Aporia and the harmonious subject

Paintings and prints in which the absence of an obvious narrative subject is combined with a sense of psychological intensity are among the most celebrated novelties of North Italian art around 1500. Images in which the “subject” appears to be music-making, such as Lorenzo Costa's Concert and Giorgione's Three Ages of Man, achieved widespread popularity as a part of that broader phenomenon. The vogue for these so-called concert pictures is usually explained in relation to either an assumed Venetian musical exceptionalism or an improbably subtle investment in the neo-Platonic philosophy of cosmic harmony. This chapter proposes a different, more straightforward approach. Harmony—understood in the period as disparate elements brought into rational concord—was used right across Italian culture c. 1500 as a ubiquitous metaphor for any system involving the proper arrangement of diversity. From the 1480s to the 1510s, a whole series of print publications applied this metaphor to different aspects of image-making, including perspective composition and coloring. For artists interested in looking beyond the narrative subject to new principles that might organize an image and give interior life to its protagonists, harnessing the metaphor of harmony must have seemed an obvious and promising strategy.