Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual history
• intellectual history of art
• intellectual history of music
• visual history of ideas
• aural history of ideas
• Quentin Skinner
• Michael Biddiss
• Annabel Brett
• Michael Baxandall
• Christopher Small
• musicking

The essays in this special issue were developed from papers presented at events hosted by the Sydney Intellectual History Network between 2013 and 2016.¹ While dominated by historians and philosophers, the network is specifically concerned with expanding the borders of intellectual history to include scholars from disciplines that remain somewhat on the margins of the field. As an art historian and a musicologist contributing to the debates of the network, we continually returned to the same question: do the creative arts have an intellectual history? Our first response is “yes”, if we use the same starting point as Quentin Skinner when he summarised most generally the subject matter of intellectual history as the study of past thoughts.² We could equally characterise in general terms the intellectual history of the creative arts as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural, even within the disciplines of art history and musicology.

This emphasis on words perhaps arises because of intellectual history’s long-standing methodological focus on the close reading of texts as the primary way of accessing the thoughts and ideas of past people. If ideas are understood as being exclusively thoughts expressed (or at least capable of being expressed) in words, then the visual and aural media of art and music would appear, a priori, to be ruled out as proper subjects of intellectual history. Yet at least some strands of recent thinking about intellectual history have moved beyond studying only written, verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of materials that can be understood as vehicles for generative thought. As early as 1985, Michael Biddiss included music and the visual arts – along with mathematics and physics – among the modes of discourse which must be taken into account by intellectual history, but in which language is merely secondary.³ Annabel Brett’s 2002 survey of the current state of intellectual history also showed how the study of cultural practices and “structures of mental reference” had by then been incorporated into the scope of the discipline.⁴

In some respects, the question comes down to one of definition. Can a body of art work or a musical composition constitute a “text” for the purposes of intellectual history? And if it can, can it be said to convey a coherent treatment of an idea which is susceptible to systematic analysis? The papers in this issue approach these questions from a variety of perspectives, addressing the history of ideas expressed in images, music notation and sound, as well as in the words written about all of these subjects.

The perspective from art history

In art history, the intellectual history of art to date is mostly a subcategory of the historiography of art theory and writing.⁵ It is an exploration of the impact of writing about art, or art itself, as it is has been used in arguments about the role of art in society, culture or politics. There is, for example, an intellectual history of texts in which philosophers, novelists, dramatists and artists have written on the aesthetic and social value of art from antiquity to the modern era. One aspect of art’s intellectual history has thus been an analysis of the differences, transformations, continuities and discontinuities in the beliefs and theories about the ways that art affects people and how this has changed over time in accordance with political, cultural and intellectual climates – what has been termed as an exploration of trajectories of ideas about art.⁶ But this has been, for the most part, explored in relation to verbal texts. The intellectual history of art, practiced in this way, is thus primarily text-based. It is about the interpretation of words, not images.

There are further examples of intellectual biographies of artists – although these remain relatively partial in connections made between biographies of thought and the visual. While there may be biographical studies of Hogarth, who was not only an eighteenth-century artist, but also England’s first true art theorist, there is perceived within the discipline to be a disjuncture between his theoretical writings and the art that he produced. The focus taken in the intellectual biographies of Hogarth is on his text, The Analysis of Beauty, his theoretical writings and networks, seen as separate and distinct from the visual qualities of his art.⁷ A great deal more could be done to link the intellectual life of Hogarth which focused on aesthetics, to his artistic productions and his characteristic style, something that was taken up by Mark Cheetham to explore the Englishness of Hogarth’s art theory – but again, the focus is on words, not images.⁸ An equally promising intellectual biography of the Neopolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico was completed by Malcolm Bull.⁹ To explore Vico’s conception of human truth as located in the imagination and akin to the making of painting, Bull looked at the pictorial context of Vico’s aesthetic writings. Bull reconstructed the visual aspects of Vico’s life – the Neopolitan painting surrounding him that he would have owned and known – to consider how the visual arts in seventeenth-century Naples informed Vico’s philosophy and perception of the world. While this is once again a text-based study, it makes innovative use of the disciplinary skills of the art historian. Bull developed a fuller understanding of Vico’s ideas by providing a visual context for their development and exposition. He demonstrated the ability of art to influence a sequence of thought processes and philosophical ideas.

