Mark the Music

Ut pictura musica – to paraphrase Horace. Painting is much like music. During the Renaissance, both arts reached extraordinary heights in terms of the richness of detail and the refinement of formal structure, returning to the classical canons of poetics and architecture, considered anew after the scholastic reworkings of the Middle Ages. Just as with painting, many musical innovations arrived in the Italian peninsula from the Netherlands. Flemish masters such as Dufay, Desprez, Ockeghem, and Obrecht ushered in a new musical language, soon an integral part of courtly refinement, as codified by Baldassare Castiglione. And so music and painting drove the Renaissance along parallel paths and many artists were both visually and sonically inclined. Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo and Cristina Farnetti present exemplary figures of Venetian painter-musicians; and it was in Venice that, in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s Lorenzo uttered these immortal lines: “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; / The motions of his spirit are dull as night, / And his affections dark as Erebus. / Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”