Euterpe, plate eighteen from Apollo and the Muses (c. 1465): Artwork and History

Euterpe, plate eighteen from Apollo and the Muses (c. 1465) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Master of the E-Series Tarocchi Italian, active c. 1465.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This engraving comes from a set of 50 cryptic tarocchi (tarot) cards that neither tell fortunes nor constitute a modern deck of cards. Instead, these didactic flashcards illustrate the abstract forces affecting mankind. The sequence Apollo and the Muses includes Euterpe, the Muse of music, shown here with her attribute, the double flute. She was later known as the Muse of lyric poetry. The Muses were typically invoked at the beginning of an epic poem, as in Canto II of Dante’s Inferno: “O Muses, O lofty genius, aid me now!”

Object facts

• Title: Euterpe, plate eighteen from Apollo and the Muses
• Date: c. 1465
• Artist attribution: Master of the E-Series Tarocchi Italian, active c. 1465
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Engraving on paper
• Dimensions: Plate: 17.9 × 10 cm (7 1/16 × 3 15/16 in.); Sheet: 18.4 × 10.5 cm (7 1/4 × 4 3/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1924.39.12

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.