Lovely Beasts, Bestial Lovers: Animals, Righteous Men, and the semiotics of musical mirrors

In Aesop’s narrative world, metaphorical representations were apparently used to point out human flaws by attributing those to beasts, while anthropomorphic animals were actually able to disclose how bestial mankind is. In mediaeval bestiaries the same animal may carry multiple meanings, depending on what particular aspect of it is being highlighted and on its relationship with the other animals appearing in the same context. Even music forces to a continuous re-structuring of sounds in configurations which change depending on context, and which determine the conditions for a process of meaning-making based on both internal and external systems of relations. Thus, there seems to be a perfect analogy between the language of the bestiaries and that of music, and a commonality in how both bestiaries and music bestow on Nature its role as locus of truth. But how does musical rhetoric intervene in the effective construction of similarities, of metaphors and allegories that condense or articulate a narrative transformation through the organised conjunction of different animal figures? Throughout an analytic journey from mediaeval Italian musical bestiaries to erotic madrigals, from the intriguing fashion of musical “portraits” to the French late baroque representation of savages, this essay investigates the semiotic device of music as an ironic reversing mirror, which points out alterity and reveals the true bestial nature of mankind.