Music images in manuscripts of the OeNB

The National Library of Austria, Vienna, houses one of the world`s finest collections of illuminated manuscripts, comprising nearly every type of manuscript in specimens of partially exceptional artistic value: books of hours, breviaries, bibles and psalteries, chronicles (both universal and regional), courtly romances, the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, splendid manuscripts of liturgical monophony and polyphony, encyclopedias, astrological treatises, the Tacuinum Sanitatis etc. This musicological project, conceived for two years, will explore systematically the musico-pictorial representations in French, Netherlandish, German and Italian manuscripts of the 14th and 15th centuries. It examines the modes of visualization of music, both in the centres and the periphery of late medieval manuscript production, notwithstanding the borderlines of place, time or genre, without restriction to a single school or a single type of manuscript, and without separating secular and clerical milieu. Aspects both synchronous and diachronous will interact. In contrast to prior studies in late medieval musical iconography, music representations will neither be conceived merely as "`topoi" nor reduced to a motivical or organological substrate. A thorough understanding of the relation between text and image is considered as the precondition for studying the factors which may have determined the choice of specific instruments (and which may be localized between genre-principle, pictorial conventions and the actual performance of music) and the modes of representation. Basic questions concern the hierarchy of instruments and how musical iconography reacts to the performance of music both sacred and secular (e.g. the presence of the organ in liturgy, the increased forms of representational music in courtly chapels or civic bands). Such strategies of actualization are but one possible reaction to fundamental changes in the history of late medieval music. In the opposite direction the shaping of historical or even antique events in an archaic manner may take place. In studying the illuminated manuscripts of Vienna, some iconographic questions are to be raised, in particular: How far does angels` music spread out in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries? Which may be the consequences for the iconography of King David and the Elders of Apocalypse? Does the image of wordly musicians or minstrels change with respect to a discussion (largely based on Aristotle) about the importance of entertainment for the Christian society? The visualization of music will prove to be a multifarious task, depending on various matters of context, time and place, genre and milieu, patrons and artistic schools.