Minerva and the Nine Muses

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Minerva and the Nine Muses

Artist Arie de Vois (Dutch, about 1632- 1680)

Place of OriginThe Netherlands, Leiden

Date1662

Dimensions47 1/2 × 72 3/4 in. (120.7 × 184.8 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

2020.24

Not on View

Label TextPallas Athena and the Nine Muses is Arie de Vois’s largest known painting and one of his most important. Its source is a passage in The Metamorphoses by the classical Roman author Ovid, in which Athena, goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts, visits the nine Muses on Mount Helicon to see a sacred spring called the Hippocrene. Athena stands at the left. Seated just right of center with a large orb in her lap, Urania, Muse of astronomy, gestures to the spring, just visible in the upper right. To the left of Urania is Clio (history); to the right of Urania stands Polyhymnia (choral poetry). In the background shadows are Thalia (comedy) and Melpomene (tragedy). Erato (lyric poetry) is in front of them. Calliope (epic poetry) and Euterpe (music; holding a flute) sit at the right, and Terpsichore (dance) sits with her back to us. De Vois was one of the artists active in Leiden, Holland known as the fijnschilders (fine painters), who were renowned for their meticulous technique that resulted in the realistic rendering of textures and the deliberate avoidance of visible strokes of paint.Published Referencesvon Wurzbach, Alfred, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexicon, 1906-1911, II, p. 809.

Pigler, Andor, Barockthemen, Eine Auswahl von Verzichnissen zur Ikonographie des 17. Und 18. Jahrhunderts, 1974, vol. II, p. 183.

Bernt,Walther, Die Niederländischen Maler und Zeichner des 17. Jahrhunderts, III, 1980, p. 50, ill. 1407.

Hecht, Peter, De Hollandse fijnschilders. Van Gerard Dou tot Adriaen van der Werff, Amsterdam, 1989, p. 231, fig. 49-50b.

Exhibition HistoryMuseum of Fine Arts Boston, The Poetry of Everyday Life, Dutch Painting in Boston (catalogue by Ronni Baer), 2002, p. 80.