Will she or won’t she? The ambivalence of female musicianship in two paintings by Bernardino Licinio (1489–1565)

Abstract

This article examines the depiction of sexual propo­sition, the corruption of female virtue and the ambivalent allurements of secular music in a pair of 16th-century Concert paintings by the Venetian artist Bernardino Licinio. It argues that Licinio’s multi-figure concerts, centred on the music-making of young women, both parody and invert the classical elegiac theme of the pauper amans, the impoverished poet-lover who condemns the power of wealth and bestows poetry instead of gold on his beloved, only to be rejected due to her vanity and materialism. The pauper amans theme appears in several 16th-century Venetian strambotti and early madrigals, which are decidedly satiric in tone. In his paintings, Licinio reverses the familiar roles of poet and beloved, and the refined music of the virtuous-seeming young woman is challenged by the dissonant sound of her older male admirer shaking a purse full of coins or by his bold physical advances, which impede her playing. The dissonant and crude gesture of offering her coin payment equates the young woman’s art of music with her sexuality. It alleges not only her corruptibility and low status as a piece of merchandise for sale, but also debases the spiritually elevating art of music, with its noble and abstract figurations of love. The motif of the shaken purse with its ‘music of gold’ first appears in the Venetian dialect comedy La buelsca (c.1514), and is repeated in a series of later songs and poems centred on the subject of the grasping, mercenary prostitute in the 1520s and 30s. Licinio’s paintings play with such popular literary and musical themes but ultimately prefer visual ambiguity and unresolved narrative tension to their frankness and specificity.

This article explores the visual depiction of sexual proposition, the debasement of female ­virtue and virtuosity and the ambivalent allurements of secular music in a pair of early 16th-century paintings by the Venetian artist Bernardino Licinio (1489–1565). The two paintings, Young woman with lute and suitor of c.1520, now known only in a black and white photograph (illus.1), and Young woman at the clavichord of c.1520–25, now at Windsor Castle (illus.2), fit within a broader genre of so-called Concert pictures—engravings and drawings as well as paintings—that were produced in Venice for the private domestic art market by artists including Titian, Giovanni Cariani, Palma il Vecchio and Bonifazio de’ Pitati, in addition to Licinio.¹ Unique among surviving examples of this profuse and heterogeneous genre, Licinio’s two paintings centre not on the depiction of informal amateur ensembles or individual professional musicians, but rather on young women of uncertain social position who perform solo music in the presence of middle-aged male admirers.

The argument is that these witty, unusual paintings play with and invert the classical elegiac theme of the pauper amans, the impoverished poet-lover who condemns the power of wealth and bestows poetry instead of gold on his female beloved only to be rejected because of her vanity and base materialism. The pauper amans theme appears in several 16th-century Venetian strambotti and early madrigals of a decidedly satiric tone, and both the paintings and the songs rely on the animated, dialogic structure of challenge–riposte poetry. However, the open-ended narrative outcome of the paintings—the beholder witnesses the ambivalent moment of sexual proposition rather than the fait accompli—leaves the beholder to speculate on the nature of the young woman’s response and thus also on her moral position. The paintings called upon their culturally conditioned beholders to resolve the incomplete dramatic situation depicted by utilizing their personal experience and prior familiarity with similar characters and scenarios found in popular poetry, songs and comedies that treat similar subjects related to contemporary urban life. In these sources, the young woman’s acceptance of the sexual advance registers as a foregone conclusion, while her persona as a musical virtuosa proves but one feature in a calculated repertory of seduction. When evaluated within their historical context as ‘inter-media’ closely connected to these other forms of cultural production, the paintings can be understood as satiric in alleging the young woman’s avarice, cunning, and potential or implied status as courtesan, or as moralizing in their emphasis on the power of money to corrupt the innocence and beauty of youth.²

