ABSTRACT
Although music was immaterial, it nevertheless found many facets of material expression, primarily as musical instruments or in richly illuminated manuscripts. Instruments, though most oĞen discussed from a predominantly organological perspective, were also material objects that could be finely carved, painted or made of precious materials, with visual and formal properties whose cultural resonances contributed additional layers of meaning to performance.3 Further intersections between music and broader categories of visual and material culture occurred with the inclusion of fragmentary or complete musical inscriptions on objects, made possible by the development of notation.4 In addition to the numerous appearances in contemporary paintings,5 such inscriptions survive today on the walls of palaces and churches, incorporated within fresco decorations or, more commonly, intarsia panels,6 on maiolica, even on the blades of knives.7 Charles Duke of Orléans had the words and music of the French
chanson ‘Madame, je suis plus joyeaux’ sewn in hundreds of tiny pearls on the sleeves of his tunic in 1414,8 and in 1502 Isabella d’Este wore a dress embroidered with her impresa of musical pauses, which also featured on a signet ring and several pieces from her famous maiolica service.9 Music was even materialised in edible form. Andrea del Sarto’s contribution to a supper of the so-called ‘Company of the Saucepan’, described by Vasari, consisted of an eight-sided temple with sausage pillars and parmesan capitals, inside of which ‘was placed the choir lectern of cold veal, with a book of lasagne, with the leĴers and notes for singing made of peppercorns’.10 The breadth of material contexts for musical inscriptions in this period raises questions about their function and their relationship to the wider dissemination of wriĴen music aĞer the introduction of printing.11 When legible, were they meant to provoke an actual, performed response? Or to evoke a general notion of music by summoning up memories of harmonies experienced in the past? While understanding or recognising such inscriptions might have inspired pleasure or superiority in the musically literate, even in those who could not read music, identifiable symbols of notation, such as notes, clefs or pauses, would have stimulated the imagination of musical sound.
