Frozen Music: Painting, Sculpture and Music in Romanticism.
It may have been Germaine de Stael who propagated the idea of architecture being “frozen music”, though the concept has been linked with other intellectuals such as the German philosopher Schiller.1 Eventually, the “frozen music” idea was extended to other branches of the arts such as painting and music; it was a romantic update of comparing the arts with each other, the paragone of the renaissance. Music appears at a time when the form is flowering with the appearance of musicians such as Beethoven and Berlioz. And there is the celebrity of the musician in this era too: artists such as the demon violinist Paganini were captured in art by Delacroix and David d’ Angers. Today, the relation between musicians and visual art may be of more interest to musicologists rather than art historians; but the link between music and the visual arts is an important facet of romanticism which should not be ignored. With the “frozen” in the phrase “frozen music”, one would have thought that sculpture would have been included in this conglomeration of the arts; but this specific art form suffered from faint praise, with the poet Baudelaire declaring it as “ennuyeuse” (boring) in one of his reviews. This accusation doesn’t stand up with sculptors of the quality of David d’Angers, his pupil Preault whose Slaughter (above) imaginatively uses the antique, the renaissance and heads from Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, and of course there were no-classicists like Thorvaldsen who kept sculpture, literally and figuratively, on its pinnacle.
1On the derivation of the concept, Honour, Romanticism, 119f.
Love this post! I always appreciate this kind of art. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Research Features Magazine | 03/16/2018 at 03:17 PM