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).
