Northern Composers, Humanism, and Rhetoric
One of the most significant implications of this practice is that northern composers showed a remarkable ability to adapt their sophisticated contrapuntal techniques to rhetorical modes of expression advocated by Italian humanists. The notion that the art of Du Fay and his successors stood at artistic odds with humanism by expounding some sort of purely scholastic (and northern) expression does not do justice to the subtlety of musical techniques or the interdependence of cultural trends. It discounts the continued importance of scholastic thought throughout the Renaissance in Italy as well as the north,[15] overlooks the rapid advance of humanistic ideals in northern courts, monasteries, and universities,[16] and, perhaps most of all, ignores the many areas of
[14] John Monfasani, "Humanism and Rhetoric," 186-87. The same argument pertains to treatises on grammar, popular in the Middle Ages and again in the sixteenth century; but in the 1400s grammarians "continued to utilize pedagogical material that had been inherited, in an unbroken tradition, from late antiquity" (W. Keith Percival, "Renaissance Grammar," 71).
[15] See Paul O. Kristeller, "Rhetoric in Medieval and Renaissance Culture," 2; and idem, "Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance," 85-105.
[16] Typical of recent studies on northern humanism, Lewis Spitz characterizes the development of German humanism as "wide open to further study" ("The Course of German Humanism," 389). See, among others, Jozef Ijsewijn, "The Coming of Humanism to the Low Countries"; Paul O. Kristeller, "The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism"; Roberto Weiss, The Spread of Italian Humanism ; Morimichi Watanabe, "Gregor Heimburg and Early Humanism in Germany"; and the articles in Albert Rabil, ed., Renaissance Humanism , vol. 2, Humanism beyond Italy .
rapprochement between scholasticism and humanism that were particularly characteristic of clerical humanism.[17]
This is not to deny either the antipathy that militantly classical humanists felt toward polyphony and its northern practitioners or the antitheoretical tendencies of many northern singers in Italy. Already in the late fourteenth century one Florentine felt it necessary to speak out against doctrinaire imitators of the ancients. The heated, caustic defense of scholastic values by Cino Rinuccini (d. 1417) indicates how fashionable antischolastic thought had become in some circles. He made his arguments on behalf of the traditional disciplines of the quadrivium and trivium in his Invettiva contro a certi calunniatori di Dante e di Messer Francesco e di Messer Giovanni Boccaci [Invective against Certain Slanderers of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio]. The defense of music follows those of logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, and geometry and precedes that of astrology. Music is no mere "science of buffoons," as many humanists claim; it also re-creates human frailty with its sweetness, delights the operazioni santissime of the church, and inspires warriors to battle.[18] There is no distinction made here between polypbony and chant, and Rinuccini wrote well before the return of Martin V spurred the arrival of so many northern musicians. But the people he derided were very plainly Florentine humanists, those who argued about which grammar was better, "either that of the time of Terrence, or that of the eroico Virgilio ripulita, " those who worried about the
[17] Among many recent works, there is D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome ; Jerry Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance ; Charles Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance ; and Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought .
[18] "La musica affermano cssere iscienza da buffoni da poter dilettare lusingando. Non dicano quanto sia utile a ricreare con sua dolcezza l'umana fragilità, a dilettare l'operazioni santissime della Chiesa, o accendere a giusta battaglia i virtuosi animi che pella republica combattono" (Cino Rinuccini, Invettiva contro a certi calunniatori di Dante e di Messer Francesco e di Messer Giovanni Boccaci , 263 on music; and see pp. 92-100 for Antonio Lanza's discussion of the treatise).
number of feet the ancients used in their verses.[19] For them the discovery of the past conventions precluded an appreciation of more traditional artistic expressions.
The two extremes should not obscure the vast, heterodox, and popular middle ground between them. In Quattrocento Venice Leonardo Giustiniani and Sabellico praised music, presumably polyphony, for exemplifying the harmony and concord needed in society as a whole; and music shared with oratory the capacity to entertain.[20] Paolo Cortesi's handbook De cardinalatu (1503-10) is in many ways a typical product of this Roman intellectual milieu. In the course of describing how to behave as a prince of the church, Cortesi argued that humanists had much to learn about theological issues and, conversely, that theologians and scholastic philosophers could benefit from a concern for eloquence. His advice to cardinals to know classical texts as well as theology was consistent with his opinions on musical matters: Cortesi lauded Flemish composers (Josquin, Isaac, and Obrecht) for their polyphony and Italian poet-musicians (Serafino dall'Aquila, Baccio Ugolini, and others) for their poetry, melodies, and their extemporaneous performances.[21] His praise of Serafino is not an indication "of the humanists' mixed feelings toward polyphony," as Pirrotta has claimed,[22] but merely typical of his open-minded acceptance of the heterogenous elements of his own international culture.
