The Music of Love, Life and Death

Interesting online talk from the National Gallery looking at the meaning of music in art.

Two speakers, Caroline Smith and Belle Smith, picked nine pictures from the galleries collection to illustrate the different allegories of music, starting with Matteo de Giovanni’s altarpiece of 1474 of the Virgin being taken to heaven my music making angels and ending with Manet’s “Corner of a Café Concert” from just over 400 years later. En route they took in Dutch Golden Age genre pictures and a still life, an Italian Renaissance court picture, a Hogarth and two Vermeers.

I learnt a lot about the symbolism including a pipe with glowing embers meaning the transience of life, a well-used music book being a sign of idle pleasure and music as a sign of personal and political harmony.

They set up a nice contrast to end between the first and last pictures from hierarchy of angels in the first to lack of hierarchy in the last, from formal organised music to the more throw away and from everyone experiencing music in their own way in the Manet to the unified experience of the Matteo.

 

 


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