The Renaissance
Two examples of eye music from the early Renaissance are from Baude Cordier, (ca. 1380-ca.1440). Cordier's chanson about love Belle, bonne, sage is in a heart shape, with red notes (coloration) indicating rhythmic alterations. Eye-music-within-eye music is in the small group of notes hanging like a locket in the upper left, also all in red and in the shape of a heart. Another work of Cordier, this time inscribed in circles, Tout par compas suy composés ("With a compass was I composed"), goes out of its way to identify itself as eye music.
Josquin des Prez, the most important composer of the next generation, used black note notation eye music in his well-known Nymphes des bois, a lament over the death of the composer Ockeghem, as well as another lament, this time for the composer Jacob Obrecht, Absolve, quaesumus, Domine.
It can be seen that words of death and lament are associated with black notes, a mannerism made even simpler to achieve in light of the contemporaneous simplification to white note notation. This feature of eye music would extend through the Humanist period.
Another instance of eye music in the Renaissance is apparently unique—the representation of a triangle for a canonic piece, which appears in juxtaposition with an anonymous canon written in a circle—in Dosso Dossi's Allegory of Music. It is possible that the two types of representation—the circle and the inherent symbolism of the tenets of Christianity in the triangle—are both suggestive of a sense of the infinite. The work represented in the triangle, is part of a "rough" version of a puzzle canon in Josquin's Agnus Dei II from his Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales canonic mass. It has the superscript "trinitas in un" ("three in one") as a clue to its solution, is a mensuration canon of 3:1, and has one voice take part at the interval of a fifth, that is, 3:2. Its relation to the Christian Holy Trinity is clear, suggesting the use of a triangular representation. The representation is unique, although possibly from a copy used by Dossi.
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