An alluring sight of music: the musical ‘courtesan’ in the Cinquecento

Abstract

The figure of the courtesan features in many literary and artistic productions of the Italian Cinquecento. The term ‘musical courtesan’ has been widely used to describe several portraits produced in the first half of the 16th century representing beautiful young women (belle) in different attires playing the lute. This article problematizes the notion of the ‘musical courtesan’ and argues instead that these depictions of belle should be understood in terms of the varied interpretations that might be reached by 16th-century viewers. Such portraits could convey higher ideals such as the institution of marriage of the contemplation of beauty. Case-studies are offered of portraits by Andrea Solario (1460–1524), Bartolomeo Veneto (1502–55), Parrasio Micheli (c.1516–78) and Palma Vecchio (c.1480–1528) that show beautiful, young female lutenists in different attires.

In the first decades of the 16th century, artists such as Giorgione (1470s–1510), Raphael (1483–1520) and Titian (c.1488–1576) produced several idealized images of anonymous beautiful women (belle) in different stages of undress. Despite their apparent simplicity, these depictions have greatly interested scholars for decades, and traditionally were considered to be representations of Italian courtesans because of their allure.¹ However, since the 1990s art historians have deconstructed this idea and instead have broadened their interpretations of these depictions in relation to elements of wider 16th-century culture, such as neo-Petrarchan trends, betrothal and marriage traditions, or art-collecting practices amongst the Italian elites.²

This group of north Italian paintings is also of interest to musicologists as some of them depict beautiful female musicians. At first glance, these depictions have a common element of sensuality (either implicit or explicit) that could place their depicted musical performances within the context of courtesanship. However, this article will argue that assigning these representations of beautiful female musicians to the all-encompassing iconographical category of the ‘musical courtesan’ greatly obscures their interpretation. Instead, I explore these portraits as manifestations of different ideas of beauty in Cinquecento Italy, examining the varied ways in which they might have been interpreted by viewers of the time.

The pursuit of beauty was an important element of the Italian Renaissance, and to seek beauty in the human body (especially the female figure) can be seen as an artistic response to the Neoplatonic theories that circulated during this time. Starting with Marsilio Ficino’s successful merging of Platonic thought with Christian ideals, dialogues on the nature of Love proliferated in Italy, advocating for an ascension of the soul through the observation of beauty.³ According to Ficino and his followers, Love is what binds the world and the divinity together, thus the human soul follows an itinerary that takes it from the observation of earthly beauty to the contemplation of the divine. Following Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, the notion of beauty exists as an abstract entity; knowledge of ideal beauty is pre-existing in the soul and can be contemplated only through the mind, a contemplation that, to achieve purity, must be completely divorced from the senses. By the 1530s, some Neoplatonic writers (such as Leone Ebreo) mixed these Platonic ideals with Aristotelian connotations by advocating that there is nothing in the mind that is not also in the senses, thus defending a cognition that stems from perception and experience.⁴

During the Cinquecento, the notion of Love took many guises, from the earthly enjoyment of the senses to a highly intellectual encounter with the divine, not forgetting the love for acquiring wealth, fame and fortune. As will be seen, painted beauties could stand for many things (a learned, musical courtly lady, an enticing lutenist, the ideality of the beloved, or the promise of a fertile marriage); but by contemplating them, their owner could attain ‘a desire to enjoy with union what is beautiful or seems beautiful to the lover’, as Tullia d’Aragona (1510–56) argued:

‘Love’, according to what I have frequently heard from other authorities, as well as by my own understanding of it, is nothing other than a desire to enjoy with union what is truly beautiful or seems beautiful to the lover.⁵

The following pages problematize the ‘musical courtesan’ as an iconographical trope by exploring four depictions of female lutenists created in northern Italy during the first half of the 16th century. Following an initial exploration of notions of the courtesan, the article examines the chosen depictions in terms of the different notions of beauty with which they might have been interpreted by viewers of the period.

The courtesan in the Italian Cinquecento

The most recent editions of several European dictionaries define the word ‘courtesan’ as a woman who exchanges sexual favours for money (i.e. a prostitute) within a socially elite environment.⁶ Such definitions are not far removed from how the early editions of the Vocabolario della Crusca defined the word: even though its first edition (1612) uses cortigiana merely as an adjective to qualify the activities of the courtier (‘… nella pratica cortigina’), its third edition (1691) includes a specific entry for cortegiana, which is defined as ‘a worldly woman’ (‘Femmina di mondo’). The definition is slightly expanded in the fourth edition (1729–38), in which the courtesan is categorized as a ‘prostitute, whore’ (‘Meretrice, Puttana’).

