Stephen A. Bergquist (Boston), Women at the Keyboard: The World of Domestic Music-Making.

Domestic music-making, which was an important part of the musical world up through the early years of the twentieth century, was driven almost to extinction by a number of inventions—the phonograph, motion pictures, the player piano, the radio, and the automobile. Under the conventions of the times, while men went out into the wider world, women’s lives remained centered in the home, and domestic music-making perforce became primarily a feminine activity. Although various instruments (the flute, the guitar, and the harp) were popular at various times, the domestic musical instrument par excellence has always been the keyboard instrument. Many artists have depicted women at the keyboard. Wenceslaus Hollar did a 1635 etching of a woman at the virginal. In 1767, Johannes Körnlein, who worked with the Dutch artist Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, produced a color intaglio print of a woman playing the clavichord. Adam Bartsch did a 1795 etching of a woman playing the orphica, a small fortepiano with a compass of two to four octaves that was held in the lap. Jean-Henri Marlet made an 1822 lithograph of a Parisian music school for young women. A Neapolitan family, with the oldest daughter at the piano, was depicted by Gioacchino Forino in 1827. Henri Fantin-Latour did an 1864 etching of an English couple playing a duet for flute and piano. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor and an amateur etcher, portrayed his wife at the piano in an 1873 etching. In 1896 Gustave Leheutre did a drypoint of two young women playing the violin and piano, and Paul Helleu did a drypoint of his daughter and her maternal grandmother playing a piano duet. In 1933 Elizabeth Orton Jones made a charming color etching of two young French children at the piano.

Stephen A. Bergquist (Boston), Emil Orlik: The Musical Portrait Prints.

The Czech artist Emil Orlik (1870–1932) is not well known today, except in the countries where he lived and worked, but he produced an extraordinary oeuvre of paintings, drawings, and prints, including very fine portraits of a number of his musical contemporaries. Born in Prague, Orlik studied art in Munich, and for about ten years thereafter he lived at various times in Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, but in 1905 he accepted a position at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, where he taught until shortly before his death. Orlik was highly extroverted, and had a great sense of humor. He had numerous friends in the worlds of art, music, literature, and the theater, many of whom he portrayed in paintings, drawings, and prints, and some of whom he portrayed multiple times. His most famous musical portrait is his 1902 etching of Gustav Mahler, which has become an iconic image of the composer. From 1915 to 1928 he did portrait prints of Conrad Ansorge, Eugen d’Albert, Richard Strauss, Bronisław Huberman, Wanda Landowska, Anton Bruckner, Arthur Nikisch, Willem Mengelberg, Fritz Kreisler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Wilhelm Furtwängler. In addition to his formal etched portraits he produced a number of quick lithographic sketches which he drew in cafés or private homes, and at concerts or rehearsals. A descriptive checklist of Orlik’s musical portrait prints, comprising twenty-six items, is included as an appendix to this article.

Rachel Coombes (Downing College, University of Cambridge), The Sounding Body in the Musical Illustrations of Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard.

The numerous artistic depictions of domestic music-making produced in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century have drawn the attention of musicologists and art historians. Both have recognized the enthrallment at this time to the ideal of a rapprochement between music and the visual arts, as promoted by the cult of French “Wagnerism” and the vague notions inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s theories of artistic synthesis (famously expressed in his sonnet “Correspondances”, 1857). But, in pursuing these Symbolist lines of enquiry, art historians in particular have neglected the fact that musical performance is always physically constituted, however immaterial and ephemeral the sonic experience is. Through a consideration of a number of music-themed paintings and score illustrations by the post-Impressionist artists Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), this article asserts the importance of the role played by the physical performing body to the artist’s perceptual understanding of music. As is well known, much artistic exchange in the fin-de-siècle was fostered within private bourgeois domestic settings; it is this social milieu, with its intimate staging of corporeal presence, which provides the framework for my analysis. The body of the female pianist, the “transfigured” shape of the female singer, and the embodied dynamics of family life (as played out through music) serve as the focal points of discussion.

Paola Dessì (Università degli Studi di Padova), Musical Ensembles in the libri amicorum of Hans Hoch Dated Rome 1618–1656.

