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Through the Ears to the Soul: Female Musicians in Seventeenth-Century Painting
Sternbach, Jessica Sara
Sternbach, Jessica Sara
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2025-05
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Art History
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Sternbach_temple_0225E_16100.pdf
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https://doi.org/10.34944/jaer-8103
Abstract
“Through the Ears to the Soul: Female Musicians in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting” examines representations of music-making featuring female musicians to demonstrate how visual and aural elements interweave to create an emotional and physiological experience for a seventeenth-century audience. Art historians have analyzed these paintings in the past but have tended to focus on the visual sphere and either an iconographical or descriptive realist interpretation of the scenes, often favoring a male perspective. Building from feminist analysis, this dissertation reconstructs the experiences of Dutch early modern women both as subjects and viewers. As intersensorial analysis demonstrates, sight was not the only sense artists could call upon to tempt a female buyer or sustain the attention of a female owner. Dutch women looking into these painted worlds would recognize the repetitious elements of their social performance or find their minds transgressing invisible mental, special, or social boundaries from the sanctity of the domestic space where they had recognizable – if regulated – agency. The reimagined sounds of music, visually encapsulated by paintings, activated the mind and body of the viewer, as they moved “through the ears to the soul.” Breaking through the painted surface to the performance of the musicians highlights the embodied connection female audiences would have experienced in the early modern period while simultaneously inviting modern audiences to engage with these works in a new and more authentic way.
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