ABSTRACT
'Music at its most sublime must become sheer form and affect us with the serene power of antiquity,' wrote Friedrich Schiller in his letters on the aesthetic education of man: The plastic arts, at their most perfect, must become music and move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence. Music had, of course, been associated with the visual arts since time immemorial. The new importance given to music by the Romantics is a manifestation of the general shift from a mimetic to an expressive aesthetic, In order to make a double assault on the soul through the senses, artists now aspired to integrate the figurative arts with music in such a way that neither would merely complement nor illustrate the other. Some years later, Caspar David Friedrich sought to combine music and painting, though on a less ambitious scale. Eugene Delacroix's portrait of Paganini is among the few paintings which explicitly and successfully render a musical sensation visually.
