The Frontispiece of Gafori's Practica Musicae (1496)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10424930 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Haar (New York University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1974 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 7-22 |
| Publication date | 1974-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Renaissance Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-4338 • E-ISSN: 1935-0236 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2859295 |
| OpenAlex | W2321094732 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
The depiction of celestial harmony (fig. 1) used as title page for the first edition of the Practica Musicae has been a great favorite among art historians of iconographic bent; Warburg, Panofsky, Seznec, and Wind have all reproduced and commented on this woodcut at some length. The frontispiece has nothing really to do with the contents of the Practica—no more, say, than the Boethian frontispiece of the thirteenth-century Pluteus manuscript has to do with Notre Dame polyphony. But the illustration was surely Gafori's idea rather than that of his printer, Le Signerre. Gafori as a devout Boethian was enamored of myths about cosmic harmony; he expounded Boethius’ doctrine of musica mundana in the first edition of the Theorica Musicae in 1480, expanded upon this treatment in the second edition of that work (1492), and returned to the subject armed with much newly acquired humanistic lore in the De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum Opus, published in 1518 though certainly written some years earlier
Art · Art history · Harmony (color · Humanism · Literature · Mythology · Nothing · Polyphony · Theology · Visual arts · Woodcut · Diverse Musicological Studies · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |