Introduction

Around 1500 music-making decisively entered the frame of Italian secular painting as a subject in its own right, no longer necessarily fixed within approximately realistic scenes of civic or private festivity, or within the viewing contexts traditionally associated with such imagery. Since at least the middle of the twentieth century, the suggestive alignments and juxtapositions to be found within this constellation of fascinating developments have captured the imaginations of musicologists and art historians, generating a rich vein of scholarship investigating relations between musical and visual media in the Renaissance. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Italian sources pervasively describe a concept of harmony that is both essentially musical and broadly interdisciplinary. Across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rising prestige of musical practice and increasing presence of music as a self-consciously artful aspect of everyday life contributed to the development of a newly rich and varied material culture of music, which was particularly notable in domestic or “private” sphere.