Linear perspective is a visual logic. If it has any influence on music then this must be seen as a shift in the visualisation of sound. However, Filippo Brunelleschi's invention of artificial perspective in 1425 does not map on to the polyphony of the early sixteenth century, as is sometimes suggested. Do the contrapuntal constructions that conceive of sound horizontally and vertically really correspond to the illusion of visual depth in painting? It is true that the rationalisation of both space and sound in the Neo-Platonic world encapsulated a divine order as a microcosm for a humanistic society to perceive and harness, but that does not mean that music and image can exchange their historical forms without friction. The contrapuntal lines of music are not the perspectival lines that systematise space as a grid in order to locate objects behind a window of reality; its harmonies are not empty spaces in which meaning is deposited, and neither is the counterpoint the vanishing point for the ear to grasp the totality of the cosmos. In fact, far from being parallel structures, music and vision came into conflict, creating an epistemic rift by the end of the sixteenth century between the ancient and modern world.

‘The sixteenth century’, writes Lucien Febvre, ‘did not see first; it heard and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds. It was only later, as the seventeenth century was approaching, … that vision was unleashed.’