A nn E.

M o y e r
University of Pennsylvania

M usic, M a th e m a tic s , a n d Æ d h e tic s :

the Case of the Visual Arts in the Renaissance

Th e age of t h e E uropean R enaissance saw the development of new

fields of learning and new methods of study; most notable, of course, are the
disciplines and methods of humanistic studies. They have held such great
and lasting importance that they have come to be numbered among the era’s
main identifying features. New ways to define and classify the relationships
of various fields of study to one another developed at the same time. These
changes in the classification of knowledge continued into the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Those that related to studies of nature, for exam­
ple, formed part of the cluster of phenomena we refer to as the Scientific
Revolution. Others gave rise to the formation of the modern system of the
arts and its related fields, such as aesthetics and artistic criticism. It is in this
latter group that I wish especially to situate my remarks.
We know that the European notion of “fine arts” as a unified system
including music, visual arts, literature, and drama developed after the era of
the Renaissance. Prior to this time, music was most often defined in its schol­
arly form as part of the liberal-arts quadrivium. The visual arts, on the other
hand, formed part of the older, roughly Aristotelian category of mechanical
arts. Renaissance scholars began the process of breaking up these older clas­
sification systems not only by introducing the “new” fields of humanistic
studies but also by reassessing disciplinary hierarchies. Arguments began to
 Ann E. Moyer

appear that championed one or another discipline for providing the funda­
mental principles or methods for studying or explaining others. Debates raged
in some humanistic circles, for example, about whether to define primary
human approaches to understanding-since theywere located in language—as
aspects of rhetoric or of poetics. Their claims bring other examples to mind;
one is the earlier scholastic assertions about the role of dialectic as a founda­
tional field or method for studying all others. Another is the importance of
letters and literature in the Baroque era in defining and shaping both music
and visual arts. An example of scholarship on such subjects is the work of
Robert Williams on the claims made in later Renaissance Italy for art as
a master discipline among practical fields.! Amid the contesting fields and
hierarchies is the relationship between music and the visual arts. The changes
in that relationship as understood by Renaissance writers and scholars reveal
both important successes and significant failures in the efforts to develop
coordinated ways ofwriting about these creative activities. Those efforts and
developments in turn were important in the formation of both the artifacts
and the systems of analysis and criticism of European high culture in the
seventeenth century and after.
Important as this development was, it was matched by an equally sig­
nificant loss: the loss of the older systems of learning and thinking about
disciplines. In particular, the medieval quadrivium, which defined musical
study as a mathematical and scholarly discipline, met its demise by the late
Renaissance. Yet the quadrivium did not go quietly; quite the contrary.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it enjoyed a new appeal, produc­
ing the newwaves ofscholarship that ultimately replaced it. The quadrivium’s
claims (based in the Neo-Platonismand Neo-Pythagoreanism oflate antiqui­
ty) to represent universal truth and a path to divine knowledge were attractive

!.. Robert V i i ‫؛‬, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-century ‫؛‬taly: fro m Techne to Metatechne
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

to many scholars who sawin those universal truths a sort ofmaster discipline
that underlay and unified other fields. During much of this period, it looked
as though a unified theory of the arts might develop that treated quadrivial
music as the master discipline whose tenets provided the basis for analysis in a
number ofother fields, including the visual arts. By1600 this effort had failed.
If there was a “master discipline” uniting art and music after this time it was
the field of poetics, which filled a rather different role.
Changes in the explanations offered in Renaissance writings for the
connections between the visual arts and music, then, were related to broader
changes underway in classifications of knowledge in humanistic studies,
mathematics, and natural philosophy. The major transition seems to have
taken place earlier in musical scholarship than in the visual arts, and occurred
shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. At this time the Boethian
tradition, which had definedmusic as a branch ofmathematics and had domi­
nated broader thinking about music as well as its ties to the visual arts, began
to face serious challenges from both natural philosophy and humanistic stud­
ies. These challenges made room for comparisons and analyses based in the
humanistic traditions oftextual and rhetorical scholarship to develop in more
depth than had been possible earlier. From this point, humanist arguments,
especiallypoetics, began to claim the most important parts ofboth fields-aes- 113 <

thetics and interpretation-as subjects proper to humanistic study.

In Renaissance Italy (to which, for brevity, the present paper will
mainly restrict its scope) both music and visual art, of course, enjoyed both
major creative successes as well as the production of significant analytical or
theoretical literature. Yet it is important to remember that the traditions of
thought that produced the writings in each field had very different points of
origin and continued to differ in some important ways. Musical scholarship
in the fifteenth century was a well-established field, having developed with­
out a break from medieval traditions. Universities and the church were the
main locations for the production and use ofwritings about music and for the
 Ann E. Moyer

education of the authors of those works. They classified music according to

its scholarly place in the quadrivium, along with arithmetic, geometry, and
astronomy. In this environment, music retained Boethius’s De institutione
arithmetica, the companion to his work on arithmetic, as a core textbook,
though such modern authors as Jehan de Murs might serve as well in a
given classroom.^ Boethius’s subject was the abstract one of mathematical
ratio and proportion,‫ ؛‬especially as seen in the lengths of plucked, sounding
strings. In a tradition going back to Plato’s Timaeus it saw the ratios of the
musical consonances (octave, fifth, and fourth: 2:1, 3:2, 4:3) as the basic order
underlying the cosmos. It was believed that these ratios and their means
defined beauty as an objective reality that existed both in the object and in
human perceptions of its qualities, because these ratios were present both in
the thing perceived and in the human soul.234

2. See Iain Fenlon, Nan C. Carpenter, Richard Rastaii, "Education in Music, II. The Middle Ages,
III. The Renaissance", New Grove (1980), voi. 6, pp. 4-11.
3. Boethian vocabulary is not consistent w ith modern technical usage, which distinguishes between
the term s 'ra tio ' and 'p ro p o rtio n ': the latter refers to a relationship o f equality between ratios (i.e.
a/b = c/d). Boethius generally used the term proportio to indicate a relationship between any tw o
numbers (for which 'ra tio ' is the m odern term). This broad rather than narrow usage o f the term
proportio became common in medieval Latin scholarship. By the Renaissance this term inology
had begun to move into vernacular languages as well, and became standard in a number o f
> 114 fields, including the history o f art. For those reasons the term "p ro p o rtio n " is used here in its
Boethian sense, as a relationship between tw o numbers. See Michael Masi, "Boethian Number
Theory and Mustc", Boethian Num ber Theory: A Translation o f 'De Institutione Arithm etica',
ed. M. Masi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983), 26n; Murdoch, "The Medieval Language o f Proportions",
Scientific Change: Historical Studiesin the Intellectual, Social and TechnicalConditions f o r Scientific
Discovery and Technical Invention, f ro m A ntiquity to the Present, ed. A. C. Crombte LNew York'.
Bastc Books, 1963k py. 219-236-, John ٥ . North, Richard o f Wallingford, ^ n Edition o f his Writings
w ith Introductions, English Translation and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 2, pp. 55-57: see
also The Thirteen Books o f Euclid's Elements, trans. T Heath, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover publishers,
1956) 2, pp. 112-186. For the English te x t o f the De institutione musica, see Anicius Manlius
Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals o f Music, ed. C. M. Bower, intro. Cl. V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989).
4. On music in the liberal arts trad itio n and the persistence o f Boethius' treatises through the
Middle Ages, see inter alia Theodore C. Karp, "M usic": Masi, "A rithm etic": and Karl F. Morrisson,
"Incentives fo r Studying the Liberal Arts", The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Wagner
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983): Beaujouan, "L'enseignement du 'Quadrivium '", La
Scuola n e ll' Occidente latino dell'Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1972), pp. 639-667, pp. 719-723: Pearl
Kibre, "The Quadrivium in the Thirteenth Century Universities (with Special Reference to Paris)",
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

Like other quadrivial fields, music had two parts, theory and prac­
tice (theorica and practica). The “theoretical” side included the writings of
Boethius, and modern scholars often refer to it as harmonics or speculative
music. Until the use ofItalian became common in learned publications during
the early sixteenth century, the language of these works was mainly Latin.
Most genres of music treatises, theoretical or practical, took quickly to the
new medium of print when it appeared, though manuscript circulation of
texts did not cease.
An abundance of medieval and Renaissance writings restricted their
subject to some part of the practical tradition. Some were manuals for teach­
ing the rudiments ofsinging and practical music to choirboys. Others covered
topics, such as notation or the composition ofcounterpoint or plainchant, that
we would now describe in modern terms as “music theory.” It was understood
that practical music appliedBoethian mathematical ratios and theories ofpro­
portion to produce musical pitch systems and ultimately compositions. The
textual genres and traditions of musica practica were fully post-classical in
origin, however, and their actual degree ofcloseness to musica theorica varied
over time. Except for the rules for composition that they prescribed, writ­
ings on musical practice included nothing modern readers would recognize
as stylistic criticism. Even the mention of good composers by name appeared 115 <

only very late, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. Nor was there a
separate literary tradition of stylistic criticism or history.

