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Musician tuning a Triangular Psaltery. Cappella Palatina: Nave ceiling, Muqarnas, Northeast corner unit, Panel 27.
Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
Figure 7. Musician tuning a Triangular Psaltery. Palermo, Cappella Palatina: Nave ceiling, Muqarnas, Northeast corner unit, Panel 27.
KING DAVID AND NABĪ DAʾŪD
The western end of the Sanctuary is replete with Solomonic references.
The western arch of the cupola rests upon a pair of spiral columns that evoked the columns of Boaz and Jachin at the entrance of the Temple.40
On the eastern face of that arch is represented the Presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple.41 King Solomon is figured on the western side of the drum, and King David on the eastern.42
The ceiling joins with the architecture and the mosaics adding, in the precise centre of the east side above the apex of the arch leading to the Sanctuary, a pair of lions in combat with serpentine dragons,
which not only guard the entry to the Sanctuary but also carry a reference to the two lions that stood beside Solomon’s throne.43
But it is with two adjacent panels that I wish to begin.
In the north-east corner of the ceiling, abutting the arch that leads to the Sanctuary,
a large rectangular panel in the second tier of the muqarnas is painted with a Musician tuning a Triangular Psaltery (Fig. 7).44
This instrument is unique in the ceilings and is very different from the rectangular psaltery played by five dancing girls (qiyān).45
Nor does it seem to occur elsewhere in early Islamic depictions of musicians.
It is to be distinguished both from the harp with a wide, richly decorated sound-box (ponticello) that is drawn on the so-called Siculo-Arabic painted ivory caskets,
and also from the similar (if not identical) harp played by musicians in the Islamic palatial cycle that appears in the ceiling of the Fāṭimid Western Palace in Cairo.46
Such harpists are always depicted with their instrument held vertically or inclined towards them, with the pillar towards the body, plucking the strings with both hands.47
The artist in the royal chapel has drawn the triangular psaltery with the top and one side forming a right angle and represented as two sides of a frame,
while the third and longest side is open and without a border.
Eight pegs project from the top, and eight double courses of strings run from them not, as one might expect, diagonally to the other side of the frame but vertically to the third open side.
There are no sound-holes, and it is not clear whether the instrument had a hollow box or merely a raised board.
No attempt has been made to show a bridge or any method of fastening the strings to the third side.
In short, an instrument of precisely the form drawn here could never have existed.
It is probable that the model that artist struggled to follow was intended to represent the triangular psaltery that Christian writers, from at least the time of Isidore of Seville,
had particularly associated with David the Psalmist.48
What appears to be the same instrument is given a variety of names in 12th century representations.
In the Hortus deliciarum, King David tunes a triangular psalterium dicitur decacordium (Fig. 8).
In the capital depicting King David and his Musicians in the cloister at Moissac, a standing figure playing a triangular instrument is identified as Name
(i.e. [H]eman reversed) cum rota.49
The painters of the ceilings were far more successful in depicting realistically the rectangular psaltery,
an instrument that clearly belonged to their organological repertoire and with which they may even have been personally familiar.
All this suggests strongly that the artist of this panel was unaccustomed to draw the triangular psaltery,
and reproduced the instrument not from his own stock repertoire but rather from a pictorial model that was new and unfamiliar to him.
The Musician tuning a Triangular Psaltery is depicted not playing but rather tuning the instrument, with his right hand turning the peg of the shortest string with a tuning lever,
while his left hand plucks the fourth string (Fig. 7).
He sits upon a curule chair (sella curulis), one of only two figures in the ceilings to do so.
In nearly all other respects, the figure is painted in the same style and composed according to the same iconographic formula as the other musicians in the ceilings.
He is bare headed, and there is nothing to suggest that the nimbus surrounding his head is anything but purely conventional.
His facial features are those of a young man, and are wholly in keeping with other male musicians in the muqarnas zone.50
His body is arranged in one of the standard poses for a musician — turned one quarter to the right and sitting with the right leg crossed over the left —
a pose that looks rather awkward when adapted to the curule chair and triangular psaltery.
He wears the long gown worn by other male musicians, in a plain, unpatterned fabric and without unusual decoration.