This emphasis on texts in the intellectual history of art is not surprising and it may be part of its definition. For some scholars who have tried to define intellectual history, the intellectual historian seeks a complete understanding of her chosen texts and the argumentation within them – this is the aim of her enquiry, rather than using texts as a means of understanding something other than the texts themselves – a political action or an economic trend, for example. The intellectual history of art discussed thus far follows this same model. But what has yet to be considered, using this division, is a parallel intellectual history of art that is launched from the visual image rather than the verbal texts written about it. That is to say, there is a distinction to be made between those art historians who are interested in the image to understand something other than the image itself, and those who seek a full understanding of a group of chosen images – aiming to get at a particular idea that is expressed through a trajectory of visual forms. Part of the challenge is the greater slippage of meanings with images, in comparison with verbal texts, especially with the question of intended meanings.

The question of intention is perhaps less problematic in other disciplines because ideas appear fixed by words. Within philosophy, for example, intellectual history involves the tracing of an idea that seeks to determine the intention of a particular thinker. It is not uncommon for colleagues in philosophy or the history of science to use a sequence of texts to get into the mind of the author or to trace a lineage of thought by a particular author on a specific concept across a sequence of texts by approaching the words as a direct indication of what a particular writer was thinking; or a response between two scholars, from Kant to Herder for instance. A common phrase is “In this part of the text, Kant was thinking … .” This comes as quite a surprise to art historians, but leads us to think more about what art history might be able to take from this approach, to move beyond how we have been trained to refuse to discuss intentionality. Does an intellectual history of art require some consideration of the artist’s intention, and if so, how is that recovered?

As students, young art historians have “intentionality” drilled out of them. It is not something that art historians say, particularly in connection with complex images. Think of Velazquez’ Las Meninas, Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera, or Durer’s Melancholia. Taking just one of these images as an example, in spite of the fact that Melancholia involves emblematics and iconography, the signs themselves are open to multiple readings. Mieke Bal, for instance, has pointed out how a sheep can be seen as a dog, or a man might be a woman angel (and this is before Bal delves into psychoanalytic readings of the rock on which the putto sits as a womb or the face in the rock, which she reads much like a Rorschach test).¹⁰ What the viewer sees, makes others come to see, and then interprets is part of art history and quite separate from the “intention” of the artist – which almost all art historians would argue is impossible to know. Las Meninas, the Cythera pictures, Melancholia – these are images that involve a range of meanings, and it is difficult to determine the artist’s intention in setting this range of meanings into operation, unless we accept that the intention includes the artist’s awareness of the full slippage of meaning specific to the visual and involving the need for interpretation, or more precisely the need for interpretive input from viewers.¹¹ We are not arguing that this is true for every artist and every image in every cultural context; but we would argue that it is true of art that seeks to communicate ideas and of art that seeks to engage the intellect. It is also particularly true of non-narrative painting – genre scenes, portraiture, and still lifes.