Studies in Medieval Science■. Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics, and Medicine, \ LLondon: HambYedon
Press, 1984); Masi, "The Influence o f Boethius De Arithm etica on Late Medieval Mathematics",
Boethius and the Liberal Arts: A Collection o f Essays (،.Bern•. Peter Lang,, 1981Y, Mast, introduction to
Boethian Number Theory ■. A Translation o f 'De institutione A rithm etica' w ith im^rod^t^c١
^ion and Notes,
ed. M. Masi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983); Nancy Q. Siraisi, Arts and Sciences a t Padua: the Studium
o f Padua before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute o f Mediaeval Studies, 1973); James Weisheipl,
"The Place o f the Liberal Arts in the University Curriculum during the X\V‘h and XVth Centuries", Arts
libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Âge (Montréal: Institut d'Études Médiévales, 1969); Alison White,
"Boethius in the Medieval Quadrivium ", Boethius: His Life, Thought, and influence, ed. M. Qibson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
 Ann E. Moyer

Writings on music, then, displayeda range offairlywell-defined features.

Those on art lacked music’s well-established institutional and intellectual
base. Yet they could and did develop more freely as a result, and their rela­
tionship to artistic production itself was still more complex and variable
than was the case for music. Even the boundaries of the subject itself were
less sharply defined. Though the explicit claim that painting, sculpture, and
architecture belong together as fields is usually attributed to Giorgio Vasari
in the mid-sixteenth century,5writers on art might focus upon one medium
or many, just as artists might practice their art in more than one medium. As
is well known, earlier written traditions on visual arts had consisted mainly
ofworkshop manuals focusing on technical skills.6For general discussions of
beauty or for the description of works or buildings, one had to rely instead
upon scattered literary references, or to remarks in scholastic texts devoted
mainly to subjects other than the visual arts.
The distinction between guildsman and man of learning extended to
the early publishing history and reading audiences of art manuals. Before
Leon Battista Alberti, with his university learning and humanistic erudi­
tion, turned his attention to the subjects, men with formal Latin educations
generally lacked the artistic knowledge to allow them to write such works.
> 116 Artists, on the other hand, generally lacked the Latin learning to do so. The
guilds and workshops in which artists worked tended to transmit knowledge
through personal contact rather than books, whereas formal musical study
combined personal contact with written texts and notation. Renaissance
art treatises were also likely to contain far more mechanical and artisanal

5. Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic o fth e Arts (The Hague: N ijhoff, 1954), pp. 2-3; Panofsky, Meaning
in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 213-215: Irving Lavin, Bernini and the
Unity o f the Visual Arts (New York: O xford University Press, 1980), pp. 7-13. Even Vasari was not
fu lly consistent in using a term such as "visual arts". Use o f the term w ith regard to earlier writers
is thus som ething o f an anachronism, though the fields were so often named together in earlier
sources th a t in the present context little is lost by using the term throughout.
6. See, fo r example, Moishe Barasch, Theories o fA rtfro m Plato to Winckelmann (New York: New York
University Press, 1985), pp. 69-87.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

information-for example, advice on mixing pigments—than was the rule

even in practical writings on music. Although Alberti’s works marked a
famous turning point in the field, these older features did not immediately
disappear from texts by later writers. Thus when artists ventured to write
about art, the results were often in manuscript rather than print form, ver­
nacular rather than Latin, and on practical rather than theoretical topics.
A work’s appearance in print, in fact, could and often did surest that its
intended readers were persons of learning rather than artists. The published
text of Alberti’s Latin architecture treatise, De re aedificatoria, for example,
featured an introduction written not by an architect but by the humanist
poet Angelo Poliziano.7His treatise on painting, Depictura, was also pub­
lished in Latin,8while vernacular translations of both treatises circulated in
manuscript for use by artists. Alberti’s own translation of Depictura, made
for Filippo Brunelleschi, was well known in Florence.
Indeed, the sense of just who had the authority, interest, and knowl­
edge to write on the visual arts was broader than for music. For example,
humanist writers, following the classical precedents that were so important
to them, often resorted to comparisons with the visual arts when discussing
written composition, particularly poetry.9 Their writings on a variety of
subjects might include remarks or even extended discussions on painting or 117 <

sculpture, and so such writing developed outside the structure of the formal
treatise. Humanists developed ways of writing about the visual arts in terms
closely related to those they used for writing about Latin composition, based
on a number of similar references and passages in the works of classical

7. Leon Battista A lberti, De re aedificatoria (Florence, 1485): w ritten 1452: A lberti, On the A rt o f
Building, in Ten Books, trans. j. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
8. Alberti, De pictura (Basel, 1540): Alberti, On Painting, trans. J.R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1956).
‫و‬. Baxandaft, q io tto and the Orators: Hum anist Observers o f Painting in ita iy and the Discovery o f
Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971): Rensselaer Lee, "U t pictura poesis: The
Hum anistic Theory o f Painting", The A rt Bulletin, 22 (1940), pp. 197-269.
 Ann E. Moyer

authors. Art history and criticism developed especially from these humanist
rhetorical traditions.10123
Such was not the case with music. Before the sixteenth century, human­
ists had much less to say about music than they did about visual arts; they
did not draw the extensive parallels between music and poetry that they
soon developed between the visual arts and poetry.11 Their remarks about
music’s modern revival tended to appear only secondarily in lengthier dis­
cussions of letters or visual arts. Filippo Villani’s descriptions of illustrious
Florentines (Le Vite d’uomini illustrifiorentini) serves as an early example.“
His treatment of painters focuses on Giotto’s renewal of the art, preceded
by the efforts of Cimabue and followed by those of several others who
surpassed the ancients; the passage is similar to, though not quite identical
with, his treatment of the revival of letters.!‫ ؛‬In his discussion of the musi­
cian Francesco Landini, however, Villani chose a different approach. He
emphasized Landini’s personal triumph over adversity: his courage in per­
severing despite his blindness.14Even with this topos included, passages by
fifteenth-century humanists about musicians were much less common than
those about painters.15To write in a sustained way about music remained

> 118
10. See esp. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to A rt (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1994); see also Carl Goldstein, "R hetoric and A rt History in the Italian
Renaissance and Baroque", The A rt Bulletin, 73 (1991), pp. 641-652.
11. The firs t hum anist known to atte m p t to do so was the poet and extemporaneous musical
perform er Raffaele Brandolini, "De musica et poetica" (Rome: Biblioteca Casanatense, 1513),
ms 805; Raffaele B randolini On Music and Poetry, ed. and trans. A.E. Moyer w ith the assistance
o f Marc Laureys, (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2001). On the
weakness o f connections between musical scholars and humanism before 1450, see Roy M artin
Ellefson, "M usic and Humanism in the Early Renaissance: T he ir R elationship and its Roots in the
Rhetorical and Philosophical Traditions", Ph. D. diss. (Florida State University, 1981).
12. Filippo V illan i (d. ca. 1405), Le Vite d 'uom ini illustri fio re n tin i, annotations by Giammaria
Mazzuchelli (Florence, 1826); Villani, Liber de civitatis florentiae fam osis civibus, ed. G. G alletti
(Florence, 1847).
13. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, pp. 66-78.
14. V'١\\ant, Vite d ’uomini ‫؛؛؛‬ustrifiorentini,pp. 46-47-, Liber de civitatis florentiae famosis civibus, pp. 3433■
15. Another such passage is Giovanni Pontano's reference to Raffaele Brandolini. Giovanni Pontano,
De fo rtitu d in e (Naples, 1490), Book 2, "De caecitate et malis aliis corporis", f. 80r-v.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

mainly an activity ofuniversity and ecclesiastically-educated specialists until

the sixteenth century.16
These differences affected how much access the writers in one field
had to writings in the other. Major new texts in musical scholarship often
circulated easily in print. They could find a significant reading audience
among musical professionals and learned persons in other disciplines. But
since practicing visual artists generally did not read Latin, they could not
read music treatises until such works began to be published in Italian in the
sixteenth century, and so they would have been unable to make substantial
use of them earlier. Writings about art, even those by major artists such as
Leonardo, might not see publication during their authors’ own lifetimes.
The breadth oftheir readership, especially outside the fields, is more difficult
to establish. Publication in Latin might attract learned readers but excluded
actual practicing artists. In many ways, then, writings on art and on music
developed very differently.
Despite these differences, when writers discussedmusic and art together
in writings devoted to either subject from Alberti’s day until some time after
1500, they did so in fairly similar ways. The most common and important
sort of discussion took place at the level of general theory, and has been
119 <

