Portrait by the Master of the Countess of Warwick, 1550s.
I was asked to examine the musical elements of an English family group portrait painted by the anonymous Master of the Countess of Warwick on behalf of the Weiss Gallery in London. Work with my musicological colleague Kerry McCarthy began with the expectation that the partbooks held in the hands of the children would yield an English motet, perhaps by Thomas Tallis or William Byrd, with the hope that there may be some hidden meaning that would point towards identification of the painting. To our surprise the motet was by Josequin des Prez, a composer whose potential influence in England has been hard to pin down. With the enormous amount of scholarly attention that has been focussed on this important composer of the Renaissance there is something deliciously ironic about finding such central evidence of his influence in the hands of a thirteen year old boy. More can be read about this painting on my research blog here.
Connoissership at Oxford University.
For the academic world there are deep problems that arise from historic artefacts that are untethered from a record of provenance, and the violin is
