Allegory of Painting and Music

Giovanni Andrea Sirani is perhaps best remembered for training his three daughters, Barbara, Ana Maria and Elisabetta, in the ways of Bolognese painting; however, he was a talented and innovative artist in his own right. Often confused with the hand of his teacher, Guido Reni, and his most prolific daughter Elisabetta, his corpus has only recently begun to be elucidated by modern scholars. The identification of the present painting allowed a red chalk drawing to be restored to Giovanni Andrea's oeuvre, having been proposed as a preparatory study for the allegorical figure of Music, subsequently reversed for the painting (fig. 1).

The loose and lively chalk drawing shows Sirani’s affinity for Reni’s sprezzatura style, while the final painting’s subject displays his own humanistic interest in allegorical subjects. This fascination was evident from the contents of Sirani's own library, which included over twenty humanist volumes. As suggested by the file in the Zeri Archives, the figure thought to represent Music may in fact depict Poetry, illustrating Horace's motto 'Ut pictora poesis.' Sirani’s compositions also differed from Reni’s in their interest in emotional narrative—turning the figures away from each other to heighten the sense of comparison between the arts, who are both shown raptured in a moment of inspiration in the act of creation.