A member of the Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth (East Orange, New Jersey, 1947 – Cannon, Connecticut, 2013) carefully recreated imagery from art history in her work, translating the paintings from their historical sources into contemporary photographs. As the artist said, “to live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes.” Here, she draws on two images that explore music’s relationship to allegory. In The Five Senses, Charlesworth was inspired by 17th century French painter Lubin Baugin’s Still Life with Chessboard (The Five Senses),1630. Charlesworth carefully selected each prop in the photograph to match the images of the original painting, selecting everything down to the nearly identical carnations and lute. Charlesworth creates a visual parallel for each of the five senses: taste (wine and bread), touch (velvet bag and playing cards), smell (carnations), sight (mirror and chessboard), and sound (lute and musical score), each object lovingly rendered in the delicate shading and composition of Baugin’s original oil painting. Charlesworth based Allegory of the Arts on a 19th century photograph, which likely explains the restricted color palette, designed to reference the monochrome of early photography. Here Charlesworth presents the objects representing the Arts, including the bust (sculpture); the palette (painting); and the violin and score (music), heavily covered with dust, perhaps suggesting their archaic place in the contemporary world dominated by video and photography.