Describing musical features in still life photos from the Zeri Photo Archive formed part of a broad research project on musical iconography in art from the late 16th to the 18th century. In this we liaised with the Cultural Heritage Department and its Musical Imagery Archive.
The project sets out first to complete the census of instruments and sheet music figuring in paintings and, where possible, identify the artist’s probable source (instruments and scores, printed or manuscript).
A general introduction to the project and its possible ramifications is to be found in the essay Percorsi musicali nel nucleo Natura morta della Fototeca Zeri which appeared in the volume La natura morta di Federico Zeri.
A preliminary exploration of the corpus of musical images figuring in the Zeri Photo Archive led to a photographic exhibition, Musica da vedere, in which identifiable sheet music or scores were matched by printed exemplars (largely from the Bologna International Music Museum and Library) where these might be usefully compared. Curated by Nicoletta Guidobaldi and Francesca Mambelli, the exhibition was mounted in October 2013 as part of Artelibro.
Cataloguing musical iconography in photos of paintings is still in progress: it is being coordinated by Nicoletta Guidobaldi with collaboration from Francesco Panni and Angela Venturino (who have identified and supplied fact-sheets for music occurring in trompe l’oeils), as well as from Gaia Prignano.
The new fact-sheets and any updates thereto will gradually be uploaded onto the database. The plan is to create links between identified instrument/score images and possible sources (instruments and scores); they will be accessible online from the websites of the main national and international museums.