Madrigal or canzona? Performing intellectual and sensual pleasure in Jacopo Tintoretto’s Women making music

The vague mythological context of Jacopo Tintoretto’s Women making music (after 1566, Dresden Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) has puzzled scholars, resulting in little consensus regarding the allegorical meaning of the work. H. Colin Slim, for example, emphasized the orderly disposition of bodies in the painting, suggesting a musical-cosmological reading of the work. Liana de Girolami Cheney, on the other hand, includes the sensual in her reading, suggesting that the painting represents the dual natures of Venus. In this article, I build on Cheney’s dual reading of the work but focus differently on the partbooks and performance, exploring how the painting blurs lines between painting as performance, and music-making as visual experience, resulting in a painted performable image. I first demonstrate how the music in the depicted partbooks encodes two divergent ways of experiencing the painting: one characterized by learned and clever allusions in the case of Andrea Gabrieli’s madrigal Quando lieta, and the other through pleasure and the erotic in the case of the anonymous canzona napolitana Dolc’amorose. By using the partbooks as interpretative clues, I argue that the painting contributes to the Renaissance paragone between painting and music, in particular a shift away from early 16th-century associations between painting, music and reason towards a celebration of the manual, sensory and embodied acts of painting. This interpretation of the painting requires the viewer to identify the songs through a combined strategy of seeing and singing, with the painting sounding differently depending on which music the viewer performs: the intricate and elevated madrigal or the sensually pleasing canzona. Seen thus, the painting blurs lines between painting and music, visual and aural, object and performance, introducing an element of ‘play’ that decentres any one allegorical meaning.