'Dipingere il suono'. Représenter la musique à l' époque de Rubens.

The iconographic landscape of the early modern time between the glimpse of the sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century - coinciding with the flourishing of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) - is dominated by the figurative representations of music in all its dimensions : from the cosmic principles governing the laws of the universe, to the personification of Music as a discipline and as a powerful magical force able to create prodigious effects, to the portraits of professionals, amateurs and popular musicians singing and playing all kind of instruments. This paper proposes an excursus through the galaxy of thems, symbolic forms and meanings overlapping in these multivarious and sonorous images, providing us with an extrahordinary mirror of new performance practices and social functions of music, but also of the main aesthetic trends and musical tastes of the so called ‘age of Rubens’.