The Concert as a compositional type

A relatively large and diverse corpus of Venetian pictorial imagery, now classified under the modern catch-all title of ‘Concert’, figures scenes of informal group singing and music-making as intimate, ideal forms of social and spiritual harmony, whether expressed through the pastoral mode in a landscape, in a genre-like interior gathering, or in the psychologically animated pictorial language of the half-length portrait. The new interest in Venice after 1500 in the depiction of idealized yet pseudo-contemporary musical gatherings—a phenomenon already well established at the north Italian courts by the late 15th century—has since the late 19th century been primarily associated with Giorgione and his so-called creati (or protégés), those collaborators and close followers Walter Pater famously called the ‘School of Giorgione’ in his classic essay of 1877—most notably Giulio Campagnola, Sebastiano Luciani (later del Piombo), Titian, Giovanni Cariani and Palma il Vecchio.³

Between around 1505 and 1540 these artists, along with others like Dosso Dossi and Girolamo Romanino, who trained in Venice but mostly worked elsewhere in northern Italy, produced numerous paintings and graphic works that figure both interior musical ensembles and outdoor musical gatherings. This rich and novel vein of imagery, which was considered distinctly modern at the time even when deeply classicizing in its content, traverses a broad representational territory. For example, in his Concert of c.1511–12 now in the Pitti Palace, Titian deployed the technically accurate depiction of live musical performance and the dynamics of the informal ensemble to animate the new type of dramatic half-length portraiture recently introduced in Venice by Giorgione (illus.3).⁴ Titian and his counterparts were in these same years exploring the visual interplay between contemporary reality and a timeless, mythical Arcadia, between the domestic music chamber and the natural world, and between the lauded poetic practice of improvisatory music-­making and the symbolic expression of poetic inspiration in the pastoral mode. The intimate, mixed-gender quartet of shepherds and courtly musicians gathered to play in a shady copse in Domenico Campagnola’s Concert by a brook, which he grafted onto a partially completed landscape composition of a different subject by his adoptive father Giulio, epitomizes this mode of pictorial idyll (illus.4).⁵

While modern art historians tend to categorize all such loosely related paintings and graphic works under the umbrella term ‘Concert’, scholars from Patricia Egan to Wolfgang Prohashka have pointed out that this title implies a certain formality and distinction between players and public or audience, while the majority of pictures that receive this designation instead emphasize ‘musical execution in private, the mode of listening of the protagonists, a suggestive emotive atmosphere’.⁶ The interior compositions in particular are constructed to dissolve the spatial barrier between the depicted participants and their audience. They invite the beholder into the virtual environment of the darkened room or even into the musical ensemble itself through their spatial manipulations and engaging modes of address. Titian’s Pitti Concert deploys multiple such strategies, including the young singer’s side-long gaze at the beholder, the perspectival rendering of the keyboard that brings the central figure’s tensed fingers to meet the picture plane, and the Augustinian friar’s subtle gesture of touching the keyboardist’s shoulder, which precipitates his dynamic, sweeping turn across the composition. Other pictures, such as Vittore Carpaccio’s compositional study for a Concert (c.1507–10) now in the British Museum, deploy even more pointed illusionistic prompts as sensory triggers. In this drawing the front wall of the studiolo is reduced to a parapet, and the recorder and cornet resting on it are positioned in sharply calibrated foreshortening to extend towards the virtual grasp of the beholder (illus.5).⁷ At the root of this new focus on capturing musical performance in painting was the fact that music, as conceptualized by Renaissance philosophers, physicians and theorists, provided artists with a potent metaphor for the dissolution and penetration of the pictorial surface, fostering the more personalized, interactive and sociable mode of reception sought by a new generation of Venetian artists, patrons and collectors.

