ABSTRACT

Iconography of music is a subdiscipline of musicology that can be practised in two fundamentally different ways. One can view an artwork as no more than a source of evidence for some question of music history, or seek first to understand the work on its own terms and look upon any evidentiary finding as a fragile by-product. The first approach was employed at an earlier stage in pursuit of information on the history of medieval and Renaissance musical instruments and instrumental usage. The second approach has gained the ascendancy in recent years as music historians have become more sophisticated in the methodology of art-historical iconography. The idyllic romance describes the juvenile love of its hero and heroine, whose emotional union is threatened by differences in religious or social background. The variations on this theme include the inappropriate love of a Saracen slave for a Christian knight and the attraction of a lesser noble for a woman of higher rank.