Music, notation, and embodiment in early sixteenth-century Italian pictures

Music emphatically entered the repertoire of popular subjects for painting and printmaking in North Italy in the early sixteenth century. Musical scores often appear in such images, offering an interesting opportunity to reflect on the materiality of notation, not least because musical functionality cannot have been their primary purpose. From a practical perspective, these are bad scores: Upside-down, half-obscured, foreshortened, often simply illegible. And yet they are represented, and indeed both their material and their musical structure act powerfully to shape the actions and interactions of the figures in the image. This chapter begins with a brief review of the kinds of music scores found in Italian paintings in the early sixteenth century, highlighting their material features as books and noting the relationships between music books represented in paintings and those used in practice. Then, we identify three prevailing conventions governing how musical scores interact with and organise the figures appearing in an image, sketching out some of the ways in which they might relate to the dominant ideologies of contemporary musical culture. Our hypothesis is that these visual conventions reflect fundamental assumptions about music that were widely shared by those who commissioned, made, owned, and viewed musical images.