Licinio’s Concert inversions

In Licinio’s paintings of musical seduction the young woman’s refined solo playing and singing is not celebrated, but diminished by the suggestion of a base sexual transaction. This not only inverts the elegiac premise of the pauper amans, but also upends the ideals of social, natural and universal harmony symbolized by music-making in other Concert paintings. The suggestion arises not in the most obvious way from the women’s behaviour, but from the actions of the male figures who debase themselves as well as the value of music as an artform through their actions. In the Young woman with lute and suitor (illus.1), the well-dressed, middle-aged man shakes his metal mesh coin purse next to the young woman’s ear, while in the Young woman at the clavichord (illus.2) a clearly visible pentimento reveals that the man’s right sleeve originally crossed over the young woman’s, with his right hand presumably resting on her waist. This possessive gesture of physical intimacy, which would have interfered with the young woman’s ability to play her instrument, was altered in a later campaign of repainting to become the more detached gesture of solicitation now visible.

The addition of a third figure to the right side of the composition, the stern-faced, older masara (maidservant), further muddies the interpretative waters. Standing in profile and staring with laser focus across the narrative field at the male protagonist, she could be acting as a chaperone protecting her innocent charge from his untoward behaviour, or, more likely, as a mezzana (a procuress, literally a ‘go-between’), there to facilitate the young woman’s professional interaction with her client and enforce payment.⁸

Whatever their iconographic ambiguities, both of Licinio’s portrait-like Concert paintings focus on the figure of a young woman whose social status and moral virtue, which encompasses her artistic cultivation, are challenged by her implication within a compromising narrative scenario alongside an older man.⁹ Both of their pictorial narratives stand loosely within the longstanding iconographic tradition of the unequal couple, which had its ultimate conceptual origins in classical satire and comedy. Across the late medieval period a stable of ‘marginal’ imagery in a variety of media paired individuals of vastly different age, social status, mental ability or even species in intimate proximity as absurd lovers.¹⁰ In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Italian and northern European artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Quentin Massys and Lucas Cranach the Elder played with the theme, as did Licinio’s close compatriot Giovanni Cariani in Venice. Along with many others, they produced numerous drawings, prints and paintings of unequal couples that feature a grotesque or obsequious old man or woman attempting to seduce a beautiful, sumptuously dressed young partner of the opposite sex with a sack or purse full of coins (illus.6).¹¹ Alternately, some of the imagery shows the younger partner distracting the older individual through flirtation while surreptitiously stealing from their purse. In both scenarios, the stark contrast in age and physical condition between the couple is heightened, and the transactional nature of the encounter rendered more blatant than in Licinio’s comparably subtle and naturalistic paintings.

For his figural language Licinio draws on idealizing modes of female portraiture and poetic tropes of beauty and virtue—fair skin, copious blond hair, dark shining eyes, rosy cheeks and delicate features—to articulate the young women’s physical appearance and demeanour.¹² In both Concert paintings the female musician’s self-presentation registers as relatively demure and unornamented, which the artist may also have intended to denote the decorous, self-effacing style of singing and playing music considered appropriate to young women. This pristine façade, coupled with the young women’s averted gazes, which deny both the male protagonist and the beholder direct eye contact and diffuse the erotic charge of the encounter, contradict the compositional features that allege their materialism, potential status as prostitutes and false pretensions to elevated social status. As will be discussed, however, in the case of the Young woman with lute and suitor the situation is complicated by the female protagonist’s unusual combination of attire, which consists of a fur-lined men’s overcoat worn open to reveal a white camicia (chemise, an undergarment)—a loose overcoat so voluminous as to partially obscure her lute.

