Music iconography and innovation in the decoration of painted ceilings in the 15th-century Iberian peninsula

Abstract

The Italian Renaissance was highly influential in the development of iconography in the Iberian Peninsula in the later 15th and 16th centuries. Musical iconography, in particular, was enriched by the presence of Italian musical instruments and by instruments from Greek and Roman Antiquity, as represented by Renaissance artists. These changes were accompanied by a humanist ideology that allowed a symbolic interpretation of these representations through a Renaissance prism. The recently uncovered fresco painted in the vault of the main altar of Valencia Cathedral is an outstanding example of this new trend in Hispanic art: beyond its religious content and context, it evokes the courtly power of its artists' patron, Rodrigo Borgia, the future Pope Alexander VI.