Woman Playing a Lute

Bartolomeo Veneto's Woman Playing a Lute at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, painted around 1520, is a secular subject — a woman musician performing on the lute — in the tradition of Venetian and Lombard paintings of beautiful women with musical instruments that developed in the early sixteenth century under the influence of Giorgione's poetic figure subjects. Bartolomeo Veneto was active in Venice, Ferrara, and Milan, serving the courts of the Este and the Borromeo and developing a personal style notable for its acute portraits and its combination of Venetian luminosity with Lombard precision. Music and beauty were linked in Renaissance humanist culture through the ancient theory of cosmic harmony, and images of beautiful women playing instruments carried associations of refined sensory pleasure and cultural accomplishment. The Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan holds the most comprehensive collection of northern Italian Renaissance painting, including major works by Mantegna, Bellini, and Raphael, and Bartolomeo Veneto's secular figure subject provides an important document of the Lombard-Venetian court culture that the Brera collection was assembled to represent.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.