page_title: Musurgia Universalis
section_title: Illustrations
hierarchical_section_title: Musurgia Universalis / Illustrations
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece, volume two, "Musurgia Universalis" by Athanasius Kircher, 1650
context_page_description: Musurgia Universalis, sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni is a 1650 work by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. It was printed in Rome by Ludovico Grignani and dedicated to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. It was a compendium of ancient and contemporary thinking about music, its production and its effects. It explored, in particular, the relationship between the mathematical properties of music with health and rhetoric.
  The work complements two of Kircher's other books: Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica had set out the secret underlying coherence of the universe and Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae had explored the ways of knowledge and enlightenment. What Musurgia Universalis contained, through its exploration of dissonance within harmony, was an explanation of the presence of evil in the world.
context_section_description: An engraved portrait of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm faces the frontispiece of volume one, was designed by Johann Paul Schor and engraved by Paulus Pontius, a student of Rubens.  It is dated 'Antwerp 1649'.
  Each of the work's two volumes had its own frontispiece.  For volume one this followed the design common to many of Kircher's works, depicting a threefold universe with the divine at the top, the celestial in the middle and the earthly below. At the top the eye of God overlooks all from within a triangle which bathes choirs of angels in divine light. Two angels hold aloft a banner proclaiming the sanctus as a 'Canon angelicus 36 vocum... in 9 choros distributus' ('a 36-voice canon of angels, divided into nine choirs'). Beneath this sits Apollo on the celestial sphere, holding the lyre that symbolises harmony and pushing away the panpipes associated with his rival Marysas. Together with the signs of the zodiac, the sphere carries a quotation from the Book of Job (38:37): 'Quis concentum coeli dormire faciet?' ('Who shall make the concert of heaven to sleep?').At the bottom left of the image Pythagoras sits, with one arm resting on this theorem and the other pointing towards a group of smiths, the sound of whose hammers striking metal first gave him the notion of the mathematical basis of harmony. In the centre are a ring of dancers on land, and to their right, a triton dancing in the water with mermaids. On the right there is an illustration of an echo, a topic discussed in the work, with a shepherd reciting a line from Virgil and a listener mishearing only the last part of the final word. The echo rebounds from the side of Mount Helicon, where Pegasus strikes the rock with his hoof, bringing forth the stream of Hippocrene that flows down to the figure of  Muse surrounded by musical instruments.
  The frontispiece for volume two was designed by Pierre Miotte.  It depicts Orpheus with his lyre and the three-headed guardian of the underworld, Cerberus. The motto around his pedestal reads 'Apollo's right hand holds the lyre of the world, his left fits high to low; thus good things are mingled with ill.'
caption: Frontispiece, volume two, "Musurgia Universalis" by Athanasius Kircher, 1650
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