PART 2—
RHETORICAL UNDERPINNINGS

Chapter 5—
Currents in Venetian Literary and Linguistic Theory—
The Consolidation of Poetry and Rhetoric

We have already seen in Venetian salons that certain interests tended to overwhelm all others. When Venier entreated Dolce to eulogize Bembo's death with a wistful sweetness, his concern was with the poetic tone that Dolce should adopt; the object of tribute barely hovered in the periphery of his vision, except as an implied poetic muse. Similarly, looming largest in Doni's report to Annibale Marchese Malvicino on the brilliant music at Capponi's house — inseparable from the substance of the music itself — was the polished delivery of Pecorina and company. What most commanded the attention of both Venier and Doni, in other words, was not inner content but outward effects. Both were fixated on style.

Venetians were hardly unique in making style central to aesthetic interests. Writers across fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, responding to medieval writing as dry and inelegant, had gradually displaced absolute content in favor of style in innumerable varied and covert ways. By the early sixteenth century discussions not only of language and literature but of painting, architecture, sculpture, manners, and music were thickly overgrown with problems of style.^[1] This is not to say that sixteenth-century observers were innocent of semantic dimensions in art or human action; rather that they were more likely to explain meaning (or avoid doing so) through recourse to the ways things, ideas, and persons presented themselves in the world.

From the disciplinary standpoint, this meant explicating old works and inventing new ones within the framework of rhetoric, where concerns about locution and

[1] For an extension of rhetorical analysis to visual arts see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in the Renaissance and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford, 1971). On the centrality of style to musical thinking in this period see James Haar, "Self-Consciousness about Style, Form, and Genre in 16th-Century Music," Studi musicali 3 (1974): 219-31.

gesture dominated both exegesis and compositional process. Venice differed from the rest of the peninsula only in its extraordinarily single-minded, obedient attention to rhetorical modes that placed style at the very center of critical and creative thinking. Conceived this way, rhetoric could not confine itself to writing in any pure, timeless form, but necessarily involved transactions between author and audience. The enormous "dialogical" literature I have dealt with in Part I stands witness to this phenomenon, drawing for its multifaceted modes — of argument, commentary, criticism, praise, poetics, and history — from the arena of oratory.

Thinkers in Venice and its dominions, and especially Pietro Bembo, led Italy in codifying language through rhetoric. Bembo was ideally positioned to secure a loyal following by the time his dialogue on the vernacular, Prose della volgar lingua, was published in 1525.^[2] Early in the century he had already established himself in the upper crust of philological academia through ties with Aldus Manutius's press and had won favor with vernacular readers with his Neoplatonic dialogue on love, Gli asolani. After the Prose was drafted in 1512-16, manuscript copies circulated widely in literary circles, and Bembo had come to be regarded as a de facto dean of Italian letters.^[3]

At its surface the Prose simply attempts to gain Italian equal status with Latin and provide it with a set of practical guidelines for use. In its actual working out, however, Bembo's fixation on style, and especially on the style of Petrarch's lyrics, led him to codify a fairly comprehensive system of Italian poetics. To this end his second book recast Cicero's dialogues on oratory, adding to them precepts from Horace's rhetorically inspired verse epistle, Ars poetica: Bembo fused Cicero's advocacy of oratorical diffidence and variation and his advice on suiting style to particular audiences with Horace's conception of poetry as a kind of staged performance, carefully gauged to manipulate the reader according to the author's fancy. Through this consolidation, Bembo aimed for nothing less than a new vernacular program — a project he carried off with singular success. More than anyone else, Bembo was instrumental in fixing the fledgling art of poetry, only recently hatched from its medieval state as an adjunct of grammar and rhetoric, within the more generalized framework of oratory. It was also he who devised a comprehensive theoretical accompaniment to the increasingly social role literary language was coming to play in public and private spheres. Far from sequestering language in any abstract philosophizing, Bembo instead based his guidelines on the rhythms, timbres, and cadences of immediate sounding speech to produce a practical apparatus for reading and writing the vernacular that was well tuned to verbal sound. The result was highly prescriptive but also pragmatic — a program addressing real readers, listeners, and interlocutors.

[2] On Bembo's life and work see esp. W. Theodor Elwert, "Pietro Bembo e la vita letteraria del suo tempo," in La civiltà veneziana del rinascimento, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Centro di Cultura e Civiltà (Florence, 1958), pp. 125-26, and the literature cited in Chap. 1 n. 16 above.

