Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

III. Themes

1. Religious themes.

2. Secular themes.

3. Symbolic representations.

4. Portraits.

5. Synaesthetics.

Iconography, §III: Themes

1. Religious themes.

While a categorical split between sacred and secular music themes would frequently fail to do justice both to the contextual complexities of musical occasions and to the multiplicity of an image's meanings, it can nevertheless be said that in pictures with religious, metaphysical and philosophical subject matter the layers of meaning tend to be more numerous. It is no coincidence that the doctrine of fourfold meaning of scripture (and image) mentioned above was developed by theologians. On the other hand, sacred themes, in as far as they depict rituals, are also tied to the reality of any given culture, past or present. Some of the most important musical themes in religious art are considered below.

(i) The Christian and Jewish world.

In Christian and Jewish musical iconography Bible stories furnish a number of themes, in use for nearly 2000 years. The most important ones are:

(a) Acclamation to God after the crossing of the Red Sea by the prophetess Miriam and the women of Israel (after Exodus xv.20–21);

(b) Acclamation to a ruler by the women of Israel (1 Samuel xviii.6–7 for David; Judges xi.34 for Jephtha);

(c) Universal acclamation by the believer to God (after Psalm cl);

(d) Banquet scenes with music and dance (Genesis xl.20 in Egypt; Luke xv.13: lost son; Matthew xiv.6–7, Mark vi.21–2: banquet of Herod with Salome dancing);

(e) David playing his lyre or harp to soothe Saul's mental illness (1 Samuel xvi.14–23);

(f) The transfer of the Ark to Jerusalem with music and David dancing (2 Samuel vi.12–16);

(g) King David performing psalms with his lyre or harp (Psalms, passim);

(h) King David establishing liturgical service with instrumental music in the Temple (1 Chronicles xv.16–22; xxv.1–7);

(i) The derision at Christ on the Cross;

(j) The angels of the Last Judgment blowing trumpets or horns (Revelation, passim);

(k) The acclamation of the 24 Elders to the Lord (Revelation, passim).

In Western Christian history, many of these musical scenes gave rise to offsprings with theological, philosophical or music-theoretical conceptualizations. The most prominent examples are the canonized image of ‘David and his four liturgists, Asaph, Eman, Ethan, and Idithun’ (Steger, E1961), pictures of the eight modes (e.g. on two capitals of Cluny (Schrade, E1929) and in F-Pn lat.1118, ff.104r–114r (Seebass, Musikdarstellung, E1973), the so-called ‘Angel Concerts’, paintings of angelic acclamations in Marian iconography (e.g. the Nativity or Mary's ascent to heaven), or as decorations of church interiors acting as analogies for the believer, and biblical or saintly figures serving as patrons for music, such as Jubal, Tubalcain, David, and St Cecilia and the Dance of Death cycles and its relatives. As a counterbalance to the elevated character of image or text, artists create a droll world where animalistic and grotesque elements may have a place.

(ii) Islamic and Buddhist images.

Two major non-Western religions, Islam and Buddhism, place ‘Music and Dance in Paradise’ at the centre of their dogma. Both shape their vision after the reality of courtly entertainment. For Islam, the setting – developed from the original Persian idea of a fenced hunting ground – is a garden with water sources and shady trees, where drinks are provided and music and dance performed. For Buddhism, the setting is more formal: the Buddha or a Bodhisattva is sitting on a throne, surrounded by followers, while in front of him, often on a stage, a dance performance with orchestral accompaniment is taking place.

(iii) Images of rituals.

Most non-Western religions match or surpass Christianity as far as the role of music for rituals is concerned. Whether or not music scenes are depicted depends on the value placed on visual representations. Examples include:

(a) outdoor rituals linked to fertility cults, such as the representation of mother cult with dancing women on Minoan geams or the veneration of the sun in a painting in an Aztec manuscript (Martí, C1970);

(b) shamanistic rituals linked to curing the sick, calling down rain, hunting or warfare;

(c) funeral rites, such as dance and music at the bier of the deceased on Greek vase paintings (Wegner, C1963), the soul-ship with bronze drums and mouth organ players on South-east Asian bronze drums (Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, H1988) or dance and drumming at a funeral represented on a Yoruba clay pot (Willet, H1977); and

(d) temple rituals.