As representatives of a broader category of imagery, these portrait-like paintings fall into a visual middle ground between the materially opulent, lushly realized and sensually evocative ‘Bella donna’ portrayals of generic female beauty that were a hallmark of Titian and Palma il Vecchio between c.1510 and 1530, and, at the other extreme, the stark, visceral depictions of prostitutes found in invective poetry, dialect comedies and Carnival performances during the same period. The destitute, syphilitic courtesan publicly shamed in Maestro Andrea Veneziano’s Lamento d’una cortigiana Ferrarese (Siena, 1520) offers a prime example of the latter category. In the woodcut on the title-page of the pamphlet, the famous former courtesan Beatrice de’ Bonis, who had been favoured by cardinals, noblemen and curial humanists, is pushed in a cart to a Roman hospital for incurables (illus.7).¹³

Unlike such imagery of abjection and the violently misogynist texts written about courtesans by Venetian authors, which thankfully remained unillustrated, visual ambiguity proves a signature feature of Licinio’s half-length Concert paintings.¹⁴ And unlike Titian and Palma’s paintings of generic fantasy women, the costumes depicted by Licinio prove historically accurate for the period. Despite this, the young women, fresh faced, physically ample and with neatly coiled braids atop their heads, cannot readily be identified as belonging to a particular social category. The game of identification—does she represent a respectable unmarried girl at the edge of corruption, an illicit lover, an adulterous married woman or a courtesan—may have added a pleasurable tension to the beholder’s experience, just as the satiric literature of the same period is full of wayward nuns, promiscuous female servants and peasants, sexually adventurous gentildonne (gentlewomen) and aggressive, mercenary meretrici (prostitutes), who hide their avarice and ambition behind an elegant appearance and courtly manners. In popular comedies, poetry and songs these characters are motivated by sexual gratification, material reward or promises of a more comfortable and secure lifestyle, often made by wealthy, libidinous older men. In reality, the ambiguity of the courtesan’s appearance vexed Venetian authorities who sought to prevent her from appropriating styles of dress and comportment reserved for patrician and elite cittadino (citizen-class) women, a concern that only intensified across the 16th century.¹⁵ Meanwhile, respectable young women of the elite were castigated by religious and political conservatives for their revealing and ostentatious clothing, copious use of cosmetics and perfumes, all of which meant they might readily be confused with prostitutes.¹⁶

The ambivalent moral status of secular music, and the debate that surrounded young women who learned to sing and play it, only compounds this ambiguity of appearances.¹⁷ Belief in the dangerous, seductive power of secular music to loosen composure and inflame the passions was widespread in the Renaissance. In Venice, the newly minted courtesan class of prostitutes distinguished themselves in part through poetic erudition, rhetorical skills and musical accomplishment. They, like the courtly noblewomen they emulated, chose to play quiet, refined instruments such as the lute, harpsichord and other keyboard instruments as complement to their singing. Pietro Aretino was far from alone in considering the courtesan’s practice of singing self-accompanied on the lute as a potent erotic tool. He also reiterated the more generalized misogynist view that ‘the songs, sounds and letters that women know are the keys that open the doors to their modesty’.¹⁸ Of course, courtesans were not the only Venetian women who learned to sing the sweet, melodic songs adapted from Petrarchan love poetry that were popular at the time—frottole, strambotti, sonetti—and to accompany themselves on musical instruments. From around 1500, and influenced in part by noble self-fashioning and cultural practice at the north Italian courts, patrician, cittadino and even artisan-class women and girls in Venice began to learn music—practice rather than theory and composition—as a desirable social grace and pastime, although the practice remained controversial.¹⁹

The Young woman with lute and suitor

In the Young woman with lute and suitor Licinio reverses the traditional roles of the male poet and unattainable donna amata, or female beloved of the Petrarchan poetic tradition, as the demure song of a beautiful young woman is ‘accompanied’ by the dissonant sound of an older male suitor or client shaking his coin purse close to her ear. Within the narrative context of the painting, the man’s crude gesture of proffering coin payment in such demonstrative and crass fashion equates the young woman’s music with her sexuality, reducing both to the status of commodities. His action alleges not only her imminent corruptibility, low moral character and potential status as a prostitute, but also debases the spiritually elevating art of poetic song, with its noble and abstract figurations of love. From the external perspective of the beholder, however, the man’s discordant and disruptive sexual proposition also serves to debase him as ignorant of the beauty, celestial harmony and spiritual benefit of music.