The Cisalpine cities with their renowned universities were favorite destinations for the young ultramontani both in the sixteenth century during the peregrinatio academica and in the following centuries during the Kavalierstour and Grand Tour phenomenon: The presence of the ultramontani in Italy is widely attested in the libri amicorum, travel notebooks that young people carried with them to collect the dedications of friends, teachers and prominent figures they met.
The four voluminous and elegant libri amicorum of Hans Hoch, kept at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Fondo Chigi, G.IV.111–G.IV.114, contain 785 dedications by various persons, collected in Rome between 1618 and 1656. They document the presence of transalpine people in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century and they are an essential prosopographical source for tracing the circulation of young elites in the city.
There had been little biographical information on Hans Hoch (Giovanni Alto; 1577–1660), who is often confused with Hans Gros, as both shared the name Hans, came from Lucerne, worked as Swiss guards for the pope, knew the Roman antiquities and worked as guides for the visitors arriving in the city from beyond the Alps. On the basis of the entries they entered in some libri amicorum, their distinct identities are now clearly confirmed. Hoch’s libri amicorum include four images of unspecified urban settings with musicians, which document seventeenth-century performances of professional musicians hired by private individuals.

Nicoletta Guidobaldi (Dipartimento di Beni Culturali, Università di Bologna), The Reception of “Roman” Antique Models in Early Renaissance Musical Imagery: Study Cases and Research Perspectives.

Within the impressive phenomenon of recovery and humanistic reinterpretation of the ancient cultural heritage, the discovery of archaeological finds and iconographic evidence of ancient Rome aroused the passionate interest of artists, antiquarians and scholars, and exerted an extraordinary impact also on the elaboration of the Renaissance musical imagery.
On the ground of the broadly-designed research model, which develops in the musical direction the Warburg Institute’s studies on the ancient models employed by Renaissance artists, examined are the artistic resonances of the Roman gem, so-called “sigillum Neronis” (first century BC), attributed to Dioskourides, showing Apollo, Olympus and Marsyas (in works by Attavante degli Attavanti, Sandro Botticelli, Isaia da Pisa, Giovanni Baldù); compositions showing Muses, based on the late-third-century Sarcophagus of the Muses at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Marcantonio Raimondi, Filippino Lippi); the Sarcophagus of the Muses at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo in Rome (Raffaello Sanzio, Marcantonio Raimondi, Marin Mersenne, Filippo Bonanni, Amico Aspertini); and a group of Bacchic sarcophagi (Baldassarre Peruzzi, Jacopo di Giovanni Battista, Michele di Giovanni da Fiesole, Matteo Balducci). These copies, reworkings, misunderstandings and additions, gave rise to unprecedented musical icons but also to transpositions from the figurative register to the verbal and performative ones and to the assignment of new symbolic and emblematic meanings to musical figures, instruments and myths.

David Hunter (University of Texas at Austin), Lubricious Facts, Pleasing Lies: Zoffany’s The Family of Sir William Young, Bart., a Conversation Piece Funded by Slavery.

During the period 1765–70 Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) painted what has come to be recognized over the last hundred years as one of the finest achievements in British group portraiture of the era, The Family of Sir William Young, Bart. Sacheverell Sitwell said so, and Mary Webster has opined that “this picture [is] one of the most romantic of English rococo pieces.” The painting is however, more striking in several ways than already proposed.
Such basic facts as birth and death dates for several of the individuals pictured are not known with certainty. For that reason alone, highlighting the slipperiness of the facts in relation to the apparent solidity of the paint is a guiding premise. We can imagine many things about these individuals, their relationships, and their lives and deaths, but some imaginings have greater grounding in fact than others. The three main sections comprise: identification of the white persons shown, whether alive, dead or distant, their clothing and accouterments, their groupings, the staging, and their musical interests; the non-family elements of the enslaved man, horse, dogs, and location; and the dating and pricing of the painting.
The wealth of Sir William and his wife derived from slave trading, ownership of the enslaved and the plantations, which the family owned in Antigua from the 1720s and in Tobago until the 1720s, on which they were exploited, and profits from the sale of sugar. But in pointing to family facts, so lubricious that they have remained uncaught for a century or more, as well as aesthetic issues, highlighted is the gap between the family’s reality and the picture’s fantasy. Every year, behind each of the white figures stood thirty or more enslaved Blacks (rather than just the one pictured), and ever and even more ghosts. Zoffany’s The Family of Sir William Young, Bart. didn’t lie to its commissioning owner (who, after all, knew the ages and lives of his children, and the multiple sittings probably undertaken over several years), but it certainly offers us truthiness rather than truth; it lies to us, however pleasingly.

Stefania Macioce (Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma), Musica Picta: Painted Concerts by Pietro Paolini.

