Musical Instrument

Musical Instrument is a subject in art. The gallery holds 135 works in this subject in art, including works by Thomas Eakins, Edgar Degas and Georges de La Tour.

Few objects have carried as much meaning in Western art as the musical instrument. Long before paint, instruments belonged to ritual and myth: the ancient Greeks gave the lyre—a tortoiseshell-bodied harp strung with gut—to Apollo and the reed-piped aulos to Dionysian revelry, and these forms recur on vases and in Roman wall painting such as the catalogue's frescoes from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale. Because almost any object that makes sound can be pressed into music, the painted instrument easily became a sign as much as a thing—of harmony, learning, love, devotion, or the fleeting pleasures of the senses.

In medieval and Renaissance sacred art, instruments signalled the music of heaven. Angels tune lutes, viols, and portative organs around the enthroned Virgin, as in Gerard David's Virgin and Child with Four Angels and Hans Memling's Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara. The cult of Saint Cecilia, patron of music, gave the theme a human face: Raphael's Saint Cecilia altarpiece (c. 1516–17, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna) shows discarded earthly instruments at her feet as she listens to angelic song, a model that Orazio Gentileschi reworked in the contemplative Saint Cecilia and an Angel.

The Baroque turned music into intimate genre. Caravaggio's Lute Player (c. 1595–96) lit a single musician with raking shadow, inspiring the Utrecht Caravaggisti—Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen—and, in the wider Dutch Republic, Frans Hals's Lute Player (1623). Johannes Vermeer made the lute, viola da gamba, and virginal the quiet props of courtship in works such as The Concert, where playing together implies a moral and emotional accord.

The same instruments turned admonitory in vanitas still life. In Pieter Claesz's Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario, a recorder or violin embodies sensual delight precisely because its sound dies the instant it is made—a memento mori beside skull and guttering candle. Portraiture likewise used the instrument as an attribute of refinement, as in Richard Cosway's Portrait of Marianne Dorothy Harland.

The motif proved astonishingly durable. When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque dismantled visual reality around 1909–14, the guitar and violin became their favourite test subjects, fractured across planes and, from 1912, built from pasted paper—the instrument now an armature for analysing form itself.