[3] On the date of the Prose and the manuscript tradition that preceded its publication see the introduction to Mario Marti's ed., Prose della volgar lingua (Padua, 1967), pp. vii-ix. Citations below refer to Marti's ed., which is based on the definitive third edition of the Prose from 1549.

The sonorous aspects of Bembo's Prose have attracted much attention from musicologists,^[4] who have tried hard in recent decades to show how composers translated Bembo's ideas into notes. Musicologists have, above all, asked how Bembo's views on sound and prosody — vowels and consonants, syllable lengths, line lengths, rhyme schemes, accents, and verse types — combined to generate passages and entire works of varying expressive weights, from light and pleasing to grave and harsh. This has seemed a rich line of inquiry, for as Dean Mace stressed some years ago, Bembo's conceptions of words did not assign them fixed meanings but regarded them within various and changing sound contexts in ways that compare strikingly with Venetians' musical settings. But the same scholars have been less inclined to consider how Bembo's arguments relate to Venetian expressive practices more broadly. My argument repositions our past emphasis on Bembist sound to place it within what I identify as the Prose' s overarching rhetorical principle of decorum. Important in two different, but related, ways, decorum signaled a commitment to preserve moderation but also to achieve separate stylistic levels matched to subject matter. We have already encountered this duality in earlier chapters — in Tomitano's portrait of the Venetian gentleman and Venier's counsel to Dolce to temper grief with joy.

Surprisingly, the symbiotic interrelations of decorum's dual meanings are as yet barely hinted at in the growing secondary literature on cinquecento vernacular theory. In the present chapter I extend my study of these interrelations beyond Bembo into a larger field of grammarians, rhetoricians, poetic theorists, and popular trattatisti to reveal something of the process by which such untidy stylistic collapses were inscribed and reinscribed in a larger textual-critical tradition — one I identify as distinctly Venetian. I show that in the face of multiplicitous linguistic usages Venetians' repeated conflations of moderation and propriety helped assert an official, unitary language by systematizing rules for language use. Venice was engaged in two contradictory modes — asserting an atemporal language to project the official rhetoric of moderation and propriety while simultaneously generating numerous time-bound linguistic styles that often undermined the "official" one.

[4] See, most importantly, Dean T. Mace, "Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal," The Musical Quarterly 55 (1969): 65-86. Although Mace argued the relevance of Bembo's thinking to the genesis of the madrigal in Florence and Rome, he illustrated his essay with two examples from Willaert's Musica nova and one by Wert. Notable for situating Bembo in various musico-historiographic contexts are Gary Tomlinson, "Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi, and the Humanist Heritage of Opera" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1979), pp. 37-55, which develops the Ficinian context of Bembo's theories; Howard Mayer Brown, "Words and Music: Willaert, the Chanson and the Madrigal about 1540," in Florence and Venice, Comparisons and Relations: Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976-1977, vol. 2, Il Cinquecento, ed. Christine Smith with Salvatore I. Camporeale (Florence, 1980), pp. 217-66, relating Bembo's ideas to Willaert's madrigals; and Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), pp. 355-68, which extends Bembo's ideas to an analysis of the opening of Willaert's madrigal Aspro core et selvaggio et cruda voglia. Earlier than any of these are Nino Pirrotta's remarks following Walter H. Rubsamen's paper "From Frottola to Madrigal: The Changing Pattern of Italian Secular Vocal Music," in Chanson & Madrigal, 1480-1530: Studies in Comparison and Contrast, Isham Memorial Library, 13-14 September 1961, ed. James Haar (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 76-77.

This chapter concentrates on analyzing the former as it was articulated in written doctrines, keeping the latter in peripheral view in anticipation of issues that will arise in Chapters 7-10.

Bembism on the Terraferma and in the Lagoon

In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, after Bembo's Prose was published, theoretical writers in Venice and the Veneto formed two broad sociogeographic groups. The first consists of teachers and scholars situated in Padua, the second, of popularizing polygraphs based mainly in Venice; in the former group I consider Bernardino Daniello, Sperone Speroni, and Bernardino Tomitano, and in the latter, Francesco Sansovino, Lodovico Dolce, and Girolamo Muzio.^[5] The regional split is significant. Theorizers in each city played substantially different roles, with Paduans oriented in the didactic worlds of the schools, universities, and formalized academies, and Venetians often working as editors, translators, and freelancers for local presses. While Venetians were accommodating a more commercial public, eager to have the mushrooming quantities of vernacular wisdom made readily digestible, Paduans served up many of the same issues in somewhat headier concoctions. Despite these differences, Paduans and Venetians did a good deal of intermixing. It will be useful to sketch their profiles and some of their major contributions.

According to Alessandro Zilioli's manuscript biography, Daniello had come from his native Lucca to Padua, where he taught letters to boys.^[6] While there he composed orations and Italian poetry, translated classical texts (notably the Georgics of Virgil), and assembled commentaries on Dante and Petrarch.^[7] His Poetica,

[5] I should note, however, that the first Italian poetics printed in the region following Bembo's Prose was La poetica (Books 1-4: Vicenza, 1529) by the Vicenzan nobleman Giangiorgio Trissino. Trissino employed a wide reading of both Greek and Latin classics, but his treatise is mainly a handbook on versification. Based in large part on Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and Antonio da Tempo's De rithimis vulgaribus, Trissino's poetics emerged in seeming isolation from those of other theorists of the Veneto who were active at the time. The first edition, including Books 1-4, promised two more; they did not appear until 1562, although they seem to have been written by at least 1549, possibly some years earlier. All six books are included in Bernard Weinberg, ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento, 4 vols. (Bari, 1970-74), 1:21-158 and 2:5-90 (hereafter Trattati ); see also the facsimile of Books 1-4 in the series Poetiken des Cinquecento, vol. 4, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Munich, 1969). Trissino's fifth and sixth books of La poetica are significant mainly as paraphrases of Aristotle's Poetics, whose importance had already begun to be widely appreciated by the time they were published, as discussed below. See Weinberg's discussion of Books 5 and 6 in A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961), 2:719-21, and in Trattati 1:590-91 and 2:653-54. For a summary of Trissino's importance in this period see Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York, 1968), pp. 10-13.

[6] "Istoria delle vite de' poeti italiani, di Alessandro Zilioli veneziano," I-Vnm, MSS It. cl. X, No. 1 (6394), p. 140. Zilioli was a literary scholar who died in 1650. See also the biographical information on Daniello by M.R. De Gramatica, "Daniello, Bernardino," in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 32:608-10, which fixes his date of birth in the late 1400s and the date of his move to Padua ca. 1525. He died in 1565.

[7] Of special interest is his ed. and commentary of Petrarch, Sonetti, canzoni, e triomphi di Messer Francesco Petrarca con la spositione di Bernardino Daniello da Lucca (Venice, 1541); see Luigi Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano nel cinquecento, rev. ed. (Padua, 1974), pp. 66-68.

printed in 1536, is notable as one of the earliest vernacular poetics and the first firmly rooted in the Ciceronian tradition.^[8] Adopting the fashionable dialogue form, it portrays a group of Venetians as visitors to an academic Arcadia in the Veneto with Daniello as schoolmaster.^[9] The scene takes place in the bucolic Bressano on the Brenta in May 1533. There Daniello meets his mentor, Triphon Gabriele — also based in Padua at the time — along with Gabriele's two nephews, Andrea and Iacopo. As the group convenes, Daniello espies a shyly hidden copy of Horace's Ars poetica in Andrea's hand and embarks on a series of impromptu lessons on poetry. Thereafter the dialogue unfolds as a didactic-moral rereading of Cicero, taking Bembo's Prose as its point of departure and hardening it into pedagogic dogma.^[10]

Daniello was a minor scholar-didact, if a skilled linguist, commentator, and theoretician. His prestige paled beside that of Sperone Speroni, who counts as the dominant literary figure on the terraferma in the generation following Bembo.^[11] During the early 1520s Speroni studied with the Aristotelian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi and by the 1530s had become a major light at Padua. In the year 1540 he helped found and shape the Paduan Accademia degli Infiammati.^[12]

[8] Fabian, ed., Poetiken des cinquecento, vol. 2 (Munich, 1968); repr. in Trattati 1:227-318, which includes the original pagination referred to here. For a useful summary see Ralph C. Williams, "The Originality of Daniello," Romanic Review 15 (1924): 121-22.

[9] On the adoption of Cicero's model of the dialogue by quattrocento humanists see David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1993), approaches sixteenth-century dialogue from the broad perspective of the cultural economy of communicative exchange. For the later sixteenth century see also Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, 1989).

[10] Early on in the work, Daniello recounts another conversation heard in Padua, a Platonic defense of poetry involving at least two more Venetians, the poet Giovanni Brevio and the senator and letterato Domenico Moresini. In connection with vernacular arts, it is noteworthy that two of Brevio's ballate were set to music by Rore prior to their publication in poetic eds.; see Chap. 8 n. 10 (and on Parabosco's and Perissone's settings, Chap. 9, esp. n. 17). A prelate at the Roman court after 1542, Brevio reputedly had friendships with Bembo, Pietro Aretino, Giovanni della Casa, and other luminaries. The identification of Moresini comes from Verdizzotti's biography of Molino in Rime di M. Girolamo Molino (Venice, 1573), p. [6]. Moresini is also mentioned in Tomitano's letter to Longo (see the Preface, n. 2 above) as the "magnifico Mess. Domenico Moresini" (p. 386).