There is what we might call an urge among art historians interested in intellectual history to get at a properly historical understanding of what it meant to think certain thoughts in a particular period, and to give those thoughts visual expression – said another way, to express those thoughts visually. Does this primarily need to be done through texts, with images used as illustrations of ideas? If we accept that ideas have a visual, as much as a textual form, then art history is a significant repository of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But how we get at those thoughts within art history will be different. Ideas in a visual form are expressed differently – they remain as much about visual representation, as about the ideas themselves. In relation to any particular concept, the challenge for the artist is to convey ideas about that concept using the visual as a means of communication. It is not simply a question of words being translated into images. Visual ideas are expressed by artists – not writers – and therefore they use colour, light, surface textures, perspective, as much (if not more) than emblematics and iconography to convey those ideas. While emblematics and iconography can be decoded, artists have often used the formal features of a painting to work against any singular meaning that could be grasped through decoding. One way of looking at this is the rococo artist’s refusal to allow the image to be subservient to words. The appeal is to the mind through the eye, rather than through written and spoken language as intermediary. There is a theoretical basis for this in words – specifically the philosophy of aesthetics, which developed as a discipline in the eighteenth century, in theories of human understanding, and in art theory itself, as writers interested in the visual tried to grapple with how images worked in relation to the mind. This interest began in the seventeenth century with theorists such as Roger De Piles, was picked up by French Lockeans, such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and pursed by Immanuel Kant, with Kantian aesthetics becoming the foundation of modernism and non-representational art. There has been awareness throughout history, but especially since the beginning of the eighteenth century, that the visual operates differently from the written word in the way that concepts are conveyed and understood.

We want now to qualify our initial “yes” to the question “do the creative arts have an intellectual history” by exploring how an intellectual history of art has been practiced within the discipline of art history and more widely, in the disciplines of philosophy and literature. There is a reason for this focus on the visual as closer to intellectual history as practiced within philosophy and literature, as opposed to within history departments.¹² In part, this has been the result of respect paid to the specialist skills required of the art historian (although that is less the reason than it once was). As philosophy often incorporates the interrogation of the way that the world is perceived, there is a fundamental connection with art history. Both disciplines are interested in perception – although philosophers and art historians (as well as artists) come at the issue of perception from different backgrounds and perspectives.

While there is an affinity between philosophy and art, there is also clearly a relationship of art historical thought to political thought.¹³ In history departments there has been a preference to work on ideas and thoughts (or, more precisely, the discourse about ideas and thoughts) that influenced politics and political parties. Intellectual history is often conceived by historians as a history of political thought. For this reason, art history has struggled to argue for the significance of non-political artworks to the field of intellectual history, as if ideas in art are of less interest when they do not address politics and power structures. Nevertheless, in art history, non-political artworks are recognised as carrying meanings because they are connected to thoughts provoked by the medium of art during the viewing process. To give just one example from Milam’s art history writing, play as theme and form in rococo art was fundamental to the creation of the visual experience by major artists and in major works, and the concept of play led to an understanding of the image in the mind of the beholder.¹⁴ Moreover, an eighteenth-century conception of play was grounded in a philosophy of ideas shared by Enlightenment writers on art, drama, literature, and human understanding. Even to think about rococo art without understanding the idea of play from Aristotle to Winnicott is difficult, and to not consider why play became a principal concern of eighteenth-century artists, thematically and formally, is somewhat missing the point. The question then is not if the idea of play was politically important in the period, but rather how, when taken up by eighteenth-century artists and experienced by eighteenth-century viewers, images of play fit in to a longer trajectory of the philosophical consideration of play in Western thought.¹⁵ Not to trace the context of play through philosophical, pedagogical, and aesthetic writings would limit analysis to the visual, rather than to the wider engagement of the visual within the world of ideas in Enlightenment France, specifically in relation to the cognitive and the aesthetic value of experience. Perhaps, in a way, this is the flipside of intellectual history – while in the search for a fuller understanding of a particular idea in verbal texts the intellectual historian might inquire into visual evidence – illustrations for example, or narrative cycles – whereas the art historian begins and stays with the object, to which her primary explanatory duty is owed. Significantly, the intellectual historian feels comfortable discussing narrative cycles, particularly those with political purpose, which have iconographic details that can be read as a text.¹⁶ It is far less common to find an intellectual historian engaging with a painting or other art object that is non-narrative. In turn, an intellectual history of art, as it has been practiced by people like Michael Baxandall, has focused on pictorial qualities, rather than on narrative.¹⁷

