![]() Alexander Scriabin contrived a “color organ” – an early precursor of a 1960s psychedelic light show – to accompany performances of his music by projecting the colors corresponding to the score’s harmonies. But, while few would deny a strong relationship between musical and visual forms, the character of that relationship is hard to describe.įor example, many musicians and composers have observed that the key signatures are associated with different colors. At least in the case of the visual and musical arts, it seems that the “vocation” and “avocation” are not simply two independent pursuits – there seems to be a profound connection between them, and that is how they are often experienced by those who are blessed with such multiple gifts. So familiar is the story of the great painter and his nearly equal dedication to music that the French phrase le violon d’Ingres has come to refer to an avocation at which one excels. Image credit: Harald Fritz.” width=”336″ height=”417″> Violin by Johann Christoph Leidolff, Vienna, 1749. At this moment, the musical and the visual experiences fuse into one. ![]() The music is all beauty of line, and so is the painting. The violin traces out an arc of melody that seems a sonic analogue to the linearity of the artist’s drawing. He draws the bow across the strings and produces consonant intervals that correspond to the simple whole-number ratios first demonstrated by Pythagoras in the fifth century B.C. The anthropomorphism of the instrument is surely not lost on the painter, as his eyes move between its sinuous curves and those of the odalisque taking shape on the canvas next to him. The proportion of neck to body of the violin is that known as the Golden Section, a ratio thought to underlie many natural forms as well as the proportions of Greek temples. The instrument he plays is a composition of molding profiles drawn from classical architecture – torus, scotia, bead and cyma recta – culminating in a spiral resembling the volute of an Ionic capital. His interest in the violin is both musical and visual. Sitting in his studio at the French Academy in Rome, the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres picks up his violin and begins to play. EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, who originally published it in American Arts Quarterly, Spring 2006, Volume 23, Number 2.
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