Avison’s Analogies between Music and Painting

Part I, section II of Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (London: Lockyer Davis, 1775) treats of “the Analogies between Music and Painting.” The principles of painting are more widely understood than those of musical composition; so analogies with the former can provide a way into the latter (pp. 18–9).

1

“They are both founded in geometry, and have proportion for their subject.” “[V]ibrations of musical strings […] are as capable of mensuration, as any of those visible objects about which painting is conversant” (p. 19). Both the represented object of painting and the rendered structure of music are formal, i.e. mathematisable. Both are abstract, and variously realisable.

2

The “excellence” of a painting: “design, colouring, and expression” (ibid.). A lot has been made of the first two categories over the years: witness the disegno–colorito controversy in Renaissance painting. Avison seems to mean the represented form and the pigments used to represent it. One could generalise these to the divisions of the surface, and all the qualities of the divided—hue, intensity and value (light–dark and warm–cold).

A. W. Dow on Appreciation

We know from Plato (Republic, 601d–2a) that the “quality, beauty and fitness” (transl. Lee, 1974 [1955]) of an object, or its “excellence or beauty or rightness” (transl. Cornford, 1941)—or, better, its “excellence or virtue”—depends upon its use. Thus, an object’s user, having gained the most thorough acquaintance with it, best knows its use. Its manufacturer, wishing to make a good (“virtuous”) object, should consult its user; thereby, he comes to believe rightly about the object and its virtues.

Knowledge by acquaintance is proper to the user qua user, and (true) belief to the manufacturer qua manufacturer.

Nicolas Poussin provided the following definition of painting in a 1665 letter to the Sieur de Chambray:

C’est une Imitation faicte auec lignes et couleurs en quelque superficie de tout ce qui se voit dessoubs le Soleil, sa fin est la Délectation [Correspondance (Paris: Jean Schemit, 1911), p. 462].

Painting’s “end,” purpose, or use is delectation. Its user is the art lover, who delights in it. if a painter wishes to make a good painting, he must consult the art lover, its user. This inner dilettante, “inner critic,” or assimilation by maker-as-such of user-as-such—is, according to Arthur Wesley Dow, “the divine gift APPRECIATION” (Composition [New York: Doubleday, 1913], p.128).