Well, in the interest of examples here is Piero della Francesca's Resurrection from c. 1463:



I don't know whether the columns themselves are part of the picture or the frame, not having ever seen this in San Sepolcro myself; but there is a really beautiful formalism to it all, a kind of juxtaposition of human chaos and aesthetic order which, it seems to me, could have analogues in a very formalized musical structure. Roberto Longhi says about Piero that:

"Piero's great merit lay in understanding that it was necessary to contain the snaky meanderings of the functional line within the inexorable pipelines of perspective so that, properly irrigated, the vast fields of color might all burst into flower together."

I think Rosen is referring to a substantial body of western art theory about the frame, and I'm not well enough versed to guess what would be the best reference here.

Rosen might be thinking of the notion of composition in painting, which, at a minimum, is about spatial relations between objects represented in space and in the plane of the painting.  Both of these kinds of relation tend to be organized, in western painting in the period we're talking about, by their relation to the frame, which is itself not understood to be part of the painting.  (Imagine how the history of painting would differ if the conventional frame were circular.)  Rosen's analogy is probably motivated by the idea that the frame is therefore the organizing principle of the composition, just as he claims that the cadence motivates the musical composition.

In Kantian terms, maybe we could say that both the frame and the musical cadence provide orientation.  There is obviously a difference in the way that the musical cadence implies some kind of directedness or teleology, but in both cases it might be reasonable to say that the frame or cadence motivates the composition, subjects the composition to its own organizing law, or at its least obtrusive gives some kind of orientation.

The telos of the frame is less apparent, even if some compositions do guide the eye along a certain path.  But more speculatively, I would say that the frame encapsulates a culturally enshrined way of making of representation possible -- that is, of mediating between the object represented and the viewer.  This is a bit like what Molly calls the "juxtaposition of human chaos and aesthetic order."  If we admit that shared representations are central to culture, then this mediation aims at producing the continued possibility of culture.  The frame's arbitrariness and ubiquity suggest this, and maybe we could say that cultural mediation occurs precisely in the way the frame organizes the composition.

To extend the analogy, does the cadence have a similar function as a proxy for culture in the musical work?  Perhaps so, if we think of something like "sonata form," which is assumed to have a kind of comic structure, the final cadence asserting a renewed social order.  (There's a pleasant popular exposition of this approach to classical form in chapter 4 of Anthony Burgess's book This Man and Music.)

It might be worth mentioning that there's a lot of conscious reflection on the frame and support in modernist painting, where the values of representation are themselves at stake; you might be interested in some of Michael Fried's art criticism on painters like Frank Stella in Art and Objecthood.  And there are earlier painters who draw attention to the convention of the frame using nested frames or frame-like structures, as in the previous post's example.  In these cases too, each painter's relation to the frame might be interpreted as inducing a specific sense of culture.

Where to begin indeed.
Molly, it's a very nice picture, which I had seen before but in this context really has a certain dimensionality: you can feel the movement of the revelation set against the very formal architecture of the scene.
Thanks Jeremy for the very useful critical orientation -- maybe I won't say framing the question but here's an image to the same effect, which is also a response to Molly's picture. It's always very helpful to be able to see one's own investigations in the context of a larger formal project:


"How would the history of painting differ if the frame were circular?" I'm not convinced things would be so different. There are certainly plenty of nonrectangular frames: oddly shaped altarpieces, oval portraits, judicious use of shadows to create a kind of circular or oval effect. And as you say, the frame is not exactly part of the painting, and it seems to me that we should be able to recover the organizing principles of composition from within the painting itself. This is certainly related to your point about the way that culture mediates our interaction with the work of art.

The musical analogy here might be that what gives the piece its structure are the formal elements, including silence, which occur as part of the piece itself, rather than the silence before and after.