As for the young woman, the turn of her head and gaze towards the man indicate that she listens to his proposition, which appears to be voiced through his parted lips in addition to being sounded through the coin purse. She holds the fingerboard of the small lute with her left hand, whose strings are muted by the fur coat that—together with the parapet—partially obstructs the body of the instrument. Thus, rather than play with her right hand, she either points towards the inscription on the right side of the stone parapet before her or indicates time by tapping her index finger against it, using the tactus, or musical beat, to guide the tempo as she sings.²⁰ In either case, the open mouths of the two protagonists and close proximity of their faces surely indicate sung dialogue rather than speech given the musical context of the painting. If Licinio did intend to deploy the tactus to symbolize the temporal aspect of musical harmony as a guide for the singing shared by the two figures, this would indicate a clever display on the part of a musically knowledgeable artist.²¹

The bearded man stands close behind the young woman, regarding her face intently and encircling her shoulders with his arm. The generic, portrait-like setting suggests a darkened domestic interior, and the atmosphere of intimate proximity is amplified by the young woman’s atypical mode of dress. She wears an ample fur-lined coat with wide lapels over a loose white camicia in an incongruous juxtaposition of the most private and public, or outdoor, layers of clothing that emphasizes the sensuality of silk and fur against skin. The heavy coat familiar from numerous male portraits of the period also closely recalls the one worn by Giorgione’s Laura of c.1506. Laura, so named by modern scholars for the laurel branches that frame her from behind, may have been a bride, a poet in her own right, or the muse of ‘Messer Giacomo’, the unidentified man whose name appears inscribed on the back of the painting. Anne Christine Junkerman first observed that Laura’s oversized coat is in fact a male outer garment, and suggests that it exudes a particularly charged form of erotic allure that connotes male possession and protection of the female body, but also the courtesan’s incorporation of both masculine and feminine attributes in her intellectual and erotic self-fashioning.²² Like Laura, but in contrast to the majority of painted Venetian belle donne, who wear their long hair loose over the shoulders, Licinio’s lutenist sports a tidy coiffure that includes a large golden balzo (a crown with padded roll) fashioned either of braided silk or false hair. However, she wears no jewellery or other accessories to mark her as a figure of excessive luxury or convey the hyperbolic avarice typical of prostitutes in contemporary invective literature and dialect comedies.²³

The middle-aged man behind the lutenist wears a rather standard gentlemanly ensemble of a stuffed black cap with medallion on the front and a black doublet. Rather than playing an instrument, he shakes a shimmering mesh purse to make his own version of harsh, jangling ‘music’ as his accompaniment in the duet.²⁴ Unique among Venetian Concert paintings, Licinio includes a Latin inscription on the front of the raised parapet at right. In capital letters the interrogative text asks: HIC AURI SONITUS PALLEN / PULCHRA PUELLA / QUID MIRUM SI TE / FLECTIT ET ILLE DEOS (Beautiful girl, is it a marvel if you yield to the sound of gold as the gods yield to you [i.e. your music]).²⁵ The trope of the shaken purse with its ‘music of gold’ appears in an early Venetian dialect comedy, the Comedia dicta la bulescha (hereafter La bulesca, c.1514), about a lowly brothel prostitute who strives to become a somtuosa meretrize (sumptuous prostitute), one of several terms used by patrician diarist Marin Sanudo to denote the newly minted courtesan class of elite, independent sex workers.²⁶ The motif recurs in several follow-on ‘alla bulesca’ songs and comedies that treat the subject of the grasping, mercenary prostitute; Venetian beholders who attended these theatrical performances or purchased the printed texts after the fact could be expected to recognize it. In La bulesca, the ambitious, streetwise prostitute Marcolina boasts to her cousin Zuana of a wealthy lover she has seduced. Marcolina asks Zuana: ‘Che te par de custù? Te par che’l sona?’ (What do you think of him? Do you think he jingles?). She is referring to the sound of coins in his purse.

