Smithsonian Associates: Art Meets Music – A Duet of Visual Artists and Composers, Lecture 2 – Symbols and Allegories: Art’s Hidden Musical Codes

Music and the visual arts have always walked hand in hand. For millennia, artists have obsessed about how to represent music’s invisible beauty, just as composers have sought to render art’s vibrant colors in pure sound.

Popular speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin leads a fascinating exploration into the intimate relationship between the visible and invisible arts and how music can literally bind the arts together.

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Humans have been playing music for more than 40,000 years and images of us with our instruments abound from Neolithic times onwards. From intimate family portraits to massive historical, religious, and allegorical artworks, music and musicians are embedded throughout the history of art. Many of these works contain secret codes that contemporary viewers would have understood. Franklin interprets glorious paintings by artists such as Lippi, Vermeer, and Hogarth and offers music that would have been performed at the time.