Only shoes, which are rarely depicted in the ceilings, distinguish his costume from that of other male musicians.
The usual trays bearing fruit and a wine-jug hover in the background, next to foliate sprigs.
The scene is enclosed by an elaborate inner polylobed frame of a type not infrequently employed to surround musicians, nudamāʾ
and other figures, in the large rectangular panels in the middle of all three muqarnas units.51
For all that, three anomalous elements — the triangular psaltery, the manner in which the musician does not play but rather tunes his instrument, and the curule chair
(sella curulis) upon which he is seated — are not found in earlier Islamic painting and were almost certainly drawn from a Romanesque model depicting King David tuning his Psaltery.
All three elements appear in that very scene in the Hortus deliciarum, as well as in in other 11th- and 12th-century examples (Fig. 8).52
52 For the various instruments played by David in Romanesque art, see I. Marchesin, L’image organum: la représentation de la musique dans les psautiers médiévaux 800–1200 (Turnhout 2000), 24–27.
For the act of tuning, compare fig. 7 with, for example, ibid., colour illus. F (Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, fonds L’Escalopier, MS 2, fol. 115v: Psalter, Angers, mid-11th century) and illus. 16 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. MS 343, fol. 12v: Psalter, Milan, late 10th century), 29 (Pommersfelden, Schlossbibliothek, Codex 334 (2776), fol. 148b: Bible, Cologne, c. 1100).
For the curule chair: Johns, ‘Pitture’ (as n. 4), III Schede, 600; Kapitaikin, ‘Twelfth-Century Paintings’ (as n. 37), 122 and 475.
Romanesque artists usually seat King David upon a throne, but often instead place him on a curule chair, e.g. Marchesin, L’image organum, as above, illus. 18 (Klosterneuburg bei Wien, Stiftsbibliothek, CCL. 987, fol. 11v: Bible, Franconia, late 9th or early 10th century) and 39 (Mantua, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 340 (C.III.20), fol. 1v: Psalter, San Benedetto Po, c. 1125); see also the relief panel from the portal of the chapter house of Notre-Dame la Daurade, Toulouse (3rd atelier; c. 1165–75), now in the Musée des Augustins, K. Horste, Cloister Design and Monastic Reform in Toulouse: The Romanesque Sculpture of La Daurade (Oxford 1992), pl. 198.
However, the curule chair was known in medieval Islam: J. Sadan, Le Mobilier au proche Orient médiéval (Leiden 1976), 131–33.
In Islamic painting of the early 13th century, it is particularly associated with royalty: a curule chair serves as the throne for Badr al-Dīn Luʾluʾ in frontispieces of the Cairo and Istanbul Kitāb al-Aghānī (Cairo, Dār al-Kutub, 579 adab, vol. IV, fol. 2a, Baghdad, AH614/1217–1218AD: B. Farès, Une miniature religieuse de l’école arabe de Bagdad: son climat, sa structure et ses motifs, sa relation avec l’iconographie chrétienne d’Orient, Mémoires de l’Institut d’Egypte no. 51 [Cairo 1948], pl. XI; and Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah
Efendi 1566, fol. 1b, Mosul, c. 1218–19; R. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting [Geneva 1962], 65), while the three examples of curule chairs illustrated in the early-13th-century Cairene Kalīla wa-Dimna (Bibliothèque nationale, MS Arabe 3465, fols 15b, 77a, 83a) — all serve as thrones.
For other Romanesque comparanda with fig. 7, see also the image of a young musician tuning his harp-psaltery, representing the first musical mode, from the late-11th- or early-12th-century Gradual of St-Etienne of Toulouse, British Library, Harley MS 4951, fol. 295v; H. Steger, David Rex et Propheta (Nuremberg 1961), pl. 19.3 and good colour image at <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=22906> [accessed 03/05/2015].
Source: Jeremy Johns, Muslim Artists and Christian Models in the Painted Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina
Continued in an Arabic Scribe in The Painted Wooden Ceiling of the Palatine Chapel (Cappella Palatina).
Musician tuning a Triangular Psaltery before restoration
ISL 14999
Back to Page 7, The Painted Wooden Ceiling of the Palatine Chapel