16. The authors o f most major fifteenth-century music treatises had university educations, as did a
number o f composers o f ecclesiastical polyphony; others were educated at cathedral or monastic
schools. Nicolaus Burtius studied canon law at Bologna; Franchino Gaffurio was named professor
o f music at Pavia; Jehan de Murs studied and taught at Paris; Prosdocimo de Beldemandis studied
at the universities o f Bologna and Padua, and ta u g h t at Padua; Bartolom eo Ramos de Pareja
lectured on Boethius at the universities o f Salamanca and Bologna; Johannes Tinctoris attended
university at Orléans and was later described as doctor utriusque juris. See Giuseppe Massera (ed.),
Nicolai B u rtii Parmensis: Florum libellus (Florence: Olschki, 1975), pp. 1-18; Clement A. M iller and
Bonnie J. Blackburn, "Burtius, Nicolaus", New Grove (2002), vol. 4, pp. 649-650; Giovanni Ballistreri,
"Burzio, Nicolao", Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, hereafter DBI; Alessandro Caretta, Luigi
Cremascoli, and Luigi Salamina, Franchino Gaffurio (Lodi, 1951); Blackburn, "G affurius", New Grove
(2002), vol. 9, pp. 410-414; Lawrence Gushee, M atthew Balensuela and Jeffrey Dean, "Jehan de
Murs", New Grove (2002), vol. 17, pp. 409-413; Herlinger, "Prosdocim us de Beldemandis", New
Grove (2002), vol. 20, pp. 431-432; Dean, "Ramos de Pareja, Barolomeo", New Grove (2002), vol. 20,
pp. 809-810; Ronald Woodley, "Tinctoris, Johannes", New Grove (2002), vol. 25, pp. 497-501. See
also Fenlon, Carpenter, Rastall, "Education in Music, II-III", New Grove (1980), vol. 6, pp. 4-11.
 Ann E. Moyer

studied by Rudolf Wittkower among many other modern scholars. Writers

asserted that musical mathematics—that is, the principles of ratio and pro­
portion from the Boethian tradition—formed the basis for visual, as well as
aural, composition and perception of beauty. Writers on art took principles
and terminology from music theory and applied them to their own subject,
and writers on music used these visual applications to support their claims
that these principles were universal and interdisciplinary. To these writers,
the visual arts were related to music insofar as the fundamental principles of
music—proportion and ratio—also underlie the aesthetics ofarchitecture, of
representations ofthe human form in any medium, ofthe parts ofa painting,
or the geometry of linear perspective.
Whether employed by writers on art or those on music, this approach
proved to have weaknesses as significant as its strengths, and so it bears a
summary despite the familiarity of many of its features.17The links between
musical proportion and architecture had been made, ofcourse, by the Roman
architect and treatise author Vitruvius. In awell-known passage ofhis treatise
De architectura (1.1), he compares the proportions of buildings to those of the
human body by means ofmusical harmony.18Other discussions ofproportion
appear throughout the work, notably a description of musical modes in 5.4.
Both Vitruvius and his Renaissance commentators could then go on to discuss
musica humana, the presence of these proportions in the human body and
soul, a subject discussed in Boethius’ music treatise.19They formed the basis
for human emotional and aesthetic response, as well as the effects of sense
experience on character. Renaissance Vitruvian commentators also used these

17. Among the great volume o f scholarship on the subject, a few works at least should be noted: Rudolf
W ittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age o f Humanism, 4th ed. (London: Academy, 1988); G. L.
Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance *Ithaca, U N : CorneW
UnWerstty ‫ ؟‬ress, 197&Y, Hanno-Watter Kruft, A History o f Architectural Theory fro m Vitruvius to the
Present, trans. R. Taylor, E. Callander and A. Wood (London: Zwemmer, 1994).
18. V itruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. I. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999). V itruvii De architectura lib ri decem, ed. V. Rose (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1899).
19. Boethius, De institutione musica 1.2.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

passages to stress the role ofmusical ratio and proportion in renderings of the
human figure itself.2. Such discussions became more and more prominent in
treatises on perspective and on rendering the human form, as for example in
the writings of Albrecht Dürer.2021
Alberti’s use of the harmonic term concinnitas as the basis of beauty
shows these principles at work. This aesthetic standard is the same for sight
or hearing, and is revealed through the study of Nature. As he notes in De
architecture..
When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the
workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind [...]. That is why
when the mind is reached by way o f sight or sound, or any other means, concin­
nitas is instantly recognized. It is our nature to desire the best, and to cling to it
with pleasure [...]. Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts
within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated
by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature.22

Alberti’s use of principles of musical harmony is easy to see, not only in his
choice of the word concinnitas itself, but also in his description of beauty in
terms of sympathy and consonance, as well as his emphasis on the impor­
tance of number. Aesthetic judgments are based upon reason, an ability to
recognize harmony that is part of human nature. The use of harmonics to
set standards in the visual arts also led the mathematicians Luca Pacioli 121 <
and Niccolò Tartaglia, in early sixteenth-century Milan, to argue that per­
spective should be classified with the subjects of the quadrivium. Pacioli
su.sted that because both the visual arts and music require sense percep­
tion as well as mathematics (a point often raised in traditional discussions
of the quadrivium), they should have a similar standing among disciplines.

20. Moyer, Musica Scientia: Musical Scholarship in the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1992), pp. 186-187.
21. For a discussion o f Dürer's work on proportion see Kemp, The Science o f A rt: Optical Themes in
Western A rtfro m Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 56-62.
22. A lberti, On the A rt o f Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykkwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 302-303.
 Ann E. Moyer

Either perspective should be admitted to the quadrivium or music should be

dropped.« Tartaglia borrowed this argument in his introduction to Euclid to
buttress his claim for the superiority of geometry. Both music and perspec­
tive, he argued, relied on sense perception for their study; geometry does
not, and so it is the higher field.2324Many interpretations of Euclid since the
Middle Ages had had Platonic influences, and so were also consistent with
the principles of the quadrivium as outlined by Boethius. This approach
to understanding the ties between music and the visual arts, then, was not
restricted to writers in those two fields alone; it was shared by other scholars,
in this case by mathematicians.25
Such claims about the ties between music and visual arts, whether
they are labeled Boethian, Vitruvian, or Pythagorean, were thus based in
well-established traditions and major texts. They related the two fields hier­
archically, with music taking the higher place. The claims that these ratios
and proportions were the universal basis of aesthetic standards were taken
seriously, and were extended from their perceived origin in music to the
phenomena ofvisual experience. Such arguments generally held positions of
greater importance in writings on art than in writings on music. By bring­
ing to the visual arts—traditionally labeled as mechanical and artisanal—the
higher status of this formal scholarship, such arguments contributed to the
elevation in status of the visual arts that was underway during the period.26

23. Luca Pacioli, Divina proportione (Milan: Paganinus, 1509), sig. Biii r. Despite Pacioli's advocacy
o f the Golden Section in this work, musical proportion was far more significant throughout this
period. See Kruft, A History ofA rchitectural..., p. 63.
24. NtccoYo Tartaglia fe٥.١, Euclide Megarense... reassettato, et alla integrità ridotto... (Verace‫ ؛‬:. Bar'\\ett ٥,
1569), f. 6r.
25. See, fo r example, Leonardo's (brief) comparison between music and perspective: Jean Paul
Richter (ed.), The Literary Works o f Leonardo da Vinci (London: Phaidon, 1970: f.p. 1883), par. 102;
see also Kemp, Science o f Art, 46: Walter Wiora, "D er A nteil der Musik an Zeitstilen der Kultur,
besonders der Renaissance", Die Musikforschung 30 (1977), pp. 160-164.
26. SamueY Y. Edgerton, J i, The Heritage o f qiotto's qeometry: A rt and Science on the Eve o f the Scientific
Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 166-169 and 183-185. On Tartaglia as practical
mathematician see also Kemp, Science f r t , p. 92: see also John Onians, "On How to Listen to High
Renaissance A rt", A rt History 7 (1984), pp. 411-437. On Pacioli, his intellectual relationship to Piero
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