Part of an historical explanation of pictures in Patterns of Intention, Baxandall’s approach taken in the mid-1980s approximates a certain form of intellectual history focused on the visual.¹⁸ His interest in this essay was to question how far we can think through the relationship between the visual interest of pictures and the systematic thought that appears in science and philosophy of the cultures from which they came.¹⁹ Most importantly, he argued that “thought” is not the exclusive province of science and philosophy – thoughts are not “better” (more detailed, more sophisticated, more thoughtful) because they are expressed in science and philosophy than when they are expressed by a painter in a painting. At the same time Baxandall proposed that visual thoughts should be understood as distinctly connected to the artistic process – not the writing process, or the philosophical process or the scientific process. Visual thoughts form part of a process that is concerned with art making. Such thoughts are interconnected to the development of a pictorial problem, of which thinking in regards to a theme and subject are only a part. The pictorial problem is primarily visual, and therefore includes the expression of ideas through formal qualities not words. The “idea” as expressed is tied to the language of the pictorial medium.

What then might distinguish a visual history of ideas from an intellectual history of art?²⁰ Art history, like intellectual history, has had a shift in practice in the past two decades. As noted by Skinner, a shift has occurred within intellectual history from a focus on texts towards “social and political vocabularies” in different historical periods, looking more at intellectual contexts of major texts, to which he refers as “fields of meanings”.²¹ Skinner’s qualification of “major texts” as those being the point of focus in relation to “fields of meanings” is important. Does this mean that the intellectual history of art should focus on major works (so Leonardo’s Mona Lisa rather than a workshop production of a minor portrait)? Even if this has more to do with the emotive, aesthetic and artistic quality of the work in the eyes of contemporary audiences – which is subject to change? There is no question that some works of art are more thoughtful than others. Why this is the case can be hard to define. But it does not always have to do with whether or not the art work makes a major political argument. Instead, it is the way that an artwork engages with a field of meanings that makes it “major” – that field may be political, philosophical, visual or aesthetic – but a work is rarely “major” for political reasons alone. The political narrative of Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government is only one aspect of its significance.²² It is the resonance of meanings that makes a work “major” in the history of art. Part of its intellectual history is to understand the full resonance of meaning within its own culture and along a trajectory of artistic production.

It is worth specifying that art involves a certain and distinctive kind of intellectual activity. Art historians would, for the most part, agree with this statement, even if their interests largely lie within workshop practices or technique. These other concerns still require scholars to approach the history of art from the accepted position of art making as an intellectual activity. Yet once art is approached in this way, and the intellectual enterprise and context become the focus of inquiry, what takes place? Are thoughts different when they are expressed visually, rather than textually? Are the processes of expression and reception substantially modified when the mode of communication is visual? We would argue that they are, and also that an intellectual history of art should not be confined to art with political purpose or art that serves (or subverts) power structures. The visual itself is often a principle point of consideration. Just as intellectual history has shifted to consider speech that is about speech, there is a parallel within art history with scholars who attend to the way that art is about art, in which visual language is used not only to communicate ideas in the making of an object and to engage with the practice of art making, but also to discuss the ways in which art itself is used to do both of these things. What is at issue is the visual discourse around specific ideas, some of which are specifically related to the visual (such as Baxandall’s study of shadows), but others which are more thematic with visual implications, such as Thomas Kavanagh’s focus in the moment and Milam’s concern with play – not just as subject, but as visual form.²³

Coming back to the point made initially – that an intellectual history of art necessarily involves an understanding of how thoughts are expressed visually – and to consider how we might pursue that visual intellectual history. This has been accomplished by Baxandall and Kavanagh, both of whom explore a visual idea in a larger context of images and texts. Another approach is to follow the trajectory of a visual idea without a reference to texts, but instead with reference to social and cultural contexts. Martin Kemp’s recent study of icons is an example of this approach, which he has not framed as a form of a visual history of ideas, but which could be seen on these terms.²⁴

Kemp’s study of icons from Christ to Coke begins with the questions: Why and How have iconic images achieved their status? He plots the “key moves” by which each image has achieved its fame, looks at the origins of each, and hones in on the notable and curious course of their ascent.²⁵ Looking at this another way, if the original image represents the early idea along an historical trajectory of visual engagement, the method becomes one of tracing how an idea is taken up, adapted, modified and changed in different historical periods to become iconic.

