Ornament and the theories of the arts in the Renaissance

Abstract

The thesis is an interdisciplinary study concerned with the understanding of ornament and the relationships between the arts in the Renaissance, as they are disclosed by a richer understanding of ornament in this period. The work entailed study of rhetorical, literary and artistic theory in this period, as well as the more general speculations of music theory {i.e. concerning musica universalis) and the ancient philosophical sources, whether mediated through Roman rhetorical culture or “recovered” such as the Platonic corpus translated by Ficino. The work is articulated in three large sections, which take for their principal themes music and poetry, rhetoric, culminating with the discussion of emblematics, and decorated architecture. One moves back, in a sense, from the enactment of the union of music and poetry in the Florentine intermedi of 1589, with which we start out, through the discourses in which the relation of word and image, to the setting in which these relations were set forth; the role of theatre as a central setting and topos is a sustained theme of the argument. The work demonstrates the fiindamental importance of understanding rhetorical meditations on figura and locus and philological preoccupations with the nature of historical meaning in approaching theoretical discussions of the visual arts; it also works constantly with the paradigmatic status of music as both universal harmony and consummate art of moving expression, and with the conjunction of body and soul in the emblem, like music founded in the meeting of contraries conceived in terms of likeness and unlikeness, or form and matter. We look both at unmediated conjunction of the two and the continuum of mediation, articulated in Platonic philosophy and vulgarisations thereof, this continuum underpinning the seven liberal arts and the structure of many Renaissance decorative schemes.