Why images matter for music
Sound from the Middle Ages has vanished, and written music tells us little about instruments, because notation of the period rarely says who played what. Pictures partly fill this gap. Painters, sculptors and manuscript artists showed musicians over and over, and from these images historians learn what instruments looked like, how they were held, how many players made up a group and in which settings people expected to see music. Images are valuable because they preserve things that no text records. They are also tricky evidence, and a careful reader must ask what the artist was trying to show.
Where musicians appear
Music in art turns up in several kinds of object.
- Manuscripts. Psalters, the books of Psalms used for private prayer, often show King David with a harp, or sometimes a psaltery or fiddle, and surrounding scenes with musicians and dancers. Among illuminated manuscripts, the margins of some later books are filled with playful figures, including animals playing instruments. The Cantigas de Santa Maria, produced for Alfonso X of Castile, is famous for its many small scenes of players, including Christians and Muslims side by side.
- Church carving. Cathedral portals, capitals and choir stalls show angels, saints and ordinary performers. A well-known example is the porch at Santiago de Compostela, where the elders of the Apocalypse hold instruments. Stonework gave artists a chance to show music as part of the heavenly order, and carved scenes are among the most permanent records of instrument shapes.
- Panel and altarpiece painting. Painters of the 14th and 15th centuries filled paintings of the Virgin and heaven with angelic musicians. One famous altarpiece of the 1430s shows a group of singing angels and another group playing instruments, painted with close attention to detail.
- Everyday scenes. Calendars, hunting books and pictures of feasts show performers at work, and the border illustrations of devotional books sometimes show peasants dancing to a pipe.
What they show about instruments
Images give a good sense of which instruments were common and how they developed. Early manuscripts show harps, lyres and horns in forms that suggest older traditions. From about the 12th century, vielles, rebecs, psalteries and organs appear more regularly, and later centuries show lutes, shawms, trumpets and small organs in growing numbers. The appearance of new instruments in art is one of the clearer signs of their spread. For instance, the lute becomes common in pictures only gradually, in step with other evidence for its arrival.
Pictures also show how instruments were played. A fiddle might be held against the chest or the shoulder, rather than under the chin as in modern violin playing, and some harps are plucked with a specific hand position. Musicians often stand in small groups, such as a shawm band with a slide trumpet, which tells us something about the combinations used in towns and courts.
What they cannot tell us
There are several reasons for caution.
- Symbolism often wins over accuracy. Angels playing music in heaven were not meant to be portraits of real players. Their instruments sometimes combine features that would not work together, or are drawn from imagination.
- Copying. Artists often copied older models, so an instrument shown in a 13th-century image may reflect a design from a century earlier, or may simply be a stock pattern.
- Scale and detail. Small miniatures leave out strings, finger holes and tuning pegs, and some instruments are drawn in the wrong proportions.
- Sound is absent. A picture cannot say how loud, how fast or in what style a piece was played.
Because of these limits, historians usually compare art with surviving instruments, written descriptions and inventories. Real medieval instruments are very rare, and many of the details of their construction come from a mix of images and later copies.
Meaning in the images
Artists did not paint music only for documentation. In Christian imagery, music often meant harmony and praise. David’s harp pointed to the Psalms, and heavenly choirs suggested order and joy, while the Last Judgment sometimes used trumpets to announce the end of time. Musical instruments could also take darker meanings. Wild or misplaced music appears in scenes of vice, with dancing and piping used to suggest temptation. In art meant to teach those who could not read, a simple image could carry such messages quickly, much as with other visual symbols.
Music itself was also personified. Pictures of the seven liberal arts included a figure for Music, usually with an instrument and sometimes with the legendary Jubal or the ancient thinker Pythagoras, who was said to have discovered musical ratios. These scenes link the art of performance to the scholarly side of music.
Change over time
Early medieval images present music mostly in a sacred or symbolic setting. Over the centuries, scenes became busier and more varied, with secular performers, dancers and everyday players appearing alongside angels. By the 15th century, painters were attentive to details such as the number of strings and the shape of the body of an instrument, though realism never fully replaced symbolism. The overall trend is toward more detail, but the symbolic function stayed alive until the end of the period.