The pauper amans in popular song

The scarsella (purse) is also a device associated with prostitutes and other grasping, materially motivated women in Renaissance popular song outside the Venetian ‘alla bulesca’ tradition. One early example is the Matinata della potential de danari (Matinata on the power of money), a strambotto included in Baldassare Olimpo Alessandri’s highly popular Libro de amore chiamato Ardelia (Book of love called Ardelia, Perugia, 1520).²⁷ The song delineates the profile of a woman who favours money over her lover’s music and his attempts at elevated, beautifully sung Petrarchan poetry of praise:

There is no more need [for] so many instruments

Nor [for] barzellette and canti figurati!!

If you are searching to be every hour content

If you are searching to be consoled

As long as you have money [you will go] without suffering

You will always be praised with honour

Turn your eyes and regard to what I say:

It is with money that a man or a woman is bought.²⁸

The rejection by the beloved of the would-be ­lover’s songs and music—his attempts to impress her on multiple instruments and in different styles—in favour of cold hard cash ultimately has its roots in the Roman elegiac tradition of the pauper amans.

The trope of favouring monetary payment over poetry and music continues in early Venetian madrigals and other poetry that was set to music in the 1530s, including a pair of challenge–riposte poems set as madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt and published in Venice in his Terzo libro and Quarto libro di madrigali of 1539. In the opening challenge a courtesan bluntly tells her lover, ‘If, as you always say, you find me beautiful, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to put a few coins in my hand’.²⁹ She then scoffs at her suitor for imagining that he could ‘pagar con parole’ (pay with words, i.e. poetry), before bluntly concluding: ‘But to him who desires to have his way with me let this be said, for better or worse: put your hand often in your purse!’³⁰ In the response madrigal, her male partner chastises her: ‘Lady, among the most beautiful faces, honest and dear, yours would rank as first if it weren’t spoiled by your asking for money’, and ends emphatically that despite his love, ‘I pray you not to touch my purse!’³¹

Unlike these songs, Licinio’s painted inscription does not label the female protagonist as a greedy prostitute. Rather, it deploys the neutral term ‘puella’ (girl), thus maintaining the pleasurable tension regarding her ambiguous identity and moral character. This linguistic move could also derive from classical sources. While the term ‘puella’ had a generic value in the Renaissance, authors of classical Roman elegy, including Ovid and Propertius, employed it to denote young women of uncertain class or virtue. K. Sara Meyer characterizes the elegiac puella in just the sort of open-ended terms used by Licinio, terms which also align with the unstable, socially in-between position of the Renaissance courtesan:

Unlike the virgo or matrona, she must be sexually accessible …, but unlike the meretrix, she must not be easily purchasable. By situating her differently at times between the traditional polarities of matrona and meretrix, the elegiac poets deliberately play with a variety of possibilities for the social status of their puella in order to explore different social and erotic configurations and ramifications.³²

The inscription’s claim that the pagan deities succumb to the young woman’s beauty and music and the choice of Latin rather than Italian vernacular or Venetian dialect prove a tongue-in-cheek way to aggrandize and classicize the low, sometimes rough humour of dialect comedies and songs. Yet, however elevated the language and claims for her charms, the inscription’s content still satirizes the young woman’s musical pretensions and calls her virtue into question by stressing the seductive power of gold.

