The first volume from Brepols's Music and Visual Culture series brings together an impressive group of scholars in a collection of essays exploring an array of inter-media relationships that span well beyond composition and imagery. For those keeping up with recent scholarship on music and visual art, many of the authors published herein will be familiar from their monographs – Simon Shaw-Miller's Eye hEar the Visual in Music (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), Annette Richards's The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Thomas Tolley's Painting the Cannon's Roar (Burlington: Ashgate, 2001). As editors Eisen and Davison note in their concise Introduction, the number of studies that focus specifically on the intersections between music history and art history is small. However, taking a broader view – understanding the field as ‘visual culture’ instead of the more restrictive ‘art history’ – expands the body of literature available for consultation. (As the editors use the terms ‘visual culture’, ‘art form’ and ‘visual art’ interchangeably (1), it is difficult to know exactly how they define the limits of the field.)

The opening chapter, written by Zdravko Blažeković, explores the ‘Wunderkammer’ of ancient-instrument images found in Charles Burney's General History of Music (London: author, 1776). Blažeković discusses various sources used as inspiration for these engravings, including artwork and instrument specimens studied at Herculaneum and Pompeii during Burney's Italian sojourn. He also considers popular reception and the longer-term influence of Burney's organological iconography, highlighting the power of interpretation and misrepresentation in historical imagery. The following chapter, by Alan Davison, steps away from visual culture and delves into the fascinating disassociation of music and poetry, as described in John Brown's A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Powers, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London: Davis and Reymers, 1763). Briefly discussing James Barry's painting Orpheus (1777–1784, also used as the book's cover image), Davison focuses on Brown's arguments relating ‘to historical and social causes for music's change and relative importance through history and between societies’ (59), placing Brown's ideas in the context of his musical work (such as the oratorio The Cure of Saul).

In chapter 3 Thomas Tolley explores a possible relationship between large-scale paintings by the Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens and Mozart's early education during his childhood European tours. A large part of this research centres on Leopold Mozart's experience, and implies that his viewing of art, personal relationships to artists and family travels suggest a means of connecting the visual arts to Mozart's precocious creative ability to express deep human emotion. Although the direct influence of Rubens's work on Mozart's output (or education) is largely conjecture, Tolley provides an admirable exploration of eighteenth-century education that offers avenues for future study. The following chapter suggests a more direct link between music and painting – Annette Richards offers an engaging consideration of gaze and female form as depicted in Naked Woman and Woman Playing a Piano (1799–1800) by Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli) and the 1799 display of Titian's Venus, Cupid and the Lute Player (1555–1565). Richards pertinently notes that Füssli's work reflected ‘a contemporary culture imbued with anxiety about the visuality of music and, especially, of musical performance by women’ (114). She considers musical scenes and images of performance, with a focus on the containment of women at music. Also discussed are gender expectations in both ‘factual and fictional accounts of music’ (114), as found in Gothic literature and reports on performance practice from near the turn of the nineteenth century.

Keith Chapin's study of German publications on music serves as a cornerstone for the book, explaining eighteenth-century thoughts on the connection, competition and separation between aural and visual art. Chapin's essay is beautifully researched and clearly presented; he leads the reader through the shifting place of art in eighteenth-century discourse, with ‘men of letters’ such as Friedrich Rochlitz functioning as part of a ‘professional culture in which writers on music stressed its immateriality and ineffability’ (123). The move away from physical representation of the body and a lessening of emphasis on spectacle reflected the separation of music from sensory culture, and enforced the principle that music was a divine art. Also considered is the focus placed on the temporality of music by writers such as Moses Mendelssohn, along with the various ways in which distinctions were drawn between musical and visual spheres. Chapin arms the reader with an understanding of the separation and interactions between the arts during a momentous period of musical development, poignantly noting that ‘Never do musicians work in the dark, appealing to the ear alone and avoiding the eye of all’ (152).