But how do you define the iconic image? Is this a problem that is related to the definition of what makes an art work major? The definition of a visual icon by Kemp is an image that has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognisability and has come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large numbers of people across time and cultures, to a greater or lesser degree transgressing the parameters of its initial making, function, context and meaning. This, in a sense, is a sort of visual history of ideas. An example is the Mona Lisa – the original by Leonardo; modified and adapted by artists like Du Champ, Dali and Warhol – but this can also be seen as modernism engaging with and positioning itself against a history of image making. Does that fact make this engagement any less a history of ideas? Argumentation is made in visual form by artists about the significance of the image in western culture and how images work to convey those ideas.

Art history is no longer a history of style and individual biographies of artistic training and stylistic debts. But this past methodology is worth exploring from a slightly different perspective. Style can be seen as a particular language within the visual language of communication through which meanings are constructed. Like a dialect, it works in tandem with themes and subject matter to communicate concepts within a specific culture and society. It is local, rather than general and can be understood through translation, but there will always be some loss of meaning in the process – even in the very best translations. A visual history of ideas is drawn into this process of translation. It seeks a fuller understanding of the image itself – how it communicates thoughts about particular concepts which necessarily involve the visual but are linked with thought processes that need to be situated within an understanding of historical and philosophical ideas related to the same concepts. Thus in seeking to gain a full understanding of the image itself, we must necessarily go to texts for that context, but then return to the image and the visual as a specific and distinctive form of communication within intellectual life. Perhaps this is what art history has to offer in a multi-disciplinary pursuit of a new history of ideas – the ability to translate the visual and to make judgements about what makes a work of art “major” in relation to a particular concept through a more comprehensive understanding of how images work.

The perspective from musicology

Music has always had an ambivalent relationship with ideas. In early modern aesthetic schemes, instrumental music was generally valued below poetry, which can articulate ideas in words, and also below the visual arts, which can represent specific ideas through concrete images. The idea that music without words could not convey meaning in some respects replicated the medieval division between music theory and musical practice, or performance. The intellectual work of music theory, concerning itself with acoustics, rhythmic proportions and harmonies, belonged to the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and was consequently the province of the educated classes, whereas the practice of music – creating and performing actual pieces – was a less prestigious craft performed primarily by artisans. While this devaluation of music began to shift during the early modern period, it remained influential as late as Hegel who, in his Aesthetics, placed poetry at the top of his hierarchy of the arts, followed by architecture, sculpture and painting, with music and dance at the bottom.²⁶ Nevertheless, by the late eighteenth century, music was becoming much more highly valued as an expressive art in its own right, eventually, in a remarkable reversal, displacing poetry as the superior expressive art.²⁷ But what is it that music expresses? Vocal music can convey ideas through the sung words, but does the musical setting of those words add anything intellectually, or is it simply a pleasant vehicle for the ideas expressed in the poetry? Can purely instrumental music convey anything at all, let alone anything that could be construed as ideas?

This ambivalence is perhaps reflected in the relatively limited engagement with music in the intellectual history literature – certainly less than that with the visual arts. Perhaps emblematic of this is the scant attention music receives in the Blackwell Companion to Intellectual History (2016), which includes two full chapters dealing with art history and aesthetics, but only a single short passage which mentions music.²⁸ Similarly, Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History (2006) contains chapters on intellectual history in political thought, literature, society and culture, science, medicine and art, but only a single, rather apologetic paragraph in the Introduction dealing with music as something of an afterthought. While the author notes the recent contribution of musicologists such as John Butt to a sophisticated intellectual history of music, taking music into account in the practice of other intellectual historians is presented as a challenging project to be considered for the future, rather than as a present reality.²⁹

