Constructing Isabella d'Este's musical decorum in the visual sphere (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
This thesis is based on how Isabella d\u27Este (1474-1539) cultivated her extensive collection of rare antiques and art, given the parallel evolution of her art commissions and political concerns as it pertains to iconography and feminism. Instead of discussing what previous scholars have researched concerning Isabella d’Este, this thesis will incorporate the iconography as it pertains to her commissions in a historiographical sense, as well as argue why this iconography would eventually become a beacon for feminist discussion. This will primarily examine Isabella’s commissions from 1494 to 1507, including her earliest portraits and the first four paintings of her studiolo. This will include background of iconographic theory alongside how Isabella wanted herself depicted as a powerful court lady of Mantua from a feminist standpoint
Image-Making and Female Rule in Seicento Florence: Music-Theatre Under the Medici Women
Studi Secenteschi, L, 209-227, 2009
See also S.G. Cusick's forthcoming monograph (with Chicago Uni. Press) on Francesca Caccini and Tuscany's women's court under Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine. I am particularly indebted to the work of Prof. Harness, from which most of the following information on regency-sponsored music-theatre in Florence is drawn. I am also most grateful to Prof. Cusick for sharing a pre-publication copy of her forthcoming work.
Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy
Chriscinda Henry and Tim Shephard ed., Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (New York: Routledge, 2023), 2023
The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend iconographic analysis with a wider range of approaches, investigate the discourse surrounding the arts, and draw on both social art history and the material turn in Renaissance studies. They address not only paintings and sculpture, but also a wide range of visual media and domestic objects, from instruments to tableware, to reveal a rich, varied, and sometimes tumultuous exchange among musical and visual arts and ideas. Enriching our understanding of the subtle intersections between visual, material, and musical arts across the long Renaissance, this book offers new insights for scholars of music, art, and cultural history.
The sight of sound : resonances between music and painting in seventeenth-century Italy
2009
The seventeenth century was a period of significant innovations and developments in music theory, vocal music, and instrumental music. It also was a period of innovation in paintings that depict musicians and musical instruments. Art historians and musicologists have tended to interpret music-themed paintings as pictorial records of contemporary musical performance practices in either domestic or sacred settings. Such an approach, however, overlooks the subtleties and complexities of the individual paintings and fails to consider possible relationships between the paintings and broader social, political, and religious contexts of Italian Seicento painting. This study dismantles the idea of paintings of musical subj ects as a homogenous group and demonstrates that these works are more visually and intellectually complex than previously thought. This thesis presents five case studies that analyze music-themed paintings produced between 1590 and 1677 from different perspectives: Chapter One presents a reassessment of Caravaggio's The Lute Player, created for Vincenzo Giustiniani, that challenges existing interpretations rooted in performance practices and offers, instead, a reading in light of the madrigaVmonody debate. Chapter Two focuses on the many paintings of St. Cecilia produced after 1600 to explore both the implications of a female saint increasingly depicted with stringed instruments and the effects, pictorially and spiritually, of her rapt engagement with music-making. Chapter Three analyzes critically for the frrst time the relationship between Bernardo Strozzi's rustic peasant musicians and his patrons' desires to fashion themselves as part of the new nobility in Genoa and Venice. Chapter Four explores how Pietro Paolini's three images of luthiers comment on the artisanship of instrument making; on the relative merits of the senses; and on the enduring virtues of knowledge, skill, and physical labor. Chapter Five enlarges upon existing scholarship on Evaristo Baschenis' musical instrument still-lifes by investigating overlooked religious undercurrents beyond merely vanitas, and by exploring the social and spiritual dimensions of silence.
left the city to join Pope ]ulius II in the papal campaign to expel the Bentivoglio family from Bologna. Shortly after Francesco's departure, his consort Isabella d'Este (1474 1539) inspected the work being done in her husband's absence on the apartments in his new town house, the Palazzo di San Sebastiano, then under construction. In a letter from Mantua dated 5 October 1506, Isabella wrote to Francesco about her impressions, drawing a clear parallel between his new rooms and her own apartments in the Castello di San Giorgio: In September 1506, Francesco II Gonzaga, the marquis of Mantua (ruled 1484-1519),
Anthropomorphism, Musical Instruments, and Depicted Female Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy
According to Michel Foucault, the construction of symbolic meaning during the early modern period was determined by the episteme of resemblance. Following this, in the late 1990s musicologists such as Gary Tomlinson adopted notions of resemblance to explain features of sixteenth-century music, such as text-setting. Moreover, the recent study The Anthropomorphic Lens outlines how the early modern chain of resemblances established an association between bodily attributes (both physical and emotional) and the body, leading to the notion of ‘anthropomorphism’. Anthropomorphism can be applied to the common symbolism of musical instruments: for example, the shape of woodwind instruments echoing the male phallus, the lute mirroring the curves of the female belly, and so on. Building on this, it can be argued that musical instruments are mediations between society’s construction of proper femininity, and the visual projection of a woman’s musical body. This paper will offer an analysis of anthropomorphic interpretations of musical instruments in relation to early modern extant sources: for example, treatises (such us Pietro Cerone’s El melopeo y maestro), mythological stories, poems (such as Giulio Cesare Croce’s enigmas), surviving instruments, and iconography (which include Piazza da Lodi’s Concert, Bartolommeo Veneto’s Lute Player or Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait at the Spinet amongst others). I will also consider an image where the anthropomorphic associations of instruments were neutralised by other symbolism such as that of the Muses.