music-making women

Music-Making Women, painted around 1580 and now in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, belongs to the long Venetian tradition of depicting women with musical instruments as allegorical embodiments of Harmony — a tradition extending from Giorgione's enigmatic figures through Titian's Concert Champêtre to the poetic woman-with-lute images popular throughout the sixteenth century. Music was among the most sophisticated forms of allegory in Renaissance Venice: the harmony of voices and instruments was a metaphor for social concord, divine order, and the concordia discors (discord harmonized) that Plato had identified as the governing principle of the cosmos. Tintoretto brings his characteristic dramatic energy to a subject more typically treated in a mood of serene contemplation, giving the music-making women an animated physicality unusual in the genre. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the vast complex of museums assembled from the Saxon Electors' collections and holding some of Europe's finest works in painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, acquired significant Italian paintings through the systematic collecting of August the Strong in the early eighteenth century — including Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which anchors the collection's Italian holdings.

The group composition arranges the female musicians in an interlocking arrangement that creates visual rhythm and movement. Tintoretto's warm palette and atmospheric lighting envelop the figures in a golden tonality, while his characteristic loose, energetic brushwork gives the scene a sense of spontaneous musicality that suits the subject.