Vitruvius’s discussion ofthe education ofthe architect also reminded human­

ist readers ofthe orator’s education described by Quintilian; this comparison
to humanistic studies further helped to raise the standing of architecture
and architects. By the first decades of the sixteenth century, writers often
assumed that their readers were familiar with the basic shape of these argu-
ments.27They still featured prominently in the writings of such art theorists
as Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo in the 1580s.
Despite the importance of this use of musical mathematics, it had some
important limitations. Many of those limitations appeared as authors
attempted to move these theories into the realm of practice. One example
can be seen in writings on art. For not only did they normally contain any
number of topics quite unrelated to proportion, where these theories found
no obvious application; but in fact not all an artists mathematics was nec­
essarily consistent with Boethius. Like other tradesmen and merchants,
Italian artists learned their numbers not at university but in abbacus schools,
private urban institutions that taught business-oriented computation, not
Boethius.28 Some of their teachings paralleled those of Boethius, but most
did not. Alberti criticized such rough (though quantitative) practices in
his treatise on painting.29Further, the specifics of ideal proportion might
vary from one writer to the next, such as those proposed for the parts of the 123 <

human figure. This diversity shows that writers on art might use Boethian

della Francesca, and influence on the study o f perspective see Kemp, Science o fA rt, pp. 27, 55, 62-63
and 171.
27. For example, in his praise o f music Franchino Gaffurio cited V itruvius as an ancient who gave
proper veneration to musical scholarship, assuming his own readers would recognize the reference;
Gaffurio, Theorica musice (Milan, 1492); Eng. trans., The Theory o f Music, trans. W. K. Kreyszig,
ed. Cl. V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 28. So too Serlio could describe
perfect and proportional bodies as closer to the divine intellect, w ithout bothering to offer
systematic detail. Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva, 1 (Venice: Giacomo
de'Franceschi, 1619), p. 1.
2‫>؟‬. BaxandaW, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century italy■. A Primer in the Socia‫ ؛‬History o f
Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 86-102.
29. A lberti, On Painting, pp. 56-57.
 Ann E. Moyer

arguments in their general discussions and yet apply them somewhat differ­
ently or depart from them significantly in practice, even in the discussions
of practice offered in a written treatise. Nonetheless, these inconsistencies
seemed not to disturb them or conflict with their expressed beliefthat musical
proportion did provide their field’s ultimate principles.
Similar arguments about ratio and proportion as the link between these
fields also appeared in the musical scholarship ofthe early sixteenth century.
Agood example is the work of the musical scholar and composer Franchino
Gaffurio (1451-1522), a colleague of Pacioli and Tartaglia, and probably also
of Leonardo; his writings came to set the standards for musical scholarship
during the first half of the sixteenth century.30Gaffurio’s high reputation
and the popularity of his works gave his arguments a general currency in
the era’s musical thought. He was important for his efforts to incorporate
newly translated works of Greek musical theory into modern scholarship, as
well as the substantial introduction of humanist sources, methods, and even
writing style into the field. Many of Gaffurio’s “new” ancient sources were
themselves products of the neo-Pythagorean thought of later antiquity that
had produced Boethius’ treatises, and so served to strengthen still further
Gaffurio’s sense that ancient scholarly opinion had united in agreement on
> 124 the truth of the Boethian position.
It is hardly surprising, then, that when Gaffurio linked music to the
visual arts he too did so by means ofharmonics. Such proportions, he claims,
account for the human aesthetic response to painting, just as they do for
music. Like Alberti, he argues that it is the perception ofthese ratios in nature
that inspires artists. He turns his attention to the subject as part ofhis discus-

30. On Q affurio see W. K. Kreyszig's In tro d u ctio n to Q a ffurio , Theory o f M usic; Irw in Young,
"Franchinus Qaffurius, Renaissance Theorist and Composer (1451-1522)", Ph. D. diss. (University o f
Southern C alifo rn ia , 1954); A. C aretta, L. Cremascoli, and L. Salamina, Franchino Gaffurio (Lodi:
Archivio Storico Lodigiano, 1951).
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

sion of modes in his last work, De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus,

of 1518. In this case, the comparison itself is based on musical proportion:
For when you look at a picture, you find nothing in it that is without the propor­
tion o f numbers. You see the measure of the bodies and mixture o f the colors in
numbers and proportions, and so too the ornament o f the picture. Again, it is
through numbers themselves that this first art imitates nature. This proportion
made such beauty in natural bodies and accordingly in their proportion of their
measure and color, that it caused painters to want to explain life and customs in
colors, form, and figure.1‫؛‬

The association between proportion and color is new. Gaffurio later expands
upon it when discussing musical modes, where the comparison works much
less well. In this passage, he associates each of the principal modes with
planets, colors, and humors; in some cases he adds such topics as friendship,
politics, and parts of the mind. The associations themselves come mainly
from the ancient music theorist Aristides Quintilianus. Amid the abun­
dant mathematical references, this passage also involves a second kind of
comparison between music and art just beginning to appear, one that com­
pares practical features of one activity with the other. On occasion Gaffurio
explains these similarities in terms of the characteristic steps of the mode’s
pitch or its relative highness or lowness overall:
125 <
Nature has compared various human constitutions to the four modes. For the
bards considered the Dorian, most appropriate for serious affects o f the soul and
bodily motion, to be the mover o f phlegm. In the same way, it was connected to
men o f great talent, and it was represented by painters as nearly crystalline in
color [...]. They depict the Phrygian with a fiery color (as it provokes a greater
movement of bile); for it is considered appropriate for harsh and severe men,
exciting them to anger. The cause o f this is the very high whole tone placed above
two conjunct tetrachords; it has a forcible sharpness in velocity.2‫؛‬312

31. q a ffurio , De harm onia musicorum instrum entorum opus, 4 (Milan: Pontano, 1518), p. 16, f. g6v:
trans, in Moyer, Musica Scientia, p. 8g.
32. qa ffurio , De harm onia 4, p. 4, f. 84V: p. 5, f. 85V: trans. in Moyer, Musica Scientia, p. 88.
 Ann E. Moyer

These passages are typical of the era in the types of association given: the
musical modes (typically though not exclusively ancient modes) are associ­
ated with Galenic humors, emotions, and colors. Gaffurio claims further that
ancient painters actually depicted these modes in their work, and that they
did so in terms of color. The passages are also typical in their vagueness. That
is, Gaffurio does not explain why it is that listeners should perceive the high
whole tone of the Phrygian mode as forcible and sharp, nor how it is that
their bile is moved thereby. Neither does he offer information that would
be of practical help to a modern painter. The little that he does offer often
seems merely self-evident, such as the association of colors with emotions
and thence with musical modes, as fiery color with anger (and the Phrygian
mode). It comes as little surprise that these arguments found few takers
among writers on art; nor do they seem to have found much contemporary
application in painting.
By the middle decades of the sixteenth century, other writers were
attempting to describe connections between the musical modes and the hom­
onymous architectural orders; yet their efforts remained as vague as those
of Gaffurio. One was the physician and polymath Girolamo Cardano, who
claimed that these modes and orders had undergone parallel development
> 126 and therefore expressed similar characteristics. In one ofhis works on music
(De musica, 1574) he argued, for example, that the Dorian in both music
and architecture was “sharp, unpolished, and hard;” the Phrygian mode
(in architecture the Corinthian had long been substituted for it, he claims)
was “soft, ornate, and given to pleasure.”33Yet Cardano did not specify the
features of the Dorian mode or Doric order that make either one “sharp” or
“unpolished”. Nor did he articulate a specific connection between the mode
and the order, or explain what sorts offorces could affect simultaneously the

33. Qirolamo Cardano, "De m usica" (1574) Cardanus, Hieronymus: Writings on Music, ed., trans. C.A.
M iller (N.p.: American Institute o f Musicology, 1973), p. 97.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

development both of a pitch system and of the shape chosen for the columns
of buildings. These comparisons between mode and order, like those that
musical scholars had also begun to draw in their writings between music
and language, were more su.stive than substantial. They were not able to
sustain much analytic scrutiny or serve as the foundation for new arguments
by these authors or their colleagues.
The problems here seem to lie in the very success of musical thought
in dominating the analysis. The Boethian musical tradition was absolute in its
truth claims and strongly assertive of its ability to encompass all phenomena
and experience. It could easily accommodate new subjects, such as painting,
as long as it could expand its number theory to cover aspects of them. Indeed,
such efforts reinforced Boethian claims to explain the fundamental numerical
order that underlay all fields of knowledge, and thus to represent an absolute
and universal aesthetic. Some scholars, Gaffurio among them, even argued
that poetics should be subject to music theory by means of the numeric values
involved in the study ofmetrics.When scholars were able to identify features
about these other fields that could be treated in this kind of quantitative
way-such as setting the dimensions of a building, or for renderings of the
human figure-these comparisons had productive results.
On the other hand, comparisons that relied not on mathematics but on 127 <

historical or cultural factors fared less well. The Boethian tradition lacked a
way to talk about historical change or variations ofindividual style, since its
mathematical principles were believed to be fixed and unchanging. Writings
on the visual arts, with their stronger base in humanist rhetorical analysis,
were much better able to develop such topics, on their own or in comparison
with letters and poetics. As long as musical scholarship’s claims to being the
superior field met with general acceptance, however, its terms and modes of
explanation dominated the comparison when music and art were discussed
together; its analytic strengths and weaknesses determined the association.
 Ann E. Moyer

