Typologie des Musikerporträts in Malerei und Graphik. Das Bildnis des Musikers ab der Renaissance bis zum Klassizismus. Text- und Tafelband

In this book, portraits of professional musicians from the renaissance to the classicism (from about 1450 to 1800) are shown in very different manifestations: visual mementos of "famous men" in portrait ensembles for the galleries of sovereigns (so called "viri illustri") and in galleries of music-schools, individual portraits, portraits in illumination-paintings, titles in books of music, advertisements etc. According to the commission and the function of the portraits, different types and forms have been develloped: full-figures, half-figures, busts, double-portraits, counterparts, as well as group portraits of portraits of musicians being integrated in an image of an special event. For the first time, all these images are considered according to their stilistic form and their iconography and their typology are examined. An especially created database (soon to be placed in the internet), made it possible to store the analysis of 830 of namely known musicians according to about 200 characteristic features and to retrieve these features in relation to certain points of view. These concern the special form of a portrait and its content aspects, as musicians in an allegorical representation, as well as the attributes (e.g. the instruments, notebooks, etc.), the allegories (e.g. the Musica, the virtues etc.) or the gods of mythology and other persons, who escort the musicians (e.g. Athena, Mercury, Apollo accompanied by the nine Muses: Pythagoras as the inventor of the harmonic intervals of music; sovereigns, spouses etc.) Also, there are considered the formal elements, e.g. the kind of posture of the musican, the ambience etc, so that the typus is the result of concept and style. In this book, the iconographical and stylistic evolution of these portraits is shown by numerous elected characteristic examples and 410 illustrations in a separate tome. An important point of this work is the verification of traditional contributions to certain painters or graphic artists as well as the dates of the portraits and their authenticity, that means, whether the portrait was performed at the lifetime of the musician and fits to the work of the artist or if it is a later replica or copy. The method of the art historians, the stylistic analysis, leads here to new results.