ABSTRACT
In a 1524 canvas by Italian master Dosso Dossi, Apollo performs on the lira da braccio, a bowed stringed instrument in vogue at the Ferrarese court of Alfonso I d’Este. This chapter considers the intellectual, performative, and ethical resonance of this image, calculated to engage the initiated viewer in a consideration of various currents of early sixteenth-century thought and practice, and the significance of embodied musical performance that pertains. Apollo’s presumed ‘lament’ is at once the figurative captivation of Daphne into poetry and song and the recollection of their fleeting expression, for Apollo governs memory and the poetry and music that are its ingenious daughters. The foregrounding of the musical performance engages many points of sensation—hearing, touch, and vision—through the direct contact with the instrument and its sounding. Just as critical are the qualities related to time—memory, imagination, invention, recollection, and judgment—that are not only also identified with poetry and rhetoric but also with the Aristotelian inner senses. In portraying Apollo the musician, Dosso invites us to hear this canvas—a soundscape rather than a landscape, a performance rather than a pursuit—and consider its broader implications.