On La poetica's Platonic defense of poetry see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2:721-22, and for an overall prospectus of its content, 2:721-24. See also De Gramatica's article on Daniello in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani, which provides a précis of the Poetica and a list of Daniello's Venetian contacts (including Aretino, Federigo Badoer, and Iacopo Bonfadio) based on his correspondence. Despite these references the extent of Daniello's interaction with Venice remains unclear (see Weinberg, Trattati 1:611). For an attempt to clarify Daniello's relationship with Gabriele see Ezio Raimondi, "Bernardo Daniello, lettore di poesia," in Rinascimento inquieto (Palermo, 1965), pp. 23-69. Daniello was also connected with Parabosco, as revealed in Parabosco's letter to him (first published in 1545) in the first book of the Quattro libri delle lettere amorose, ed. Thomaso Porcacchi (Venice, 1561), fols. 95'-98'.

[11] Speroni lived from 1500 until 1588. For his life see Mario Pozzi, ed., Trattatisti del cinquecento, vol. 1, Bembo, Speroni e Gelli (Milan and Naples, 1978), pp. 471-509 (and the Nota ai testi, pp. 1178-94, with references to earlier biographies).

[12] On Speroni's role in the Infiammati see Florindo [V.] Cerretta, Alessandro Piccolomini: letterato e filosofo senese del cinquecento (Siena, 1960), pp. 23-31 (who fixes Speroni's leadership from November 1541 to March 1542); Francesco Bruni, "Sperone Speroni e l'Accademia degli Infiammati," Filologia e letteratura 13 (1967): 24-71; and Valerio Vianello, Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro: contributi sulla cultura veneta del cinquecento, Biblioteca Veneta, no. 6 (Padua, 1988), Chaps. 3-5, the last of which also deals with Tomitano.

Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue, set in 1530 and composed soon afterward, offered the most probing philosophical response to linguistic issues raised by Bembo.^[13] On the surface it constituted an attempt to arbitrate debates about the choice of a vernacular language and extract a truce from the embattled lines drawn around them. The main sides in the conflicts were represented by Lazaro Buonamici as a hardnosed antivernacular classicist, an anonymous courtier who favors spoken vernaculars, and Bembo as champion of old Tuscan. But the deeper problematic for Speroni stood outside the choice of language. In fact, language hardly constitutes the real site of polemic at all (as Francesco Bruni has noted), for although Lazaro and Bembo take different sides in the discussions, each displays a fundamental methodological faith in Ciceronian rhetorical ideals.^[14] The true conceptual divide emerges in a larger conflict introduced surreptitiously through an interpolation in the latter half of the dialogue, where a new interlocutor recounts a discussion between Pomponazzi (called Peretto) and the humanist scholar Giovanni Lascari. Revealingly, this interlocutor, bearing the quiet epithet "Scolare," boasts himself ignorant of all languages. Introduced not as an expert but as a "disinterested" yet perceptive witness, he narrates a scene of conciliation in which the philosopher and his humanist opponent make two new claims that will now be used to mediate the terms of the initial linguistic dispute: the first is for the pragmatic value of all languages for cognitive and scientific purposes; the second for the ultimate inferiority of any language to philosophy.

Speroni's little Dialogo thus lays out a dialectical tension between rhetoric and philosophy that inevitably arose within the Paduan university elite, where Aristotelianism was the coin of the realm.^[15] In that respect it may seem a departure from the resolutely rhetorical and Bembist themes I have set out to trace in this chapter, as in part it is. But when the conversation comes back to the principal interlocutors the last word goes to Bembo, who reiterates his pro-Tuscan position with the admonition that "if you . . . want to compose canzoni or novelle in our way — that is, in a language different from Tuscan and without imitating Petrarch or

[13] See Piero Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici della letteratura volgare," in Storia della cultura veneta: dal primo quattrocento al concilio di Trenta, vol. 3/2, ed., Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 175-77; Raffaele Simone, "Sperone Speroni et l'idée de diachronie dans la linguistique de la Renaissance italienne," in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. Herman Parret (New York, 1976), pp. 302-16; Bruni, "Sperone Speroni," pp. 31ff.; Riccardo Scrivano, "Cultura e letteratura in Sperone Speroni," in Cultura e letteratura nel cinquecento (Rome, 1966), pp. 121-26; and Snyder, Chap. 3 in Writing the Scene of Speaking, pp. 87ff. (on Speroni's dialogues). For briefer mentions see G.A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500-1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar II (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 63-64, and Robert A. Hall, Jr., The Italian "Questione della lingua": An Interpretative Essay, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature, no. 4 (Chapel Hill, 1942), p. 17.

