Allegory of Music (Erato)

Filippino Lippi painted this small poplar panel in Florence around 1500, two years after the city had hanged and burned the friar Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria. In the winters before that, Savonarola's followers had piled mirrors, wigs, playing cards and pictures onto bonfires in the same square. Filippino was among the busiest painters in the city through all of it, at work on the Strozzi family's frescoes in Santa Maria Novella. He made this for somebody's private room. A young woman stands by the sea holding a long ribbon while two small cupids use it to bridle a swan. On the left a lyre grows out of a stag's skull, with a set of pan pipes beside it. The German art historian Aby Warburg read those attributes and named her Erato, the muse of lyric poetry.