For example, one might resolve Cardano’sproblemwith linkingmusical

modes and architectural orders byinvoking cultural associations between the
two. One might surest (as later writers would) that because these practices
had developed together in time and place, and because regional distinctions
had been strong among the ancient Greeks, such practices became associated
for them with other regionally identifiable aspects of Greek culture; thus
their connection with one another would lie not in their intrinsic natures
but in their customary uses. While this sort of argument might require a
greater understanding of Greek culture than early humanists could have
enjoyed, Cardano faced a different problem. To him, the basis of comparison
was mathematics (as seen especially in the ratios that formed the musical
modes) rather than culture; hence he lacked a way to discuss the two fields
comparatively in cultural terms. As writers came to address such topics more
and more during the sixteenth century, these older mathematically-based
explanations seemed to wear thin, and so the writers began to cast about for
more satisfying arguments.
Some early efforts to modify Boethian thought came from the influence
ofMarsilio Ficino and the Platonism ofhis circle. Despite FicinoS own inter­
est in music, subsequent musical scholars referred to him only infrequently,
> 128 and so much of FicinoS Platonism found its most direct influence in other
fields. But the notions ofpoetic inspiration or furor that he advocated offered
to some scholars a way to compare artistic activity of different types while
remaining within a larger Platonic explanatory model. One example occurs
in the Lucidario in musica (1545), by the musician and theorist Pietro Aaron.
Aaron has taken up the question of how it is that there seem to be variations
in quality among composers, variations that cannot be fully related to their
level of education about musical principles. Aaron claims that the successful
composers, whatever their degree oflearning, enjoy a celestially inspired gift
that sets them apart. The creative process does indeed appear supernatural:
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

[...] whence one can believe that the good composers are born, not made
through study, nor from much practice, but indeed thanks to celestial influence
and inclination, and truly, that few are so destined.4‫؛‬

It is this creative gift that, for Aaron, unites composers with sculptors, and
explains the differences in aesthetic quality among works of similar type:
And so, as we see that if different sculptors in marble or some other material
produce the same figure or form, nonetheless one of them w ill be much more
perfect than another, by the amount that one’s artifice is better than the other.
I say that it happens likewise with our harmonic faculty, in which we may observe
many composers, each of whom would know the materials or musical intervals of
harmonic form. Yet it is present in greater excellence in one of them than another,
and has greater sweetness according to which one has more understanding and
grace in such faculty than the other.5‫؛‬

Here Aaron remains committed to a Platonic approach to music and aes­

thetics. He explains creativity by means of celestial influences and inborn
inclinations; this is consistent with Boethian claims for a correspondence
between celestial, human, and instrumental music. Yet this particular subject
had not in fact formed part of the Boethian tradition. Aaron’s arguments
come not from these sources but from the notions of poetic furor advocated
by Renaissance Platonists.6‫؛‬
This approach also shifts the point of comparison in a significant way, 129 <

away from the two fields of activity and onto the creative force of the per­
sons undertaking those activities. That is, Aaron argues not that there is a
resemblance between music and sculpture, but between musicians and sculp­
tors. This seemingly minor difference allows him to circumvent generally
accepted arguments that music is the superior field because its principles are
mathematically demonstrable. Fields so different in this regard would not3456

34. Pietro Aaron, Lucidario in musica (Venice, 1545), f. is r.

35. Aaron, Lucidario..., f. i5 r.
36. For biographical inform ation on Aaron see Peter Bergquist, "Aaron, Pietro", New Grove (1980) vol. 1,
pp. 2-3; A. Bonaccorsi, "Aaron, Pietro", DS,. See also Moyer, Musica Scientia, pp. 119 and 136-137.
 Ann E. Moyer

be discussed together often in scholarly discourse. But by focusing instead

on the participants themselves, scholarly attention could turn to new topics
the Boethian tradition had not addressed, and which were in the process of
being examined with a wider range of analytic methods.
Several of these approaches appear in the portion of Leonardo’s writ­
ings now known as the Paragone. The notes of Leonardo that were later
organized and given this title date from the years ca. 1490-1510, so they are
roughly contemporary with the writings ofPacioli, Tartaglia, and Gaffurio.37
These writings take the form of relatively brief, discrete passages united by
their goal ofpromoting the superiority ofpainting; they tend to assert rather
than prove. Indeed, the passage in which Leonardo advocates the addition of
painting to the liberal arts is so terse that the scribe of the Codex Urbinas was
led to suggest that a piece of the argument was missing.38Leonardo accepts
the importance of musical ratio and proportion in his comparisons among
painting, music, and poetry, as well as their necessary combination with
sense perception, though he claims that since vision is widely accepted as the
superior sense it is better than hearing at transmitting such harmony.39
Several ofLeonardo’s comparisons invoke the painter and the musician,
as Aaron would do later, rather than the disciplines of music and poetry.
> 130 Unlike Aaron, he seems less interested in their initial artistic inspiration
than in their products. Here he parts company with contemporary musical
scholars; for them, discussions of musical practice generally meant composi­
tion. Leonardo focuses instead on musical performance; so too in discussing
poetry he focuses on the poem’s recitation rather than its composition.
Doing so allows him to claim painting’s superiority over the others due to its

37. Carlo Pedretti, "The Paragone," The Literary Works o f Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter,
Commentary by C. Pedretti, 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1977),
pp. 76-86.
38. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting [Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270], trans. A. Philip McMachon,
1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 15.
39. Da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, pp. 28-29 and 32.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

permanence and to the audience’s ability to grasp the whole at one moment.
These issues—the differences of permanence and the temporality of percep­
tion, as part of claims about the superiority of vision to hearing—appeared
in many comparisons between the visual arts and poetry, but would figure
in musical scholarship only several decades later. It is difficult to determine
whether Leonardos departure from the contemporary arguments ofmusical
scholarship—his emphasis upon performance rather than composition—was
a deliberate rhetorical move. It may have resulted instead from his greater
familiaritywith improvisatory court singers than with the discourse ofmusical
scholarship, which dealt mainly with composed polyphony; he was described
as a skilled improviser of poetic song himself.40 Only after mid-century
would this focus on the cultural products—musical works or performances
and works of art—be combined successfully with sustained analysis so as to
have a clear impact on both musical and artistic scholarship.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, then, written comparisons of
music and visual arts were common enough to show both typical features and
signs of change. Musical proportion formed the basis of most comparisons,
as seen in the writings of Alberti, Gaffurio, and others. But efforts to extend
this mathematically-based comparison to new topics and new comparisons
had mixed success at best. Such efforts remained frail and undeveloped 131 <

despite their evident appeal to the authors, because such analogies lacked a
systematic foundation. On the other hand, newer arguments about divine
inspiration for artistic creativity developed by Renaissance Platonists, such
as the one offered by Aaron, offered a way to compare not the fields them­
selves but the practitioners or their products. That expanded the range of
topics open to examination, and allowed them to be studied in ways not so
constrained by mathematics.

40. Emanuel W internitz, Leonardo de Vinci as a Musician (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
 Ann E. Moyer

During the second half of the sixteenth century, changes in this picture
came more rapidly and more substantially; further, humanistic approaches,
especiallypoetics, would come to replace mathematics as a basis for aesthetics.
Since Platonic—let alone Pythagorean-models had never been as important
in the field of poetics, and became even less so with the burgeoning influence
ofAristotle’sPoetics, this humanistic turn also brought marked philosophical
changes.41The growing influence ofpoetics on scholarly writings about both
music and the visual arts would mean that comparisons of each one with
language (whether poetics or rhetoric) came to play a greater role in each
field than did direct comparisons between music and the visual arts.
As we have seen, these humanistically-based comparisons had been
limited earlier by the strength of Boethian claims to analytic primacy. Some
writers, especially in the visual arts, might evade such limits simply by
shunning broad statements of principles where Boethian arguments were
prominent, and focusing instead on separate, practical elements.42 They
could also choose to emphasize comparisons between visual arts and poetics,
rather than those with music. Yet musical mathematics provided the means to
elevate the visual arts above their old classification as mechanical arts, and so
more general solutions were needed. The change came by settinglimits on the
!32 kinds oftopics that writers claimed to be properly subject to Boethian analysis,
and then shifting the burden of the rest into the respectability of humanist
studies. This process was led mainly by musical scholars who pursued issues
of harmonics into the related fields classified as natural philosophy.
One such approach focused on sense perception and its interpretation.
Cardano tried to develop a theory of musical perception that would account
for the successful use performers were making of tempered scales—that is,
41. Latin translation: Giorgio Valla (1498): Greek edition: Venice (Manuzio), 1508: Italian trans.
by Alessandro de' Pazzi, (1536): see Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, "H um anism and Poetics",
Renaissance Humanism, ed. A. Rabil (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1988), vol. 3,
pp. 108-110.
42. Kruft, History o f Architectural Theory, p. 80.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

