Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone and I Fagiolini: Painting vs Music

After his death, Leonardo da Vinci’s thoughts on the arts, scattered across various manuscripts, were brought together in A Treatise on Painting (1651). 1 Making up part of this book is Paragone , literally a “comparison” (of the arts). The desire to compare and rank art forms was typical of the competitive spirit of Leonardo’s time. In their pursuit of perfection, Renaissance artists competed not only with each other but also with their predecessors: the artists of Ancient Greece and Rome. But, ultimately, the pre-eminent aesthetic principle of naturalism pitted all art against true perfection: nature. 2 In Paragone , Leonardo awards painting (the “grandchild of Nature” 3 ) the highest rank. Painting’s physical presence and durability allows the viewer to study it at leisure, becoming increasingly engrossed. Leonardo terms this a harmony of proportions . Music, on the other hand, is attributed a lower status because it is temporal. Leonardo compares the act of listening to music to only gradually revealing a painting — where each previously painted part is covered up (through forgetfulness) so that the work is never seen in its entirety. 4 In the modern landscape of the arts, it is less common to view music and painting as competitors. In a recent concert at the Barbican (“Leonardo da Vinci: Shaping the Invisible”, presented by Leonardo expert Martin Kemp), the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini marked the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death by performing complementary choral works, as a selection of Leonardo’s paintings played on a large screen. 5 The performance highlights the irony of Paragone . While Leonardo had asserted that music was inferior to visual art, the concert demonstrated that music, in fact, only served to enhance Leonardo’s oeuvre.

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