Apollo crowning a Poet and joining him with a Consort, witnessed by Hercules and by four other Females
Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice 1518 - Venice 1594)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1570 - 1579
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
2616 x 2286 mm (103 x 90 in)
Place of origin
Venice
Order this imageCollection
Kingston Lacy Estate, Dorset
NT 1257229
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Apollo crowning a Poet and giving him a Consort, witnessed by Hercules and by four other Females by Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice c.1518 - Venice 1594), 1570s. Apollo (or possibly Hymen), crowned with laurel, in the centre, on a cloth-covered seat in the sky, and with his feet on a gold chalice, a gold dish with coins on it, an open gold box, and a golden steeple, bends down and placing, with his right hand, a leafy crown over a figure, perhaps a poet, in loose blue and yellow drapery, holding a book (or a stone tablet) against his thigh in his right hand, lower left. This figure is supported by two women. One – who helps prop up the book - draped, and with hair done up in a pearl-adorned net; the other, almost nude, with leaves in her hair. In his left hand Apollo (or Hymen) holds strands of an orange-flowered plant (perhaps myrtle) over a virtually nude - but shadowed and very loosely-draped - young woman, who is holding a strand of the same plant in her right hand on the upper right. She is accompanied by another young woman. Below them, bottom right, sits Fortune, holding a cornucopia, over a die showing, the face with five dots and three dots to the left. Above all these, in the sky, top left, Hercules, holding a spear in his right hand and a bow in the other (rather than his usual attribute of a club), looks down on them, and, at the very top, two cupids scatter roses.
Provenance
Acquired by William John Bankes from the Pasquali sisters, through Alvise (Ulisse) Mazzuoli, in Venice in 1850 as 'Apollo & the Muses Tintoretto from the Grimani Palace, Venice' (Receipt, dated 26th March 1850, amongst the Bankes papers in the Dorset Record Office) and intended by him as the centrepiece of a new and raised Library ceiling, flanked by the two ‘Bonifazios' (now attributed to Palma Giovane), but he was dissuaded from this by his widowed sister, Anne Frances Bankes, Lady Falmouth, who slept in the bedroom above (see also his letter to her of 5 May 1854); bequeathed to the National Trust by Henry John Ralph Bankes, 1981.
Credit line
Kingston Lacy, The Bankes Collection (National Trust)
Makers and roles
Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice 1518 - Venice 1594), artist
References
Waagen 1857 Gustav Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, London, 1857, p. 379 Berenson 1957 Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Venetian School, (2 vols) 1957 , p.174, & pl.1307 Schulz 1968 Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968, p.121 Nichols 1996 Tom Nichols, ‘Tintoretto, prestezza and the poligrafi: a study in the literary and visual culture of Cinquecento Venice’, in: Renaissance studies, 1996, V. 10, 1996, no. 1 Mar., 72-100. Laing 2012 Alastair Laing,‘Album amicorum: Oeuvres choisies pour Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée’, Paris, 2012, pp.32-33
