Caravaggio e i suoi seguaci a Napoli (1600-1650), by Filomena Pascarella

The main topic of this essay is the study of Caravaggio's paintings through musical iconography, analyzing above all the musical aspect. I thought it appropriate to begin this work by referring to the various studies conducted on the iconographic discipline, a very recent discipline that deals with analysis and investigation of works of art without underestimating the relationship with music and the organological apparatus, therefore the various musical instruments and scores that emerge in the works of art. The expression musical iconography indicates the whole apparatus of illustrations and means the discipline that historically studies and analyzes images with musical content in order to document the biography of a musician, particular aspects of the culture of an era, organological characteristics of musical instruments, or to highlight relationships between these images and the cultural context to which they belong. Especially in the last decades of the twentieth century it has undergone a process of gradual transformation of musical iconography into a specific musicological discipline. Starting from the late Middle Ages very often the works were represented in a not very truthful way because most of the time the artists who represented these images did not have a direct relationship with the musical instrument, they were not musicians but they painted the musical instrument like any other object , often making changes and thus giving rise to a thousand doubts about the actual congruence of the same. The climax occurs above all between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century where there is a flowering of images.