Contrasting with these reductionist definitions, modern scholarship has developed nuanced understandings of the figure of the courtesan during the Cinquecento as much more than a high-class prostitute. Scholars have defined the courtesan as a woman who ‘[engaged] in relatively exclusive exchanges of artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons’.⁷ Indeed, the unlimited arts of seduction of the Italian courtesan were a ubiquitous trope within the culture of the Cinquecento, especially the courtesan’s music-making.

Due to music’s links with sensation and seduction, 16th-century accounts of both real and imagined courtesans often outlined the enchanting effects of the courtesan’s song and her music-making on her audience. In his accounts of musical courtesans, Pietro Aretino (like many of his contemporaries) constructs these women as living sirens that used their artistic abilities to lure men into their traps.⁸ For example, in a letter written in 1550 to Abbot Vasallo, Aretino describes the lute playing of a certain Franceschina as having ‘penetrated [his] heart with so sweet a sort of musical persuasion’.⁹

Some Cinquecento artists (most notably Titian and Palma Vecchio) used prostitutes as models for their compositions and indeed the same women can be identified in different depictions by these artists. For example, the inventory of Palma Vecchio’s workshop in 1528 lists a ‘portrait of the carampana with her hair falling on her shoulders and dressed in green’,¹⁰ a painting that has been identified as Young woman in green holding a box (c.1512–14, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).¹¹ Therefore the model Palma Vecchio used for this painting was an unknown prostitute. However, using courtesans or prostitutes as models does not mean that the resultant artworks are portraits of specific courtesans: rather, their looks are being used as the means to convey an idea (in this case, a generic beautiful woman).

Extant sources, though, do provide some examples of known portraits of courtesans. Much like the portraits ‘in concerto di Musicha’ listed in Paola Provesin’s inventory from 1638,¹² other courtesans owned their painted likeness and displayed them in their rooms, such as Elisabetta Condulmer.¹³ Most famously, the image of Barbara Salutati (fl.1520s), courtesan, professional singer, poet and dedicatee of Machiavelli’s comedy Clizia (1524), was painted by Domenico Puligo (c.1523–5, private collection). Her portrait is far removed from the images of idealized belle that traditionally have been identified as depictions of courtesans. In this painting, Salutati performs the role of a learned woman within the humanistic world she associated herself with, her much praised musical abilities displayed via the music book she holds open.¹⁴ In Puligo’s portrait, there appears to be the intention of endowing Salutati’s image with a veneer of respectability, undoubtedly a sign of how the sitter constructed her own identity.

Some 55 years later, Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) is known to have painted the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco (1546–91), a portrait that art historians have tried to identify within Robusti’s corpus.¹⁵ The most plausible artworks (by the hands of Jacopo and his son Domenico) present the sitter with a mixture of respectability and sensuality that situate her closer to a male fantasy of what a courtesan might have looked like than to Salutati’s portrait. Tintoretto’s version presents its sitter wearing several layers of rich clothing, as shown by the intricate embroidery, lacing and beading she dons. Her curly red hair is tied at the back of her head and her attire is finished with exquisite jewellery. The milky white tone of her skin would have categorized this elegant young lady as a beauty according to Petrarchan ideals. However, her flushed cheeks and partly revealed nipple add a careless sensuality to the portrait, as if the woman was about to disrobe (illus.1). Whereas Tintoretto’s rendition points towards a more sexualized version of Franco’s image, the sitter in Domenico Robusti’s painting captures an idealized beauty. Even though she is still depicted as a refined and beautiful young woman, adorned with lavish jewellery, she is wearing fewer and less-defined items of clothing, allowing for her exposed breasts to signify the quality of her soul (illus.2).

The following paragraphs address four depictions by Andrea Solario (1460–1524), Bartolomeo Veneto (1502–55), Parrasio Micheli (c.1516–78) and Palma Vecchio (c.1480–1528) that show beautiful, young female lutenists in different attires. I aim to offer more nuanced, historically informed interpretations of these paintings that go beyond the reductionist category of ‘musical courtesan’, by exploring different aspects of the wider Cinquecento culture such as clothing fashions, copies of popular art models and the art market, wedding rituals, Petrarchan literature and Renaissance ideal beauties.

Earthly belle

The young female musician depicted in Solario’s Lute player is wearing an off-the-shoulders dark dress with big, puffed sleeves, and a white camicia decorated with black ribbons and red sleeves (illus.3). She dons a striking turban-like headdress (a capigliara), which is intricately decorated. Partially visible underneath the capigliara, her red hair is parted at the middle. Her attire is finished with a pearl necklace.

