Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists

and musicians met in the companionship of minds, quoted famous

authors, made an occasional obeisance to religion, graced their

language with a light fantastic touch, and basked in one another's

audience. Such conversation was so admired that many essays and

treatises were cast in dialogue form to appropriate its elegance. In

the end the game was carried to excess; language and thought became

too precious and refined; an enervating dilettantism softened

manliness. Urbino became Rambouillet in France, and Moliere attacked

les precieuses ridicules just in time to save the art of good

converse for France.

Despite the preciosity of a few, Italian speech enjoyed a freedom of

subject and epithet that would not be allowed by social manners today.

Since general conversation was rarely heard by unmarried women of good

character, it was assumed that sex might be openly discussed. But

beyond this, and even in the highest male circles, there was a

looseness of sexual jest, a gay freedom in poetry, a coarse

obscenity in drama, that seem to us now among the less presentable

aspects of the Renaissance. Educated men could scribble lewd verses on

statuary, the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus. `052091 Youths

competed in obscenity and profanity to prove their maturity. Men of

all classes swore great oaths and curses, often involving blasphemy of

the most sacred names in the Christian faith. And yet the phrases of

courtesy had never been so flowery, forms of address had never been so

gracious; women kissed the hand of any intimate male friend on meeting

or leaving him, and men kissed the hand of a woman; presents were ever

passing from friend to friend; and tact of word and deed reached a

development that seemed unattainable in northern Europe. Italian

manuals of manners became favored texts beyond the Alps.

The same was true of Italian handbooks of dancing, fencing, and

other recreations; in recreation, as in conversation and profanity,

Italy led the Christian world. On summer evenings girls danced in

the squares of Florence, and the most graceful won a silver garland;

in the villages young men and women danced on the green. In homes

and at formal balls women danced with women or men, and men with men

or women; in any case the aim was grace. In the Renaissance the ballet

flourished; the poetry of motion was added to the arts.

Cardplaying was even more popular than dancing; in the fifteenth

century it became a mania in all classes; Leo X was an addict. Often

it involved gambling; recall how Cardinal Raffaello Riario won

14,000 ducats in two games with the son of Innocent VIII. Men

gambled also with dice, and sometimes loaded them. `052092 This too

became a passion, which legislation vainly sought to moderate. In

Venice gambling ruined so many noble families that the Council of

Ten twice forbade the sale of cards or dice, and called upon

servants to report masters violating these ordinances. `052093 The

monte di pieta established by Savonarola in 1495 required of

borrowers a pledge to avoid gambling at least till the loan had been

paid. `052094 Sedate people brooded over chess, and fondled

expensive sets; Giacomo Loredano at Venice had chessmen valued at 5000

ducats.

Young men had their special games, mostly in the open air. The

upperclass Italian was trained to ride, wield sword and lance, and

tilt in tournaments. For such contests the towns, on certain holidays,

roped off space in a square, usually convenient to windows and

balconies whence the ladies could encourage their knights. As these

combats proved insufficiently mortal, some rash youths, in the Roman

Colosseum in 1332, introduced the bullfight, with a man on foot

armed only with a spear; on that occasion eighteen knights, all of old

Roman families, were killed, and only eleven bulls. `052095 Such

contests were occasionally repeated in Rome and Siena, but never

caught the Italian taste. Horse racing was more popular, and aroused

the enthusiasm of Romans, Sienese, and Florentines alike. Hunting,

falconry, foot races, boat regattas, tennis, and boxing rounded out

the sports, and kept the Italians individually in form, while

collectively the defense of the cities was left to mercenary aliens.

