St Cecilia's Halo: Music, Sex and Death in Victorian Painting. Now on Kindle

'Music has become the modern art’, Macmillan’s Magazine, July 1876

Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Leighton and Whistler: four radical Victorian artists, who embraced the idea of painting music. They understood that music suggested many meanings to Victorian audiences: spirituality, sex, death. The slippery nature of its symbolism made it attractive to Aesthetic artists. Musical subjects, often combined with seductive images of women, sidestepped the constraints of narrative and moral frameworks. Even conventional subjects, like the figure of St. Cecilia, could be subverted, to create new and troubling works of art. In the 1850s, music was usually signified by esoteric props: organs, psalteries, flutes. But as musical ideas started to suffuse the concrete arts of painting and design, so music stopped being a collection of unexpected objects, and became the subject.

This study offers a fresh reading of familiar Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic images from 'The Golden Stairs' to 'The Awakening Conscience'. By analysing the music in these paintings, we suddenly see connections between works that look, on the surface, so different. Music links Leighton's sensual classicism, Rossetti's medieval fantasies, Burne-Jones's androgynous beauties and Whistler's colour-harmonies.

Rossetti, Whistler and their Aesthetic colleagues recognised that realism was a cul-de-sac. Instead art should glimpse a space where all senses were satisfied, where nature, for once, sang in tune. As music did not try to replicate the real or the visible, it offered the ideal pretext for exploring a landscape of the imagination.

Read the full work on Kindle now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/St-Cecilias-Halo-Victorian-ebook/dp/B00873GPNS