The Artistic Decoration of Organ Shutters: Hearing and Seeing Redemption in the Renaissance

In the cultural system of the Renaissance, music was never conceived of only as a practical discipline or a simple form of entertainment. It was a deeply intellectual activity able to connect a single individual to the universe and to God. Church organs had an important task in this regard, for they played a privileged role among musical instruments when it came to liturgy. The essay examines these dynamics through an art-historical analysis of organ shutters, and, in particular, their decoration. Shutters quite literally occupied the ground between music and painting. Their unique position gave distinctive characteristics to these peculiar paintings, turning them into something that differed from other artistic representations in churches, like altarpieces or devotional sculptures. The essay examines the paintings on organ shutters from the end of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in order to determine what the use and decoration of these shutters might tell us about how relationships between music and religion generally were conceptualized in the Renaissance. Might these material objects, quite literally suspended between two leading art forms, be useful tools for opening new questions in the study of Renaissance religions? Looking to aesthetics, musicology, and material culture, this essay aims to offer an interdisciplinary examination of an overlooked art form that may help us reconstruct the complex sixteenth-century religious world.