All in all it was a gay life despite its toils and risks, its

natural and supernatural terrors. City folk had the pleasure of

walking or riding out to the countryside, to the banks of the rivers

or the shores of the sea; they cultivated flowers to adorn their homes

and persons, and, by their villas, carved stately gardens into

geometrical forms. The Church was generous with holydays, and the

state added holidays of its own. Water festivals were held on the

Venetian lagoons, on the Arno at Venice, the Mincio at Mantua, the

Ticino at Milan. Or, on special days, great processions moved down the

city streets, with floats and banners designed for the guilds by

artists of international renown; bands played, pretty girls sang and

danced, dignitaries marched; and in the evening fireworks shot their

evanescent wonder into the sky. On Holy Saturday, in Florence, three

flints brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem lit a taper that

lit a candle that- carried along a wire by a mechanical dove-

reached and set off the fireworks in the Carro or emblematic car

of state in the piazza before the cathedral. On Corpus Christi the

parade would be halted to hear a cantata sung by a choir of girls

and boys, or see an episode of Scriptural history or pagan mythology

enacted by some confraternity. If a great dignitary came to town he

might be received with a trionfo, a procession arranged with

chariots in the manner of a Roman triumph for a victorious general.

When Leo X visited his beloved Florence in 1513, all the city turned

out to watch his triumphal car- decorated and painted by Pontormo-

pass under great arches that spanned the central street; seven other

chariots moved in that cavalcade, bearing impersonations of famous

figures in Roman history; on the last a naked boy, covered with

gilt, represented the coming, with Leo, of the Golden Age; but the boy

died shortly afterward from the effect of the gilt. `052096

At carnival time the processional floats in Florence might symbolize

some idea like Prudence, Hope, Fear, Death, or the elements, the

winds, the seasons, or tell in pantomime a story like Paris and Helen,

or Bacchus and Ariadne, with songs appropriate to each scene; for such

a "masque" Lorenzo wrote his famous ode to youth and joy. On those

carnival nights everyone from urchins to cardinals wore masks,

played pranks, and made love, with a freedom that revenged itself in

advance for the restraints of Lent. In 1512, when Florence seemed

still prosperous, but unsuspected misfortunes were only a few months

away, Piero di Cosimo and Francesco Granacci designed for a carnival

pageant a "Masque of the Triumph of Death": an enormous triumphal car,

drawn by black buffaloes, was covered with a black cloth on which were

painted skeletons and white crosses; in the car stood a colossal

figure of Death with a scythe in his hand; around him were tombs,

and lugubrious figures on whose black robes were painted white bones

gleaming in the dark; and behind the car masked figures walked,

whose black hoods were painted with death heads both in front and

behind. From the tombs on the cars rose other figures, painted to seem

only bones; and these skeletons chanted a song reminding men that

all must die. Before and after the car came a cavalcade of decrepit

horses, bearing the bodies of dead men. `052097 So, at the height of

carnival, Piero di Cosimo, echoing Savonarola, pronounced his judgment

on the pleasures of Italy, and his prophecy of the doom to come.

IX. DRAMA

-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++

In such masques and carnival fetes the Italian drama had one of

its progenitors. For often some scene, usually from sacred history,

would be performed on one of the floats or cars, or on temporary

stages at points on the procession route. But the primary source of

the Italian drama was the divozione, an episode of the Christian

story acted by the members of any guild, sometimes by professional

players belonging to a confraternity that made a business of

presenting such spectacles. The texts of several divozioni have come

down through time, and show a surprising dramatic power; so the

Virgin, finding Christ in Jerusalem and then again losing him,

searches frantically for him, crying out: "O my so loving Son! O my

Son, where have you gone? O my so gracious Son, through what gate have

you gone? O my divine Son, you were so sorrowful when you left me!

Tell me, for the love of God, where, where has my Son gone?" `052098

In the fifteenth century, especially in Florence, a more developed

form of drama, the sacra rappresentazione, was played in the oratory

of a guild, or in the refectory of a convent, or in a field or

public square. The scenic arrangements for these performances were

often complex and ingenious: skies were simulated by vast awnings

painted with stars; clouds were represented by masses of wool

suspended and swaying in the air; angels were impersonated by boys

supported aloft on metal frames concealed in waving draperies. The

libretto was usually in poetic form, accompanied with music on the

viol or the lute. Lorenzo de' Medici and the Pulci were among the

poets who wrote words for such religious plays. Politian, in his

Orfeo, adapted the form of the sacra rappresentazione to a pagan

theme.