scales with intervals less pure than usual—to allow for newer compositional
styles and instrumentation. He argued that the human mind (for reasons
based ultimately in Platonic theories) sought mathematical order so strongly
that if a listener heard an interval that departed slightly from proper pro­
portions, the mind would attempt to classify it as the closest correct one. In
general, he continued, the mind finds pleasure both in recognition of the
familiar and learning the new; the mind finds consonant intervals familiar,
dissonances unexpected. Thus the better musical compositions strike a bal­
ance between the two. This process, mixing consonance with dissonance, the
familiar with the unexpected, is followed also by painters, he claimed.43Here
Cardano has offered, however briefly, a comparative discussion ofaesthetics
based on the mental processes of perception.
The Venetian musician and theorist GioseffoZarlino (1517-90) extended
such arguments in important ways. Zarlino was a careful scholar ofancient
texts. But he devoted his energies above all to delineating in systematic detail
the ways in which music belonged to the fields of mathematics and natu­
ral philosophy; the debates he inspired led the way for rapid change in the
field. Zarlino developed several comparisons between music and the visual
arts in order to articulate his arguments. At one point in his first treatise,
Le Istitutioni harmoniche, he compares the mind’s response to sound and 133 <

vision in ways reminiscent of Cardano. A“full” musical consonance (pieno)

approaches the relative purity of duple proportion, or an octave. “Pleasant”
ones (vago) are made of proportions farther from the duple, whose rapid
movements penetrate the hearing more quickly and hold more interest.
These he compares to colors, which are more attractive to the eye than the
“full” tones of black and white:
As black and white give less delight than that caused by other intermediate and
mixed colors, so too the principal consonances cause less delight than the other less

43. Cardano, De subtilitate (Paris, 1559), p. 495.

 Ann E. Moyer

perfect ones. Likewise green, red, blue and others are more delightful and pleasant
because they are far from their principals than those called roanno or beretino
[blue-gray], one of which is closer to black and the other to white. So hearing
delights more in consonances that are farther from the simplicity of sounds, as they
are much more pleasant than those nearer simplicity. And the ear delights in the
composition of sounds in almost the same way as does the eye in the composition
of colors. Thus the composition of colors cannot be without some harmony, or it
resembles harmony, because each is composed of diverse things.44

This focus on sense perception, long acknowledged as a trait common to

music and the visual arts, allows all the subjects to be compared more directly
and precisely with one another. By the seventeenth century the studies of
human perception and cognition would keep the two fields linked, but the
topic itselfwould move increasingly into the realm of medical and scientific
scholarship rather than remaining solely part of artistic theories.
Zarlino’s interest in investigating music as part of natural philosophy
seems to have led him here to Aristotelian passages that discussed color in
numeric terms, but had been relatively neglected by musical scholars: the
De Sensu et Sensibilibus. Sixteenth-century writers on art had begun to pay
increasing attention to color, turning to these and other ancient texts in the
process.45Several efforts to link music and art by means of pitch and color,
> 134 through concepts of harmonic ratio, show that Zarlino’s interest was far
from unique.

44. Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1573 ed. (f.p. 1558)), p. 181: "che si come il Bianco & il Nero
li porgono m inor diletto, d i quello che fanno alcuni a ltri colori mezani & m isti; cosi porgono m inor
d ile tto le Consonanze principali, d i quello che fanno le altre, che sono men perfette. Et si come
il Verde, il Rosso, lo Azuro & gli a ltri sim ili più li dilettano, & tanto più si dim ostrano a lu i vaghi:
percioche sono lontani da lli principali, che non fa il colore, che chiamano Roanno, overo il Beretino;
de lli quali l'uno è più vicino al Nero & l'a ltro al Bianco, cosi l'U d ito più si d ile tta nelle Consonanze,
che sono più lontane dalla sem plicità de i Suoni: conciosia che sono m olto più vaghe, d i quele che
le sono più vicine. Et quasi allo istesso modo si d ile tta l'U d ito della compositione de i Suoni, che fa
il Vedere della compositione de i Colori: percioche la compositione de i colori, overo che non può
essere senza qualche harmonica, overo che ha con l'harm onica qualche convenienza: percio che
l'una & l'altra si compone di cose diverse".
45. Kemp, The Science o f Art, pp. 264-274.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

The Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was one artist who tried
to correlate musical pitch with color. Arcimboldo did so during his time in
Prague at the court of Rudolph II (1562-87), though the discussion of his
efforts was only published several years later. Gregorio Comanini described
a set of experiments in which Arcimboldo used black and white to represent
the interval of an octave, and mixed paint in varying proportions to derive
a scale, just as musicians did by dividing the monochord.46He did the same
with several colors, which he then arranged as per bass, tenor, alto and
soprano parts: white as the lowest, then yellow, green, blue, dark purple,
and brown. He became sufficiently precise with such gradations that he
could notate music using color for pitch, and to do so clearly enough that
one of Rudolph’s musicians, Mauro Cremonese, could pick out the notes on
a harpsichord. Comanini offers no evidence that Arcimboldo was actually
able to translate this experiment into paintings, or that other painters or
musicians found it useful. His description also shows that persons who might
want to pursue such an application of musical theory to color had to face
rather quickly the difficulty of quantifying color so as to set up proportions;
Arcimboldo had resort only to the rather crude means ofmeasuring volumes
of paint. It is hardly surprising that this fascinating experiment apparently
found no Renaissance successors. 135 <

A somewhat earlier effort to use color mathematically in music nota­

tion is worth menitoning for its use of color to represent not pitch but
rhythm. John Tucke, an Oxford-educated teacher of music and grammar
(1482-l540s/l550s), included in his notebook a discussion of multi-colored
music notation.47 Tucke described the use of not only the familiar black,

46. Kemp, The Science o f Art, pp. 273-74: te x t o f Q. Comanini, II Figino, overo del fin e della p ittu ra
(Mantua, 1591), T rattati d'arte del Cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, 3 (Bari: Laterza, 1962), pp.
368-370.
47. Woodley, John Tucke: A Case Study in Early Tudor Music Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp.
68-75 and 110-132.
 Ann E. Moyer

white, and red, but a schema of five colors: black, green, blue, red, and
yellow. He specified their relations to one another in Boethian terms (for
example, green to black and red to blue are each sesquioctava, or 9:8).48He
also described using similar means for employing heraldic colors as the basis
for musical compositions.49Tucke did not offer a particular textual authority
for the proportions among colors. His modern editor notes that despite some
particular circumstances in which such multicolored notation would serve
a practical use, it did not gain wide currency.50
Doubtless more such sixteenth-century efforts remain to be found.
All seem interesting and experimental; none seem to have had success in
garnering significant followers and imitators. Zarlino pursued this type
of comparison between color and sound in his later writings. He felt that
sight and hearing shared the ability to convey meaningful communications.
This trait sets them apart as the “supreme” senses.51Yet they also differed
in significant ways. Zarlino’s work also helped to provide solutions to such
difficulties as Cardano’s comparison of modes and architectural orders. For
example, Zarlino took up the distinction noted byLeonardo, that music takes
place in time and sequential order while the visual arts remain stable and
fixed once created. Zarlino shows no evidence offamiliarity with Leonardo’s
> 136 writings, however, and seems to have developed his argument indepen­
dently. Indeed, despite the origins of such an approach in the comparisons
of painting and poetry, Zarlino uses the language of Aristotelian natural
philosophy by distinguishing differences of qualities, attributes of an object
that cannot be fully quantified. One kind of quality, he notes, is found “in
act” in things stable and permanent, such as the color or shape of an object.
Quality in sounds exists in several ways: in potential in the sonorous body,
48. Ibid., pp. 68-6g.
49. Ibid., pp. 70-73.
0‫ ؛‬. Ibid, pp. 117-119.
51. Zarlino, Sopplimenti m usicali (Venice: Senese, 1588), p. 31: "che sono i Sensi più ragionevoli, il
Vedere & il Udire "
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

in act in the air itself, and in genus of things sequential.2‫ ؛‬So high and low
sounds are caused by small and large sounding bodies.
On the other hand, light and dark colors (such as white and black) are
qualities caused in very different ways. Zarlino describes them in terms ofthe
balance of elements, so that white is caused by a maximum of luminous Fire
and minimal opaque Earth as seen through transparent air or water; black is
caused by the opposite balance ofFire and Earth. The difference between these
visual and aural qualities is obvious, he says, if one were to divide relevant
bodies in half. One-halfofa body ofa given color retains the color ofthe whole
body; but to divide in half a sounding body has the effect of raising its pitch
by an octave. Thus these kinds of qualities are different from one another in
important ways. Any attempt to compare color and pitch, then, would have
to take such specific qualitative differences into account if it were to have any
validity at all. In fact, this argument su.sts that color and pitch are not really
comparable at all. Zarlino’s treatises circulated widely, and his systematic
explorations of the limits of comparability seem to have been accepted by his
readers, who began to turn their attention in more productive directions.
By setting these limits on the kinds of issues open to study in terms of
quantity and harmonics, Zarlino left a space into which different kinds of
analysis could grow. Despite Zarlino’s great interest in natural philosophy, 137 <

the most important source of such analysis for most writers was humanistic
studies, especially but not exclusively poetics. By mid-century, comparative
examples were beginning to appear that made use of humanist criteria, and
in which writers other than musical scholars were beginning to offer distinct
aesthetic judgments about music. For example, at mid-century Bernardino
Cirillo, engaged in Tridentine religious reform, wished to criticize the well-
established practice of taking the tune of a popular song as the theme for a
polyphonic mass. He did so by invoking the principle of decorum. Masses52

