intended for. We know Leonello d'Este
was not only friends with Guarino of Verona,
and other humanists, but he had interest
in that way himself,
and in his study his studio at Belfiore
he would have been reading some of those
Ancient Greek and Roman texts
that were becoming popular among his circle.
And while some of those texts are very
worthy, other texts were perhaps
more risque. Texts like Ovid's 'Art of
Love', for example, were not things that
you would necessarily want to read in public.
Having a private study would have been a
great place
for reading those texts. I don't think
we'll ever know exactly what Leonello
and his brother Borso
thought of this painting, whether they
considered our muse Calliope
to be a very noble representation of a
noble art, that art of epic poetry,
or whether they would have been
interested in this connection
with the sirens. It's worth noting I think
that any representation of a concept
who is embodied as a woman is always
going to have,
at this point in time anyway, some of
these more sensual, more dangerous
qualities to her.
During this time I think we've all
learned the importance of having
some true inspiration on our walls and
this muse Calliope and her sister muses
now scattered across the world
would, I think, have provided a similar inspiration
to those Renaissance princes in their
study at Belfiore.
If you're interested in learning more
about art history, click here
and here. Thank you very much for
watching, and we'll see you next time.