Art and its Spirits

The holding museum dates this to 1876, which makes it the earliest of Gyzis's symbolic pictures, painted well before the allegories that filled his last years.

In the middle is a winged girl playing a violin, and the small putti around her busy themselves with the instruments and tools of the other arts. Giving the violinist the centre, and arranging everyone else in attendance on her, says plainly enough where music stood for him among the arts. The design runs along a diagonal, the old Baroque device, set up by the movement of the angels and by two arches, one at the upper right and one across the lower part. The colour is warm brown and red with black and white struck through it, and the girl's loose purple skirt takes up a good share of the surface.

It is a modest panel-sized canvas, 67 by 55 centimetres. The same collection owns two versions of a closely related subject, The Liberal Arts and Their Spirits, which shows how long the idea stayed with him.