The inaudible music of the renaissance: from Marsilio Ficino to Robert Fludd

Abstract

This article revaluates the significance of musical treatises written by the Ficinian physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637). By reconsidering the implications of Fludd’s interpretation of Marsilio Ficino’s musical philosophy, I propose that his “reconstruction” of the Renaissance outlook in the seventeenth century is not merely a backward-looking oddity, but is rather indicative of a long-standing and pervasive history of inaudible music (i.e., the “silent” harmony of the universe and of the human body). Music played a central role in Fludd’s polemics with the scientists Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), regarding not the composition of art music but rather the understanding of the composition of the universe itself. The societal tensions evident in Fludd’s musical books reveal that it is not only musical practice but also broad scientific, medical, and philosophical conceptions of sound that comprise musical understanding in the early seventeenth century.