880 jonathan glixon
the city was also home to some of the most important renaissance
music theorists, including pietro Aron (for part of his life) and gioseffo
Zarlino. while all have been the subject of considerable musicological
attention, there has been little effort to place them into a particularly
Venetian context, with the notable exception of Aron’s reliance on musi-
cal examples from petrucci’s prints and Zarlino’s dependence on willaert
as the model for his ideas of excellence in musical composition (which
appears throughout the literature) and text setting.
Music in Venetian Paintingwith the ubiquity of music in the culture of renaissance Venice, it is not
surprising that musical images were prominent in the work of Venetian
painters. As elsewhere, of course, musical angels appear frequently in 15th-
century sacred paintings, but it is with the allegorical use of music in non-
sacred works that the Venetian school stands out. Much of the discussion
of these images is integrated into art historical studies of individual paint-
ers and their works (for instance, in David rosand’s book on titian), but
there is also a considerable amount of scholarship on the specific topic.
one approach is to view the musicians and instruments in the paintings
as referring to contemporary performance practice. For musicologists,
these paintings can then be used as a source. stefano toffolo has surveyed
Venetian painting as evidence of the usage and form of specific musical
instruments. Anthony rowland-Jones sees in the ensembles depicted in
works by Bonifazio Veronese evidence for the varied practices of amateur
musicians. edward lowinsky used the appearance of an enigmatic bit of
musical notation in titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians, which he argues
was intended for performance, as the starting point for an extended essay
on the little-known genre it represents and its significance both in this
painting and elsewhere. For art historians, the link between artistic depic-
tion and actual practice provides a clue to the meaning of the painting,
as it can be seen as referring to a specific set of activities that would have
been recognized by a Venetian audience. Katherine powers, for example,
argues that the lira da braccio that appears in so many Venetian paintings
of the madonna enthroned, by Bellini and others of his period, reflects
the contemporary practice of singing laude (see above) to the accompani-
ment of just that instrument, and thus lets the viewer see his own activi-
ties reflected in those of the musical angels.