La chouette et les oiseaux du clavecin de Nicolas Dumont – Paris, 1697

Résumé 0

Musical instruments with their place at court and in private mansions, French seventeenth century harpsichords were sometimes ornamented with a variety of paintings. Their soundboards featured flowers and birds inspired by vellums or by engravings. Distancing itself from this iconographic disposition, Nicolas Dumont’s harpsichord (Paris, 1697) highlighted a motif of an owl surrounded by birds. Its presence is reminiscent of highly prized artistic and literary works: ornaments on engravings, representations of concerts of birds, fables. It demonstrates the influence of easel painting on art objects as well as the rapprochement between artistic and literary domains. Evocative and ambivalent image painted on the vibrant part of the harpsichord, the owl invites us to place music in the aesthetic questions animating the end of the century.