Meanwhile other components of Italian life were sharing in the birth

of Italian drama. The farse or farces that had long been played by

passing mummers in the medieval towns contained the germ of Italian

comedy. Some players excelled in improvising dialogue for simple

scenarios or plots; this commedia dell' arte was a favorite

vehicle of the Italian genius for satire and burlesque. In such farces

the traditional masks or characters of popular comedy took form and

name: Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella or Punchinello.

The humanists played their part in the complex of factors leading to

the drama by restoring the texts, and arranging performances, of

ancient Roman comedies. Twelve plays of Plautus were discovered in

1427, and served as an additional stimulus. At Venice, Ferrara,

Mantua, Urbino, Siena, Rome the comedies of Plautus and Terence were

staged, and the old classic tradition soared over centuries to form

again a secular theater. In 1486 the Menaechmi of Plautus was for

the first time presented in Italian, and the transition from ancient

to Renaissance drama was fully prepared. Toward the end of the

fifteenth century the religious drama lost its hold on educated

audiences in Italy; pagan subjects increasingly replaced Christian

themes; and when native dramatists like Bibbiena, Machiavelli,

Ariosto, and Aretino wrote plays, it was in the ribald style of

Plautus, a world away from the once-beloved stories of Mary and

Christ. All the old scenes of Roman comedy, all the superficial

plots turning on mistaken sex or identity or rank, all the stock

characters, including panders and prostitutes, with which Plautus

had pleased the groundlings, all the old plebian coarseness and

rough play, reappeared in these Italian comedies.

Despite the preservation of Seneca's plays, and the recovery of

the Greek drama, tragedy never acquired a standing on the

Renaissance stage. Even the upper classes wished to be amused rather

than deepened, and turned a cold eye upon Gian Trissino's Sophonisba

(1515), and Giovanni Rucellai's Rosamunda, which in the same year

was performed in the Rucellai gardens at Florence before Leo X.

It was the misfortune of Italian comedy that it took form when

Italian morals were at nadir. That such plays as Bibbiena's Calandra

and Machiavelli's Mandragola could satisfy the tastes of the Italian

upper classes, even at refined Urbino, and could be performed before

popes without arousing protest, reveals again how intellectual freedom

can comport with moral deterioration. When the Counter Reformation

came with the Council of Trent (1545f), the morals of clergy and laity

were severely censored, and the comedy of the Renaissance was banished

from the amusements of Italian society.

===========================================================

==========

X. MUSIC

-

It was a redeeming feature of Italian comedy that ballets,

pantomimes, and concerts were presented as intermezzi between the

acts. For next to love itself, music was the chief recreation and

consolation of every class in Italy. Montaigne, traveling in Tuscany

in 1581, was "astounded to see peasants with lutes in their hands,

and, beside them, shepherds reciting Ariosto by heart"; but this, he

adds, "is what we may see in all of Italy." `052099 Renaissance

painting has a thousand representations of people playing music,

from the luting angels at the Madonna's feet in so many Coronations,

and Melozzo's serenading seraphim, to the quiet exaltation of the

man at the harpsichord in The Concert; and note the boy- whom we can

hardly believe to be the painter himself- in the center of

Sebastiano del Piombo's Three Ages of Man. The literature likewise

conveys a picture of a people singing or playing music in their homes,

at their work, on the street, in music academies, monasteries,

nunneries, churches, in processions, masques, trionfi, and pageants,

in religious or secular plays, in the lyric passages and interludes of

dramas, in such outings as Boccaccio imagined in the Decameron. Rich

men kept a variety of musical instruments in their homes, and arranged

private musicales. Women organized clubs for the study and performance

of music. Italy was- is- mad about music.

Folk song flourished at all times, and learned music periodically

rejuvenated itself at that fount; popular melodies were adapted for

complex madrigals, for hymns, even for passages in music for the Mass.

