High Notes: Listening with Our Eyes: “Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd” by Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632)

In the “High Notes” series, Matthew Shorten bridges the worlds of music and art through works in the High’s collection.

By Matthew Shorten, Curatorial Research Associate, High Museum of Art

Matthew Shorten. Photo courtesy of Matthew Shorten.

My path to working in museums and studying art unfolded from my musical life. As a lifelong musician, mainly a composer and tenor these days, I have always found it impossible to separate music from the way I experience, write about, and think about art. When viewing art and visiting museums, my eye is drawn toward works that blend these two art forms and disciplines — paintings with sheet music, sculptures featuring musical instruments, immersive installations that activate all of our senses. This new blog series, High Notes, provides a space to explore art and music in tandem, and to consider the ways we encounter objects with our eyes and our ears.

As Richard Leppert, a leading scholar on this artistic intersection, writes, “Reference to music occurs in visual art not because musical sound exists but because it has meaning.” [1] This call to consider music in visual terms, and art in aural terms, enables us to discover the intricate meanings and symbolisms within one of the High’s extraordinary European paintings. But first, let’s time travel for a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of this painting’s seventeenth-century viewers.

We find ourselves in Rome in the early 1600s. The art world has been transformed by one of art history’s most illustrious figures: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). In the wake of Caravaggio’s reinvention of the art form — focusing on chiaroscuro, or the interplay of shadow and light, to impart maximal theatricality and emotional freight into painted images — art is never quite the same again. Caravaggio’s characteristic “tenebrist” (or “dark”) style is so influential that he continues to gain students and followers well into the eighteenth century. Such artists, hailing from all over continental Europe, become aptly named “Caravaggists” (Caravaggisti in Italian; Caravaggesques in French).

Historically speaking, this moment also marks the beginning of the Baroque era, as the Renaissance passes the baton — a global transition with an Italian epicenter in both music and art. This period sees changes and developments in the construction of musical instruments, performance styles, and creative impulses that inspire new works. Just as painters created scenes with greater dynamism and emotional entanglement, in stark contrast to the poise and stillness of Renaissance painting, composers and musicians created works overflowing with ornamentation, virtuosity, drama, and spectacle. In short, these were thrilling times! This vital context allows us to look with fresh eyes at Valentin de Boulogne’s Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd, an oil painting on view at the High.

Valentin de Boulogne (French, born Coulommiers, France, 1591–1632), Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd, oil on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through exchange and gifts from friends of J. J. Haverty and an anonymous donor, with additional funds from the bequest of Clarissa Hale Poteat, 1988.41.

As with all great works of art, this painting raises lots of questions. Firstly, how do we know this is Apollo? The Greek god of music is usually riding through the heavens in a swan-drawn chariot, wearing free-falling fabrics — if he’s wearing clothes at all! — and carrying extravagant implements like a lyre or an archer’s bow. However, in the somber world of Valentin’s painting, something tells us that this is no ordinary shepherd: the laurel wreath, Apollo’s symbol par excellence. In fact, as we look again, we can see satin and velvet garments beneath his sheepskin vest — princely tastes for a lowly shepherd. But why would a god dress this way? And why is Apollo holding a wind instrument instead of a lyre, the stringed instrument with which he is synonymous?

Details of Valentin de Boulogne’s Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd.

Several ancient stories might justify his attire, but the most likely source is Ovid’s Metamorphoses — specifically, a passage in which Apollo, tasked with watching over his herd, becomes so absorbed in his playing that Hermes is able to steal the animals and hide them in a cave. [2] This might explain our Apollo’s facial expression, dejected upon discovering the theft. [3] However, because many of Valentin’s surviving works are allegorical, and frequently indicate his own investment and fluency in music, I believe there is more behind Apollo’s expression and the choice to give him a wind instrument instead of his famous lyre.

Specifically, Valentin has given Apollo a tenor recorder, an instrument from the artist’s own time that would have been immediately recognizable for seventeenth-century viewers. [4] It is, however, anachronistic for the subject matter at hand — a Greek god might be best suited to the aulos, an instrument with its own divine origins. [5] If there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s that artists of this period knew their Ovid inside and out. So Valentin’s choice to revamp this ancient subject with a modern instrument is telling.

