By Ilja M. Veldman

Muses making music in the company of Apollo are a recurrent theme in the work of Maarten van Heemskerck: three pictures and a print survive; in addition two separate paintings of this subject are described in old auction catalogues.[1] Heemskerck was one of the few northern painters to have been fascinated by this theme, which was especially popular in Italy. In the following we shall discuss a number of artistic precedents that were of importance for Heemskerck's compositions. With the aid of sixteenth-century literature, an attempt will be made to throw some light on the deeper motivations of the artist in choosing this theme. For a painter of Heemskerck's caliber it is rather unlikely that such a classical subject should have been chosen purely for reasons of fashion, as a sort of „genre painting a l'antique". In his other work, too, it appears that a moralizing undertone is characteristic of his northern adaption of a classical Italian theme.[2]

 

In the Apollo and the Muses[3] (Fig. 1), recently acquired by the Museum of Art at New Orleans, which on stylistic grounds can be dated to the years between 1550 and 1560, the Muses are divided into two groups: on the left five Muses grouped behind a portative organ and on the right four Muses gathered around Apollo, who is playing the lyre. Apollo and the two foremost Muses are almost directly lifted out of Coornhert's 1549 etching after Heemskerck (Fig. 2)[4]. In the background of the painting and of the print Apollo and the Muses are once again portrayed, this time performing a choral dance on a hill.

 

In his monograph on Heemskerck Grosshans (1980) pays less attention to the iconography and importance of the Muse theme in the work of Heemskerck than to stylistic precedents. He tentavely suggests that Heemskerck may have been familiar with a small panel by Baldassare Peruzzi (Fig. 3), now in the Pitti Museum in Florence.[5] In view of the overall composition of the group of dancers, the attitudes of the individual figures, the direction in which they look, their legwork, clothing, hair, and Apollo's central position (fifth from the right), there is indeed no doubt that this is a case of direct derivation.

 

With respect to the horn-blowing Muse in the upper right of Heemskerck's painting, Grosshans quite rightly pointed to the affinity with the Calliope of the Tarocchi prints made in c. 1465.[6]

It has not been pointed out previously that the Muse with her organ must have been inspired by Georg Pencz's print entitled Musica (Fig. 4), belonging to a series devoted to the Liberal Arts.[7] Not only her posture but also several details, such as the putto working the bellows, the quasi-antique seat, the laurel wreath in her hair and the musical instruments spread out around the organ are indicative of direct derivation. Due to the existence of such a visual prototype there is no reason to relate - as Grosshans attempts to do - the putto to Apollo as the god of childhood.

A second painting, entitled Parnassus (Fig. 5) and dated 1565, is preserved in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk.[8] In this painting Heemskerck took over the left part of his earlier picture (Fig. 1) with a few variations. Apollo and the five remaining Muses have been moved to a less prominent position; Apollo, however, less so than the others because he is placed exactly where the diagonals cross. The background affords a view of the spring Hippocrene created by Pegasus, above which towers the bronze statue of the horse itself. In the extreme right, behind two seated Muses, stand two poets with laurel wreaths, a motif that is also to be seen in the upper right-hand corner of the etching of 1549.