52. Zarlino, Sopplimenti, pp. 174-176.

 Ann E. Moyer

based on such worldly popular songs as “L’homme armée,” “Hercules Duke

ofFerrara,” or “Filomena” were inappropriate, he argued, as inappropriate as
Michelangelos nudes in the Sistine Chapel, fit more for a garden house than a
church.‫ ؛؛‬The Bishop’s protests were made in the context of religious reform,
in which Michelangelo’s works had already come in for criticism. Yet while
these humanistic terms such as decorum or social appropriateness had been
used in art theories since Alberti, they had seldom been employed until this
time by music theorists. They would become much more prominent by the
end of the century. The importance Zarlino gave to human powers ofjudg-
ment, a notion which for himas for others clearlywent beyond mere cognition
to matters of criticism and choice, further invited the use of such terms.
By the end of the century, most writers on these subjects followed
Zarlino and came increasingly to distinguish between evaluations based
on mathematics and natural philosophy on the one hand, and humanistic,
text-related ones on the other. Zarlino finally defined them as two distinct
parts of the study of music, using Ciceronian terms: the “methodical” part,
still for him the dominant half, based in number and dealing with topics
ranging from basic mathematics to contrapuntal rules; and the “historical”
part, based in things contingent and subject to change, such as matters of
> 138 style and customary usage.4‫؛‬
The musician Vincenzo Galilei found Zarlino’s division of the field into
two parts so useful that he gradually began to articulate the two as distinct
subjects. He disagreedwith Zarlino, however, byrejecting the field’sBoethian
underpinnings: not only did he show by physical experiment that harmonic
proportions described pitch intervals only under limited, not universal con­
ditions; he also argued that Boethius should be understood as a historical
figure, not as the bearer oftimeless truths.‫ ؛؛‬Once Galilei detached music from534

53. C irillo Franco d i Loreto, le tte r to M. Ugoiino Qualteruzzi, 16 February 1549, in Lettere volgari di
diversi nobilissimi huom ini... (Venice: Manuzio, 1564), voi. 3, f. I i4 r - I i8 v .
54. Zarlino, Sopplimenti, p. 10.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

Boethius he was much more interested in attaching it to poetics and other

humanist subjects than he was in discussing the visual arts, for it was in these
fields oftextual criticism that he found the analytic methods he felt were most
proper to musical scholarship. Nonetheless, he discussed painting, sculpture,
and architecture at several significant points in his writings.
These references usually serve to emphasize the distinction between
the artist’s or composer’s “tools” on the one hand, and the culturally located
specifics of works or compositions on the other. In so doing he makes use of
classical references already long in use in writings on the visual arts. Thus he
compares composers who need no recourse to accidental pitches to painters
with deliberately limited palettes: “this manner of doing many things with
few means was also employed by some of those excellent painters who in
their painting make use of no more than three or four colors...”6‫ ؛‬Elsewhere
he again likens a musician’s consonances to the arithmetician’s numbers or
a painter’s colors.7‫؛‬
These comparisons also figure in Galilei’s criticisms of musical con­
temporaries. Modern contrapuntal composers resemble the ancient painter
Hermippus of Athens, he asserts, who was so poor at rendering details the
viewer could not identify specific individuals but could only distinguish male
figures from female ones; similarly, these modern composers are so careless 139 <

with the details of their modes that the listener cannot tell which is being567

55. Moyer, Musica Scientia, pp. 241-263.

56. Vincenzo Galilei, "Discorso all'uso dell'Enharm onico" (Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale)
(hereafter BNC), Galileiani 3, f. 19V: "la qual maniera d'operare m olte cose con pochi mezzi
l'hanno ancora nell'arte loro usato alcuni eccellenti Pittori, i quali nelle pittu re loro non si sono
vo lu ti servire piu che d i trover' qu a ttro c o lo r i- " Among musicians he m entions here Annibale
Padovano and Claudio da Careggio; among paintings, th a t o f Pontormo (Jacopo da Pont'Olmo) in
the Chapel o f San Lorenzo. The passage its e lf is based on Cicero, Brutus 18, which had been used
by Vasari. See Ernst H. Gombrich, "Vasari's 'Lives' and Cicero's 'B rutus'", Jou rn a l o f the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, 23 (1960), pp. 309-311.
57. Galilei, "Intorno all'uso delle Consonanze" (Florence: BNC), Galileiani 1, f. 11r (another copy, f. 6ov):
"N ulla dim eno il Musico si come ancora fa l'A ritm etico de numeri, si serve solo nelle sue bisogne
d'una determ inata et breve quantità de piu n o ti al senso, non altram ente di quello che fa il Pittore
de colori".
 Ann E. Moyer

used.8‫ ؛‬Galilei castigates virtuoso performers who believe that their technical
skill can be equated with real knowledge. In their ignorance, they reduced
varied compositions to a “confused fog” of notes; they are like the painters
in the age of Giotto whose command of detail was insufficient to allow them
to distinguish in their work between various plants and animals, so that they
had to resort to writing labels underneath.5859
In these cases, Galilei has taken over a type of comparison made by
Zarlino. Zarlino’s example had appeared in his criticism of composers who
made excessivelyblunt use ofchromatic and other non-diatonic pitches. These
pitch systems are inappropriate when used in their entirety, he claims, and
should instead be usedas a sculptor uses a piece ofmarble; the sculptor does not
keep the entire block, but according to his pre-made plan removes those parts
that are superfluous. So too a musician makes use only of the relevant parts of
these harmonic genera to ornament and perfect the diatonic.60The difference
between the two scholars lies mainly in the status they give these raw materi­
als. Zarlino is adamant that musical consonance is natural and not a product
of human artifice. Galilei claims with equal conviction that everything we
call music except the physical sound production comes from “art.”
This distinction between the raw materials ofnature and the artifice of
> 140 the composer allowed Galilei to make fuller use than his predecessors ofsuch
humanist evaluative categories as “invention” andjudgment, which had long
been in use in the visual arts. For him music and the visual arts are linked by
way of poetry and oratory. He was able to maintain these comparisons more
consistently than the writers of earlier generations because those parts of the
field termed “nature” were now understood as features distinct and separate
from the artistic production itself.

58. Qalilei, Dialogo, p. 77.

59. Qalilei, Dialogo, pp. 141-142.
60. Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche, pp. 352-353.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

Galilei tends to use the term “judgment” (giuditio) when referring to

the composer’s ability to balance the limitations of nature, rules of decorum,
customs and styles. It is exercised especially in knowing when to break or go
beyond the rules, as in the use of dissonance in composition. “In all human
actions,” he argues, “judgment is worth more than rules.”61 This exercise
of judgment is similar to that used in the visual arts. Composers need to
understand not only the rules of consonance but also the effective use of
dissonance; so too Michelangelo understood moderation in all visual media,
while his intellect allowed him to surpass the rules when necessary to produce
a given effect. We can see this trait in many works of art: in the liveliness
of Donatello’s St. George, in Michelangelo’s Night, or Raphael’s Jacob.62
Good counterpoint cannot proceed as if by mathematical demonstration, he
notes elsewhere, but through the judgment of the well-trained ear and the
experienced composer; the composition’s expression ofemotions with simple
sounds and words is in the end outside the bounds of rules and resembles
architectural ornament that goes beyond the mere utility a building holds
for its inhabitants.63The notions of artistic judgment on the one hand (even
though its acquisition was not easily reduced to matters of training and of
the audience’sperception on the other, were able for many to replace Platonic
furor in explaining both artistic creativity and the audience’s response. 141 <

Galilei’s distinction between mathematical demonstration and artistic

judgment would find a range of similar expressions in art theory by the end
of the century. Writers on art, like musical scholars, now began to detach
their use of mathematics from Boethian theory. Daniele Barbaro’s Vitruvius