(iv) Myths.

Myths are related to both the sacred and the secular world, sometimes refering to rituals, sometimes to daily life with its ceremonies and entertainments. Not infrequently, in the course of history, they move from the sacred to the secular or change meaning in other ways. The European Renaissance and Baroque furnish examples, for example the split in the conception of the figure of Dionysus, who appears in the Renaissance not only as the divine respresentation of ecstasy and magic but also as Bacchus, the drunkard.

Particularly rich in music scenes are the myths of Near Eastern and Greek cultures of Antiquity and their offsprings (such as the tale of Alexander that spread from eastern Christian cultures to the West and also far into Asia; fig.2), as well as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Iconography, §III: Themes

2. Secular themes.

The demarcation lines between ritual, liturgical and religious on one side and ceremonial, private, and secular on the other are not of course, always clear. Until the formation of an urban middle class, music and art as leisure activities were developed by the upper levels of societies with a literate tradition. Their economic surplus permitted the well-to-do to keep musicians who would entertain them and painters who would celebrate, among other themes, their musical activities.

In non-literate cultures, portrayals of musical esturity are usually connected with rituals; other musical occasions find their way only slowly into pictorial representation. This happens through two different avenues. One leads through secularization of the popular culture itself; it absorbs and there imitates the modalities of upper-class life. The other proceeds in the opposite direction: the upper class reflect in their art the culture of lower classes, for encyclopaedic or satirical purposes, out of a wish to regain Arcadian innocence, or through ethnic or social interest. When the borderlines between the strata disappear, the visual themes lose their attachment to the previous social environment and become available to everyone until new relationships are formed.

A list of secular pictorial themes that pertain to music should include:

(a) pictures celebrating the political power and cultural patronage of the sponsor with representations of court music of the formal type (acclamations, receptions, festive music with dance, triumphal processions etc.; fig.3);

(b) the genre painting and pictures originating in less formal contexts with representations of informal music-making at court and among the educated (music and art for their own sake, in the salon or the homes of the bourgeoisie, for leisure, hunting etc.). Two topics – music and love-making, and the music lesson – are preferred themes in genre painting; they are no less frequent in East Asia, often in combination with drinking and eating, on drinking cups and dishes and eating bowls made of silver or ceramic, in miniature painting, on silk screens etc.;

(c) representations of public music, for battles and tournaments, in processions and cortèges, at weddings and funerals, in the circus, at public baths, at the opera or concerts etc.;

(d) pictures of music as a healing force, sponsor of love etc.;

(e) pictures of popular music in the open, in the tavern, the bordello etc.;

(f) representation of popular music in popular art; and

(g) pictures of bucolic music-making, in which the patron seeks a projection of his world into Arcadia.

Iconography, §III: Themes

3. Symbolic representations.

(i) Allegory.

The spiritualization of the European culture of the literati in late antiquity and the Middle Ages led to the frequent use of allegorization (the personifications of concepts). In accordance with the feminine genus of conceptual terms in Latin, such concepts were personalized as women. Thus depictions of virtues (with harmonia) and vices (with luxuria), the five senses (with auditus), the seven liberal arts (with musica), the four winds (as four male wind players) and others remain pervasive in Western iconography until the 18th century. Since the Renaissance they have often been combined with secularized mythical figures from antiquity, such as the Muses, Orpheus, Apollo and Venus, and the astrological children of Venus and Mercury, music-making animals, fabulous creatures and putti. Allegories also play a prominent role in the iconography of Baroque feasts and musical theatre and still appear on title pages of music and printers' marks today. They were, before the advent of abstract art, the most important vehicle for the visualization of the ephemeral and magical qualities of music.

