Josquin’s Ave Maria and Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch 

Josquin’s opening leap of a fourth in the highest voice. We are suddenly looking up. Ave Maria (Hail to Mary). Raphael paints her so beautifully she must be divine. Beauty equals God in the Renaissance. That’s how they interpreted Plato. That’s how they interpreted this world, too.  Raphael’s flowers, trees, and distant mountains an exquisitely nuanced altarpiece. His Madonna a perfect pyramid of symmetry where John balances Christ, trees balance trees, clouds balance clouds . . . Josquin’s music, too, balanced and symmetrical. All four voices equal, mathematically ordained, beautiful and graceful, from high to low. In his first three settings of Latin phrases (Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, Dominus Tecum) Josquin’s subtle, expressive word painting is imitated in succession in all four voices, a technique called points of imitation. For Gratia plena (full of grace), Josquin’s descending stepwise motion is as graceful as the curve of Mary’s shoulders, the subtle curve of her arm as it reaches towards Christ. These curves flow back and forth between sky (or heaven) and the rock (nature’s throne) Mary sits on. Her solemn joy fills the heaven and earth in Josquin’s music as voices keep rising and rising and lifting our bodies our spirits our love of Renaissance music and Renaissance art till heaven and earth are one. Madonna after Madonna in Raphael. Motet after motet in Josquin.

Two footnotes on Balance and Symmetry:

1. Josquin’s sacred music (motets and masses) is balanced by all the secular music he wrote. Music like “El Grillo,” where el grillo (the cricket) sings all night for love.
2. Raphael’s Madonna is balanced by the almost contemporaneous Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. Mary not as white as the Europeans might think. The superiority of European Renaissance culture and Christianity in the minds of Europeans has its dark side of conquest and cultural genocide.

Josquin’s Ave Maria

Raphael’s “Madonna of the Goldfinch” taken from the Google Art Project.

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