Apollo and the Muses Awakened by the Call of Fame (1590s): Art, History and Details

Apollo and the Muses Awakened by the Call of Fame (1590s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Italian, c. 1548–1628).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Here a barely visible Apollo, sleeping in the upper left background, and the nine muses are roused by the allegorical figure of Fame, who flies overhead with a trumpet. This dynamic scene signifies a reawakening of the arts. The loosely arranged clusters of figures and natural forms also suggest a harmonious relationship between humanity and the environment. This drawing, with its heavily subdued details and attention to the overall impact of contrast and design, is characteristic of Venetian draftsmanship in the late 1500s, and was valued by the small circle of Venetian intellectuals for whom Palma produced many similar mythological works.

Object facts

• Title: Apollo and the Muses Awakened by the Call of Fame
• Date: 1590s
• Creator attribution: Jacopo Palma il Giovane (Italian, c. 1548–1628)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 20.4 x 26.1 cm (8 1/16 x 10 1/4 in.); Secondary Support: 26.3 x 31.9 cm (10 3/8 x 12 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1926.265

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Heseltine, J. P. Original Drawings by Old Masters of the Schools of North Italy in the Collection of J.P.H. London: [publisher not identified], 1906.
• Tietze, Hans. Four Centuries of Venetian Painting. Exh. Cat., Toledo Museum of Art: March, 1940.
• Francis, Henry Sayles. Venetian Tradition : Catalogue of the Exhibition. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1956.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.