Musical codes in the works of Da Vinci and Caravaggio? Possible. But probably lost in translation. Scoring music was different, as well as the way instruments were strung and made. But, what seems apparent is both touch on the essence of counterpoint. A contrapuntal conception of music- like the Bach sonatas- an uneasy coexistence of contradictory and opposing forces which visually would sustain a narrative tension in the work, that is separate from our current concept of harmony. The melody derived from counterpoint is considered a horizontal concept: an idea of independent melodies that when integrated together create a consonance. There might be a perfection and beauty of an individual line isolated from the whole even though it is only part of that whole. The same idea can exist in art in a contrapuntal relationship between shape and form.
…”So, in the end, in this painting we see this young boy playing very “old” music using an “old” instrument. Yet he is doing something quite new : he is playing poyiphonic music all alone, probably accompanying himself with the instrument”…( Caravaggio )
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519, had many gifts, but one of them was for music. He composed music, spontaneously, improvising freely as he went – and presumably he recorded some of this. However, no written record of his music survives. So we may never know whether he was, in fact, a good composer, to add to all his other wonders.
---A group in New York is set to unveil a musical instrument devised – but never built - by Leonardo da Vinci. Enthusiasts have constructed a "viola organista" that, like a Renaissance one-man band, is designed to be played while walking. The viola organista has been built from drawings in the Codex Atlanticus, made around 1488. The 1,000-page set of notebooks covers everything from weaponry to plants, and the viola organista is just one of several musical instruments. Also known as a harpsichord-viola, it combines the bowed sound of a viola with a harpsichord. Though pianos did not exist in da Vinci's time, the viola organista offers the same advantage the piano has over the harpsichord – it can play chords.--- Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/dec/10/leonardo-da-vinci-designed-instrument
We do know however that he had a great reputation for being able to play ANY stringed musical instrument, at first sight, even if he had never encountered the particular type of instrument before. Though, his official instrument was the lyre, he was able to play others, too. Presumably, he was physically dextrous and so comfortable with music as an art, that he could respond to the opportunities and constraints of a new instrument well enough to coax adequate music from it.
So, not only could Leonardo da Vinci play an instrument – he had shown himself able to play any stringed instrument of his time. Read More:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2007/05/leonardo-da-vinci-musician.html
ADDENDUM:
---Music is closely linked to mathematics in terms of the rhythmic patterns a piece of music can employ. Leonardo understood this. In the painting of the Last Supper, it was recently discovered that the proportions of the Last Supper painting were mathematical in nature (apart from the use of a vanishing point), which derive themselves from the musical equation of 12:6:4:3. If measured in equal units, the paintings' size is 6 by 12 units. The back wall measures 4 units and the windows are 3 units. In terms of the musical equation, 6:12 represents an octave, 4:6 denotes a fifth and 3:4 is a fourth. Leonardo left clues to his thinking with the following quotes, 'resonance between visual and aural harmonies' which shows he saw a correlation between the two (painting and music) and 'offer praise to the harmonies of the universe' was used to signify his intention of using the equation proportion. Within the painting, music melds the harmonies of the paint and mathematics. --- Read More:http://www.leonardo-da-vinci-biography.com/leonardo-da-vinci-mathematician.html
An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting. “It sounds like a requiem,” Giovanni Maria Pala said. “It’s like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus.”
Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the “Last Supper” vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus’ last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ’s followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him. Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo’s painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work….
---As many musicians, art lovers and early music fans do already know, not only the immense Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted many times musical instruments and music performance scenes in his paintings ("Amor Vincit Omnia" , "The lute player" , "The musicians" just to mention a few), but he was so fastidious and meticulous about his idea of Reality, that the musical scores in his paintings have been recognized as existing music printed in those times (or, as in one of the two surviving copies of the
t;Lute Player", some decade ago). Valuable musicologists like Agostino Ziino or the late Franca Trinchieri Camiz succeeded in analyzing those scores in Caravaggio's paintings and nowdays we have a complete catalogue of those music that Caravaggio painted.--- Read More:http://www.antiquamusica.net/index.php/baroque/59-the-sound-of-caravaggio
…”Afterward, I didn’t hear anything more about it,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper.” In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues. Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.
This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo’s particular writing style. In his book — “La Musica Celata” (“The Hidden Music”) — Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note….
Read More:http://lishbuna.blogspot.com/2011/01/historia-e-uma-gaja-estranha-e-boa-amor.html . In terms of a coded visual language such as coding in Da Vinci or Caravaggio has probably been lost in translation long ago; and if it is there the true knowledge and experience is highly personal or individual and not meant for vulgarization ( Ray Tyler )
…The result is a 40-second “hymn to God” that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo’s time for spiritual music. A short segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage played on the organ. The tempo was almost painfully slow but musical. Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he had not seen Pala’s research but that the musician’s hypothesis “is plausible.” Read More:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21724485/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/leonardo-painting-has-coded-soundtrack/#.TmDcd6hJLfI
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