Ascanio Sforza's patronage of Josquin and Serafino was hardly unique in Rome, or indeed for patrons elsewhere in Italy. One could also cite Lorenzo de' Medici's support of Isaac, Agricola, and others together with Baccio Ugolino and Angelo Poliziano. Likewise, Georges de
[19] Ibid., 262.
[20] John McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism , 57-58. Giustiniani lived from ca. 1389 to 1446, Sabellico (Marc Antonio Coccio) from 1436 to 1506.
[21] Pirrotta provides a facsimile and commentary for the relevant pages of De cardinalatu in "Music and Cultural Tendencies," 96-112. My discussion is indebted to D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism , 148-54, and 227-37; see also Christopher Reynolds, "Rome: A City of Rich Contrast," 67-68.
[22] Pirrotta, "Music and Cultural Tendencies," 91-92. For the same reasons Cortesi's attitude toward music should not be attributed to some' difference in the amount or type of music he studied in his own education, as suggested by Giulio Cat-tin in his "Il Quattrocento," 275, n. 8.
Trebizond, active in Rome from the time of Eugenius IV until Sixtus IV, commended Alfonso I of Aragon for his support of theology, philosophy, and humanism (studia humanitatis ).[23] Cortesi's views had distinguished precedents in Rome. His ecumenical outlook has a mid-fifteenth-century forerunner in Lorenzo Valla's Elegantiae . On a practical level, Valla advised jurists that they can only attain their full potential through humanistic studies, that ancient grammar is a tool that can benefit even nonhumanistic disciplines. More fundamentally and provocatively, he argued for the combination of Christian faith and humanistic studies.[24] It would have surprised no one when Giannozzo Manetti (well known to musicologists for his effusive account of Du Fay's Nuper rosarum flores ) lauded Nicholas V in his biography of the pope as the model for all humanist clerics, as a man whose erudition in both humanist thought and patristic theology made him the ideal "union of classical and Christian culture."[25]
The career and writings of the theologian Lodovico Valentia da Ferrara are typical of many for the lack of conflict between these two modes of thinking in late fifteenth-century Italy. Having taught both philosophy (at Ferrara) and theology (at the University of Padua), he finished his career in Rome as the procurator general of the Dominican order (1491-96). His works, reflecting his teaching positions, include an enchiridion of Aristotle's ethics, commentaries on Lombard and Aquinas, and a treatise on the Holy Eucharist. And the five surviving sermons he preached before the pope successfully blend thematic and epideictic elements to varying degrees. According to his view of church history, the theology of his own day was the culmination of all previous eras, building on scholasticism and the Greek as well as the Latin Fathers.[26]
Among musicians there are similar examples: as Serafino Aquila could study with Guglielmo Flamingo in Naples, so could the north-
[23] John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic , 296.
[24] Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic," 94; and Salvatore Camporeale, "Lorenzo Valla tra medioevo e rinascimento: Encomion s. Thomae , 1457"; and idem, Lorenzo Valla tra medioevo e rinascimento: Encomion s. Thomae 1457 .
[25] D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism , 120.
[26] O'Malley, Praise and Blame , 105-8 and 163-64.
ern musician Bertrandus Vaqueras take part in the activities of Roman poets and their patrons. Vaqueras came to Rome by 1481, sang at St. Peter's for three years, and joined the Sistine Chapel in November 1484. His few known compositions do not compare to those by his papal colleagues Josquin Des Prez or Gaspar van Weerbecke, yet unlike either of them he was also a poet with strong humanistic pretentions. The one poem of his that exists in a modern edition, "Bertrandus de Vaqueirassio Antonio Flaminio," is in fact a plea Vaqueras penned to his friend, the poet Antonio Flaminio, asking him to return to Rome.[27] Since it speaks of the cessation of a plague, Vattasso dated the poem "not after 1494," linking it to the plague of 1493-94, which caused Romans to seek protection in the countryside. This poem survives in the miscellany Vat. lat. 2836 (fols. 100-103v),[28] along with two others easily attributable to Vaqueras: "Bertrandus de Vaquerassio in suam sortem: brevis querela" with its second part, "Quisquis es infaustis hominem qui cernere faris" (fol. 94a), and "Barnabe Christino. In domo domini Camilli de Bene in Bene" (fol. 94av), which includes the line "Barnaba, qua careo Bertrandus ipse salute."[29] These poems place Vaqueras not only in the company of Antonio Flaminio but also of Camillo Beneinbene, by career a powerful lawyer and notary.[30]
[27] It is in an appendix to Marco Vattasso, Antonio Flaminio . Vattasso discusses the poem as a source of biographical information for Flaminio on p. 13.
[28] This late fifteenth-century manuscript is briefly discussed in G. Tournoy-Thoen, "La laurea poetica del 1484 all' Accademia romana," 219-36, which includes several poems from it. See also Paul O. Kristeller, "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and His Sources."
[29] Vat. lat. 2836 contains two copies of the Vaqueras epistle to Flaminio. Preceding the copy edited by Vattasso is an earlier version of the same poem, marked by extensive revisions (fols. 95-96, 97-97v). As a rough draft, it is very likely an autograph, and so too is the later version, which also has a number of cancellations. The same hand also appears frequently in a second Vatican manuscript, Vat. lat. 7192, along with another copy of "Bertrandi de Vaqueirassio in suam sortem" (fols. 96-97). How many other poems by Vaqueras survive in the two manuscripts is a question that demands a separate philological study. If the hand does indeed belong to Vaqueras, then the number may prove substantial.
[30] He notarized Cardinal d'Estouteville's inventory of art works, manuscripts, and books. By avocation Beneinbene was, like Vaqueras, a minor poet in his own right. And like Tinctoris, Beneinbene used his talents to compose a poem in honor of Alexander VI. The poem is preserved in BAV, Vat. Ottoboni 2280; see Eugene Müntz, Les arts à la cour des papes pendant le XVe et le XVIe siécles , fasc. 28, p. 297.
The first Italian singer at St. Peter's with similarly strong literary interests is apparently Lodovico Fogliano, one of the first members of the Cappella Giulia in 1513. A composer and theorist—his Musica theorica was printed in Venice, 1529—he also intended to publish translations he made from Aristotle and Averroës, some of which survive in a manuscript entitled "Lodvicus Foglianus Mutinensis Flosculi Philosophiae Aristotelis et Averrois."[31]
The mid-twentieth-century view of humanism and scholasticism (and north and south) as opposing factions in a kind of cultural cold war was often defined more narrowly in the fifteenth century as one between rhetoric and philosophy. The distinction is important, because while with humanism music historians are easily snared in problems of definition and the lack of ancient musical models, with rhetoric and oratory there is a system of communication with many parallels to music. In Kristeller's formulation, humanists were not philosophers who made up for their lack of philosophical depth with an interest in rhetoric and antiquity, but "professional rhetoricians... who tried to assert the importance of their field of learning and to impose their standards upon the other fields of learning and of science, including philosophy."[32]
Northern musicians, by their education and by their exposure to Italian culture, had ample opportunity to adapt new rhetorical ideas to their own musical language, as much science as art. Indeed, the winner
[31] Knud Jeppesen, La Frottola , 1:157; and Henry Kaufmann, "Lodovico Fogliani," 687. By the sixteenth century, as opportunities for Italian music instructors grew and those for northerners waned, Rome remained a city where international exchanges were possible. How different the northern heritage of Palestrina and Annibale Zoilo was from the Italian experiences of many non-Roman composers who led stylistic changes into the next century. Monteverdi could trace his musical heritage back through at least four generations of Italian teaching: Biagio Rossetti in Verona taught Vincenzo Ruffo in the 1520s or 1530s, and Ruffo then (probably) taught Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, who taught Monteverdi; Giulio Caccini (born ca. 1545) studied in Florence with Giovanni Animuccia (born ca. 1500); and Jacopo Peri (b. 1561) studied with Cristoforo Malvezzi (b. 1547), who had previously learned from his father in Lucca.
[32] Kristeller, "Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance," 92. In northern countries as well as Italy, humanism developed not in philosophy or science but in grammar and rhetoric; see ibid., 91, and Noel L. Brann, "Humanism in Germany," 131.
of a rhetoric competition held at the court of the duke of Burgundy in 1460 was Robinet de la Magdalaine, first out of twenty-seven contestants.[33] The skills required to achieve a rhetorical sophistication in polyphony comparable to that which Italian humanists achieved in prose began with the grammatical fluency in counterpoint that northerners learned as children. Stressing the need to start an artistic education as a boy, Tinctoris illustrates with a nod to Socrates and Homer, in his pedantic humanistic fashion.
For, wherefore, I have discovered that Socrates himself, beginning to play [the lyre] so exceedingly late [in life], although he was judged as the wisest of all by the oracle of Apollo, has been named by not one writer as a divine musician, like Democritus of Homer, or outstanding, as Epaminondas by Tullius [Cicero]; so, in our time, I have known not even one man who has achieved eminent or noble rank among musicians, if he began to compose or sing super librum at or above his twentieth year of age.[34]
Perhaps unknowingly, Tinctoris reiterated an opinion that had been voiced forty years earlier by Leonardo Bruni, chancellor of Florence and a prominent man of letters. In his biography of Dante and Petrarch, Bruni faulted Boccaccio's ability to write Latin, explaining that Boccaccio had this defect because he had learned grammar as an adult.[35]
Grammatical fluency was only the starting point for artistic eloquence. That is the point Lorenzo Valla makes in his Elegantiae linguae latinae when he distinguishes between elegantia , which he takes to mean a refined and precise command of Latin, and oratorical eloquentia : "For I am writing not about eloquence, but about the refinement of the Latin language, from which one may nonetheless begin the pur-
[33] Andrè Pirro, "Robinet de la Magdalaine," 18. Howard M. Brown discusses the receptivity of northern musicians to rhetorical techniques in "Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance," 42-45.
[34] Johannes Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint , 140-41. There are references to Socrates learning to play the cithara in old age in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers , chap. 5, and Valerius Maximus, Fact. et dict. mem ., 8: chap. 7. The tale is retold in Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 75 .
[35] Leonardo Bruni, Levite di Dante e del Petrarca , 61: "Apparò grammatica da grande, e per questa cagione non ebbe mai la lingua latina molto in sua balía." I am grateful to James Hankins for this reference.
suit of elegance."[36] Northern composers had the ability to contribute their musical techniques to this pursuit, adapting their styles to the latest rhetorical ideas and conventions. A generation after Valla, a new conception of elegantia had replaced Valla's. Paolo Cortesi criticized 'the outdated teachings of Valla in 1489: "But in fact there is a different basis for composition, which Valla either omitted or did not know. For ornate, sweet, and uncorrupted Latin style requires a certain periodic composition which creates an audible harmony (concinnitas ad sonum )."[37] This describes no less aptly the growing tendency for periodization in musical styles, evidenced perhaps first in imitative works from composers such as Josquin and Compare who had been in Milan in the 1470s. In the mid-fifteenth century the latest rhetorical ideas of Italian humanists could have reached northern musicians through contacts at ecclesiastical councils, the influence of Italian humanists residing in the north (such as Poggio Bracciolini in England and Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the "apostle of humanism," at the Hapsburg court of Frederick III), and above all, through contact with colleagues who had returned from a sojourn in Italy (such as Du Fay, resident at the same courts as Leon Battista Alberti—Bologna, Rome, Florence—for the better part of a decade).
Contrapuntal citations of preexistent works were not at all new to the fifteenth century, but then, neither was an interest in classical rhetoric. Musical precedents exist in the parodies of early Quattrocento Italian composers like Bartolomeo da Bologna and in the musical and textual paraphrases of fourteenth-century French composers. Bartolomeo and Antonio Zacara da Teramo both based Mass movements on ballate . Zacara based his Pattern scaboroso in BolQ15 on the ballata D'amor languire, suspirare e piangere . As John Nádas observed, the tide of this Patrem refers to the verse "I scratch like a mangy dog and yet I have no scab" [Grattar come rognioso e non ò scabia].[38] Colorful, even risible, this barnyard image occurs in the Patrem at the text "Et incarnatus," that is, just as the Credo refers to God being made man.
[36] Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic," 102.
[37] Marsh, "Grammar, Method, and Polemic," 103. The quotation is from Cortesi's dialogue De doctis hominibus .
[38] John Nádas, "The Lucca Codex and MS San Lorenzo 2211: Native and Foreign Songs in Early Quattrocento Florence."
