Gaetano Previati

(Ferrara 1852 – Lavagna 1920)

The Muses, 1902

Oil on canvas, 33 x 92 cm

Museo dell’Ottocento, inv. 8315

On the back: cartouche “The New York Cultural Center, 2 Columbus Circle, New York 10019”

The painting first appeared in 1902-03 at the group exhibition at the Permanente in Milan, and was reproduced by 1914 in a historical photograph in the archive of the Gaetano Previati Art Society acquired by the City of Ferrara in 2021.

From the literature of the time we know that in the 1920s it belonged to the fine collection of conductor Arturo Toscanini, who cultivated a special relationship with painting and had a particular fondness for The Muses, since he could recognize in it, as much in the subject matter as in the chromatic range and the fluid and rhythmic drafting of the painting, the visual transposition of the principle of communion between the arts, i.e. the Gesamtkunstwerk: a concept developed by composer Richard Wagner that indicates the fusion of pictorial and musical language for the purpose of creating a total artistic effect. Previati was an avid music connoisseur and in fact his production is peppered with symphonic references, so much so that he represented the fluidity of music in painting through incorporeal forms such as sound.

In this canvas the figures are arranged in horizontal succession, repetitively and with musical motions, recalling patterns also recurring in European symbolism. The Muses is in close correlation with the famous Maternity of 1891, which has gone down in history as the banner of the new Divisionist and Symbolist theories: the critic-artist Vittore Grubicy calls Previati’s art “musical ideism” precisely because it restores a mystical idea, “whose aesthetic beauty lies in its symbolic indeterminacy.”

For a long time, traces were lost of this painting, which was probably transported to the United States during the last century and only resurfaced in 2007 in an exhibition in Livorno and Parma on the Toscanini collection. In 2022 it was donated by the Pianori Foundation to the Ferrara Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art.