The sight of sound : Resonances between music and painting in seventeenth-century Italy

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