Venus and Cupid with a lute-player

Titian (ca. 1488-1576)

Item type:

painting

Date of creation:

1555-1565

Height:

150.5 cm  (59 1/4 in.)

Width:

196.8 cm  (77 1/2 in.)

Technique / Medium:

oil on canvas

School:

Venetian School

Description

A man plays lute while looking at a sheet of music paper, entertaining Venus and Cupid. A viol lies in the lower right corner, showing the back of the instrument. Venus holds a recorder, and an open bass voice partbook of music and words (probably undecipherable, but seems to represent a madrigal) lies beside her cushion.

Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)

Lute [3394]
Tenor viol [3591]
Recorder [4039]

Musical works

illegible music notation
The open page of the bass partbook depicts a legible, rarely used F5 clef (see Rowland-Jones article in references).

Image URLs

image link 1

Bibliographic references

Woodfield, Ian. The early history of the viol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) fig. 19. ISBN 0521242924. RILM 1984-5302.

Rowland-Jones, Anthony. "The minuet: Painter-musicians in triple time", Early music 26/3 (1998) 415-431, illus. 4. RILM 1998-1844.

Notes

There are five known works by Titian on the same
subject: two of them in the collection of the
Prado Museum (inv.-no.: P00420, P00421), see this
database, ID 3329 and 3330; one in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv.-no.: 36.29), see this database ID 3331; one
in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, see this database ID
3332; and one in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge (inv.-no.: 129), see this database ID
2080.

RIdIM record id

2080