A Painting about Music at Dresden by Jacopo Tintoretto
H. Colin Slim
An mventory taken at Prague Castle in 1621, nine years after the death there of the Holy Roman Emporer Rudolph 11 (1552-1612), describes one of Rudolph's more than 3000 paintings as: "Eine musica von jungfrauen, schön, vom Tentoreto, Orig[inal]."l After Swedish troops looted Prague in 1648 thereby closing the Thirty Years War, they removed almost all of Rudolph's former art collection to Stockholm. That year the Swedes drew up another inventory which contains an identical description of this painting. In the same year 1648, Carlo Ridolfi at Venice was describing four paintings which Rudolph 11 had com missioned from Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), presum ably after Rudolph was crowned Emperor in 1576. About the first of these paintings Ridolfi states: "In one of them are gathered in a garden the Muses who make a concert of music on various instruments.,,2 The paint ing thus described by Ridolfi is usually linked to the one described in the 1621 and 1648 inventories and often identified with a painting by Tintoretto of six women at Dresden called Music-Making Women. 3 [See the plate] However, Muses are normally nine in number and often, as in other paintings even by Tintoretto hirnself, the Muses appear with Apollo and/or Pegasus.4 Here we have only six women and no garden, just the outdoors. Whether the descriptions in the two inventories and by Ridolfi refer to our Dresden painting remains uncertain, though probable since the other three paintings by Tin toretto which Ridolfi mentions did in fact belong to Rudolph and are extant. 5 By the early 18th century many of Rudolph's widely 1 2 Explorations In Renaissance Culture dispersed pamtmgs had found their way back to the Hapsburgs at Vienna and at Prague. In order to raise money for her campaigns against Frederick the Great, the Empress Maria Theresa sold the painting (now in Dresden) from Prague Castle along with several others also kept there.6 It arrived in 1749 at the Royal CoHec tion in Dresden, where it remains to this day. Although now accepted as a genuine Tintoretto, most art histo rians date it many years before Rudolph's coronation in 1576.7 Consideration of the two musical compositions that Tintoretto painted into his canvas (center sheet and right book) will alter the date which art historians usu aHy give it. Like many Renaissance painters, Tintoretto was also a performing musieian. In 1549 his literary friend Andrea Calmo described Tintoretto's recreational habits. Among these Calmo noted: "playing, laughing, and singing, so as not to damage the brain." After Gior gio Vasari met Tintoretto in 1566 he reported in his Lives oE the Painters that Tintoretto delighted "particu lady in playing music and on diverse instruments." Half a century after Tintoretto's death, his biographer Carlo Ridolfi teHs us that: "in Tintoretto's youth he took plea sure in playing the lute and other strange instruments of his own invention."s Working at St. Mark's in Venice, Tintoretto literaHy rubbed shoulders with musieians. For example, in 1563 and again in 1566 he was one of the judges of a mosai eist decorating that basilica, one Domenico Bianchini, weH known for musical compositions printed in 1546 in his lute book.9 And in the late 1560s, Tintoretto had Giulio Zacchino (c.1550-1584), an organist and com poser, instruct his daughter Marietta (c.1555-1590). Marietta's self-portrait bears out Ridolfi's statement that "she learned to play the harpsichord and sang very weH."lO Tintoretto the performer is not responsible for the in correct names both art historians and music historians