ART AND ICONOGRAPHY

The work of Anthony Rowland-Jones has been demonstrating in recent years that the recorder has a rich history of representation in works of art. He has been assisting Nicholas Lander in putting up a comprehensive list of these representations, with illustrations wherever possible, on the Recorder Home Page (item 68). 236. Ballester, Jordi. “La flauta dulce en la antigua corona de Aragón a finales del siglo

XIV: Nuevas aportaciones” [The recorder in the ancient kingdom of Aragón at the end of the fourteenth century: new contributions]. Revista de flauta de pico, no. 15 (2000): 9-12. Building on Rowland-Jones’s work on the recorder in Catalan art (item 263), Ballester

reports that, in addition to the two altarpieces by Pere Serra dating from the late fourteenth century (mentioned by Rowland-Jones), there is a third, “in all probability” from this period, a Virgen del Lirio in the church of Longares and painted by the anonymous “Master of Longares.” It depicts the Virgin and Child surrounded by six angels, five of them playing musical instruments, including a recorder. He has also turned up an interesting document: a letter from the Infante (Crown Prince) Juan (later Juan I) of Aragón, written from Zaragoza in 1378 to his chamberlain, Pere d’Artés, asking him to send, presumably from Valencia, “the lutes and the flahutes as quickly as possible.” Ballester believes that, seen in conjunction with the contemporary paintings, these flahutes can only be recorders, and that Juan wanted them to have “instruments in accord with the new musical tendencies in the French avant-garde manner,” or in other words, “to interpret the ballades, virelais, and rondeaux so popular in the courts of contemporary France.” Unfortunately, whether the instruments were made in Valencia, elsewhere in Spain, or abroad is not clear. 237. Ballester, Jordi. “El pastor músico y la flauta dulce en la pintura catalana y

valenciana del siglo XV” [The shepherd musician and the recorder in the Catalan and Valencian painting of the fifteenth century]. Revista de flauta de pico, no. 16 (2000): 11-15. Ballester writes about the five fifteenth-century Catalan and Valencian paintings he

found that depict shepherds playing the recorder (out of a total of 315 surviving works of art, of which 28 feature shepherds). He concludes that these paintings probably tell us nothing about what shepherds really played, but only confirm that the recorder was a sophisticated instrument employed in court circles. 238. Ballester i Gibert, Jordi. “Retablos marianos tardomedievales con ángeles músicos

procedentes del antiguo reino de Aragón. Catálogo” [Late medieval Marian altarpieces with musician angels from the ancient kingdom of Aragón: catalog]. Revista de musicología 13, no. 1 (1990): 123-201. This catalog of 141 Aragonese altarpieces dating between 1350 and 1525 shows

vertical flutes (flauta recta) in eighteen of them and double pipes (flauta doble) in five. As in Brown’s catalog (item 239), the black and white reproductions are unfortunately too small to enable us to see any of these instruments clearly. 239. Brown, Howard Mayer. “Catalogus: A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical

Subject Matter.” Imago Musicae 1 (1984): 189-243; 2 (1985): 179-281; 3 (1986): 103-187; 5 (1988): 167-241. An invaluable catalog of the surviving fourteenth-century Italian works of art with

musical subject matter. The first two installments cover panel paintings, frescoes, and mosaics signed by or attributed to particular artists or their followers. The catalog, arranged alphabetically by artist, includes 2 1/2-inch square black-and-white photographs of each work for identification purposes. Entries refer the reader to other sources where the pictures are reproduced-large enough, we hope, to be studied. His index reports recorders in fourteen of the paintings and double recorders in no fewer than seventy-five. Unfortunately, some of the references are equivocal, and we wonder whether the whistle or duct flutes that Brown detects in these pictures are true recorders. 240. Fischer, Pieter. “Music Paintings of the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th

Centuries.” Sonorum Speculum, no. 50/51 (1972): 1-128. Includes a reproduction and brief discussion (pp. 96-97) of a vanitas by Ewart Collier

(1684), which depicts a recorder and a copy of volume one of Jacob van Eyck’s Der fluyten lust-hof (1646). 241. Frings, Gabriele. “‘Flauti dolci’ und ‘pifferari’: Bemerkungen zur Ikonographie der

Blockflöte in der Renaissance” [Flauti dolci and pifferari: remarks on the iconography of the recorder in the Renaissance]. Tibia 17, no. 2 (1992): 117-24. [The author’s last name, given as Limberg at the head of the article and in the table of contents, is corrected to Frings in an errata slip, in which Limburg [sic] is said to be her maiden name.] Written to correct the notion in present-day art history writings that the recorder in

sixteenth-century painting “is often a priori negatively classified and considered an indicator of low social degree” (“eine sozial niedere Sinngebung”). Two recent publications are typical: Augusto Gentili, “Savoldo, das Bildnis und die Musikallegorie,” in Ausstellungskatalog “Savoldo und die Renaissance zwischen Lombardei und Venetien. Von Foppa und Giorgione bis Caravaggio.” 71-77 (Milan, 1990); and Elhanan Motzkin, “The Meaning of Titian’s ‘Concert champêtre,’” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 116 (1990): 5365. Uses these two sources as the starting point for a consideration of paintings by Savoldo, Giorgione/Titian, Costa, Moroni, del Piomba, Frangipane, Raimondi, and others, showing that in both iconography and music practice the recorder possessed an elevated rank, far different from that of the piffari (shawms, trumpets, crumhorns, and cornettos). 242. Frings, Gabriele. Giorgiones Ländliches Konzert-Darstellung der Musik als

künstlerisches Programm in der venezianischen Malerei der Renaissance. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 1999. 222 p. ISBN 378611806X. Not seen. Concerns the Concert champêtre by Giorgione and Titian now in the Louvre.

According to Hermann Moeck’s review in Tibia 25, no. 2 (2000): 136-37, Frings interprets the two naked women (one holding a small recorder) as the Muses. * Griffioen, Ruth van Baak. Jacob van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lust-Hof (1644-c1655). Cited