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Cours Année : 2019

Musicians in Portraits: archaeology of a Genre, codes of representation, symbolic and social meanings

Résumé

Considering that a portrait is the representation of a specific person, and not a “figure of character”, the lecture will be devoted to paintings (and sometimes graphic art representations) of identified musicians. The first visual evidences of renowned musicians (instrumentalists, singers, composers, theoreticians, cantors, and sometimes persons who have several such functions) comes from the 14th and 15th centuries in a variety of media from miniatures in codex to figurative tombstones. The production of medals, woodcuts, and painted panels during the 16th c. spawned a tradition of representing the professional musician as a figure “acting”, sometimes with other persons, in a typical environment (chapel, court and official settings) or framed alone in bust or face. Since the Renaissance, individual portraits on canvas have expressed the social status of musicians with codes of representation and often with contextual attributes and elements. Selected in different Western countries and times, they present famous municipal or street musicians, court and ecclesiastic musicians, instrumentalists and virtuosi, singers on stage in their famous roles, but also “à la ville”, composers with their emblems and inspired attitudes, concert masters and conductors in action. In addition to professional musicians, amateurs range from princes and other royal amateurs, to aristocrats and bourgeois practitioners with a special focus on female painters making music. Portraits of especially famous music personalities will be presented as case studies to demonstrate each of these categories (the castrato Farinelli, the virtuoso Liszt, the composers Lassus, Rameau or Berlioz). Group portraits support an understanding of the context in which musicians were acting together (in court bodies like chapels or chamber ensembles) but also in domestic companies. Artists’ colonies and communities were also sometimes portrayed as a manifesto. Historiated portraits, self-portraits, caricatures, as well as “deconstructed” effigies (in the 20th century, for example) are good opportunities to develop the symbolic vocabulary used by painters across the centuries to emphasize the peculiarity of musicians in portrait.
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Dates et versions

halshs-04020064 , version 1 (08-03-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-04020064 , version 1

Citer

Florence Gétreau. Musicians in Portraits: archaeology of a Genre, codes of representation, symbolic and social meanings. Doctoral. The inaugural Claire Brook Award lecture, New York, The City University of New York, The Graduate Center, United States. 2019, pp.47. ⟨halshs-04020064⟩
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