When the Picture Bursts Out Singing: An Essay on Multimedia and Intermediality
When the Picture Bursts Out Singing: An Essay on Multimedia and Intermediality

Summary/Abstract: In 1971 I attended a church concert for the first time. It was a performance of G. F. Händel’s Messiah in the Church of Our Lady in my hometown of Aalborg, Denmark. Little did I know that not only the four soloists and the choir were singing. Behind the audience in the pews, an epitaph was silently occupied with its own song performance. Years later I learned that the painting had been copied from a 16th-century print by Jan Sadeler of the southern Netherlands, The Adoration of the Holy Lamb, displaying the musical score of the four voices of Renaissance cantus firmus. This motif and its genre are the focus of this essay on the probability of paintings bursting out in song. Can paintings sing? Not literally, but they can perform and interact with their viewers and with sister arts. The essay is a meditation on art, the power of the image, the function of pictures, text and image, and the limits of pictorial representation.

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