Chapter four examines the Muses, the sole female divinities who are regularly depicted as musicians in the surviving visual material. The ambiguity inherent to their representation, where it is never clear whether they are goddesses or human women, allows for their bodies to become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities. Laferrière considers the images within their original contexts, including the domestic sphere, the cemetery, the sanctuary, and the symposium, to examine how the images invited their viewers to imagine the sounds of divine music and what effect this visualized music had upon the viewing audience. In each instance, she argues that the depictions of the Muses respond to the spaces in which they are encountered, so that their visual interpretation becomes inherently multivalent and malleable. When representations of the Muses are considered within a range of possible contexts of use, the vases make a powerful statement about the Muses: not only may they appear in any context or work through any female figure, but as divinities who are flexible in their visual representation, the Muses become visual forms capable of taking on multiple identities.

There is clearly a paradox at work here: how can sounds that are unheard, that are silent, be more pleasing to the ear than those that can be heard? In invoking this tension between the sounds of music and its corresponding visual representation, Keats points to the role of the imagination in the aesthetic experience of ancient Greek vase-painting. Images of musical performances are sweeter precisely because they cannot be heard. The audience must instead imagine the sounds, creating an infinite variety of melodic possibilities that emanate from the image. Permanently captured in a state of continued poetic performance, the pipes play on, repeatedly offering to the viewer the opportunity to imagine the acoustic sounds that fill the visual scene.

Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

Chapter three turns to scenes of Apollo Kitharoidos, the god most associated in contemporary scholarship with musical performance. In order to analyze how the surviving representations make visible Apollo’s music to the ancient viewer and how the god’s music is shown to have an effect on both his human and divine audience, Laferrière examines black- and red-figure vase-paintings that depict the god playing his lyre. Apollo’s powerfully affective music informs the scene’s composition, whether it is through the physical position of the figures, who direct their attention to the god’s music, or through the repetition of similar lines and forms among Apollo, his instrument, his audience, and the plants and animals that accompany him. She argues that the formal aspects of the composition can be discussed in terms of rhythmoi, symmetria, and harmonia, which are all integral concepts within ancient discussions of music and art theory. In making the sounds of Apollo’s music visible in this way, Laferrière shows that Apollo’s music has a unifying and harmonizing effect on those who listen to it, so that the music he plays both embodies and creates the harmonia with which he is associated.

Chapter two explores how we might develop a vocabulary for describing the appearance and effect of visual music by examining red-figure vases that depict Apollo simultaneously playing his lyre and pouring a libation. This synchronicity between the god’s two actions, one musical and the other ritual, demonstrates that his movements are rhythmic in a similar way to, or are even conditioned by, the sounds of his music, so that the images draw an implicit connection between divine music, rhythm, and ritual. Laferrière argues that the slow music that Apollo creates with one hand establishes a visual rhythm and musical pattern that are derived from the god’s body as well as the forms of the musical and ritual objects that he holds. For the ancient viewer, each image acts as an invitation to engage with its visualized musical rhythm, to hear imaginatively the sounds of the god’s music. In this interplay between visual image and imagined sound, and in one’s own participation in animating the god’s ritual, the viewer could experience the presence of Apollo in a moment of coordinated musical rhythm and harmony.

Chapter five focuses upon scenes of revels in which Dionysos is surrounded by the musical and danced performances of satyrs and maenads, the mythical beings who accompany him. Dionysos exhibits a distinct kind of musicality: unlike the other gods, Dionysos rarely plays an instrument himself. Rather, he acts as the source of inspiration for satyrs and maenads, prompting them to play their instruments, dance to the wild music they produce, and lose themselves, collectively, to the ecstatic sounds that envelop them. The movements of the satyrs and maenads also communicate to the external viewers how they might experience Dionysos’ presence. Within the symposium, ancient viewers created the opportunity for Dionysos to manifest when they consumed wine from the vases, looked at the representations of mythical revels, listened to music performed on similar instruments, and moved their bodies in response to the music they both saw and heard. Such immersive and imaginative seeing and hearing thus allowed the symposiasts to join in the divine revel, where, under the influence of Dionysos, they played instruments and danced with satyrs and maenads.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

Martin Luther’s monastic origins within the order of Augustinian Hermits present a curious case for historians of the Protestant Reformation. Seemingly following Luther’s theological leadership, this monastic order was overrepresented in the Reformation by numbers hugely disproportionate to its otherwise small size. Luther was joined in theological reform by his confrères Wenzeslaus Link, Johann Lang, Gabriel Zwilling, Richard Nangle, the Antwerp Augustinians – including Jakob Propst and Hendrik van Zütphen – Jean Chatelain, Michel d’Arande, Agostino Mainairdi da Piemonti, Guilio della Rovere, Ambrogo da Milano and Nicolo da Verona. So too was it the Augustinians who showed initiative in providing vernacular translations of the Bible in Germany, France and England. This trend is particularly curious given that the Augustinians were the only mendicant order directly founded by a pope, but which simultaneously housed voices so vehemently opposed to the papal office.

In England, the Austin Friars, as the order was known there, produced Robert Barnes, the only Lutheran Reformer in Henrician England. From the same priory as Barnes came Miles Coverdale, the renowned translator of the Bible and eventual bishop of Exeter. They were joined by George Browne, the institutional Reformer who functioned as a general visitor to the mendicant houses in the years leading up to their dissolution, and who later unsuccessfully transposed his evangelical vision to Ireland while there as archbishop of Dublin.