Amico Aspertini's Apollo and Muses in the Isolani Castle at Minerbio near Bologna

During the late 1530s Amico Aspertini (1474-1552) painted a cycle of frescoes at the castle belonging to the Isolani family at Minerbio, near Bologna. The frescoes are located in three rooms (possibly used as studioli) in the tower on the north side of the castle and they were all inspired by the classical world: Hercules and his Twelve Labors, Mars, and Apollo and the Muses. Aspertini was a man of culture, a friend of scholars, philologists and humanists, and he frequented the most culturally advanced circles of Bologna animated by the Bentivoglio court and featured by the knowledge and the study of the classical world. His model for the cycle of Apollo and the Muses were the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi, but he made many changes, both in the objects and musical instruments held by the characters, and by inserting new figures which did not appear in the series. As a repercussion, this practice somehow upset the symbolic meaning of the original model. Apollo, god of music and poetry, is represented with a shawm, contrary to the iconographical tradition portraying him with a string instrument. The wind instrument might allude to the power of Eloquence, and thus of Rhetoric that in the Renaissance period were closely related to Poetry.