The Latin inscription also provides insight into the classically derived comic premise of the painting and corollary imagery by inverting a popular conceit of Roman elegiac poetry, that of the impoverished poet-lover in the posture of the pauper amans who traditionally offers his beloved poetry instead of gold.³³ Licinio’s painting inverts the motif of the courtesan refusing her lover’s music (barzelette and canti figurati) that appears in strambotti and early madrigals by having the male protagonist seduce not with the style, sweetness or passion of his music, but rather with the rote sound of shaking the contents in his purse—which nonetheless proves a seductive ‘music’ to the young woman according to the inscription. This satiric debasement of the elegiac conceit that poetry and genius are more precious than material wealth, which the elegiac poet soundly condemns, proves a perfect conceit for the painter who plays visually with the ambivalent moral status of secular music and young women who learned to play it, not to mention perform it for an audience. The humour is only heightened by the nature of the music women typically played in domestic settings, whether courtesans or court ladies. Their repertory consisted primarily of refined love songs grounded in medieval conceits of chivalry and the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, in which, to quote William F. Prizer, ‘love is essentially ethereal and unrequited, seemingly existing in vacuo’, that is, the exact opposite of the mercenary form it takes in paintings of unequal couples.³⁴

In summary, the historical beholder of Licinio’s painting must have been expected to keep the sensory trigger of sonic dissonance—the sweet sound of a frottola or strambotto versus the repetitive sound of shaken coins—in mind when regarding the painting. Its humour depends on the beholder summoning just the sort of sweet and pleasing love song a young woman might play and then contrasting it with the vulgar tunelessness of the man’s base ‘music’, which in a practical sense ruins her delicate performance. In terms of the narrative, the coin purse shatters the illusion of virtue and demeans the young woman by equating her musical virtuosity with commerce, alleging her greed and status as a potential prostitute. The Latin inscription, while seemingly elevated in its form and evocation of the classical deities, in fact cheapens the spiritual purity and emotional force of women’s beauty and art by equating it with the corrosive power of money.

The Young woman at the clavichord

Licinio painted a second Concert scene involving sexual proposition around the same time or a few years later, which offers a slight variation on the theme of the power of money versus art and virtue (illus.2).³⁵ The Young woman at the clavichord also adds a third character familiar from both classical and contemporary comedies, the literature on courtesans and a number of lost and extant paintings by Licinio, Palma il Vecchio, Bonifazio de’ Pitati and Paris Bordon.³⁶ She is the weathered masara, whose plain and forbidding appearance in the paintings offsets the beauty, freshness and, in this case, musical accomplishment of the young woman. The central protagonist of the Windsor Castle Concert, another ample, lovely and refined young woman, remains similar in type to the earlier composition, although she is now fully dressed in a fashionable gown of shining orange silk, which sets off her neatly braided and coiled auburn hair. While the gown itself is sumptuous in its vibrant orpiment colour and copious use of fabric for the puffed over-sleeves and full skirt, as in the Young woman with lute and suitor, no additional jewellery or accessories point to an overly acquisitive nature. The bodice of the dress is high cut and completely fastened, making this costume a decorous choice for any young woman of financial means. This choice registers a significant departure from Licinio’s other rendering of the subject with its more revealing and intimate combination of men’s overcoat and camicia.

The choice of musical instrument is of course also different. The clavichord and related keyboard instruments were second only to the lute in popularity among amateur female musicians in 16th-century Venice, and like the lute, the clavichord was favoured by gentildonne and courtesans alike for its soft, delicate sound. Beyond the change in instrument, it proves difficult to discern from the shape of the young woman’s mouth in the Windsor Castle Concert whether or not she sings. In sharp contrast to the muscle tension clearly visible in the fingers of Titian’s keyboardist in the Pitti Concert, her hands are resting in a relaxed fashion on the keys rather than actively playing. As mentioned, in Licinio’s original composition, the bearded man’s right arm crossed over the young woman’s sleeve to reach her waist, a pentimento that remains visible to the naked eye. Hovering just behind her, he regards her face intently, anticipating a response to his bold physical advance, which is also presumably why she has ceased actively to play her instrument. Despite the disruptive gesture, her facial expression reveals no obvious reaction. Instead, the female musician looks up and obliquely into the distance with an impassive countenance, much like her counterpart in the Young woman with lute and suitor. Her neutral demeanour and elegant, composed appearance heighten the narrative ambiguity and potential irony of her deception if she is indeed to be understood as a woman who regularly trades in carnal commerce.