Left: Detail from Valentin de Boulogne’s Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd. Right: Bassano Workshop (active 1530–1650, Venice and London), Tenor Recorder, ca. 1600, boxwood, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Amati Gifts, 2010.205.

To move forward artistically, Valentin goes backward historically! In ancient Athens, the debate concerning the relative merits and moral consequences of stringed and wind instruments was both philosophical and political. Even Plato weighed in on the subject, claiming that players of wind instruments — as followers of Dionysus, the deity of chaos and irrationality — should be banned from the city lest they corrupt its moral fabric [6]. Dionysus, as an infamous counterpose to Apollo, has longstanding ties to wind instruments, making Valentin’s choice more curious still.

By giving Apollo a recorder — painted so realistically that we feel we could pluck it from the canvas and play “Hot Cross Buns” ourselves — Valentin enforces a long-overdue punishment, inspired by another fragment from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the musical contest between Apollo, playing the lyre, and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos. Apollo’s punishment of Marsyas in victory — flaying the satyr alive for his hubris in challenging a god — won him no favor, and somehow the repentant, pained expression on Apollo’s face in Valentin’s painting feels inseparable from this episode.

But the hidden meanings don’t end there! In the social context of Baroque Italy, Valentin has given Apollo an instrument associated with consorts and ensemble playing. That is, the god of music is no longer a soloist but instead one of many in the group. Apollo being the only figure in this painting makes the work feel even lonelier considering the absence of fellow band members — a sense of isolation made only more acute when the work is compared to the artist’s best-known scenes of music making and performance. Take, for instance, A Musical Party, with its lively multi-instrumentalist band caught in a carousing jam session (with almost-legible sheet music perched on the lute player’s lap!). Apollo’s solitude lies bleak and cold against such a dynamic backdrop.

Valentin de Boulogne (French, born Coulommiers, France, 1591–1632), A Musical Party, ca. 1623–1626, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, gift of the Ahmanson Foundation, AC1998.58.1.

But can we hear Valentin’s painting after all? The role of sound in this work is an open question, and it all hinges on what moment in time we find ourselves in as we encounter the painting. Is Apollo about to play, leaving us forever suspended in anticipation of his recorder performance to come? Has he just finished playing, leaving his final tones reverberating in eternity, too faintly for us to hear? Or is he in the middle of a performance, given the primed position of his fingers on the holes of the recorder? It remains unclear which moment Valentin had in mind, but this temporal and sonic dilemma is, in my view, exactly what the artist wanted us to meditate on. He invites us to become not just viewers but listeners, to use our own complex aural imaginations and inner ears, sharpened by our cultural surroundings past, present, and future, to bring his work to life.

You can hear more from Matthew at the video below:

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References

[1] Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Social-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3.

[2] Marina Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne (Eikonos, 1989), 202.

[3] Annick Lemoine, Keith Christiansen, Patrizia Cavazzini, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, and Gianni Papi, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016), 2.

[4] For more on the history of the recorder, and how it reached the style and construction depicted in Valentin de Boulogne’s painting, see Wendy Powers, “The Development of the Recorder,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1, 2003, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/recd/hd_recd.htm.

[5] The aulos, a double-reeded pipe, was said to have been created by the goddess Athena and later cast down from the heavens after she saw her reflection while playing and found the sight of her puffed-out cheeks unseemly. For more on the origins of the aulos and what it came to signify, in the ancient Mediterranean world and its afterlives, see Pauline A. LeVen, “New Music and its Myths: Athenaeus’ Reading of the Aulos Revolution (‘Deipnosophistae’ 14.616E-617F),” Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010): 35–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41722529.

[6] Plato, Republic 3.10, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press,1937), 1:249–51: “Well, will you admit to the city flute-makers and flute-players? … We are not innovating, my friend, in preferring Apollo and the instruments of Apollo to Marsyas and his instruments.”