Overview
One of the most intriguing findings of the Research Project “Music Related Visual Sources of Switzerland from the Middle Ages to 1650” (project lead: Prof Dr Antonio Baldassarre) conducted at the School of Music of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts was the discovery of two quite similar early sixteenth-century canvases, one in the collection of the Musikmuseum - Historisches Museum Basel, the other in a private collection, located in Herrliberg, Zurich. Both provide an exuberant visual depiction of the Castalian Spring including a vast amount of Hellenic and
contemporary musical motifs and hence present a unique allegory of music.
Neither the canvases themselves nor their topical interrelationship and their cultural and socio historical contexts have been subject to comprehensive and comparative scholarship. The recent and painstaking restoration of the Basel painting that also resulted in new insights, and the willingness of the owner of the Herrliberg canvas to grant access to his painting, provide a unique opportunity to fill the mentioned research gap with a symposium in which experts of various research fields will gather to present their ideas and thoughts on the visual agendas and pictorial narratives as well as on the interrelationships and the cultural and socio-historical contexts of the
two paintings.
The interdisciplinary approach will seize opportunities of a methodologically and topically diverse approach and generate scholarly important insights about early sixteenth-century social, cultural, visual, and music culture(s).
From a broader perspective, the findings will form solid grounds for the critical assessment of hypothesis and theories on the interpretation and contextualization of sixteenth-century visual culture linked to musical content.