This anonymous lutenist is perfectly poised whilst playing her instrument, perhaps echoing Castiglione’s advice to avoid showing any effort when playing one’s musical instrument.¹⁶ Her gaze, directed straight at us, seems to be inviting the audience into her performance, our heart strings resonating in sympathy with the vibrating strings of her instrument (a common metaphor in contemporary thought).¹⁷ The corporeality of the scene is undeniable. Yet it was not only courtesans who played the lute. Renaissance sources reveal instances of so-called respectable women practising their music-making honourably and being praised for it. In I ritratti (1524), his idealized account of Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), Giangiorgio Trissino described her singing voice in very enticing terms:

when she sings, especially to the lute, I believe that Orpheus and Amphion … would be stupefied with wonder on hearing her … I am certain that you would be like those who heard the Sirens and forgot their native lands and their own homes.¹⁸

If such praise could be directed at the music-making of a courtly lady of high status, then the direct gaze and choice of musical instrument of Solario’s lutenist do not necessarily turn her into a courtesan.

The outfit of Solario’s lutenist marks her as an affluent and fashionable young lady but does not immediately indicate whether we are looking at a courtesan. According to 16th- and early 17th-century evidence (most especially costume books and alba amicorum), courtesans could not be easily distinguished from aristocratic ladies solely based on their clothing. Italian courtesans were trend-setters and would have used their clothing to attract their clients, even though they did not always don the most risqué outfits: for example, the album amicorum of the Nuremberg university student Sigismund Ortels of 1575–7 depicts a Venetian gentlewoman with bare breasts, whereas the image of the courtesan included in the same volume appears fully covered.¹⁹

The capigliara in Solario’s painting is not dissimilar to that worn by the woman at the centre of Sebastiano Florigerio’s Music lesson (1530s–40s, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), identified as a courtesan by some scholars partly due to her attire.²⁰ However, the capigliara was a fashionable headdress amongst northern Italian ladies during the first decades of the 16th century, having been made famous by the Marchioness of Mantua.²¹ Following this trend, female portraiture of the 1520s and 30s shows Italian women (both cortegiane and gentildonne) donning capigliare, such as the wedding portrait of the wealthy textile merchant Marsilio Casotti and his wife Faustina (1523, Museo del Prado, Madrid), Barbara Salutati’s likeness discussed above, or the portraits of Margherita Paleologo (c.1531, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), Isabella d’Este (c.1534–6, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and Eleonora Gonzaga (1538, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) to name just a few instances.

Like Solario’s lutenist, Bartolomeo Veneto’s female musician is also exquisitely dressed in a dark green, off-the-shoulders dress; her curly hair, covered by a semi-transparent veil, falls loose over her shoulders (illus.4). Her attire is finished by a zibellino hanging on her left arm, another item of clothing considered to have been made fashionable by Isabella d’Este.²² She is also gazing directly into her onlooker’s eyes. Next to her, the painter has included an open music book (containing contrapuntal parts including tenor and bassus) facing the viewer.²³.

There are at least 27 versions of this depiction.²⁴ Even though compositionally very close to one another, some of these paintings have been modified slightly afterwards by adding a halo and musical angels.²⁵ Some of these Cinquecento paintings were conceived with a broad market in mind, rather than for a particular patron: in order to work for as wide a public as possible, these depictions had to offer open meanings not to limit the market, thus functioning at different levels depending on who was looking at them.²⁶ Thus one owner of Bartolomeo Veneto’s painting could have imagined this anonymous lutenist to be a courtesan, because her tilted head, loose hair, direct gaze and lute could evoke the enticing sirens that both threatened and aroused the male population of the Cinquecento. Another anonymous buyer could have intended to purchase this depiction as a wedding present for a recently married young woman, as the zibellino was considered a symbol of fertility and can be found in many contemporary dowries.²⁷ The beautiful and exquisitely dressed young female musician could also be seen as a memento mori, for her youth, lavish attire and choice of activity might act as reminders of the passage of time. For another more pious viewer, she could be St Cecilia, adding a halo and angels to leave no doubt over the identification. She could also serve to symbolize the cultivation and learning of a particular household, displaying a beautiful young amateur musician accompanied by a music book in order to show both the family’s musical literacy and their awareness of the need for well-bred ladies to have musical knowledge (‘notizie … di musica’, in Castiglione’s words).²⁸