The man repeats as a character type even more exactly from Licinio’s other Concert painting than does the young woman: a middle-aged, bearded everyman indicative of wealth and gentlemanly status, who is fashionably dressed in black with a large, stuffed balzo crafted of velvet patterned with a raised leaf-and-vine motif and accented with a centrally placed medallion. The maid servant, as per her typical iconography in such paintings, presents a stark foil to her young charge. She is much older, severe and unornamented in appearance and dressed in simple shapes and drab colours. Licinio’s frank rendering presents the masara as a formidable adversary to the man, all sinew and scowl with pronounced jowls. Her hair is pulled tightly back in a white cloth bonnet, and her sharp gaze is directed across the composition to fall squarely on the actions and intentions of her charge’s presumptive suitor or client.

Unfortunately, the surface of the painting is badly damaged as is particularly visible in the background. Licinio scholar Luisa Vertova has claimed that the man previously held a sack of coins in his extended right hand, which is now empty, presumably to shake it and make false music just as the analogous figure does in the Concert composition with the lute.³⁷ However congenial the repetition of this iconographic motif would be to the argument of the present article, X-ray radiography of the painting does not support the claim. The possessive reaching gesture must on its own accomplish the same pictorial objective in terms of suggesting innocence soon to be lost or the feigned illusion of that effect. Similar attitudes of possessive physical intimacy—sometimes coupled with gift-giving on the part of the male protagonist—crop up in portrait-like paintings of illicit lovers by Altobello Melone and Paris Bordon among others, but in which the female partner reciprocates.³⁸ The crucial difference in Licinio’s Concert is the presence and agency of the older masara character, who may signal the base, transactional nature of the gesture if she is indeed to be understood as the young woman’s procuress.

The painting asks: will this beautiful young musical amateur, perhaps under pressure from the older woman, succumb to the twinned vices of luxuria (lust and luxury), developing an insatiable appetite for ‘piacer carnale’ (carnal pleasure) conflated with a desire for money and fine things, as frequently occurs in the satiric literature on courtesans and in ‘alla bulesca’ comedies?³⁹ Or it instead asks if she is the elegant and well-practised courtesan virtuosa whose artful playing is here satirically reduced to a cheap trick of seduction?⁴⁰ Both scenarios are possible. The corruption of young, naive and vulnerable women by pimps and aging prostitutes looking to lengthen their professional lives through procurement is a regular feature of ‘alla bulesca’ farces that, like so much Renaissance comedy, developed from classical roots. Aretino adopted the premise for his dialogues on the ‘school of whoredom’ in which the retired prostitute Nanna teaches her young charge Pippa the tricks of the trade.⁴¹ Of course, the innocent appearance and demure playing of the young woman in Licinio’s painting could also be the contrived and convincing dissimulation of a practised courtesan. In his Dialogues Aretino warns his audience, ‘[t]he truth is that the accomplishments whores acquire are only snares to catch the fools … Any whore who starts singing songs and can read music from a book at sight, stay away from her—in fact run away as fast as you can, even in your bare feet.’⁴² Licinio’s painting of a Young woman at a clavichord, even more than his Concert with the lute and Latin inscription, invites and accommodates a range of interpretations based on the beholder’s projected narration of the dramatic action depicted and completion of the various possible comic scenarios. The goal of this article has been to re-create the local Venetian context of mutually supportive, even integrated, artistic and cultural forms—painting, poetry, music, comedy and satiric literature—in which such a robustly interactive mode of reception was enjoyed.

Chriscinda Henry is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Canada. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, recreation and festivity in Renaissance Italy, including the recent book Playful pictures: painting, leisure, and entertainment in the Venetian Renaissance home (Penn State University Press, 2021). Current research includes projects on the patronage and material culture of the specialized music study in 16th-century Venice and on the somaesthetic interaction of mobile beholders with wall paintings in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent.chriscinda.henry@mcgill.ca

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