Nancy November considers the title-pages to various Mozart publications that appeared both during his lifetime and posthumously through to the early nineteenth century. She investigates marketing techniques and paratexts as part of a complex transaction between composer, performer and reader, also attending to canon formation during this time. Her essay explores the role of Mozart's œuvre in the evolution of print culture through examining text font, lithographs and vignettes. She argues that imagery held strong significance during the creation of a posthumous ‘view’ of Mozart's music and his rising mythological status. Addressed as well are hidden puzzles, political messages and visual trickery within music editions; importantly, November notes how ‘verbal and visual elements of title pages could be used directly or indirectly’ to appeal to specific and ever-evolving markets (170). Vanessa Esteve Marull's concise chapter also examines print culture, focusing on the monarchical processions in eighteenth-century Catalonia captured in the richly illustrated Máscara Real (Barcelona, 1764). This book, with illustrations by Francesc Tramilles, was published to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the arrival of Carlos III in Barcelona in 1759. Marull considers a broad range of art and sensory experience in relation to the social and hierarchical transformations of mid-century Barcelona during public celebrations. This included architectural decoration, musical celebration and a presentation of the city itself as a mythical Arcadia.

Cliff Eisen's work on Mozart portraiture is a highlight of the book – his meticulously researched discussion of likeness and authenticity deals with the problematic ideals of appearance, essence and biography that Mozart's image conveys. Eisen aptly notes that the eighteenth-century ‘distinction between authenticities of provenance and substance seems to have been lost in recent discussions of Mozart portraiture’ (186) and that differing opinions existed in the posthumous use and interpretation of the composer's likeness. Exploring Johann Georg Sulzer's ideas on portraiture and contemporary arguments on likeness and verisimilitude opens a wonderful array of possibilities for future study of representation within imagery – regardless of connection to music or musicians – and is an impressive contemplation on what is seen, and what is wanted to be seen.

The final chapter, by Simon Shaw-Miller, ventures into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the study of Beethoven and image. Shaw-Miller notes that Beethoven's image ‘has achieved a mythical status, one that is invulnerable to empirical data, unshaken by fact’ owing to the role it plays ‘outside the day-to-day prosaic incidents of his, and our, life’ (201). He explores Beethoven's character and musical output widely with images that span from a Charles Schulz Peanuts comic strip (1952) to the Beethoven bust in Josef Danhauser's Liszt at the Piano (1840) to Gary Oldman as Beethoven in the film Immortal Beloved (1994).

Producing scholarship on the act of ‘seeing’ is a challenging task on its own; mixing sight and sound, or music and visual culture, is even more challenging, particularly in an eighteenth-century context where imagination and elegant conjecture must be employed creatively and convincingly. In this sense, Music and Visual Culture is successful. Well researched and thoughtfully compiled, the book offers readers a gateway to the numerous ways in which music and visual elements can coexist. However, it is disappointing that a book devoted to the acts of ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ fails to use colour images beyond the cover page – the numerous greyscale illustrations included certainly provide valuable context but filter out much of the artists’ intended expression and impact. Some readers may take issue with this, particularly those deeply engaged in art history or in discussion about the nature of ‘sight’ and ‘sound’ as experienced through natural philosophical study and debate.

This diverse collection of essays is a valuable resource for musicologists, eighteenth-century specialists and European art enthusiasts interested in collaborative artistic processes. Readers looking for a book more directly centred on the connection of music to visual art may find the text lacking in focus: its contents take a broad view, using an idea of ‘visual culture’ that goes well beyond traditionally defined artistic media. Rather, it challenges readers to consider what elements constitute visual culture during the late eighteenth century – how artforms potentially interacted, how gender affected what was seen, how music's ‘image’ was manipulated for political and marketing purposes, how desires shaped portraiture. These remarkable questions will surely inspire future discussion of music in relation to visual media and enable us better to reimagine the symbiotic relationship between ‘looking’ and ‘listening’ in the eighteenth century.