Although an uninformed modern viewer might initially identify Solario’s and Bartolomeo Veneto’s lutenists as musical courtesans because of their direct gaze, stylish outfit and choice of musical instrument, a closer analysis of these depictions shows that such a reductionist interpretation was unlikely to be in the minds of 16th-century viewers. Solario’s painting is most likely the portrait of an anonymous north Italian lady, her identity now lost to us. However, her beautiful frozen earthly performance is still a reminder of an ideal harmonious union with the beloved. It can be argued that this interpretation is even more prominent in Bartolomeo Veneto’s many versions of Lady playing the lute: the inclusion of the zibellino (symbol of fertility) and the sensuality of the woman’s pose and music-making (pointing towards the figure of the courtesan) highlight music’s dual meanings and bring the painting’s owner towards ‘a desire to enjoy with union what is beautiful or seems beautiful to the lover’, in the words of Aragona.

Idealized belle

Lady with a lute by Palma Vecchio depicts a young woman wearing a white camicia with a round neckline and big sleeves, and a black sleeveless bodice over the camicia, tied at her chest with two knots (illus.5). She wears no jewellery. Her blond hair, parted at the middle, falls loose over her shoulders, with her head resting in abandonment on her right hand. Standing out among the four examples chosen for this article, this woman merely holds the lute by the neck instead of playing it. Equally unusual amongst the depictions I am discussing, she is represented against an exterior reminiscent of other natural backgrounds found in late 15th- and early 16th-century depictions of belle donne, such as Leonardo’s Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (c.1474–8, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), the Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci by Piero de Cosimo (c.1480, Musée Condé, Chantilly), Titian’s Sacred and profane love (1514, Galleria Borghese, Rome) and Nude woman with a mirror by Giovanni Bellini (1515, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

As art historians have argued in relation to other painted beauties, Palma Vecchio’s painting can be found halfway between the real and the ideal: in the neo-Petrarchan atmosphere of the early Cinquecento, female beauty was a popular topic of discussion and was systematically codified in dialogues such as Niccolò Liburnio’s Selvette (Venice, 1514), Gian Giorgio Trissino’s I ritratti (Rome, 1524), Agnolo Firenzuola’s Delle bellezze delle donne (Florence, 1548) and Federigo Luigini’s Libro della bella donna (Venice, 1554).²⁹ The attributes of beauty according to Petrarchan poetry were codified, analysed and reused to construct paintings that could help their onlooker to contemplate real beauty. Like a modernized version of Petrarch’s Laura, Palma Vecchio’s lutenist can be seen as capturing in the particular the beauty of the ideal.

In a society that valued game-playing and dialogue as accepted ways of bonding and socializing,³⁰ one can imagine that the ambiguity of this lute player could have made a good starting point for a parlour game, its obscure meanings prompting learned conversations regarding courtesanship, female music-making, musical repertory, sensuality, beauty and harmony. For example, Innocentio Ringhieri’s Cento gioucchi liberali et d’ingegno (1551) includes simple games such as ‘il giuoco della bellezza’, ‘il giuoco della musica’, ‘il giuoco della pittura’ or ‘il giuoco della cortegiana’, which invite their players to discuss such topics in a playful manner:

one lady is selected, one that is not considered the most beautiful amongst the others; place her neatly in the centre and say: ‘the hair’. Then the one to whom this noun applies will respond with the following verse: ‘the blond hair that my heart ties’. Then, this person will address whoever they please, as games are not good without some shrewdness and deceit.³¹

This ‘one lady’ could easily be changed into the beautiful lady painted by Palma Vecchio, so that the group could identify the elements that define her as a bella donna. Perhaps, what this artwork is depicting, then, is not as important as what it could have evoked in its onlookers.

Parrasio Micheli’s Lute player is only half-dressed, with the open camicia revealing her breasts. She is adorned with gold and pearl earrings, bracelets and necklace (illus.6). Her blond hair is tied up in a bun. The woman, enraptured by her lute playing, looks upwards in ecstasy. She is accompanied by a small putto that holds a book open for her.

