Music-Making Goatherds

Music-Making Goatherds, 1655, in the Scottish National Gallery, shows rustic musicians — identified by their goats and rough garments as shepherds or goatherds — playing pipe and making music in an open landscape. The subject belongs to the pastoral tradition that runs from Theocritus through Virgil into seventeenth-century painting, in which music-making shepherds represent an ideal of innocent rural contentment. Castiglione's late date of 1655 places this among his most fluent and confident works. The Scottish National Gallery holds a distinguished collection of Italian Baroque painting, and this canvas — with its warm Mediterranean light and loosely-painted figures — represents the tradition at its most approachable.

By 1655 Castiglione's brushwork had reached its most expressive freedom: the goats are painted with rapid gestural strokes, the landscape with broad sweeps of loaded brush. The human figures are summarily but convincingly rendered. A warm golden light from the left unifies the composition and evokes the Mediterranean pastoral ideal.