"In Florence," says Cellini, "people were wont to meet on the public

streets of a summer night" to sing and dance. `0520100 Street singers-

cantori di piazza - strummed their sad or merry notes on handsome

lutes; people gathered to sing laudes, hymns of praise, to the

Virgin before her street or roadside shrines; and in Venice mating

songs rose to the moon from a hundred gondolas, or throaty lovers

hopefully serenaded hesitant lasses in the mystic shadows of

labyrinthine canals. Almost every Italian could sing, and nearly as

many could sing in simple vertical harmony. Hundreds of these

popular part songs have come down to us under the picturesque name

of frottole, little fruits; usually short, usually amorous; arranged

for a dominant soprano supported by tenor, alto, and bass. Whereas

in previous centuries the tenor voice had "held" the melody and so

derived its name, now in the fifteenth the air was carried by the

soprano- so called because its music was written above the rest.

This part did not need a female voice; as often as not it was sung

by a boy, or by the falsetto of an adult male. ( Castrati did not

appear in the papal choir till 1562.) `0520101

Among the educated classes considerable knowledge of music was

required. Castiglione demands of his courtier or gentleman some

amateur proficiency in music, "which not only doth make sweet the

minds of men, but also many times doth wild beasts tame." `0520102

Every person of culture was expected to read simple music at sight,

accompany himself on some instrument, and take part in an impromptu

musicale. `0520103 Sometimes people joined in a ballata that

involved a union of singing, dancing, and instrumental music.

Universities after 1400 offered courses and degrees in music; there

were hundreds of music academies; Vittorino da Feltre founded a school

of music at Mantua about 1425; our "conservatories" of music are

called so because in Naples many orphanages ( conservatori ) were used

as music schools. `0520104 Music was further spread by the

adaptation of printing to musical notation; about 1476 Ulrich Hahn

printed at Rome a complete missal with movable type for notes and

lines; and in 1501 Ottaviano de' Petrucci began at Venice the

commercial printing of motets and frottole.

At the courts music was more prominent than any other art except

those of personal adornment. Usually the ruler chose a favorite

church, whose choir became the object of his care; he paid goodly sums

to attract to it the finest available voices and instrumentalists from

Italy, France, and Burgundy; he trained new singers from their

childhood, as Federigo did at Urbino; and he expected the members of

the choir to perform also for his state ceremonies and court

festivities. Guillaume Dufay of Burgundy directed music at the court

of the Malatestas in Rimini and Pesaro, and at the papal chapel in

Rome, for a quarter of a century (1419-44). Galeazzo Maria Sforza

about 1460 organized two chapel choirs, and brought to them from

France Josquin Depres, then the most famous composer in western

Europe. When Lodovico Sforza welcomed Leonardo to Milan it was as a

musician; and it is to be noted that Leonardo was accompanied, in

going from Florence to Milan, by Atalante Migliorotti, a celebrated

musician and maker of musical instruments. A still more famous maker

of lyres, lutes, organs, and clavichords was Lorenzo Gusnasco of

Pavia, who made Milan one of his homes. The court of Lodovico was

flush with singers: Narcisso, Testagrossa, Cordier of Flanders, and

Cristoforo Romano, chastely loved by Beatrice. Pedro Maria of Spain

conducted concerts in the palace and for the public; and Franchino

Gaffuri founded and taught in a famous private music school in

Milan. Isabella d'Este was devoted to music, made it the chief theme

of decoration in her inner sanctum, and herself played several

instruments. When she ordered a clavichord from Lorenzo Gusnasco she

specified that the keyboard should respond to a light touch, "for

our hands are so delicate that we cannot play well if the keys are too

stiff." `0520105 At her court lived the leading lutanist of his day,

Marchetto Cara, and Bartolommeo Tromboncino, who composed such

alluring madrigals that when he killed his unfaithful wife no

punishment was meted out to him, and the matter was passed over as a

discord soon to be resolved.