As in the case of the visual arts, however, there are nevertheless many studies by musicologists which draw on the methods and approaches of intellectual history. For instance, a fruitful path for charting the intellectual history of music is one shared with other disciplines: the intellectual biography of musicians, an outstanding example of which is Christoph Wolff’s magisterial J. S. Bach: The Learned Musician.³⁰ Other studies have dealt with the intellectual context in which significant musical developments took place, or that of particular aspects of a notable composer’s work.³¹ Music theory has also generated much intellectual work and debate, including that addressing relationships between music, philosophy and related disciplines, a subject taken up in relation to key medieval thinkers by Stoessel, and by Mews and Williams, in this issue.

Since antiquity, much intellectual effort has also gone into accounting for the expressive effects of music. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, European musicians were fascinated by accounts of the power of ancient Greek music to move the emotions and motivate actions – like the story of Alexander the Great responding to Timotheus’ song by leaping up and arming himself for battle – and tried to replicate this expressive power in their own music.³² This concern with speaking eloquently in music, based on what were understood to be classical models, lay at the heart of the development of opera by Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries arising out of the antiquarian discussions of the Florentine “camerata” of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi at the turn of the seventeenth century.³³ It is also evident in the theories of musical rhetoric developed primarily by German musicians through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – perhaps most famously by J.S. Bach’s direct contemporary Johann Mattheson.³⁴ The intellectual history of these concerns has generated a rich vein of modern scholarship which has in turn informed recent research on music cognition and emotions.³⁵

Studies of these kinds fall largely into the category of the history of ideas about music, rather than dealing directly with the aural per se. Is there room, then, for an “aural history of ideas”, analogous to the concept of a visual history of ideas discussed above? If ideas are defined, as they have been in some influential branches of intellectual history, purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an epiphenomenon, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many – perhaps most – musicians, it seems obvious that in addition to constituting an aesthetic experience, music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and coherently worked out.³⁶ Certainly no-one familiar with, for example, the late fourteenth-century complexist style known as the ars subtilior, or with the fifteenth-century mensural canons of Josquin des Prez or Jehan Ockeghem, or the astonishing quadruple-themed fugue that ends Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony K551, or with Beethoven’s late string quartets – let alone Bach’s The Art of Fugue or The Musical Offering – could doubt that there was serious, systematic and innovative intellectual work going on in them, or that the musical texts in which they are preserved are susceptible to rigorous and illuminating analysis. These composers wrote no substantial treatises, no theoretical manifestos, but their compositions clearly embody intellectual endeavour and generative thought. It is not necessary to be able to say that Bach or Mozart articulated their intellectual efforts in words (they largely did not, as far as the written record tells us), or even that they could have, if asked to do so. Their ideas are evident in the music; they can be read in the notated score, but further, they are above all communicated when the music is realised in performance, an idea that is explored further in Maddox’s essay.

Music notation is, of course, only one of many kinds of largely non-verbal graphic text which can be used to convey ideas, including chemical or mathematical formulas, statistics, scientific diagrams and architectural drawings. These are simply efficient, fit-for-purpose ways of representing ideas, which, for their subject matter, are more precise and specific than words. Music notation is similarly an efficient script for conveying information, including in at least some contexts, specific and complex ideas. For instance, in his summative works such as the “Goldberg” variations, The Art of Fugue or the Musical Offering, J.S. Bach explained by exhaustive demonstration the possibilities for musically working out the potential of a given musical theme, in particular through melodic and rhythmic variation and through complex counterpoint. Just as there have been many commentaries and analyses of Machiavelli or Newton, each of these musical works has been extensively analysed and its technical details and methods explained in words by music theorists, but it is important to remember that the ideas being explained and interpreted in such analyses are Bach’s ideas, expressed originally in music.