Pietro Paolini (Lucca, 3 June 1603–Lucca, 12 April 1681) arrived in Rome towards the end of the 1610s, on the initiative of his father who sent him to study with Angelo Caroselli, a well-known copyist and forger. In Rome, Paolioni assimilated many elements of Caravaggio’s style, which influenced many of his later works. In 1628 Paolini went to Venice to deepen his knowledge, but soon he returned to Lucca where he remained until his death. In 1652, in Lucca he founded an Accademia dal Naturale, which had a task to introduce the most important aesthetic themes of the new naturalistic school into the Lucca environment.
Among his compositions representing musicians and concerts, stands out the beautiful Concerto a cinque (ca. 1625), known in two versions, one in the Louvre and the other in a private collection in Milan. The painting is a sort of “manifesto” of the new music, like some Caravaggio’s paintings. Paolini is interested in profane themes influenced by the Venetian tradition, but at the same time he demonstrates his contrast with the style of the strictly conservative culture of Lucca.

Licia Mari (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), “Ogni secolo ha carattere suo proprio”: The Coronation of the Virgin Mary in Mantua from 1640 to 1940.

The first half of the seventeenth century, especially after the great plague of 1630, was marked by a renewed devotion to the Virgin Mary. The celebrations of the coronation of her image were magnificent, involving religious and civil spaces. The first coronation with the pope’s approval was organized for the Madonna della Febbre in the Vatican Basilica (1631). In Mantua this ceremony took place in 1640: it began in the Cathedral, where the ancient image of the Virgin was placed, and with the coronation of the image in Leon Battista Alberti’s Basilica of Sant’Andrea. After the ceremony was printed the book Descrittione della solennità dell’ Incoronatione della beatissima Vergine, fatta d’ordine della Serenissima Signora Duchessa di Mantova e di Monferrato by the Bishop of Casale Scipione Agnello Maffei who officiated the ceremony. The book described in detail the rite, the theatrical machines, the ornaments, the procession, and some engravings of the sacred theatre built in the church.
The project of the apparatus and of the machines with singing angels and saints was designed by the Gonzaga architect Nicolò Sebregondi (1585–1652), who also worked in Rome and Prague. The music was composed by Francesco Dognazzi (1585–1644), ducal chapel master, and likely played by the organist Maurizio Cazzati (1616–1678). Since 1640, Mantua celebrated this anniversary every hundred years. During this time, the coronation changed its face several times, boasting at times triumphal chariots drawn by elephants or troops deployed to honor the Virgin, great Masses with choir and orchestra, with music written for the feast, and even the heartfelt petition to Mary during the Second World War.

Thomas Metcalf (The University of Edinburgh, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), Imagetext, Indeterminacy, and Iconoclasm: What do Graphic Scores Want?

The year 2022 marked the eightieth birthday of the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell, and deaths of the sociologist Bruno Latour and the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. These events were taken as an occasion for a reflection about their work and its relationship to graphic notation. The material, conceptual, and graphic impact of musical notation shows clear and palpable similarities to concepts found in visual culture, particularly that of iconoclasm (the destruction of images/icons). By thinking critically on the relationship between notation’s visual and verbal (sonic) relationship, Mitchell’s concept of the “imagetext” is taken as a suggestion that the move to graphic scores from the 1950s highlights a much stronger sociological act than currently theorized, demonstrating “a composite, synthetic form … a gap or fissure in representation” that unsettles the cultural “image” of music writ large and its propensity for hierarchical and hegemonic systems of knowledge. Following the theoretical discussion of the visual and the musical, An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, organized by Ichiyanagi and Kuniharu Akiyama (Tokyo, 1962), is used to demonstrate parallels between the paradoxical nature of iconoclasm and iconophilia, and the utopian potential of the visual/musical. Final thoughts are offered on the role of the graphic score in contemporary culture, noting how digitality provides us with the ability to more readily engage with this enigmatic form of musical writing, with new technologies perhaps realizing the central intellectual project through the democratisation of musical engagement.

Arnaldo Morelli (Università dell’Aquila), Musicians’ Portraits in Musicians’ Homes in Early Modern Italy.

The extraordinary collection of musicians’ portraits, now preserved in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, was put together by the music historian Giovanni Battista Martini (1706–1784) with an intention to include them in a volume of his Storia della musica that would collect biographies of famous musicians, which has never been published. Nevertheless, the number of portraits collected by Martini grew beyond the editorial and documentary needs and the collection contributed to the prestige of Martini and of the personalities immortalized in his rich gallery. The antecedents of Martini’s collection can be found not so much in the galleries of illustrious figures—such as, for instance, those of Paolo Giovio and Federico Borromeo—but rather in the portrait collections of ecclesiastical, academic, and professional figures, or aristocratic families.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries portraits of musicians were occasionally displayed in halls (ridotti) of aristocratic palaces, were gentlemen would play or discuss music. The well known collections were owned by Count Mario Bevilacqua in Verona and Antonio Goretti in Ferrara. Some seventeenth-century collections, such as those of the music printer-publisher Bartolomeo Magni in Venice (who owned exclusively portraits of Venetian musicians) or the collection of the Veracini family in Florence (who owned portrait of musicians from Florence), were formed thanks to the networks of their personal relationships, highlighting a specific group or “school” of musicians.
Starting from the early eighteenth century, some small collections of musicians’ portraits, such as those of the maestro di cappella Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni in Rome and of the famous singer Francesco Bernardi, known as il Senesino, in Siena, were conceived in a historical key for their reception and would become fundamental documents for the construction of the nascent historiography of music.

