Hesiod and the Muses in Art

 

The ancient vase-painters were concerned to portray the Muses in the company of other deities (especially Apollo), and occasionally showed them teaching a mortal (Orpheus or Musaeus), but as far as I know there is no extant ancient pictorial representation of Hesiod with a Muse or Muses.

 

However, in the 19^th century the French took up the subject in a fairly substantial way.  In 1838 Delacroix was commissioned to paint the ceilings of the Palais Bourbon Deputies’ Library, and spent close to a decade on the project.  (For one particular discussion of the result, with references, see G. L. Hersey, “Delacroix’s Imagery in the Palais Bourbon Library,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 [1968], 383-403; for those who can access JSTOR, read it there.)  One bay is taken up with four themes from ancient poetry: Alexander storing Homer’s poetry; Ovid in exile; the education of Achilles; and Hesiod and the Muse, adapted from the poet’s description at Theogony 22-34.  For the latter image I link you directly to the website artroots.com:*

 

 

 

 

Consistent with Delacroix’s stature, his literal rendering of the poet’s account of deity confronting an unsophisticated peasant to give him his charge (Th. 26) certainly affects us.  Nonetheless, on that aspect the artist’s task was rendered easy because his philologically expert contemporaries effectively held that Hesiod remained a bumpkin even after this charge was realized (a view with which Hesiod scholarship has struggled ever since).  The symbolist painters later in the century at least had what one might call a more ethereal view of him, as in several distinct portrayals by Gustave Moreau and at least one (if rather more contextual) representation by Edmond Aman-Jean.  Here are some thumbnails:

 

 

 

(For still more versions by Moreau, go to ArtprintCollection.com and search with keywords Moreau and Hesiod.)

 

 

Finally, between 1932 and 1935 no less than Georges Braque did a set of illustrations from etchings, for a French translation of Theogony which, to be sure, was not published until 1955. Of these, Hésiode et la Muse formed the frontispiece, as described by Sophie Bowness, “Braque’s Etchings for Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’ and Archaic Greece Revived,” The Burlington Magazine 142 (April 2000), 204-14, with the representation reproduced on p. 205. Here is a thumbnail:

 

 

 

While Braque employs some of the abstraction of body parts inherited from cubism here, it is notable that his style is also indebted to ancient Greek vase-painting (particularly in the block letters ΗΣΙΟΔΟΣ and ΜΟΥΣΑ identifying the figures just off the hips of Hesiod on the left and the Muse on the right, respectively).  Perhaps he thereby makes up for the discrepancy noted at the beginning above.   {Added 7/2/09: For an up-to-date discussion of Braque’s relation to Hesiod with references, see Alex Danchev, George Braque: A Life (New York, 2005), 194-200.   Indeed, according to Danchev (196) Braque was influenced by Carl Einstein’s idea of “a stylistic connection between ... the pre-Classical and the Cubist.”}