In this “Allegory of Music” (1649), Laurent de La Hyre presents a composition of perfect harmony where each element responds to a meticulous visual orchestration.
A young woman of idealized beauty, draped in fabrics of warm ochre and vermilion tones, tunes her theorbo. This gesture, far from trivial, symbolizes the perpetual quest for harmony pursued by the musical art. The artist deploys a classical language of great elegance: fluted columns evoking antiquity, masterful perspective, and amber light that subtly models volumes. The small bird, a discreet witness to this scene, introduces a natural touch contrasting with scholarly music. The richness of details demonstrates a profound knowledge of the musical universe. La Hyre thus transforms a conventional allegory into a visual meditation on the very nature of musical art, suspended between theory and sensuality.
Object Information
- Title: Allegory of Music
- Artist: Laurent de La Hyre
- Date: 1649
- Dimensions: 105.7 x 144.1 cm
- Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue, New York, Gallery 622
- https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436836
Historical Context
Laurent de La Hyre (1606-1656) embodies the golden age of French classicism. A founding member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, he developed a style characterized by clarity of composition, elegance of figures, and soft light. Trained in the wake of late Mannerism, he evolved toward a more measured expression, imbued with Italian influences yet profoundly French in its restraint and intellectual refinement.
This “Allegory of Music,” created for the private mansion of Gédéon Tallemant, forms part of a series dedicated to the seven Liberal Arts, a typical iconographic program for aristocratic residences of the Grand Siècle, reflecting the humanist ideal of encyclopedic culture.
Music among the Liberal Arts
Allegory of Music is one of seven canvases Laurent de La Hyre (Paris, 1606 – Paris, 1656) painted depicting the Seven Liberal Arts for the Parisian townhouse of Gédéon Tallemant, a magistrate and patron of the mid-seventeenth century. A young woman tuning a theorbo, a long-necked lute-family instrument characteristic of learned seventeenth-century music, occupies the center of the composition, flanked by fluted columns and bathed in amber light filtering through a background curtain. A small bird perched at the right edge of the canvas offers a quiet counterpoint, evoking natural song to complement the artifice of the musician’s careful tuning.
La Hyre and French Classicism
La Hyre is one of the essential figures of seventeenth-century French painting, less celebrated than Poussin or Claude Lorrain, his contemporaries, but indispensable to any understanding of Parisian classicism. Trained entirely without travel to Italy, he developed his style from engravings and French collections, absorbing the lessons of Raphael and the Carracci without ever slavishly imitating them. The Liberal Arts series, of which this Allegory of Music is among the best-preserved examples, demonstrates his ability to give abstract allegorical subjects convincing human presence: the musician here is not a cold symbol but an inhabited figure, her precise gesture, tuning an instrument, drawing the abstraction of harmonic proportion back to a concrete, physical act. La Hyre was one of the founding members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, established in 1648, a year before he completed this canvas, a coincidence that makes it a document of the institutional moment at which French classical painting defined itself and its ambitions.