Emma Petrosyan Էմմա Պետրոսյան (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography | Հնագիտության և ազգագրության ինստիտուտ, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia | Հայաստանի Հանրապետության գիտությունների ազգային ակադեմիա), Semantics of the Bronze Belts of the Kingdom of Bainili/Urartu.

Among the objects excavated in archaeological locations of the Kingdom of Urartu, which flourished around the Lake Van in the historic Armenian Highlands (today located in eastern Turkey), between the mid-ninth century BCE and the conquest by the Iranian Medes in the early sixth century BCE, important are bronze belts worn by men and women. These belts are usually richly decorated with ornamentation and visual motives providing us with insights about the life, religion and culture of the Urartu people. The belt no. 4 that used to be kept in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection, Musa Eretz Israel Museum, in Tel Aviv, and recently transferred to a private collection, was probably worn during the holidays by a young woman of a high social status. The belt has no inscription; and the place of its discovery is unknown. It is nearly fully preserved, about 74 cm long and 6.8 to 7 cm wide. The right section of the belt represents ten women, priestesses-servants attending the queen who is sitting at the sacrificial table. The maids represented on the left section bring gifts, followed by musicians, an acrobat, and a luxurious cart, drawn by two oxen guided by a charioteer. The composition may represent the holiday celebration known as Great Assembly or “feeding the deity”, which included the sacrifice of animals, display of shields, weapons, vessels, and various utensils offered to gods.

Charlotte Poulton (Utah Valley University), Heaven on Earth: Images of St. Cecilia as a Musician.

Paintings of St. Cecilia as a musician proliferated in Rome after 1600 and seem to participate in two apparently divergent themes: music as part of a sacred story of access to the divine, and music as part of a secular story of the refinements of education and social class. The implied devotional effects of Cecilia’s music making and connections to secular music practices are not mutually exclusive and can best be understood and reconciled when investigated in light of contemporary practices of female musicians, namely nun musicians. The musical instruments Cecilia plays are examined in context of the controversial use of stringed instruments in sacred music performances during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Depictions of violins, lutes, and theorboes in the hands of a female saint seem to parallel the increasing presence of these instruments within female convents despite official decrees forbidding their use. Just as Cecilia’s music making served as a conduit between heaven and earth, contemporary accounts of nuns’ music describe the rapturous effects on individual musicians as well as on audiences as a whole. Cecilia serves as an appropriate proxy for nuns and their musical activities not only because of her connections to music but also because of her piety and virginity. By exemplifying these qualities, nuns and their musical activities were considered earthly manifestations of heavenly choirs. Implications of rendering St. Cecilia and her music as secular and aristocratic are explained in relation to representations of Lady Music and the social status of nuns. What emerges are arresting conjunctions of heavenly and earthly, sacred and mundane in painting and music. While St. Cecilia and her music-making are brought to an earthly realm through associations with female musicians, the angelic quality of nuns’ music-making enhances the saint’s spirituality and amplifies the devotional and musical elements of the paintings.

Cristina Santarelli (Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte, Torino), Cardinals Del Monte and Montalto and a Rediscovered Painting.

It has always been believed that the famous Suonatore di tiorba (ca. 1610) in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, once attributed to Caravaggio and later to Antiveduto Gramatica (1571–1626; a painter of Sienese origin who grew up in Rome), was part of a larger composition in which the player was accompanied by other instrumentalists. This hypothesis is supported by an ancient copy in which the lutenist is portrayed along with a woman playing the harpsichord and a young flautist. The recent discovery, in a private Greek collection, of the presumed missing part of the painting, by the Turinese antiquaries Massimiliano Caretto and Francesco Occhinegro, has reopened questions already raised by critics in previous decades: it could be the missing fragment of a “concert” listed in the 1627 inventory of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte (1549–1626); both paintings are cut on one side and partially modified to create two independent pieces that would have been more easily sold. As for the portrayed musicians, it has long been proposed to identify the faces of the singer Ippolita Recupita (on the harpsichord) and her husband Cesare Marotta (on the theorbo), both belonging to the circle of Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Damasceni di Montalto (1571–1623), although the identification is still controversial.