Music and the Figurative Arts in the Baroque Era

Florence Gétreau, Fulvia Morabito (eds)

Pages: approx. 450 p.
Size:210 x 270 mm
Illustrations:178 b/w, 32 col.

Language(s):English, Italian, French
Publication Year:2026

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ISBN: 978-2-503-62184-5
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This book explores the relationship between music and the figurative arts in the xvii and xviii centuries in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Austria.

Subject(s)

BIO

Florence Gétreau is Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS (Paris, Institut de recherche en musicologie). A musicologist and art historian, her research focuses on organology, musical iconography and the history of collections. A heritage curator until 2003 and project manager of the Musée de la Musique, she directed the Institut de recherche sur le patrimoine musical en France (2004-2013). She founded and edits the journal Musique-Images-Instruments (CNRS Éditions).

Fulvia Morabito, pianist and musicologist, is President of the National Edition of the Complete Works of Luigi Boccherini and currently Vice President of the Centro Studi Opera Omnia ‘Luigi Boccherini’ of Lucca. Appointed ‘Cultore della materia della Musica Barocca e Classica’ by the University of Pavia, her interest are focused particularly on the late Baroque and Classical period, with particular reference to the figures of Pietro Antonio Locatelli and Luigi Boccherini.

Summary

The figurative arts — or the arts that transcribe the visible — are interested in music in many ways. If we consider the hierarchy of genres, particularly formalised at the end of the 17th century with the advent of the academies, music is present in religious subjects, historical and mythological themes, the performing arts, genre scenes, portraits and still lifes. Artists offered musical motifs using a wide variety of techniques, including painting of course, but also the graphic arts (drawing, engraving) and the plastic arts (sculpture, objets d'art and textiles in particular). This multiplicity of themes, media and techniques gives us the opportunity to discover common or rarer musical instruments that can be remarkably observed, but also musical notations that are sometimes perfectly identifiable, particular playing techniques that refer to theoretical treatises or learning tutors, and musical ensembles appropriate to a wide variety of circumstances (religious rituals, festivals, urban or court entertainments, the performing arts, domestic practices). All these visual traces of music raise questions about the place of music among the other arts, and about its social and symbolic importance, since it suggests or even provokes the affirmation of a status, of a terrestrial or spiritual power, of an aesthetic or even philosophical choice. The contributions gathered here reflect this diversity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Austria.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Florence Gétreau and Fulvia Morabito, Preface

Spiritual Inspiration

Maria Luisa Baldassari, Chi era il maestro di Santa Cecilia? Dipinti di S. Cecilia e trattati tastieristici nel primo Barocco

Galliano Ciliberti, Un caso di «musica picta»: il mottetto «In te Domine spes mea» attribuito a Giacomo Carissimi

Gaëtan Naulleau, Le chœur polyphonique dans les planches illustrées du «Cæremoniale Episcoporum» (1600-1779) : caractéristiques, circulation et signification d’un thème iconographique

Scenography and Theatrical Art

Silvia Bier, «Le propre de ce spectacle …»: Early French Opera and the Idea of a Synthesis of Arts

Adriana De Feo, Pietro Pariati and Apostolo Zeno at the Viennese Court: Baroque Spectacle and the Representation of Power

Portraits of Musicians

Nicola Usula, Musica nei ritratti e ritratti nella musica: il caso di Leopoldo i Asburgo (1640-1705)

Florence Gétreau, The «Musical Assembly with Reincken, Buxtehude and Theile» Painted by Johannes Voorhout in 1674: Musicians, Instruments, Canon, Scenography and Interpretation

Vincent Robin, Quelques portraits de musettes et de musettistes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Court Music Images

Florence Gétreau, Présence de la musique dans l’iconographie du salon de la Paix à Versailles : les peintures et les trophées des bas-reliefs de métal doré

Michael Latcham, «All the World’s a Stage»: Farinelli at the Royal Court of Spain, 1737 to 1760

Cristina Bordas, Visual Memory of Farinelli in 21st Century Madrid

Abstract and Biographies
Iconographic Appendix
Index of Names