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Having given the concept of “absolute music” a negative connotation in 1846, Richard Wagner not only inspired discussions about the correlation of form and content in music, but also affected painters, who were looking for the ideal of non-mimetic meaning-generating strategies in music, and whose art was specified as the “Wagnerian painting” by French critic Theodore de Wyzewa. Using the historical and the comparative approaches, as well as the semantic and structural analysis of the expressive means in music and ...

The paper offers a renewed interest for Erwin Panofsky’s iconology, which consists of the applying of this concept and analytical method to musical art per se. Although Panofsky himself did not intend to introduce his methodology into the sphere of music, he establishes correlations between some musical compositions and painting. Thus, Panofsky felt the presence of certain general laws of the formation of structure of the artistic whole in painting and music. In terms of iconology, music, like painting, presuppose...