Attributed to Paolo Fiammingo

Attributed to PAOLO FIAMMINGO (Antwerp, ca. 1540 - Venice, 1596)
"Allegory of the ear".
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 90 x 75 cm; 99 x 84,5 cm (frame).
This scene represents with refinement one of the most cultivated themes in Mannerist and Baroque painting: the personification of the senses. In this case, hearing is embodied in a youthful figure playing a lute in an idealized garden, accompanied by sheet music and other musical instruments, obvious symbols of sound perception. In the background, a group of characters converses and listens, while a small Cupid points his arrow from the sky, alluding to the power of sound as a vehicle of love and pleasure. Such allegories, very much to the taste of the time, united sensory delight and moral meaning, expressing the harmony between the senses and the intellect. The style of Paolo Fiammingo, a collaborator of Tintoretto's workshop, is manifested in the rich scenographic composition, the balance between figure and landscape, and the warm luminosity that envelops the forms. His brush, meticulous but agile, combines the Flemish heritage in the taste for detail with the spatial amplitude and Venetian coloring, achieving a work that exalts both the sensuality of music and the intellectual sophistication of Renaissance allegorical art.
Paolo Fiammingo was a Flemish painter who spent most of his career in Italy. His name is first recorded in the Antwerp Painters' Guild in 1561, although it is not known who his teacher was in that city, then heavily influenced by the Italian artistic currents introduced by Frans Floris and Martin de Vos.
Like many northern European artists, he traveled to Italy, where it is believed that he spent some time in Florence and came into contact with the painters linked to the studiolo of Francis I de Medici. He eventually settled in Venice, where he worked from the 1580s and was a member of the Confraternity of Painters from 1584 to 1596.
In Venice he collaborated with Jacopo Tintoretto, whose influence can be seen in much of his production. Fiammingo specialized in narrative compositions of historical, mythological and allegorical themes, standing out for his sensitivity towards landscapes and natural scenes, an aspect that anticipates the later development of this pictorial genre.
The Prado Museum has four of his works from the royal collections, a series of country scenes allegorically representing the four seasons.