“Whatever happened to the Muse? She was once the female figure–deity, Platonic ideal, mistress, lover, wife–whom poets and painters called upon for inspiration.” –Lee Siegel, Where Have All the Muses Gone?, from The Wall Street Journal
Below is a shorthand version of article above:
Man / Occupation / Number of Muses Utilized
[Muse characteristics in ancient times: divine, benign, helpful]
– Hesiod / Greek poet / 9 (Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Terpsichore, Thalia, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Urania)
– The Romans / Warriors / 9 (first to assign a function to each muse and use for that specific purpose: “Terpsichore was the goddess of dance; Thalia, of comedy; Melpomene of tragedy and so on”)
– Virgil / Roman poet / 1 (Himself)
– Ovid / Roman poet / 9
– Dante “Pilgrim” Alighieri / Protagonist in the Divine Comedy / 12-9-3 (in the move through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, “the pagan nine had been replaced by the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost”)
– Dante “Poet” Alighieri / Florentine poet / 1 (Beatrice Portinari, an “actual person,” marking the “turning point for musedom”)
***
Man / Muse / Unattainable Ideal or Sexual Object
[Muse characteristics post-Dante–1) unattainable ideal; or 2) sexual object]
– Petrarch / Laura de Noves / Unattainable Ideal (she was married when he knew her and died 11 years later: “Death, like myth, protected the artist from real entanglement and real obsession with his muse. He was free to let his imagination run wild without the encumbrances of physical desire”)
[14th Century: “heavenly” muses]
– The Every Man / Madonna (mother of Jesus, not musical icon) / Unattainable Ideal
[Italian Renaissance: “earthy” and “touchable”]
– Raphael / Margharita di Luti / Sexual Object
– Fra Filippo Lippi / young nun named Lucrezia Buti / Sexual Object
[Muse turned vixen]
– Andrea del Sarto / wife Lucrezia / Unattainable Ideal and Sexual Object
***
Muse / Man / How She Inspired and/or Ruined Him
[More than muses: women who were “powerful and often creative women in their own right”]
– Georgia O’Keeffe (artist) / Alfred Stieglitz / she “influenced the direction of his art”
– Gala Dalí / Salvador Dalí / she “shrewdly tortured her sex-averse and masochistic husband with her flagrant affairs”
– Suzanne Farrell (dancer) / George Balanchine / she “allowed the legendary choreographer to fall in love with her while rejecting his advances, only to marry another dancer the very day Balanchine obtained a divorce from his wife”
– Marie-Thérèse Walter / Picasso / she modeled and “later bore him a daughter though he refused to marry her, and killed herself in 1977, four years after Picasso died“
[Muse-havocs]
Maud Gonne (heiress and Irish nationalist) / William Butler Yeats / “Her role as muse ended the instant they embarked on their night of love,” 20 years after their first encounter
Zelda Fitzgerald / F. Scott Fitzgerald / “their mutually ruinous marriage inspired him to produce his greatest work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, not least because along with basing several of his characters on Zelda, he inserted material from her diaries directly into his fiction”
***
Man / Muse
[Recent years]
Lee Friedlander (photographer) / Maria (wife)
John Lennon // Yoko Ono (mutual muses)
John Currin (painter) / Rachel Feinstein (artist and “his Botticellian wife”)
***
Man / No One
[Present day]
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Why the decline in muses? Lee Siegel doesn’t say this, but I’m going to go there. Feminism: “These days a muse’s role as equal partner and/or equal talent now outweighs her or his function as inspiration. Who, in our proudly individualistic culture wants to feel like a valet to someone else’s imagination?”
