MAKING MUSIC

Music mattered in Dürer’s intellectual, spiritual, and social worlds. Dürer, like many of his humanist friends, would have known basic music theory concerning harmony, which in the Renaissance was closely related to the mathematics and theories of proportion so central to artistic practice. Dürer’s surviving writings include a musical setting of the well-known Marian antiphon Salve Regina (Hail, Queen) using a numerical system of notation known as tablature.

Musical instruments – harps, lutes, drums and trumpets – are a constant presence in Dürer’s depiction of heavenly scenes, particularly those featuring the Virgin Mary. We can perhaps imagine these prints evoking the sounds of the numerous musical works in Mary’s praise that were sung in churches, on the streets, and in homes in early modern Nuremberg.

Nuremberg was a city renowned for its manufacture of brass instruments – part of its metalworking expertise. Numerous other musical instrument makers and performers are found scattered through the city’s records and Dürer’s images. Dürer’s close interest in music across different physical and social settings is witnessed in works such as The Bathhouse and his astonishing portrait The Bagpiper, which explores the rougher sounds of rural peasant music-making.

Albrecht Dürer

Germany, 1471-1528

Madonna Queen of Angels 1518

woodcut

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift Program by Elizabeth Lane in memory of Richard Lane, 2021.

Prints and Drawings Collection, Archives and Special Collections.

University of Melbourne

2021.0073.000.000

This Madonna is an imperious ruler, evoking the sounds of the well-known melody Regina caeli laetare (‘Rejoice, Queen of Heaven’). In contrast to the soft domestic harp of Dürer’s Glorification of the Virgin, this Mary, surrounded by fruit and flowers, appears to the public, outdoor sounds of drum, pipe, and trumpet, played by a putto from printed music. Another putto holds a pot of lily of the valley, in German sometimes known as Marienglöckchen (little bells of Mary).

Albrecht Dürer

Germany, 1471-1528

Glorification of the Virgin c.1502 from The Life of the Virgin, 1511

woodcut

Gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton 1959.

Prints and Drawings Collection, Archives and Special Collections.

University of Melbourne.

1959.2114.000.000

The gentle music of an angelic harp suffuses this image of the Virgin and Christ Child, surrounded by saints. Above, Moses plays on the stony tablets of the law. But down below it is all about flesh: Christ’s body, the leather-bound book with pages of animal skin, and the harp, strung with animal gut. One well-known song in honour of the Virgin likewise praised her ‘blessed innards’ (Beati viscera) that had brought God into the flesh.

after Albrecht Dürer (artist)

Germany, 1471-1528

Charles Amand-Durand (publisher)

France, 1831-1905

The bagpiper (1514), copy printed c.1869

photogravure

Gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton 1959.

Prints and Drawings Collection, Archives and Special Collections.

University of Melbourne.

1959.2069.000.000

The harsh, unrefined sound of the bagpipes were associated with peasants and shepherds across early modern Europe. The instrument’s bag is made of animal skin stitched together, just like the piper’s leather jerkin and trousers. The leather shoes are worn, revealing the contours of the piper’s toes. The carefully worked wood of the pipes seems offset by the gnarled wooden tree trunk. This is sound that derives from nature’s rough materials.

Unknown artist

Guidonian hand and system of hexachords

in Simon de Quercu, Opusculum musices perquam brevissimum (A Brief Treatise on Music)

(Nuremberg: Johann Weyssenburger, 1513)

woodcut

Hanson-Dyer Collection.

Rare Music, Archives and Special Collections.

UniM Bail Music RB LHD 205

This is one of many works of music theory printed in Dürer’s sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Its Netherlandish author, Simon de Quercu, travelled widely, working for the Duke of Milan and at the imperial court in Vienna. This page shows the ‘Guidonian hand’, a well-known system for remembering sequences of six notes (hexachords), the foundation of Renaissance music theory. But the theoretical was never far from the material: musical harmony is here written onto the hand’s skin and bone.

Unknown artist

An image of Music

in Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophica (The Philosophical Pearl) (Freiburg im Breisgau: Johann Schott, 1503)

woodcut

Hanson-Dyer Collection.

Rare Music, Archives and Special Collections.

UniM Bail Music RB LHD 207

The Philosophical Pearl, an extremely popular work by the Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch, included a long treatise on music. Here you see a fashionable Lady Music presiding over a group of musicians including piper, lutenist, harpist, and organist. Holding the scales is the ancient figure of Pythagoras, who, according to legend, had heard the striking of differently weighted hammers in a blacksmith’s forge producing different pitches. From this very material foundation, he derived the mathematics of musical harmony.

The daughter of Jephthah playing drums to welcome soldiers;

Michael Wolgemut (artist)

Germany, 1434-1519

Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (artist)

Germany, c.1458-1494

The daughter of Jephthah playing drums to welcome soldiers; sacrificial scene

in Stephan Fridolin, Schatzbehalter, oder, Schrein der waren reichtumer des heils (Treasury of the True Riches of Salvation)(Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1491), sigs k i verso – k ii recto

hand-coloured woodcut

Rare Books collection, State Library Victoria. RARESF 093 C913K

Jephthah had sworn before battle that if he triumphed he would sacrifice the first to emerge from his household. On the left, his daughter greets her victorious father. On the right, Jephthah carries out his vow. The left-hand scene activates the sense of sound with stamping hooves, jingling Renaissance armour, and martial drums. The author was connected to Nuremberg’s Poor Clares convent, and we can imagine its female residents viewing these biblical scenes given a contemporary twist.