ABSTRACT
As this is the only chapter devoted to music it seems sensible to offer, rather than the detailed exploration of a specialist topic, some kind of marginal commentary draped around the more substantial and in-depth examinations of ideas and objects that constitute the core of the present volume. A brief general survey, in short, that attempts to outline, however sketchily, the trajectory of musical contacts and perceptions, to account for fluctuations in interest and comprehension, and also, incidentally, to take account of some of the ways in which music is represented visually. To be comprehensive, though, is out of the question; rather, a few representative instances will be considered, some of which, in relation to any conventional art-historical Renaissance time frame (say 1400-1600), will be impudently anachronistic. The justification for this is to be sought both in the exiguous nature of the evidence, which necessitates trawling rather more widely through time, and in the artificiality, for music, of whatever chronological slicing is standard for art.1
