ABSTRACT
Over the past five hundred years, composers have been depicted in all the major media—paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Printmaking is an intimate medium, and while an etched or engraved portrait may lack the immediate impact of an imposing oil painting or a life-size sculpture, prints are an extraordinarily important source for the visual history of music. Even for composers whose images are familiar primarily from paintings, prints have made significant contributions to their iconographies, and for many composers, prints constitute the only visual record. They can thus be of great interest not only to the music lover, but to the musicologist and the music historian as well.
