Themes in Art with Lydia Bauman

Music

Though paintings are silent, artists have long sought to make music visible. From medieval and Renaissance altarpieces showing heavenly orchestras as symbols of divine harmony, to accurate depictions of secular polyphony in 15th-century Ferrara, music signified order and culture. In 16th-century Venice it evoked a poetic Golden Age; in 17th-century Holland and Victorian Britain it reflected leisure while carrying moral lessons. Only in the late 19th century did artists begin to align painting with music itself: the Aesthetic movement privileged formal beauty over narrative, and abstraction aimed to evoke sound through colour and line, appealing even to synaesthetic experience. Thus music in art spans religion, morality, pleasure and pure sensory expression.

Artists: Van Eyck, Giorgione, Vermeer, Whistler, Kandinsky and others.

In the series:
Mar. 17: Music
Apr. 14: Dance