Nevertheless, a music score is ultimately no more a piece of music than a film script is a movie, or a bound sheaf of printed papers is a story, or for that matter a treatise on political theory. Ideas are represented in the book or script or score, and to some extent worked out in creating it, but they are only effectively transmitted from their author to someone else when – and to the extent that – the ideas embodied in the medium (book, script, score) are recreated and retranslated in the mind of the receiver. While it is possible for skilled musicians to read a musical score silently, and in imagination to hear its sound and analyse its meaning in much the same way that a verbal text can be read silently, the way most people encounter a musical work – and indeed the primary manner in which its author intended them to encounter it – is as an audible performance. If this embodied aurality is excluded from the purview of intellectual history, we would argue that an important way of accessing and understanding the distinctive kind of intellectual activity involved in music would be overlooked.

The concern with performance reflects another recent trend in thinking about music. As Christopher Small argued in his influential book Musicking, music is properly an activity rather than a thing – a verb, not a noun. This activity, which he called “musicking”, engages all of those who take part in its rituals, in any capacity, in collectively exploring their social identity and constructing meaning.³⁷ Viewed in this way, it is clear that the often overlapping roles of composition, performance and listening cannot be separated out into water-tight categories. Musicking, like other performative activities (including writing about economic theory, or lecturing about mathematics), has dimensions of entertainment, interaction, creativity, and through them, the development of new knowledge.

Conclusion

Many of the issues which arise about the intellectual history of art and music are similar, most obviously in that both deal with media which are primarily non-verbal, yet there are also significant differences. While the key texts of both are preserved in material form – as painting and sculptures, or as printed or manuscript music notation – art history works directly from those material objects, whereas music is intrinsically a temporal activity for which the material sources are indirect representations.

Further, an art work is a physical object which remains more or less constant; interpretations of it will change, but barring damage or the deterioration of its materials, the physical artefact does not. The physical artefact of a piece of music (the notated score), on the other hand, is not in itself the art work, but a script for reproducing the art work, which is enacted over time and will be different each time it is performed, potentially multiplying its potential meanings. Any performance only becomes an artefact if it is reified as a recording, which then becomes a new, fixed text in itself, susceptible to analysis like any other. In this respect, music is more analogous to drama, for which the surviving written texts are only sketches for a complex and multilayered performance activity. While Shakespeare’s plays can profitably be read as literature, this approach does not necessarily illuminate ideas about drama in the same way that performing the plays does.

If the methods and conceptual framework of intellectual history offer useful stimulus to studies of art and music history, we propose that the converse can also be true, particularly in the ways that they force their practitioners to confront questions about the nature of ideas and of the texts in which they are preserved. And more generally, while it is perhaps a truism among art historians and musicologists that it is impossible to fully understand the music and art of any particular time and place without understanding its context in contemporary ideas about philosophy, poetics, cosmology or theology, it is also arguable that these subjects, in turn, cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of their relationships with musical and visual ideas.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Milam is professor of Art History and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. Since 2013, she has been the director of the Sydney Intellectual History Network. Her area of research specialisation is art and garden design during the Enlightenment.

Alan Maddox is senior lecturer in Musicology at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. He is an associate investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and consultant musicologist to the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. He also trained as a singer, working with Australia’s national opera company and as a freelance performer. Recent publications include a series of articles on rhetoric in early modern Italian vocal music, and a study of the role of music in 19th-century Australian prison reform.

Notes

1 Essays by Bull, Butler, Cole, Mews and Williams, and Stoessel were developed from papers presented at the Rethinking Intellectual History conference in April 2015. Milam's essay was expanded from a paper contributed to the conference Nature and Culture in German Romanticism and Idealism at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in March 2014. Maddox and Lusty each presented lectures as part of the Key Text series co-hosted by Sydney Ideas in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Our introductory essay began as presentation by Milam at The Future of the History of Ideas Workshop in August 2014, and has been considerably expanded by Maddox, who made important points about music from the floor. All events were held at the University of Sydney. We are grateful to Stephen Gaukroger who offered us this special issue in which to bring together the work of the network in the areas of art and music.

2 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding.”