Finally the cathedrals and the churches, the monasteries and the

nunneries resounded with music. In Venice, Bologna, Naples, Milan, the

nuns sang Vespers so movingly that crowds flocked to hear them. Sixtus

IV organized the famous Sistine Chapel choir; Julius II added, in

St. Peter's, a capella Iulia, or Julian chapel choir, which

trained singers for the Sistine choir. This was the summit of the

Latin world's musical art in the Renaissance; to it came the

greatest singers from all Roman Catholic countries. Plain chant was

still the letter of canon law in church music; but here and there

the ars nova of France- a form of complex counterpoint- made its way

into the Roman choirs and prepared for Palestrina and Victoria. Once

it had been held undignified to have any other musical instrument than

the organ accompany a church choir; but in the sixteenth century a

variety of instruments were brought in to give church music some of

the grace and adornment of secular performances. At St. Mark's in

Venice the Flemish master, Adrian Willaert of Bruges, presided over

the choirs for thirty-five years, and trained them to such

performances as made Rome envious. At Florence Antonio Squarcialupi

organized a School of Harmony, of which Lorenzo was a member. For a

generation Antonio reigned over the cathedral choir, and the great

duomo rang with music that stilled all philosophic doubt. Leon

Battista Alberti was a doubter, but when the choir sang he believed:

-

All other modes of singing weary with repetition; only religious

music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for

myself those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very

effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the

soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence

toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he

hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true,

in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen...

to the Greek words ( Kyrie eleison ) that call on God for aid

against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder

what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe. `0520106

-

Despite all this popularity, music was the one art in which Italy

lagged behind France during most of the Renaissance. Shorn of papal

revenues by the flight of the popes to Avignon, and with the courts of

the despots still culturally immature in the fourteenth century, Italy

lacked then the means and the spirit for the higher grades of music.

She produced lovely madrigals (a word of uncertain derivation), but

these songs, modeled on those of the Provencal troubadours, were set

to a musical frame of such strictly regulated polyphony that the

form died of its own rigidity.

The pride of trecento music in Italy was Francesco Landini,

organist of San Lorenzo in Florence. Though blind from his

childhood, he became one of the finest and most loved musicians of his

time, honored as an organist, lutanist, composer, poet, and

philosopher. But even he took his lead from France; his two hundred

secular compositions applied to Italian lyrics the ars nova that had

captured France a generation before. The "new art" was doubly new:

it accepted binary rhythms as well as the triple time previously

required in the music of the Church; and it devised a more complex and

flexible musical notation. Pope John XXII, who hurled his thunderbolts

in all directions, aimed one at the ars nova as fanciful and

degenerate, and his prohibition had some effect in discouraging

musical development in Italy. However, John XXII could not live

forever, though at times it seemed possible; after his death at the

age of ninety (1334) the new art triumphed in the learned music of

France, and shortly thereafter in Italy.

At Avignon French and Flemish singers and composers constituted

the papal choir. When the papacy returned to Rome it brought with it a

large number of French, Flemish, and Dutch composers and singers;

and for a century these alien musicians and their successors dominated

the music of Italy. As late as Sixtus IV all the voices in the papal

choir were from beyond the Alps; and a like foreign supremacy ruled in

the music of the courts in the fifteenth century. When Squarcialupi

died (c. 1475), Lorenzo chose a Dutchman, Heinrich Ysaac, to succeed

him as organist in the cathedral at Florence. Heinrich wrote music for

some of the canti carnascialeschi, and for Politian's lyrics, and he

taught the future Leo X to love- even to compose- French

songs. `0520107 For a time the chansons of France were sung in

Italy, as once Italy had recited the lays of the troubadours.

This invasion of Italy by French musicians, preceding by a century

its invasion by French armies, produced toward 1520 a revolution in

Italian music. For these men from the north- and the Italians whom

they trained- were steeped in the ars nova, and applied it in

setting to music the lyric poetry of Italy. In Petrarch, Ariosto,

Sannazaro, and Bembo- later in Tasso and Guarini- they found

delectable verses crying out for music; indeed, had not poetry

always intended itself to be at least a recitative, if not a song?

Petrarch's canzoniere had already lured musicians; now every line of

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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