Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Melpomene.
The gallery
Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy
Unknown (Roman, Hadrianic period), AD 117–138
This over-life-size Roman marble of the Hadrianic period, unearthed at the Villa of Cassius near Tivoli and now in the Vatican Museums, presents Melpomene with her canonical attributes as the Muse of tragedy. She wears a long chiton and the cothurnus, the high tragic boot, and once held a tragic mask, the emblem by which she was distinguished from her eight sisters. Her grave, statuesque bearing embodies the elevated suffering of the tragic stage, fixing in stone the iconography that ancient and later artists alike would reuse for the patroness of tragedy.
Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy
Unknown (Roman, 1st century AD), 1st century AD
A colossal Roman statue of the first century AD, said to come from the Theatre of Pompey in Rome and now in the Louvre, monumentalizes Melpomene as the presiding genius of the tragic theatre. She stands draped in a heavy himation, crowned with vine leaves, and grasps an oversized tragic mask, while the cothurni lift her among the actors she patronizes. The grand scale, fitting for a building dedicated to dramatic performance, makes explicit the link between the Muse and the physical stage on which tragedy was enacted.
Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy
Elisabetta Sirani, c. 1660
The Bolognese Baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani gives Melpomene an intimate, half-length treatment, distinct from the towering ancient statues. The Muse turns toward the viewer holding the tragic mask, her contemplative expression and rich drapery translating the gravity of tragedy into the warm chiaroscuro of seventeenth-century Bologna. As one of the most celebrated women artists of her age, Sirani revisits a classical personification and reclaims it through her own hand, locating Melpomene among the long line of painters who depicted the Muses to allegorize the arts.