However crude the analogy, it follows the same illustrative principle later composers applied to more refined poetry.
Already in the later thirteenth century French composers quoted trouvére compositions in the motet-entè . They could graft the secular tune, its text, or both into either of the upper voices of the motet. Adam de la Halle is typical in citing note for note and word for word the refrain from his rondeau A Dieu commant in his motet A Dieu commant / Aucun se sont /Super te . The middle voice of the rondeau is divided so that it begins and ends the middle voice of the motel, while the tenor and upper voice are new.
In the same way medieval preachers often quoted verbatim from Greek and Roman writers. What was new in the fifteenth century was the extent to which humanists integrated the words of classical and secular authors into their writings and sermons. With regard to the stylistic differences of medieval and Renaissance sacred oratory, O'Malley observes a marked tendency for sermons of the older thematic type to quote directly and explicitly from classical as well as biblical sources; in contrast, epideictic sermons minimize such literal citations in favor of allusions and paraphrases. Orators who avoided literal quotations were "following, probably wittingly, the example of Cicero himself."[39] In explaining how writers should incorporate phrases from earlier sources, the Ciceronian Gasparino Barzizza (d. 1431) taught that "all good literary imitation comes from adding, subtracting, altering, transferring, or renewing."[40] Fifteenth-century notions about the proper way to translate from Greek similarly differed from medieval practices in the admonition to avoid "word for word" [ad verbum] renditions.[41]
Early instances of melodic quotation (and what has been called "par-
[39] O'Malley, Praise and Blame , 54, and the discussion on 53-58. Thematic sermons are so called because they begin with a biblical quotation, that is, a "theme" (ibid., 44). Regarding areas of continuity between medieval and Renaissance rhetoric, see Kristeller, "Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance," 94-95.
[40] Quoted in Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators , 34.
[41] Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism , 120. Brown arrives at the same conclusion to describe how chanson composers emulated each other: "Old voices are not merely taken over intact and adorned with new counterpoints, but rather the existing melodic material is reshaped and rearranged into new musical phrases." See his "Emulation, Competition, and Homage," 15.
ody") can also be compared with the evolution of polytextual techniques in fourteenth-century French motets and fifteenth-century combinative chansons.[42] Part of the poetic skill required of Machaut and others was the ability to relate different texts to each other, not just stanza by stanza but verse by verse. Consequently, northern composers were adept at musical and textual counterpoint well before the fifteenth century. Given the value humanists placed on communicating a message, textual clarity would not permit the confusion of two simultaneous texts (already in Petrarch's day the Italian motet discarded polytextuality). Finally, the relationship of allusive counterpoint to English contrafacta practices, by which French originals often acquired Latin texts, is potentially relevant.[43]
It is necessary to distinguish between the type of polytextuality that arises from careful coordination of the separate texts in a motet by Machaut and that which is the product of an allusion. In a polytextual motet the composer/author includes in the composition all the information that the audience needs to achieve a full understanding of the artistic message. The system of information is self-contained. In contrast, in a work with allusions the artist supplies only part of the full meaning. The demands on the audience differ considerably. Moreover, a successful allusion augments the meaning of a work that is to all appearances complete even if the allusion is not recognized or understood. Thus readers of a text, viewers of a painting, or hearers of a Mass who were unaware of an allusion could also be unaware that they were missing anything.
[42] An important study of polytextual polyphony is Reinhold Hammerstein, "Über das gleichzeitige Erklingen mehrerer Texte: Zur Geschichte mehrtextiger Komposition unter besonderer Berücksichtigung J. S. Bachs." See also Ludwig Finscher, "Parodie und Kontrafaktur," vol. 10, col. 882; Leo Schrade, "A Fourteenth-Century Parody Mass"; Ursula Günther, "Zitate in Französischen Liedsätzen der Ars Nova und Ars Subtilior"; Kurt von Fischer, "Kontrafakturen und Parodien italienischer Werke des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento"; Roland Jackson, "Musical Interrelations between Fourteenth-Century Mass Movements (A Preliminary Study)"; and Brown, "Emulation, Competition, and Homage," 44-45. Indeed, as Alejandro Plan-chart pointed out to me, the urge of composers to incorporate modern commentary on sacred texts can be traced back to the troping impulse in medieval chant (although such commentary was necessarily not simultaneous).
[43] Bent, "The Transmission of English Music 1300-1500: Some Aspects of Repertory and Presentation," 66-69.