The observation above about veiled borderlines, with reference to religious and secular spheres, also applies to transitions from the natural to the ideal and from the ideal to the symbolical. The medieval world uses a few mythical figures and allegories (Prudentius Psychomachia and Physiologus); the Renaissance adds more of them. Very often allegory and symbolism are combined with naturalism in the same painting.

A famous and fascinating example is the oil painting begun by Giorgione and finished by Titian with the spurious title ‘Concert champêtre’ (fig.4). It combines shepherds with a lute playing courtier and two females in the country side; as the women are naked accordingly they are likely to be understood as allegories or deities (Nymphs or Muses). There is disagreement among scholars about the roles of these figures; interpretations range from a realistic depiction of a Renaissance music party to an allegory of Poetry, Virtue or Luxury and Abstinence to a neo-Platonic representation of divine and earthly love and finally to the image of ‘musical inspiration’. Although the painters could have intended some degree of ambivalence, no interpretation can ignore the fact that there must be a purpose in juxtaposing myth and reality in this scene. A possible reading of the work could be ‘Orpheus reborn’, a demonstration of the musically educated corteggiano to the divine and mortal dwellers of Arcadia.

The relationship between image and idea is probably no less complicated in non-Western musical iconography, but it has yet to be studied. In the first place, the concretization of spiritual concepts in the musical instrument itself should be considered (see §II, 4 above); in the second, the connection between cultic images and cosmological concepts; and in the third, concretizations of synaesthetic concepts such as the Mandala or the Rāgamālā paintings.

(ii) Emblem, still life, vanity images.

Perhaps the most prominent case of a mixture between realism and symbolism is the still life, where various objects such as fruits and other edibles, skulls, musical instruments etc. are combined in an elaborate assembly of symbols for vanity, decay and death. Music, because of its ephemeral nature, is often chosen by poets and artists as a symbol for the fragility of the moment and the transitoriness of life. Because of the quality of its sound, the lute is particularly suitable for the evocation of such associations and is thus the most common instrument in this context, often depicted with a broken string or some other defect. But painters also liked it for its complex three-dimensional shape which challenges their skills in perspective. Still lives and emblems probably are the first areas where synaesthetic equations between silence and emptiness were tried out.

Iconography, §III: Themes

4. Portraits.

The history of portraits is closely related to the social position of the sitter. The first portraits of musicians appeared in China where musicians had ascended to the classes worthy of portraiture as early as the first centuries ce. In Europe, until the late Middle Ages, professional musicians did not belong to the class vested with highest political or ecclesiastical powers for which portraiture was reserved. The circle of possible sitters widened in the late Middle Ages with the admission of rich burghers and literati. It might have been expected that when music portraiture began to surface in the 15th century, the musician would qualify through his status as a literatus and his possible academic affiliation, but that is not the case. The portraits of Oswald von Wolkenstein emphasize his social and political position but in only one of them is a music sheet included (MS A-Wn 2777, verso of the front cover). The portrait of Binchois by Jan van Eyck (London, National Gallery) and those of Landini and Paumann on their tombstones celebrate their musicianship and virtuosity, not their compositorial or theoretical skill. Such aspects begin to exert influence only in the 16th century, when portraits appear as frontispieces of musical editions and treatises. The earliest portrait of a musician is the relief on the tombstone of the blind organist Francesco Landini (d 1397; Florence, S Lorenzo): his Florentine admirers decided to eternalize his art in stone. About 80 years later another blind instrumentalist, Conrad Paumann (d 1473), received the same honour (Munich, Liebfrauenkirche). Landini is shown with an organetto and a personal resemblance is attempted by the indication of the empty eye sockets; Paumann is shown playing the lute and surrounded by other instruments. In both cases the inscription and the musical instruments serve as identifiers.