61. Qalilei, "Discorso all'uso delle Dissonanze" (Florence: BNC), Galileiani 1, f. 142r (another copy:
f. 195r; a th ird , Gal. 2, p. 106): "Hora che concluder, io ultim am ente questo; che in tu tte le a ttio n i
humane, piu vale il giuditio che le regole".
62. Qalilei, "Discorso intorno all'uso delle Dissonanze" (Florence: BNC), Galileiani 1, f. 141V (second
copy, f. 1gov; th ird copy, Gal. 2, p. 105).
63. Qalilei, "Intorno all'uso delle Consonanze" (Florence: BNC), Galileiani 1, f. 31v-32r (second copy,
f. 82r).
 Ann E. Moyer

commentary would contribute to one such development.64Barbaro’s detailed

attention to the construction oftheaters helped give rise to an increased inter­
est in theatrical acoustics. This feature of design made use of harmonic ratio
and proportion, but in a way distinct from the Vitruvian aesthetic interest.65
The Bolognese polymath Ercole Bottrigari also pursued a number of ques­
tions and topics related to Vitruvius and to musical mathematics; not only did
he write extensively on issues related to music, but he also composed a long
treatise on the construction of theaters, “La mascara” (1598).66His interest
in applying geometric principles to theater construction was indeed partly
an aesthetic decision, but unlike earlier authors he did not invoke cosmic
musical proportion in its support. More importantly, he hoped to optimize
the theater’s ability to transmit sound. Vitruvius thus remained an important
text even as the uses made of his arguments changed.
In Bottrigari’s work the mathematical study of sound unites music and
architecture, as it had for the scholars of a century before; yet the terms of
this relationship have changed greatly. Its outlines have become more detailed
than the Boethian terms of the late fifteenth century, and so each feature of
these “scientific” aspects of the fields could be studied with more specificity
and depth than had been possible before. In this case, the study ofarchitectural
> 142 acoustics can be seen emerging from Vitruvian discussions ofharmonics. But
just as in studies of sense perception, this specialization has come at the cost
of the earlier claims about cosmic unity and order. The art theorist Federico
Zuccaro (1542-1609) also limited the claims of mathematics on painting,
claims that had once been made in terms of harmonics. He attacked those
who argued, without cause in his opinion, that painting should be subject to
architecture, mathematics, or geometry. Painting does not take its principles
64. VYtruvtus P o l , ‫ ا‬dieci lib ri d e ll’architettura d i M. Vitruvio tra d u tti et com m entati da Monsignor
Barbaro eletto Patriarca d ’Aquileggia Y156T, f a c i MYYarv. ‫ ؟‬oYtftYo,‫ ة وا‬٦١.
65. Moyer, Musica Scientia, pp. 192-193.
66. Ercole Bottrigari, "La mascara, overo della fabrica de' te a tri, e dello apparato delie scene
tragisatiricom iche, d ia lo g o -" (Bologna: Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale), B 45.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

from mathematics in order to learn rules or even as the basis for theory;
rather, he asserted, it is the daughter ofNature and disegno.67Thus while the
use of mathematics remained in the visual arts, just as in music it came more
and more to be seen as a tool, not a source of ultimate explanation.
At least as important as these changes in the use of mathematics were
the changes brought by the humanistic analysis that continued to replace the
retreating claims of Boethian harmonics. The introduction of humanistic
criteria for the aesthetic evaluation of music ushered in several significant
issues that had already been familiar for some time in writings on art theory.
Prominent among them was imitation or mimesis. Imitation, especially the
imitation of nature, was a topic with a long and contested history in art
theory. While both Alberti and Gaffurio had argued that art’s “imitation of
nature” came by way of the proportion in which nature participated, this
was hardly the only way in which the phrase was used or understood.68
And literary imitation was, if anything, a matter of still greater complexity
and contest.69 But musical composition had not traditionally been seen as
mimetic. Harmonic proportion had claimed not merely to imitate the order
of the cosmos, but rather to participate in it. Nor did working composers use
such terms to describe the process of composition or their concerns about it
when communicating with one another about their work. Indeed, the term 143 <

“imitation” for them normally referred to the echoing of a musical motif

in another voice of a polyphonic piece, not to mimesis.70Thus identifying
music’s mimetic features was not as simple as it might seem.
67. Federico Zuccari, L'Idea de' pitto ri, scultori e arch ite tti (Torino: A. Disserdio, 1607), S critti d ’arte,
ed. D. Heikamp (Firenze: Olschki, 1961), pp. 249-250.
68. Vincenzo Danti (1567) also found proportion in nature, but located it in the proportion o f humors in
the human body. See David Summers, M ichelangelo and the Language o fA r t (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), pp. 362-363.
69. See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Im itation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
70. The most notable collection o f letters exchanged among Italian composers in the firs t h a lf o f the
sixteenth century is contained in A Correspondence o f Renaissance Musicians, ed. B. J. Blackburn,
E. E. Lowinsky, and C. A. M iller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). An example o f the lim ited nature o f
 Ann E. Moyer

Cardano’s effort is exemplary. He identified several types of musical

imitation, distinguishing among imitation of sense, sound, and manner.71
To imitate birds in music is not an imitation of sense but only of sound,
he notes, since the chirping of birds has no meaningful content. Imitation
of sense means imitating strong emotions, since music is unable to imitate
particular statements.72Finally he turns to that aspect of composition most
amenable to such analysis: the text. Cardano argues that the music with
greatest emotional effect was that combining text and accompaniment, not
instrumental music alone. The text carried the works sense or meaning, and
the music imitated its emotional content.
Here music would share a common mimetic element with painting or
sculpture in the text or storia on which each was based, though not in the
means by which it might imitate elements of that text. For unlike the visual
presentation ofa storia, a musical one included the actual words ofthe text. A
works ability to move its audience emotionally in this way would be a factor
in evaluating its quality. Zarlino agreed with such a comparison. He noted
that a painting in and of itself induces only a slight emotional response in
the viewer; yet when it is viewed with knowledge of the story it represents,
it may evoke very deep feelings indeed. So too instrumental music alone may
> 144 provoke some emotion, he argues; but a greater and more specific response
comes from combining music with words.73
These new models for understanding the relationships among these arts
would predominate into the seventeenth century. They appeared in Nicolas
Poussiks 1647 application of the musical modes to painting, a discussion

musical im itation is the mass "Pera, Pera" whose basic theme imitates (or better, copies) the cry o f a
Bolognese street vendor; fo r Spataro's discussion, see pp. 358-360. He also wrote another "Missa de
la pera" fo r Hermes Bentivoglio, who had a pear in his coat o f arms; Spataro notes th a t he selected
this name to please the patron, not due to any feature o f the work itself.
71. Cardano, De musica, pp. 104-106; see Moyer, Musica Scientia, p. 167.
72. Cardano, De musica, pp. 142-144.
73. Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche (1573), p. 86. His examples include Aeneas entering Dido's temple at
Carthage (Aeneid 1) and Portia daughter o f Cato o f Utica, described in Plutarch's Life o f M. Brutus.
 Music, Mathematics, and Æ dhetics

based on Zarlino.74He notes, like so many predecessors, that goodjudgment

lies not simply in sense but in reason. So too the Greeks had found several
musical modes. Poussin defines modes as “la raison ou la mesure et forme”
to ensure moderation; but in fact, he does not discuss number at all. Emotion
is aroused in the audience when all the aspects of the composition are put
together in a generally proportioned way. Like Zarlino, Poussin then turns
to the poetic text.75
By the seventeenth century, then, such comparisons differed in impor­
tant respects fromthose that had been made byAlberti or Gaffurio. During that
earlier period, “music” claimed a superior status in serving as the explanatory
model for other fields such as the visual arts, through its nature as a mathe­
matical discipline; those other fields largelyaccepted such claims. Nonetheless,
writings on art included a number of topics that were not directly related to
musical mathematics and that developed independently, including practical
mathematics as well as a variety of humanistic approaches.
By 1600, textual criteria based in the humanist tradition had expanded
in both fields, replacing musical mathematics as a means for setting and
describing critical standards. Topics such as sense perception were defined as
related subjects, studied in terms of natural philosophy that might or might
not include mathematics; they served as secondary factors in explaining 145 <

and evaluating artistic production, and the mathematics generally appeared

without claims to represent cosmic harmony. The main point of comparison
between music and the visual arts had come to be located in a third field,
that of letters. This integration into the general world of humanistic studies
offered to scholarship in both music and the visual arts a much wider audi­
ence than before, since letters and poetics were topics of broad and intense

74. Jennifer Montagu, "The Theory o f the Musical Modes in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de
Sculpture", Journal o f the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55 (1992), pp. 233-248.
75. Nicolas Poussin, Letter to C hantelou, Rome, November 24, 1647, in Anthony Blunt, Nicolas
Poussin (New York: Bollingen, 1967), Text Volume, pp. 367-370.
 Ann E. Moyer

interest in the learned culture of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Italy. It helped to secure for the visual arts a solid position within the world
oflearning, and to maintain one for music. This transition in the relationship
between music and the visual arts narrowed the distance between the fields,
and sowas instrumental in the later development ofmore general theories of
fine arts. At the same time, it formed a part of the broad changes underway
in the formation of modern definitions of the arts and sciences.‫ء‬

> 146