EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

A Musical Note and Letters

It's a red-letter day for Raphael. I have been showing a lot of letters recently, how Raphael and Renoir each used objects shaped like an R, how Manet and Matisse used M’s and Ingres used an I. And I doubt before this evening that anyone has ever shown that the Virgin in Raphael's great masterpiece The Sistine Madonna (above) also forms a giant R. Was it too large to see? Yet there are examples by a dozen more artists on EPPH under the theme Letters in Art. Painters, though, are not alone. When the composer José Bevia received a commission a few years ago, he said he followed the tradition of several Baroque masters. He structured his piano duet, Three Enigmas (2009), around the names of the two pianists Ferdy Tumakaka and Noriko Suzuki whose names were already combined in their professional identity, the Ferdiko Piano Duo. (Note for musicians: Bevia used F, E, Eb, D, B for Ferdy and A#, B, D#, E, D, Bb for Noriko.)¹

Many artists, whether literary, visual or musical, love word- and letter-play because their creative minds are often homospatial. That means the ability to layer one idea, or form, on top of another. Puns are the most obvious example.² Yet, in representing their own minds, poetic letter-games are often self-referential. Johann Sebastian Bach used notes and keys to weave the letters B, A, C, H into his composition, The Art of the Fugue.³ Although Maurice Ravel’s attraction to the 3-note figure E-B-A has long been known, musicologists only recently recognized that, when translated into French sounds, they become mi-si-la, a homonym for one of his dearest friends, Misia Sert. They then realized that in La Valse he interlinked those letters with an extra A and E which they suspect is a coded reference to the vowels of his own name, RAVEL.⁴ They must be right because I discovered years ago that artists paint not just their initials but, on occasion or perhaps even often, only one or two letters. Edouard Manet used M-N-T or sometimes just M-T, as I will show one day. John Wilmerding suggests that the contemporary artist Robert Indiana has done the same with the letters I-N-D.⁵

The link between musical and pictorial practice is deeper than letters though. Just as God’s creation of the cosmos becomes a metaphor in the poetic painter’s mind for their own creation, so it is in a composer’s mind too. Elizabeth Sacks has noted that musical suites in the Renaissance were written in sets of six because, apparently, they were intended to parallel the Deity’s six-day creation of Earth.⁶ James Gaines puts it slightly differently, that in the Renaissance “the learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself.”⁷ And that, translated visually, has long been the work of a poetic painter too. Raphael’s mind in the masterpiece above is the Virgin who has conceived and created (read, painted) human perfection itself, Christ.

 

1. Performance notes from Merkin Concert Hall at Kauffman Center, Manhattan, Jun. 20, 2009.

2. Albert Rothenberg, “Homospatial Thinking in Creativity”, Archives of General Psychiatry 33, 1976, pp. 17-26

3. James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Harper Collins) 2005, p. 250

4. James M. Keller, "Ravel Encoded Music", Playbill (Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City), December 2011, p.43

5. John Wilmerding, Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-Expression in American Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press) 2003, p. 73

6. Elizabeth Sacks, Shakespeare’s Images of Pregnancy (New York: St. Martin’s Press) 1980, p.117, n.23

7. James R. Gaines, op. cit., p. 47