A musician's portrait as a genre confronts the art or music historian with difficult analytical problems, because almost always the question arises as to how the motive for the commission is related to the content of the picture. If the purpose is, for instance, to portray the musician as a well-to-do bourgeois accepted by society, the painter will not try to represent him as a musical genius but rather will emphasize the impression of worldly wealth and will show the sitter in costly dress with jewellery. If, however, the painter is intent on the visualization of musical gifts, he can either resort to the professional attributes, such as a musical instrument or a music sheet (and these indeed remain throughout history the most common labels) or he can associate the sitter with mythical models – Orpheus or Apollo for men, Venus, a Muse, or St Cecilia for a woman. Active and naturalistic music-making is surprisingly rare in portraiture; commonly the sitter only holds or touches an instrument. The secondary elements help to make the message of the image clearer or more sophisticated, individualizing the sitter, and defining social or spiritual context. The same function can be assumed by non-musical elements such as objects in the room or paintings on the wall. Sometimes, more ambitiously, the painter attempts a psychogram or even a visualization of that Orphic quality that separates the musician from others. Such paintings are fairly rare and have been little studied.

An exception is van Eyck's portrait of Gilles Binchois (see Panofsky, L1949; Seebass, L1988). Bernardo Strozzi's portrait of Claudio Monteverdi (Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum), Lange's unfinished Mozart portrait (Salzburg, Mozart Museum), Courbet's of Berlioz and Delacroix's of Chopin (both Paris, Louvre), Rodin's bust of Mahler (Philadelphia, Rodin Museum), and Schoenberg's self-portraits could be candidates for such studies.

With the 18th century, musicians’ portraits became a favourite pictorial genre, often realized in different media. After the oil painting, the subject was frequently transferred to the miniature, the engraving and the silhouette, so moving from the privacy of direct ownership into the realm of booksellers and art shops, and portraits became accessible to a wider circle of connoisseurs and admirers. The demand created a market and led into the business of collecting. The 18th century also saw the spread of caricatures of musicians, first as sketches passed among friends and then as lithographs and wood engravings for newspapers. Caricatures widened the corpus of pictorial elements used in portraiture and included musical action and the reactions of the audience, to make a statement about the musician's personality. By the 19th century they had come to be the most telling visual mirror of musical reception.

Iconography, §III: Themes

5. Synaesthetics.

Synaesthetical experiences have a long tradition in East Asian cultures and are verbalized in poetry and visualized in drawings and paintings. The Taoist scholar-musician and the courtesan express in their qin-playing their experience of harmony in nature and the absorption of the visible and the poetic; they visualize in their ink-drawings and paintings and verbalize in their poetry musical experience of time filled with sound and silence.

An illustration to a book of Tang poems (fig.5) may serve as an example (see Gulik, H1940, 2/1969, pp.148–9). It shows a landscape with mountains and water and, in the lower left corner, a human abode where a scholar plays the qin. More than any other instrument, the qin is literally ‘in tune’ with nature. In this scene the musician is inspired by the flowering plum tree; there is a twig from it in a vase on his table. This plant is a symbol of spring, with strong erotic connotations and allegedly highly susceptible to music: music-making brings nature and man into harmonious union.

Except for architecture, Western art began to pursue these concepts only in the 19th century.

(i) Visualization of content and process of music.

Although traces can probably be found in earlier centuries (see §III, 4), the first attempts in Europe to visualize the content of music fall into the Romantic period (see ‘Musik and bildende Kunst’, MGG2).

The Viennese artist Moritz von Schwind, a member of the Schubert circle, often used musical ideas as inspiration for his drawings and paintings. There is, for instance, a series of drawings of a musical procession inspired by Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. There is also Die Symphonie (Munich, Staatliche Gemäldesammlung, Neue Pinakothek), where he transformed the dramatic process of a symphony into the narrative of a love story. A third example is the painted ceiling of the foyer of the Vienna opera house with subjects from a number of operas, popular at his time. In all these instances Schwind perceives music and music drama as stories and transforms them into pictorial narratives.

Initiated by the Romantics but fully conceptualized only by the French Symbolists and Wagner is the idea of ‘the total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which the verbal, the visual, and the musical content are expressed by complementary or even mutual means. For the 19th century it was mostly the temporal and emotional musical experience that stimulated visualization in painting by ways of evocation, emotionalization and symbolism.

