Dalle ‘Isole dell’Arcipelago’ alle corti italiane : immagini musicali dai taccuini di viaggio di Ciriaco d’Ancona

Musical images moving through ages and spaces: from Cyriacus of Ancona’s travel diaries to the early Renaissance Italian courts. An essential role in the humanistic rediscovery of themes and figures of antiquity was played by the humanist traveller Cyriacus of Ancona (1391-1450), who visited the main centres of the Mediterranean (from Egypt to Anatolia, from Athens to Thrace and the North Aegean Islands) looking for historical evidence of the ancient Greek civilization. Sketches from monuments and archaeological finds gathered by Cyriacus in his lost notebooks gave an extraordinary impulse (still to be thoroughly investigated) to the creation of ‘all’antica’ images. Of particular interest from the perspective of a history of early Renaissance musical imagery are those related to the main ancient musical myths. This paper will focus on the peculiar cases of two images copied by Cyriacus during his travels in the North Aegean Sea and in Samothrace. Circulating through copies, misunderstandings and subsequent interpretations, and after a complex dynamic of transmission and variation of iconographic patterns and meanings, these images gave rise to new visual representations of Mercury as a musician and of the dancing Muses. Both these ‘new’ musical icons, adopted by Andrea Mantegna in his Parnassus to symbolize the reign of Harmony in the court of Mantua, were to become amongst the most represented musical myths of the Renaissance.