This eighth volume of the Painting Music/Musica Picta (The Music in Painting from its Origins to Today) collection is the final result of the passion for research and documentation of artistic production focused on the theme of music that animates the author. Also for this addition, it is appropriate the definition of book ‘lost and found’, containing the works which have been lost in the previous research phase but found in this one. I collected an additional 3,100 artworks of various artistic caliber, but all of them are an expression of the clear empathy that each artist shows for the musical subject.
The documentary or cultural merit of this anthology, which now has a total of 8,800 artworks , lies in having brought to light so many unknown artists, many works that have been forgotten or relegated in minor art books, or in the warehouse of the museums, galleries, private collections, but all deserving to be known and to be admired. This collection, in my opinion, is an expression of the perfect synesthesia between the two major arts, shows the ocean of visual art.

The musical subject has inspired many artists in all eras, in all cultures and in all places of the world, so this collection is not certainly exhaustive on the subject but it discloses all the pictorial styles and artists who have made the history of the art . In particular, it should be emphasized that the eighth book, split into three large volume, contains a small group of works of intrinsic high artistic value. Whereas there are numerous works of art that are usually called 'genre painting’. In total the portraits of musicians, mostly composers, are over 650: this is a considerable but small number if we consider that in my database I classified over 3,000 composers. It goes without saying that there is no artistic document – such as a painting or sculpture – of many of them.

The structure of this digital art volume is the same as the previous volumes: it begins with Egyptian, Greek, Roman art and then the art of the Middle East, India, China and Japan. Subsequently, the scansion of the works is on a temporal basis: the Fourteenth century, the Fifteenth century and on up to Contemporary Art. In this eighth collection I wanted to introduce a small innovation in the standard structure of the previous books with the chapter dedicated to the subject of Musician Angels over a few centuries and to the Ballet and Dance theme so loved to the painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research has confirmed that, starting from the third quarter of the Twentieth century, the production of works of art with musical subject, in any expression or material, has progressively thinned out and what is worse it has had results with a modest artistic level if compared to the glorious past of art history. I wanted to include a chapter dedicated to Graphic Art, as it is an expression of the often prompt and funny creativity of our time.