This female lutenist could be identified as Venus accompanied by her son Cupid, an interpretation reinforced by the appearance of some of the attributes of the Roman goddess of love (the pearls and the lute). It could be argued, then, that her nudity, choice of musical instrument and identity mark Micheli’s lutenist as a musical courtesan. What could be more fitting for a courtesan than to construct her image as the goddess of love herself? However, the connection between nudity and courtesanship can be considered anachronistic and imbued with the highly moralistic atmosphere of the late 16th century following the Council of Trent: indeed, earlier in the century nudity was not necessarily a symbol of a lack of chastity, but a reflection of a woman’s inner, unadorned beauty, her exposed breasts standing for the exposition of her heart and soul.³² According to Jill Burke’s study on the depiction of nude bodies during the Italian Renaissance, our modern equation of nudity and sex was not shared during the 16th century, a time when people had sex wearing clothes.³³

In this painting, Cupid has a laurel crown around his left forearm, an allegorical element that appears in many Venetian wedding paintings as well as being the symbol of Venetian wives.³⁴ Early modern treatises such as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1443–52) or Giulio Mancini’s Considerazione sulla pittura (1617–21) encouraged married couples to keep beautiful and sexually arousing paintings within their bedchambers to inspire the newlyweds into practising maritally sanctioned sexuality and to increase fertility. Indeed, depictions such as Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c.1510, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden), Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid (late 1520s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the Venus of Urbino by Titian (1538, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) could have been produced within the context of weddings.³⁵

The iconography of these depictions was based on epithalamia—wedding poetry originating in Greek and Roman literature still in vogue in the Italian Renaissance—which often features Venus and Cupid blessing the future wife.³⁶ One of these poems, Catullus’s ‘Carmine 61’, links the bride and groom to mythological figures, repeatedly invoking Hymen, the Greek god of marriage. Micheli’s depiction, then, could have been produced as a wedding painting. Giving an imagined voice to the lines from Catullus and symbolizing the harmony needed within the marriage, here Venus ‘chants wedding melodies with ringing voice’ to the sound of her lute.³⁷

These poetic inventions are at once erotically charged and pure, idealized and sensualized. The eroticized female body is used as a vehicle to convey higher ideals such as the institution of marriage and its end product (procreation and the perpetuation of the family lineage) or the contemplation of a physical beauty that can illuminate an ideal, pure beauty that leads to Love. Very much like Solario’s and Bartolomeo Veneto’s lutenists, Micheli’s and Palma Vecchio’s lute players have layers of meaning that go beyond the simple depiction of the supposed ‘musical courtesan’ that modern viewers might perceive at first glance.

Conclusion

The portraits considered in this article are symbols of beauty, where the inclusion of the lute adds the sensuality of music-making, a practice that requires a physical body to produce and perceive sound. These paintings of belle with musical instruments, then, are also symbols of a beautiful harmony.³⁸ More than in any other of the idealized beauties produced in the Italian Cinquecento, the physicality of music-making can bring us closer to that perfect union of body and soul that was advocated by Leone Ebreo, Tullia d’Aragona and other Neoplatonic writers. As Aragona explained:

[Honest love] has as its main goal the transformation of oneself into the object of one’s love, with a desire that the loved one be converted into oneself. … As it is the lover’s wish to achieve a corporeal union besides the spiritual one, in order to effect a total identification with the beloved, and since this corporeal unity can never be attained, because it is not possible for human bodies to be physically merged into one another, the lover can never achieve this longing of his, and so will never satisfy his desire.³⁹

For the onlooker, contemplating these alluring sights of music-making can produce an imagined version of that perfect union with the beloved. As the famous courtesan Veronica Franco told Tintoretto when she saw his portrait of her: ‘When I saw my portrait … I wondered for a while whether it was a painting or an apparition set before me by some trickery of the devil, not to make me fall in love with myself, as happened to Narcissus’.⁴⁰

As is the case with much of the art produced during this period, the image of the woman is used as a vehicle to carry meaning. Earlier interpretations of these musical beauties tended to overlook any hidden meanings by describing them as ‘musical courtesans’, thus placing these women’s bodies in what Patricia Simons describes as ‘in the paradoxical realm of desire and repression’.⁴¹ By stepping beyond the trope of the ‘musical courtesan’ I have tried to propose other ways with which to illuminate the cultures of beauty and harmony surrounding the never wholly knowable Italian woman.

Laura Ventura Nieto is an independent researcher. She gained her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017 with a thesis on depictions of women making music produced in the Italian peninsula between 1520 and 1650, with a special emphasis on theatricality, performativity and gender construction. Her publications include an analysis of Young woman playing the virginals (1528) by Catharina van Hemessen (in The museum of Renaissance music, ed. T. Shephard and V. Borghetti, Brepols 2023), and two chapters in preparation on the lives of Lavinia Guasca and her daughter Margherita Langosca as ladies-in-waiting in the court of Turin at the end of the 16th century, and representations of St Cecilia at the start of the 17th century in relation to contemporary mysticism.[email protected]

Footnotes