Allegory of Music

Dosso Dossi was the court painter at Ferrara, working for the same d'Este family that Correggio served in Mantua, and his pictures often carry a puzzle for a cultured viewer to unpick. A woman sits among the trappings of music, but look at the small tablets and the anvil worked into the scene. They point to an old story about Pythagoras, the Greek thinker who was said to have discovered the mathematics of harmony by chance, hearing blacksmiths' hammers of different weights ring at different pitches against the anvil. So the picture is about more than pleasant sound. The tablets are inscribed with the intervals themselves, the plain numbers behind the music.