Musical Landscape. Correspondences between Music and Painting in Germany of the Early Nineteenth Century

For many German writers, toward the end of the Eighteenth Century, natural landscape is interwoven with religion, painting and music. Harmonic disposition of threes, foliage, light and shadow is interpreted as a kind of musical score we can listen with the «inner ear». The topic is very diffused in literature (for ex.: Fr. H. Jacobi, Eduard Allwills Briefsammlung, 1775-1792; W. Heinse, Ardinghello, oder die glückseeligen Inseln, 1787; K. Ph. Moritz, Anton Reiser, 1785-1790; Fr. Schiller, Über Matthissons Gedichte, 1794; C. L. Fernow, Über Landschaftsmalerei, 1803; Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 1798) and strong influenced the contemporary painting. This paper aims to investigate some pictorial approaches to this topic: the musical landscape of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) and the music “arabesque” painting of Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810). In the first case the main subject of the painting is the natural landscape, more or less populated by musical elements, such as instrument players or so on; in the second it is pursued the harmonic (and musical, indeed) disposition of decorative elements.