Large Spanish Blue and White Tile with Personified Arts 16th-19th century A.D. A large blue and white tin-glazed ceramic tile showing the personified arts of Astronomy, Grammar and Rhetoric carrying a Mons Elicon fashioned from sugar, upon which are six of the Muses either side of a fiddle-playing figure of Apollo, together with the stream of Hippocrene; Rhetoric's lute set down on the floor beside her, Gramatica holding a banner which reads 'gramaticha est scientia'; mounted in a gold-coloured frame with craquelure. Cf. Lütteken, L., Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice, California, 2019, p.175, for this scene. 1.9 kg, 28 x 28 cm (11 x 11 in.). Acquired in the 2000s. Property of a North London collector. Accompanied by a facsimile of the manuscript page from Niccolo di Antonio degli Agli's report. During the wedding festivities celebrating the marriage of Constanzo I Sforza to Camilla of Aragon in 1475, Santa Poesia appeared, together with three girls dressed as Astronomy, Grammar and Rhetoric, presumably with a musical accompaniment. Niccolo di Antonio degli Agli composed a retrospective report of the event, in the form of an illuminated manuscript containing an illustration very similar to the one shown on our tile. At the time of the festivities and for some time afterwards, the scene represented an aspect of contemporary tensions between representations of music in antiquity and the present day.