The Whole Heaven a Musical Scale and a Number

A woman ahead of her times, Judith Leyster was born the last child, a prodigy, in the large brood of a cloth maker and brewer in Haarlem. While still in her teens, she earned favorable mention in Description and Praise of the City Haarlem in Poetry, a book by Dutch poet Samuel Ampzing. She received art training, probably from Frans de Grebber and may have worked in the studio of well-known portrait painter Frans Hals. In her early 20s, she was admitted into the Haarlem painters’ Guild of St. Luke, soon had her own studio and apprentices, and earned a living as master painter. Her work―mostly portraits and genre scenes fi lled with merriment―was infl uenced by the Utrecht school, the followers of Caravaggio, who adopted the Italian master’s use of chiaroscuro. Despite her accomplishments and a measure of fame during her lifetime, Leyster was forgotten after her death at age 50, many of her works mistakenly attributed to other artists. She was rediscovered toward the end of the 19th century. Few of her paintings have survived. Leyster was innovative, not only in her range of subjects, which was broader than that of her contemporaries, but also in her interpretation of genre. Beyond the usual tavern scenes popular with the buying public, she favored women at home, not a usual theme in Holland until the 1650s. Her view of Dutch domesticity was informal and engaging, subtle and intimate; her use of light and shadow dramatic. Her subjects displayed emotion, liveliness, and a confi dence and fl air that extended to the distinctive monogram of her signature, the letter “J” capped with a star (lode star or lead star)―a playful reference to her last name. Genre scenes provide a thorough look into all aspects of the 17th century; music for one, which was ubiquitous in both life and art. Since no recordings were available, music was often spontaneous and always live in homes, taverns, or the outdoors. Scenes containing dance or other amusements always featured musicians and their instruments. Music was woven into the fabric of society and lent itself comfortably to teaching moral ideals so vital to the prevailing Calvinism: “As the old have sung so pipe the young.” Musical instruments were common too in artists’ studios. Painters struggling to raise the social rank of their profession above craft used them to show their understanding of music and solidify their connection with the liberal arts. Music’s power to inspire and animate originated in antiquity with the writings of Pythagoras, who discovered the physical relationship, expressible in ratios, between mass and sound. “[The Pythagoreans] saw that the ... ratios of musical scales were expressible in numbers [and that] ... all things seemed to be modeled on numbers, and numbers seemed to be the fi rst things in the whole of nature, [they] supposed the elements of number to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.” Accordingly, the distances between planets would have the same ratios as produced harmonious sounds in a plucked string. The stars and planets, rotating en masse, would produce cosmic harmonies, termed music of the spheres, not accessible to the human ear. Artists, perhaps intrigued by this celestial connection, have often painted musicians with their eyes lifted upward as a sign of spirituality. Instruments were often used as symbols: strings associated with Pythagorean harmony, wind instruments the province of shepherds and peasants. One of the most musical of her artistic contemporaries, Leyster