The body and the cross as musical instruments: iconography and literature in the shadow of Saint Augustine

Abstract

After an anonymous Mexican painting from the 17th-century showing Christ as a child playing the Cross transformed into a musical instrument, theological basis are explored as a means to establish a parallelism between the Cross and Christ’s own body, on one hand, and different musical instruments, on the other. Saint Augustine’s commentaries to the Psalms are crucial for this allegorical identification, specially though the morphological differences featured by zither and psaltery, which are intended to be clarified in this paper. Several literary and iconographical testimonies from the 16th and 17th-centuries are offered which reelaborate the allegorical complex mentioned above and that expand into the human body seen as a musical microcosm; among them, a poem by Gaspar depicting a vihuela as an Allegory of the Holy Virgin.