Vol. XXX/1-2 (2005)

The Froman family — the dancers and choreographers Margarita, Maksimilijan, and Valentin, and the stage and costume designer Pavel (1894–1940) — arrived to Zagreb in 1921, following the October Revolution. Pavel Petrović studied painting at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and during years spent in a close proximity to the Russian ballet was possibly influenced by developments at the Bol'šoj Teatr. For the Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište in Zagreb Froman produced 45 stage designs, collaborating during the 1920s and 1930s with the major Croatian stage directors, such as Kalman Mesarić, Branko Gavella, and Tito Strozzi. His best work was, however, staging of the Russian repertoire, where he was influenced by the circle of artists centered around the Mir iskusstva group and Djagilev’s Ballets Russes (Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, and Ivan Jakovlevič Bilibin). The analysis of Froman’s works is based on his sets for Stravinsky’s Petruška (1923), Čajkovskij’s Ščelkunčik (1931), and Rimskij-Korsakov’s operas Sadko (1930) and Skazanie o nevidimom grade Kiteže i deve Fovronii (1935). An appendix lists performances at the Hrvatsko Narodno Kazalište for which Froman designed the sets and/or costumes.

One of the defining characteristics of the many different kinds of lutes, archlutes, and theorbos is the particular tuning that each instrument was identified with – indeed, to distinguish between lute types, it is often necessary to know how the instrument was tuned. Art works are extremely rich in images of lutes, but the tuning of a depicted instrument is, in most cases, impossible to determine. Consequently, it is often quite difficult, on the basis of iconographical evidence alone, to accurately identify the particular type of lute being represented. In addition, there is still some confusion in both primary and secondary musicological sources about the correct naming of individual types of lutes. Modern scholars sometimes disagree about the meaning of terms such as "archlute", "theorbo", "chitarrone", "theorbo lute" and the like. The original sources, too, sometimes assigns the same name to different kinds of lutes and, vice versa, different names for the same instrument. It is possible, however, to distinguish between a few main types of lutes that can be easily recognized in iconographical sources, while still leaving open the possibility of giving more precise definitions when possible. The article presents a proposal for an iconographical classification of the main types of European lutes from the 16th century to the lute’s demise in the late 18th century, based on external features that do not include their tuning.

The Concert of Angels by Gaudenzio Ferrari (ca. 1471–1546) in Saronno, north of Milan, is well known and justly praised for its unique beauty as well as for the musicological and iconographical interest of its subject. However, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo described in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura (Milan, 1584) another, equally impressive painting by the same artist, to be admired and imitated by "whoever desires to become an expert painter, and to become judicious in arranging those [musical] instruments and clothing on the angels". The painting was located "in Voltollina Traona", a small village in an alpine valley north of Lake Como. No other information exists about this work, which has been virtually ignored by modern scholars. An investigation in loco in the ancient church of Sant’Alessandro, which was heavily rebuilt in recent centuries, led me to a hidden passage behind a huge Baroque altar, where I was able to recognize traces of the remains of the lost fresco, including parts of a musical angel with his instrument.

Franz Liszt’s visage is one of the most frequently encountered images in nineteenth-century music iconography. The reasons for this popularity are manifold, and include the nineteenth century fascination with physical appearance, especially with that of the face. This fascination was encouraged by, and systematized within, the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology. These belief systems provided a powerful set of visual cues within nineteenth-century European and American portraiture, with musicians forming one of several subtypes of sitter. Liszt’s face was particularly appealing to portraitists of his day because of his physiognomically striking features, although he did not conform in all respects to the ideal image of the sensitive and intellectual artist, and several representations of him show "corrections" of his features according to the precepts of physiognomy and phrenology.

Since the time that Pablo Picasso painted his famous Guernica in 1937, there were composed some 30 compositions inspired by his work, which reflect the different perceptions of pictorial art and music and the possible points of contact between painting and music. A great number of these compositions, regardless of their variety of style and technique, have common features and expresses the same intent as the Guernica painting: a lament and accusation against war and violence. This is realized in the music mainly with shrill dissonances, rhythmic ostinato figures, and contrasting changes between elegiac and aggressive parts. In several compositions can be found the symmetry, which is also characteristic formal aspect of the painting.

An iconographic analysis of the Magic Scene with Self-Portrait by Peter Bodding van Laer (1599–ca. 1642), kept in private collection in New York. Among several magical objects and books on magic, the painting includes a three-part canon with underlaid text "Il diavolo non si burla". The subject of the paining is compared with Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, published in 1628.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) depicted in his works many different types of musical instruments, portraying them with various functions and in a variety of settings. One particular type of zither — the Japanese koto — is found in Rosetti’s The Blue Bower (1865) and A Sea Spell (1877). This discussion explores the historical context of these pictures in terms of their Japanese influence, as well as their context within this period of both English art history and Japanese music history. The instrument shown in these pictures is an organological representation of Japanese culture of the time, a study of which can not only shed light on its existence in a piece of English art work, but also in understanding its place in Japanese music history.
The works of art such as these provide an important iconographical evidence relating to social and cultural information about both the artist and the material object he has used or represented. Only through critical enquiry of the instrument featured in these works can one truly understand the pictures as historical sources of information about a Japanese musical instrument. Analysis of these two art works in terms of the depiction of the instrument and its player in the work itself is something that can help in understanding the extent to which the instrument was represented authentically, and contribute to knowledge about the form and culture of the Japanese instrument depicted.

