Pastoral Concert

The painting was originally attributed to Giorgione, but modern critics assign it more likely to the slightly younger Titian, as the figures' robustness is thought more typical of his style.[2] It is also possible that Giorgione (whose works included elements such as music, pastoral subjects and the simultaneous representation of the visible and invisible) began the work, and then, after his death in 1510, it was finished by Titian.[2]

The work was owned by the Gonzaga family, perhaps inherited from Isabella d'Este: it was later sold to Charles I of England. When the English royal collections were dispersed following the revolution of 1649, the painting was sold at auction to the German banker and art collector, Eberhard Jabach, who, in turn, sold it to Louis XIV in 1671.[3]

The painting was also attributed to Palma the Elder and Sebastiano del Piombo.[4]

Édouard Manet conceived his Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) after viewing the Pastoral Concert in a visit to the Louvre museum.[5]

The painting portrays three young people on a lawn, playing music together, while next to them a standing woman is pouring water from a marble basin. Both the women are naked apart from drapes that have fallen to their legs; the two men are dressed in contemporary costume. In the wide background is a shepherd and a landscape.

The subject was perhaps the allegory of poetry and music: the two women would be an imaginary apparition representing the ideal beauty, stemming from the two men's fantasy and inspiration. The woman with the glass vase would be the muse of tragic poetry, while the other one would be that of the pastoral poetry. Of the two playing men, the one with the lute would represent the exalted lyric poetry, the other being an ordinary lyricist, according to the distinction made by Aristotle in his Poetics. Another interpretation suggests that the painting is an evocation of the four elements of the natural world (water, fire, earth and air) and their harmonic relationship.[5]

• "The Pastoral Concert". Department of Paintings: Italian painting. Musée du Louvre.