ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Antwerp portrait painter Gonzales Coques representing a Concert in a house precisely because it seems that what is recorded can be taken at face value. Yet, however convincing this portrait-like picture may be, a good deal more emerges than immediately meets the eye. Concert in a house is one document testifying to the number of highly placed, talented musical amateurs educated in the best liberal, humanistic tradition who found all of this hard to accept. Of all the demeaning views of music, the strongest are those which connect it to sexual sins, obliquely in some Vanitas pictures and explicitly in those of the Prodigal Son. Molenaer reinforces his central theme of moderation by including visual reminders of antithesis; this identical technique is used in Concert in a house. In Molenaer’s picture, two men on the left, stabbing each other with knives, provide rich and vivid contrast to the predominant virtue of temperance.
