Music and the Figurative Arts in Baroque Era

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.