Connection between Visual Arts and Music in Western Europe

While I was completing the Bachelor of Music in Performance, I attempted to understand music even more thoroughly by exploring the visual aspect of music. I wanted to understand whether the influence on empathy was unique to music or it was inherent to multiple art forms. Hence, I researched on the connection between visual art and music through different historical periods to explore.
Culture is defined by the Oxford American College Dictionary as “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” Effectively, the concept of culture unites all arts and suggests, in turn, that they are all connected in some way. Hence, it is no wonder that parallelisms can be found between the various forms of art. Nevertheless, what is certainly intriguing is the fact that arts also seem to change their themes at the same time periods, allowing us today to be able to define the key characteristics that the arts display in every time period.
Undoubtedly, art forms like visual arts and music share multiple parallels throughout history. Firstly, they share core elements such as harmony, rhythm, accents, dissonance, embellishment, form, sequence, texture, repetition and balance. Secondly, music and visual arts are also connected in the way their periods are titled, such as the Baroque period. In this case, the Baroque period of both visual art and music share the same time range in history. Conversely, the Classical period of music does not share neither the same time range nor the same characteristics with the Classical period of art. As a matter of fact, the musical Classicism is more similar to the Neoclassicism of visual arts, with which it does share the same time range and characteristics. Effectively, these and more parallelisms between the periods of music and visual art could show the level of connection these two possess with each other. By analyzing these periods of music and visual art history, from Ancient Greece to Classicism, we can better comprehend the influence of each on the other and if this influence is constant or not.