Correspondences in style between music and painting of the High Renaissance in Italy.

摘要

When Leonardo called music the "sister of painting" in the Trattato della Pittura, his aim was to raise the status of painting to that enjoyed by music as a traditional member of the liberal arts. He saw a parallel between the proportions of the Pythagorean tektraktys that governed the perfect consonances, and the proportions painters used in one-point perspective. Other writers, such as Luca Pacioli in De Divina Proportione (Milan, 1499) made similar comparisons based on the proportions of the perfect consonances.;There are significant parallels between the two arts that go beyond mathematics, grounded in the style of music and painting in the decades surrounding the turn of the sixteenth century, that reveal what was unique to both arts in the High Renaissance. Josquin des Prez in music, and Leonardo da Vinci in painting, synthesized innovations in space and form, the polyphonic interaction of these forms, expression, and harmony into a classical balance. Aspects of this style were subsequently developed in similar ways in the two arts, in music by composers such as Adrian Willaert, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Tomas Luis de Victoria, and in painting by Raphael and Michelangelo. Identifying these parallels helps to clarify the attributes of style that define the period as a whole for music and painting.