The architecture historian Anne Bulckens has studied the proportions of the Parthenon based on the measurements of Francis Cranmer Penrose (the measurements referred to by most scholars). In her work she discovered the length of a module and measure of a Parthenon foot used throughout the structure conforming well to the architectural principals described by Vitruvius. The principal result of her studies is that all of the significant measurements can be reckoned as integers within the preset tolerance of 0.2% although the load bearing elements have deviations of far less. We have discovered that the integers can be correlated with the musical scale of Pythagoras. Most notably the length, width, and heights of the outer temple and the length and width of the cella form a pentatonic scale. Our contribution to Bulckens’ work lies in trying to review it carefully within philosophical principles prevalent in the fifth century B.C. when it was under construction-for which we rely on Philolaus, the earliest Pythagorean author, writing in Tarentum while the Parthenon was under construction. We believe her analysis may prove significant both to the study of other Greek temples and to a better understanding of Pythagorean influence on Greek ideals.

Liszt’s passion for art in general testifies to his synaesthetic imagination – he could not look at certain works without spontaneously setting them to music. His writings, letters, and articles convey his culture and knowledge of art and artistic circles. His work on Raphael’s Sainte Cécile reveals his true talent as an art critic and his highly sensitive eye. The way he speaks about this painting is reminiscent of Panofsky’s approach, which is applied here to Liszt’s music inspired by the visual arts. This approach involves three stages which Panofsky terms levels of signification. The first relates to all of the immediately perceptible visual aspects, the forms, volumes and colors, the musical counterpart to this being the motifs and themes employed. The second level pertains to the images, stories and allegories contained in the painting. Here again, they correspond to a meaningful set of themes in Liszt: he evokes characters through citations. The third level considers the content of a work; Liszt expresses this through musical form. This reflects his overriding concerns of religion and death. Adapting Panofsky’s method to an analysis of Liszt’s works inspired by visual art brings out the similarities and divergences in the principles of perception and conception. It also shows that the common content of the works lies in the idea they illustrate.

Schicksalslied, Nänie, and Gesang der Parzen constitute Johannes Brahms’s trilogy of choral-orchestral works set to texts inspired by Greek antiquity. Whereas considerable attention has been given to Max Klinger’s engravings inspired by Brahms’s Schicksalslied, little has been written about the associations of Nänie and the Gesang der Parzen with two other contemporary painters, namely Anselm Feuerbach and Arnold Böcklin. When Feuerbach died in 1880, Brahms chose to memorialize the early death of his friend in Nänie. Schiller’s text abounds in allusions to the mythological figures that the painter himself had so successfully portrayed in his works, while Brahms’s music evokes a similar spirit, a counterpart to Feuerbach’s classicizing art. Böcklin’s paintings, which also drew extensively on classical myths, betrayed a more dynamic forcefulness than those of Feuerbach’s. In setting Goethe’s fatalistic verses from Iphigenie, Brahms manages to suggest but not impose musically, to imply but not assert — an approach directly analogous to Böcklin’s treatment of mythological figures, where nymphs and centaurs acquire an unusual richness in their suggestiveness, thus allowing the viewer to reconstruct the artist’s spirit. Similarly, Brahms’s music avoids literal mirroring of the text, when he deems it appropriate, as in the fifth strophe of the Gesang der Parzen; rather, it demands the participation of the listener to recreate the spirit that lies beyond the text, but that is only suggested by the music. Consequently, both artists do not adhere to Winckelmann’s Apollonian aesthetic, but rather their art betrays a Dionysian element that also reflects the changing aesthetics of the time.

The Dian Kingdom, prosperous in the central region of Yunnan Province, China, from the middle Warring States period (475– 221 B.C.) to early Eastern Han dynasty (A.D. 25–220), was a center of bronze production, and archaeologists have excavated in burial sites at Shizhaishan in Jinning County, Lijiashan in Jiangchuan County, Yangfutou in Grandu Distict of Kunming, and Tianzimiao in Chenggong County, such bronze objects as drums, cowry containers refitted from drums, chimes, and gourd-shaped mouth organs. The drums were in an initial stage decorated with protruding patterns of the sun and rhombus grid, while later decorations became more diversified and included images of flying egrets, the sun, oxen, dancers, and deers. Some bronze cowry containers include on the lid elaborate representations which show the way how drums were used. The bronze gourd-shaped mouth organs (huhu sheng) found there are considered to be the earliest instruments from the mouth-organ family in China. Representations of musicians playing mouth organs from the period indicate that the design and playing technique of the gourd-shaped mouth organ have remained unchanged since its creation more than two thousand years ago. Many bronze objects from the Dian Kindom are cast with images of music-making and dance, some of which can be related to traditional rituals that have been until recently performed among the Yunnan ethnic minorities. Described objects are kept in the collections of the Yunnan Provincial Museum and the Yunnan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute in Kunming.

Home         Back to Publications        Music in Art