School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Homer the lironist: P. F. Mola, art and music in the baroque

WERETKA, JOHN ( 2007)

Pier Francesco Mola’s Homer dictating (1663 – 66) shows the Classical poet dictating poetry to the accompaniment of his own playing of the lirone. This paper explores the intersections between fantasy and reality in this painting, and examines the ways in which Mola’s image captures the ‘true’ history of the lirone and its position in society, as well as the ways in which wilfully inaccurate archaeology was used as a site for a polemic on the hierarchical superiority of stringed instruments in the late Renaissance and Baroque. Probing musical treatises, the extant repertoire, and documentary evidence from contemporary novelle, diaries and festival records, this paper seeks to understand why Mola placed the lirone, invented at the turn of the sixteenth century, into the hand of a poet dead for almost two and a half millenia.