Allegory of the Arts

An allegorical canvas from around 1640 in the Hermitage, the Allegory of the Arts brings together personifications of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music as sisters in a Baroque celebration of creative human endeavour. Such allegories enjoyed particular popularity in seventeenth-century Venice, where the arts were celebrated as civic virtues and patrons competed for association with the Muses. Strozzi was well positioned to paint this subject: he had been a skilled religious painter, portraitist, and allegorist, and this canvas may carry an element of professional self-reflection. Each art-form could be represented by her traditional attributes — a palette for Painting, a chisel for Sculpture, a lute for Music — gathered together in a harmonious compositional group. The Hermitage's Strozzi holdings represent the thoroughness with which Catherine the Great's agents swept the Italian Baroque market in the late eighteenth century.

Multi-figure allegorical compositions allowed Strozzi to demonstrate his range by differentiating each figure through texture, colour, and attribute. The palette and brushes of Painting were particularly apt for a painter to render, allowing a degree of painterly self-referentiality. Strozzi's warm, confident touch unifies figures that could otherwise seem merely catalogued.