"Penna, pennello, e canto": Francesco Furini e le arti del melodramma

In his youth, Francesco Furini painted an extraordinary alle- gory of the three arts – Painting, Music and Poetry – now in the Musée Historique de Lausanne, having been formerly owned by Pierre de Coubertin. The picture’s rich iconography makes spe- cific reference to the poet Andrea Salvadori and the composer Claudio Monteverdi, in a complex network of cultural allusions evoking musical creativity in early seventeenth-century Florence. The article studies this nexus to arrive at an overall reading of the work’s meaning in the context of figures such as Galileo, Giulio Rospigliosi and Caravaggio.