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:*

Delacroix’s greatness lends this image a power certainly unmatched by any later painter’s treatment. And the portrayal of Hesiod as an unsophisticated peasant does correspond to what the poem says the Muses first called him, before giving him his charge (Th. 26). 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 becoming a fully-fledged poet (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:

Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse (1891); for an enlargement go to the website of WebMuseum in Paris and click on the image on this page.

Moreau, Hesiod and the Muses (1865); for an enlargement go the Art Renewal Center’s website at this page and click on the image.

Moreau, another version of Hesiod and a single Muse; for an enlargement go the Art Renewal Center’s website at this page and click on the image.

Aman-Jean, Hesiod Listening to the Inspiration of the Muse (c. 1890); for an enlargement go the Illusions Gallery website at this page.

(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:

In case your institution subscribes to JSTOR, here is a link to its copy of p. 205, with a larger image.

It is notable that, while Braque employs some of the abstraction of body parts inherited from cubism, his style here is also indebted to that of 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.