Pastoral Concert

Pastoral Concert
Artist: Titian; Oil painting on canvas; Size: 105x136.5cm; Louvre, Paris.

The famous oil painting Pastoral Concert, long attributed to Giorgione , is now regarded as a work by Titian datable to 1509. The subject of the picture has always prompted questions and arguments. It depicts two women, almost completely nude, one pouring something from a jug and the other playing the flute. With them are two young men seated side by side, one of them playing a lute. In the background a shepherd tends his flock in the shade of some trees, with a few houses further back that seem to form a village. Some scholars hold that it is an allegory with its roots in neoplatonic culture. Among the more recent and accredited interpretations is the one put forward by Elizabeth Buckley, that the subject was inspired by a text by Sannazaro, the Arcadia, published in Naples in 1504, although an unauthorized edition was already in circulation in Venice in 1502. At the beginning of the sixth part of the Arcadia a group of shepherds, including Sincero, is about to leave the tomb of Androgeo, located near a spring. Sincero sees a shepherd coming toward him who reminds him of the Trojan Paris but is actually Carino. Sincero tells him of his ill-starred love, and the shepherd asks him to write songs for his beloved. The two women in the painting could be the nymphs that Sincero meets in a dream in the twelfth part: they do not participate in the dialogue between the two youths; indeed, they appear to be invisible to their eyes.