Music and dance

Music and dance vanish in the very moment they come into being, yet art has always tried to capture them. We follow musicians and dancers from Greek vases and medieval dances of death, through Bruegel’s peasants, Vermeer’s lutes and Watteau’s fêtes, to Degas’s ballet girls, Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabarets, Matisse’s dance and Kandinsky’s colour music.

• Lyre and aulos – antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Angel choirs and peasant dances – the Renaissance
• Lutes and virginals – the Baroque
• Fêtes in the open air – the 18th century
• Ballet, café and cabaret – Paris in the 19th century
• Fiddlers and the dance of life – the Nordic countries
• Pipa and shamisen – China and Japan
• The music of colour – modernism and the post-war era