Apollo crowning a Poet and joining him with a Consort, witnessed by Hercules and by...

Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice 1518 - Venice 1594). Oil painting on canvas, Apollo crowning a Poet and giving him a Consort, witnessed by Hercules and by four other Females by Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice 1519 - Venice 1594), 1570s. Apollo (or possibly Hymen), crowned with laurel, in the centre, on a cloth-covered seat in the sky, and with his feet on a gold chalice, a gold dish with coins on it, an open gold box, and a golden steeple, bends down and placing, with his right hand, a leafy crown over an androgynous figure, in loose blue and yellow drapery, holding a book (?or a stone tablet) against his thigh in his right hand, lower left. This figure is supported by two women: one – who helps prop up the book - draped, and with hair done up in a pearl-adorned net; the other, almost naked, with leaves in her hair. In his left hand Apollo (or Hymen) holds strands of an orange-flowered plant (?myrtle) over a virtually naked white-fleshed - but shadowed and very loosely-draped - young woman, who is holding a strand of the same plant in her right hand on the upper right. She is accompanied by another young woman. Below them, bottom right, sits Fortune, holding a cornucopia, over a die showing the face with five dots and three dots to the left. Above all these, in the sky, top left, Hercules, holding a spear in his right hand and a bow in the other (rather than his usual attribute of a club), looks down on them, and, at the very top, two cupids scatter roses. According to myth, Hercules was deified after his death and became one of the twelve gods on Mount Olympus. He married Hebe, the goddess of youth, who was the daughter of Jupiter and Juno and also the cup-bearer and a handmaiden to the gods. Another reading of the subject of the scene is that this is the marriage of Mercury (god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence) and mortal Philology (learning; love of reason) from the antique source of Martianus Capella’s 5th-century allegory, 'De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii', an edition of which was published in Vicenza in 1499. According to the biographer of Venetian artists, Carlo Ridolfi in 1648 an 'Apollo and the Muses' that this paintng was once entitled (erroneously) had two other paintings of 'Jove and Semele' and 'Venus and Adonis' at its sides when they hung in the Palazzo Pesaro at San Staë. Kingston Lacy Estate, Dorset (Accredited Museum)