I Musici di Reims e il corpo come spettacolo. Geni mutanti nello “stile monumentale” circa il 1235

Abstract

Five statues representing two pairs of young men playing musical instruments and flanking a meditative young falconer have so far been of greater interest to musicologists than art historians, and the group has never really entered the debate on Gothic sculpture - a unique case in France. This is in spite of the statues’ size, their visual impact, their iconographic originality, their fine quality, and their location. Now preserved in the Musee Saint-Remi, they originally stood on the prospect of the so-called Maison des Musiciens, a private house (destroyed during the First World War) overlooking a main street in medieval Reims. The group’s problems of chronology, its function, its perception by the public, as well as its relationship to the sculptures of Reims cathedral and to the historical events of the city, together with its originality in the panorama of French and European sculpture of the first half of thirteenth century, are considered here with new proposals.