An Allegory with Mercury and Erato

Rare among Flemish allegories of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the present canvas stages with unusual amplitude the progress of Poetry and Music under the auspices of Mercury. Its subject is remarkable both for its narrative ambition and for the privileged role accorded to Eloquence – embodied in Mercury, the divine patron of speech and invention, whose power rescues the arts from neglect and guides them, through persuasion, to the fellowship of Apollo and the Muses. Conceived within the milieu of Antwerp and Brussels allegorical painting, it would have addressed directly a patrician household attuned to consort music and humanist rhetoric, where the harmony of instruments and the art of speech were upheld as emblems of cultivated life.

The drama unfolds in a sequence of episodes. At the far right a woman bearing a stringed instrument is expelled from a doorway, emblematic of the worldly rejection of the arts. In the foreground she reappears, semi-nude, encircled by lutes, viols and recorders, while Cupid bends to tune a bass viol at her feet. The attributes identify her as Erato, Muse of love-poetry, whose classical sphere united music and desire. Mercury, god of eloquence and invention, extends his caduceus as patron and guide. In the middle ground she is seen again, casting aside her instruments in renunciation of earthly charge. At the left she is borne aloft to a cloudbank, where Apollo presides among the Nine Muses on Parnassus, receiving her into their company. The sequence charts a clear trajectory – rejection, election, renunciation and apotheosis – through which Poetry, first thrust aside, is vindicated by Eloquence and admitted to the divine arts.

This iconography is well-known in both contemporary literature and the visual arts. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia defined Musica and Poesis as a female figure surrounded by instruments and amorous cues, a vocabulary widely diffused in Antwerp through engravings. Maarten de Vos’s designs for the Seven Liberal Arts, engraved by Jan Sadeler I and Adriaen Collaert in the 1580s, provided a fixed type, where Musica appears enthroned or seated amid a litter of instruments (London, British Museum, inv. no. 1996,1103.16; fig. 1), while the Francken workshops and Hendrick de Clerck in Brussels produced cognate scenes in which the Arts are presented to the Muses (for example, De Clerck’s Minerva presenting the Liberal Arts; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, inv. no. P02342). In Antwerp, Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder established a visual grammar of divine assembly – Apollo enthroned among the Muses above, attributes scattered below (Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, inv. no. P00221). Within this lineage, the meadow spring in the present picture can be recognised as Hippocrene, the fountain of poetic inspiration struck by the hoof of Pegasus, signalling purification before ascent.

The still-life of instruments in the foreground roots this allegory in lived practice. In the foreground rests a closed part-book inscribed BASVS – the period orthography for ‘Bassus’, the bass line of a polyphonic set. Early modern domestic music was performed from such voice-labelled part-books – Cantus, Altus, Tenor, Basus – issued in Antwerp by Tylman Susato and the Phalèse dynasty. Around it lie cittern, lutes, viols, recorders and percussion, the familiar equipment of the household consort. The Basvs volume would have thus been an emblem understood by contemporary viewers, while Cupid’s attention to the bass viol provided its visual echo: the foundational voice of harmony tuned in preparation for Poetry’s ascent.

Striking within this tradition is the figure of Mercury. In Netherlandish humanist culture he embodied eloquence, wit and ingenuity – ingenium made flesh – with writers from Erasmus to Lipsius invoking him as patron of rhetoric. Netherlandish allegories often cast him as presenter of the Arts before gods or princes. Here, his caduceus marks the decisive moment: he rescues Poetry and Music from civic neglect, sanctions the renunciation of worldly supports and mediates her translation to Apollo and the Muses.

Conceived for a patrician studiolo or music room, the composition reveals as much about its commissioner as about the subject itself, proclaiming a household in which practical music-making and civic eloquence were equally prized. By uniting the consort and the caduceus, the work enacts an ideal of cultivated citizenship: the worldly arts refined into virtue and judged worthy at last to enter the company of Apollo and the Muses.