Variations on a Theme: The Renaissance in Art and Music
On campus
Evening Study
Dr Matteo Chirumbolo and Tamsin Lewis
5 evening seminars on campus at Vernon Square over 5 weeks at 18:30 to 21:00, from Wednesday 4 November to Wednesday 2 December 2026, with an integral course visit on Saturday 28 November 2026.
£465
Course Description
Music and the visual arts were related disciplines throughout the Renaissance period. While practitioners often moved freely between both art forms, audiences could experience visual and musical spectacles simultaneously in both ecclesiastical and courtly or domestic settings. The disciplines themselves often moved in complementary directions, whether making use of parallel frameworks for composition, or even borrowing characteristics from the other to stimulate the senses, and thereby enhancing the persuasive qualities of a work. Renaissance theoreticians were fascinated by the similarities and divergences between art and music, debating their relative merits and building on classical traditions that posited a hierarchy of the senses.
This course will explore the cultural contexts of music and artmaking, and of aural and visual experience, in the Renaissance. It will examine parallel themes in both art forms and the ways in which these were consumed. How was the theme of love treated in art and music? In what ways did painters, architects and musicians contribute to the staging of such magnificent courtly weddings as that of Cosimo I de’ Medici to Eleonora of Toledo in 1539? How did art and music come together within the Basilica of San Marco in Venice? And can the emergence of triangular forms in art and the triad in music be considered parallel phenomena with the mutual goal of producing harmony? We shall look at marriage chests, drawings, illuminated choir books, mosaics and paintings; we shall examine madrigals, consort songs, canticles, and musical techniques such as word painting. Collections visits and live musical performances will allow course participants to ground classroom learning in first-hand experience.
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Lecturer's Biographies
Dr Matteo Chirumbolo completed his PhD at the Courtauld in 2024, where he previously taught on the BA and MA programmes. His thesis interrogates issues such as the meaning and ‘translation’ of style, and strategies of self-fashioning and memorialisation in early Renaissance northern and central Italy. Matteo has worked as Postdoctoral Associate Researcher at the University of Cambridge (2024-2026) as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Renaissance Objects and Spaces of Encounter’, contributing to the redisplay of the Renaissance galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum. He held a predoctoral fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (2020-2023), and collaborates regularly as researcher with museums and private galleries in Italy and the UK.
Tamsin Lewis FSA FRHistS is a musician and historian, specialising in the early modern era. She studied violin at the Florence Conservatoire before reading Classics and Italian at Oxford, and has written on early modern music and society. Tamsin directs Passamezzo, an established early music ensemble known for their ability to bring historical events to life through engaging performance and programming. She has also written, arranged, directed and played music for theatre productions and events at a variety of venues from Shakespeare’s Globe to the streets of Marrakech, and has collaborated with theatre and dance historians and practitioners to reconstruct Renaissance entertainments.
Tamsin has extensive experience working in film and television, as a presenter, performer and consultant, with recent work including Firebrand, A Discovery of Witches,Becoming Elizabeth, Lucy Worsley’s 12 Days of Tudor Christmas, and Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family. She is currently working on the Greensleeves Project, a multidisciplinary collaboration examining aspects of clothing and material culture in Tudor and Stuart music and song.