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Harmony in Green and Rose (1860–61; Washington DC, Freer Gallery; fig.6), shows an interior in bright daylight with decorative curtains, a child reading, a woman standing in a black dress and another sitting woman visible through a mirror; there are very few elements in the colours indicated by the title. More programmatic are Fantin Latour's paintings illustrating Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and Max Klinger's series of etchings inserted in the score of Brahms Vier Lieder op.96 (Berlin and New York, 1886), called Brahms-Phantasie. The latest monumental example of a visualization of the spiritual programme of music and of its creator is the display in the building of the Viennese Secession consisting of a combination of Gustav Klimt's frieze visualizing the ethical message of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Klinger's monument of Beethoven, the post-Christian genius (see above, §II, 2).

(ii) Visualization of structures.

The Pythagoreans established direct links between musical structures and those in the other arts and sciences. But it was only during the time of humanism, with architecture taking the lead, that these parallels began to be effectively explored. In painting, the Romantics were the first to pursue such parallels. Philipp Otto Runge wrote to Karl Privat (4 August, 1802) that his painting Lehrstunde der Nachtigall was analogous to a fugue: ‘Here I learnt that similar things happen in our [visual] art, namely that it becomes easier if one understands the musical structure underlying a composition and if it repeatedly shines through the work’ (Runge, M1942, pp.124–5). The 20th century relied mostly on structuralism as the sponsor of synaesthetic ideas: the idea of the composer as a constructor, and music as a construction, fascinated artists. In most cases the parallels are sought out intuitively, as for instance in Satie's Sports et divertissements, composed after the coloured engravings by Charles Martin, or in Paul Klee's paintings with musical subject matter. Others experimented with almost mechanical transfers of the parameters of sound and colour, surface and line (see Skryabin's Prométhée or Robert Strübin's Musikbild - Frédéric Chopin, Scherzo II, Opus 31…, Basle, Kunstmuseum).

An interdisciplinary reflection between painter and composer occurred in the circle of the Blaue Reiter in Munich, where Kandinsky and Schoenberg developed parallel theories for abstract art and atonal, 12-note music. Kandinsky, in his epochal treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), writes in Chapter 4 that music, for centuries, succeeds ‘in using its means not for the representation of the phenomena of Nature but for the expression of the emotional life of the artist and for the creation of an autonomous life [eigenartiges Leben] of musical sound’. To imagine colours means to hear inner sounds. Shapes and colours have a musical resonance for the onlooker. Seeking representation of the internal, the visual arts use music as their model. ‘This explains the contemporary artist's search for rhythm, for mathematical, abstract construction, the modern esteem for the repetition of coloured sound, the way in which colour can be made to move etc.’ (ed. M. Bill, Berne, 8/1965, pp.54–5).

It is principally the idea of music as a composed work that provides the basis for synaesthetic experiments and the stipulation of colours and forms. Hence painters' frequent adoption of the term ‘composition’ or ‘fugue’ as titles for their canvasses. M.K. Čiurlionis, himself both painter and composer, did this (even with four-‘movement’ sets of paintings as ‘sonatas’ in the early years of the century). Lionel Feininger and especially Paul Klee were also leading figures. While Klee never reflected on the aesthetic inconsistency between musical structures of the past and abstract art of the present, Kandinsky saw in Schoenberg's compositions with 12 notes of equal importance the last consequence of a constructionism that had been immanent in music for centuries but absent in concrete art. Others, for example Franz Marc, emphasize the move into abstraction in both arts as the result of a revolutionary break with the past.

The most typical aspect of music, its process in time, is for obvious reasons rarely a subject for visualization (and even more rarely a subject of art historical analysis). A happy exception among modern works with musical subject matter is Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–3; New York, Museum of Modern Art): using the flickering neon lights of Manhattan at night as a mediating metaphor, it successfully translates the ostinato pattern, the running rhythm and the exhilarating mood of the music into a network of coloured dots.

Iconography