3 Collini et al., “What Is Intellectual History?” 

4 Brett, “What Is Intellectual History Now?,” 124–7.

5 As an example, see Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Holly's more recent work engages with theories of psychoanalysis and philosophy, at the same time that it focuses on the relationship of biography and the writing about art by art historians as the primary subject of an intellectual history of art history. See The Melancholy Art.

6 Belfiore and Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts.

7 See, for example, Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 3, chapters 3–5; Bindman, Hogarth and His Times, 168–81.

8 Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain.

9 Bull, Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth.

10 Miecke Bal presented these readings in her lecture “The Images in Question: Anachronism and the Theoretical Object”, 5 August 2014, at the University of Sydney.

11 On Las Meninas, cf. Foucault, The Order of Things; Brown, Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Painting; and Steinberg, “Velazquez's Las Meninas.” On Watteau's Cythera paintings, cf. Crow, Painters and Public Life; Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations; Cohen, Art, Dance and the Body; and, more generally, Sheriff, Antoine Watteau.

12 The most useful introduction to these issues is Peter Gordon's unpublished essay “What Is Intellectual History?”

13 Some examples can be found in the work of Evonne Levy and Michael Ann Holly. See Levy, “The Political Project of Wölfflin's Early Formalism”; “The German Art Historians of World War I.”

14 Milam, Fragonard's Playful Paintings.

15 In literature, the intellectual history of play has been traced by Mihai Spariosu in relation to critical theory. See his books: The Wreath of Wild Olive; God of Many Names; Dionysis Reborn.

16 As the most well-known example, see Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo Frescoes.”

17 Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment.

18 See in particular Baxandall's essay on Chardin entitled “Pictures and Ideas” which appeared in his book, Patterns of Intention.

19 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 70.

20 In using the phrase “history of ideas” we are aware of the problems associated with Arthur O. Lovejoy’s conception of the discipline in The Great Chain of Being. Our concern is not with universal “unit-ideas”, but with ideas that are often discounted intellectually because they are more remote from written language as visual (or indeed aural) thoughts. Therefore, a visual history of ideas may be more apt than an intellectual history of the visual.

21 Collini et al., “What Is Intellectual History.”

22 Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti”; and his “Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Buon Governo Frescoes.”

23 Kavanagh, Esthetics of the Moment; Milam, Fragonard's Playful Paintings, passim.

24 Kemp, Christ to Coke.

25 Ibid., 2.

26 Domínguez, Saussy, and Villanueva, Introducing Comparative Literature, 108.

27 Nisbet and Rawson, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Volume 4, 719.

28 Whatmore and Young, A Companion to Intellectual History, 33. At the time of writing, a search of the Intellectual History Archive held by the Institute of Intellectual History at St Andrews University using the search terms “art” or “music” or “arts” produced no results, and “culture or cultural” only one. A search of the Journal of Global Intellectual History produced a similar result.

29 Young, “Introduction,” 4.

30 Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach. Another notable recent example is Fenlon and Groote, Heinrich Glarean's Books.

31 See, for example, Palisca, Music and Ideas; Knepler, “Die Zweite Wiener Schule im Kontext der Österreichischen Geistesgeschichte”; Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics.

32 The music theorist Vincenzo Galilei, for example, referred to this story in his Dialogo della musica (1581). It is also recounted and embellished at length in Dryden's Alexander's Feast (1697), set to music by Handel in 1736.

33 On the intellectual context of the beginnings of opera, see Palisca, The Florentine Camerata; Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

34 See in particular, Mattheson, Der Vollkommene Capellmeister.

35 On theories of musical rhetoric, see, for example, Bartel, Musica Poetica. For a review of musicological perspectives on music and emotions from antiquity to the present, see Cook and Dibben, “Emotion in Culture and History.”

36 In the last 10 years this understanding has also gained institutional traction. For instance, the Australian Research Council now recognises music composition and musical performance as modes of Non-Traditional Research Output which can embody the creation of new knowledge. See, Australian Research Council, Excellence in Research for Australia, 45–50.

37 Small, Musicking, 2–9.