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Maerten van Heemskerck (Netherlandish, 1498-1574)
Concert of Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon, 1565
Oil on panel, 40-3/4 x 51-1/4 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Painted by the artist toward the end of his career, the 1565 Concert of Apollo and the Muses on Mount Heliconconfirms Heemskerck's enduring devotion to mythological subjects in the Italian mode. Already in ancient Greek literature of the eighth century B.C. -- and particularly in Hesiod's Theogony -- Greece's Mount Helicon was identified as the sacred abode of the nine goddesses of poetry and song, the Muses. There, joined sometimes by Apollo -- the god of music -- the Muses danced, sang and inspired mortal singers and poets with their music and sprigs of laurel. Mentioned, too, as a source of poetic inspriation were the waters of Helicon's fountain of Hippocrene, which according to Ovid, gushed forth from the hoofmarks of the winged horse Pegasus. Heemskerck envisions Helicon as an idyllic, tree-shaded paradise, an antique pleasure garden set with statues and littered with books and musical instruments. He alludes to the creation of Hippocrene in an ingenious way, portraying Pegasus as a monumental bronze statue and the fountain as a spray of water issuing from its strut. The two male figures standing at right are poets who have received inspiration and been crowned with laurel. Other mortal pilgrims promenade, pick flowers or bathe in Hippocrene's inspiring waters, while above them putti hover, waiting to bestow more crowns of laurel. With an informality typical of the age, Heemskerck chooses not to identify the Muses by their traditional attributes. So casual is his approach that it is difficult even to locate all nine of the goddesses. Four of them have gathered to sing and make music at the positive organ at left, its bellows worked by a mischievous putto. A pair are seated at right, and two more join Apollo -- kneeling, with his lyre in hand -- in the central middleground. The remaining Muse has merged with the crowd of pilgrims beyond. A recent study of the painting's underdrawing using infrared reflectography has revealed an interesting detail: Heemskerck initially sketched two bearded, male heads at the extreme left of the composition, where he later chose to paint the standing nude Muse. The High Renaissance image of Apollo and the Muses was perfected in early sixteenth-century Italy, where Raphael's Vatican PARNASSUS fresco of 1510-11 was profoundly influential. By the 1540s, French and Flemish artists had also begun to interpret the subject. Among contemporary north Netherlandish painters, Heemskerck seems to have been the principal champion of the theme. In 1549 he designed an etching of Apollo and the Muses and around 1555 returned to the subject in a painting today in the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Chrysler Museum painting is Heemskerck's final and most developed vision of Apollo and the Muses. It is also one of the richest representations of the theme in sixteenth-century art.

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