Angels in Florentine Iconography and Trecento Musical Performance

Abstract

<p>Over the last sixty years there has been debate about the meaning of angels holding musical instruments in Trecento painting. Some regard them as simply symbols of heavenly music" others argue that payments are documented to instrumentalists 'when they made like (<i>fecerunt</i>) angels'. To resolve this issue I have used the quasi-complete catalogue of all Trecento paintings compiled by the late Howard Mayer Brown as a basic data set of images, and two inventories derived from Trecento literature, one of the names of musical instruments, the other of musical 'activities' and generic names of musical performance. From these three sources, I hoped to document musical instruments in pictures, payment records, contemporary chronicles, imaginative literature and music theory treatises.</p>