Each of the four canvases in this series depict four female figures, or muses, holding instruments in accordance with their guise as allegories of music. Each figure is richly draped in coloured robes and wears a garland about her head, which is also haloed by light. The figures are arranged in two pairs on each canvas, one to the left and the other to the right, with a gap in between. The musicians are all standing in landscapes, two in a cave and two out in the open.

These four canvasses depict music as one of the four quadrivium, or higher liberal arts. These were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The liberal arts were often allegorised in baroque painting to symbolise both cosmic order and human virtue. The idealised figures and the pastoral landscapes further emphasise the celestial, allegorical nature of the subject.

The series depicts several early 17th Century Italian musical instruments and groups them in ways that would have been familiar to a contemporary audience. The first canvas shows a harpsichord, a Renaissance zither, a viola da gamba, and a theorbo. The second includes two violins, a harpsichord, and a lute. The instruments in these two pictures were most commonly used for chamber or domestic music. In the third canvas, the figures play a horn, a flute, and two different trumpets, symbolising ceremonial or processional music, and in the final picture we have a harp, a violin, a viola, and a lute. These stringed instruments perhaps represent lyrical or poetic music.

Sandro Bellesi, when discussing a similar work in his 1996 catalogue raisonné, compares Dandini’s painting of a musical allegory, and the detail depiction of instruments, to the musician angels in Volterrano’s Grazzi Chapel in SS Annunziata, Florence. Each picture has a late 18th Century carved Florentine frame.

Cesare Dandini was one of the leading Florentine painters of the 17th Century. His biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, stated that Dandini trained under Francesco Curradi and Cristofano Allori before working with Domenico Passignano. His bold colouring (ever present in these musical allegories) was very much of the seicento Florentine tradition. He became particularly well known for his elegantly drawn, idealised figures, which were well-suited to the classical allegories in which he specialised.

We are grateful to Sandro Bellesi for confirming the attribution to Cesare Dandini.