I cite from the edition of Pierre Villey [-Desmeserets], Les sources italiennes de la "Deffense et illustration de la langue francoise" de Joachim du Bellay, Bibliothèque litteraire de la renaissance, ser. 1, vol. 9 (Paris, 1969), pp. 111-46. Another ed. may be found in Speroni's Opere, 5 vols. (Venice, 1740), 1:166-201, and in Trattatisti del cinquecento 1:585-635.

[14] "Sperone Speroni," p. 32.

[15] For a broad assessment of this theme see Jerrold Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, 1968).

Boccaccio — perhaps you will be a good courtier but never a poet or orator."^[16] This, he adds (reminiscent of Venier's advice to Dolce), may bring you temporary fame but not everlasting glory. Speroni thus accepts the vitality of Bembo's Tuscan for new literary production at the same time as he takes pains to circumscribe it within a limited intellectual domain.

Speroni's Dialogo helps explain some of the motifs and conflicts that arise in other Paduan texts, notably the Ragionamenti della lingua toscana of Bernardino Tomitano, dubbed by Baxter Hathaway Speroni's "Boswell."^[17] Tomitano, to recall my Preface, was a Paduan lecturer in the Aristotelian discipline of logic, as well as a medico. He published his Ragionamenti in 1545, republishing them with further additions from the rhetorics of Aristotle and Cicero the following year.^[18] The dialogues were set during the year 1542 in the house of Speroni, "prencipe & governo" of the Accademici Infiammati. At the outset Speroni is heard proudly announcing their lofty goal: "The occasion for assembling this noble and generous company of men having become known and arrived at by us for no other end than to add some light and beauty and dignity to this language, which we call Tuscan, and not to make a popular fraternity or Babel, I wish we were of no other opinion than to have people read Petrarch and Boccaccio."^[19] Speroni's opener provides a key to the sociointellectual context of the work. Its interlocutors appear as a kind of academic brotherhood, members of a tightly structured fraternity of the sort that was still anathema in Venice. Their mission is twofold: first, to advance trecento Tuscan as the exclusive literary vernacular against the claims of any current spoken tongue; and second, to propose as its sole models the same two authors Bembo singled out for verse and prose, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Tomitano's text thus reconfirms retrospectively that even the more philosophically oriented Speroni accepted Bembo's case insofar as it applied to modern literature. Indeed the Ragionamenti bluntly rebutted those like Baldassare Castiglione and Giangiorgio Trissino who advocated an eclectic composite of modern languages, the so-called lingua cortigiana, exalting instead Bembo's revival of Tuscan by assimilating it to Cicero's cultivation of Latin.^[20]

[16] "[S]e voglia vi verrà mai di comporre o canzoni o novelle al modo nostro, cioè in lingua che sia diversa dalla thoscana, et senza imitare il Petrarca o il Boccaccio, peravventura voi sarete buon cortigiano, ma poeta o oratore non mai" (p. 146).

[17] Tomitano lived in Padua ca. 1517-76. For Hathaway's compelling account of Tomitano's indebtedness to Speroni, especially in the area of poetic imagination, see The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 310-15. On their relationship see also Bruni, "Sperone Speroni," pp. 24-31.

[18] Both were printed in Venice. I cite from the later edition, Ragionamenti della lingua toscana di M. Bernardin Tomitano. I precetti della rhetorica secondo l'artificio d'Aristotile & Cicerone nel fine del secondo libro nuovamente aggionti (Venice, 1546).

[19] "Essendo a noi trapelata, & pervenuta l'occasione di adunare questa nobile & generosa compagnia d'huomini non per altro fine, che per accrescere alcun lume & vaghezze & dignita a questa lingua, che noi Toscana addomandiamo, & non per farne una popolaresca frataglia ò sinagoga; vorrei che non fussimo d'altra opinione che di far leggere altro che il Petrarca, & il Boccaccio" (ibid., p. 18).

[20] In Book 3 Tomitano compares Cicero's synthesis of the best in Roman literature to Plato's synthesis of Greek philosophers, likening both to Aesculapius's restoration of the members of Hippolytus's lacerated body and assigning the same synthetic role in Tuscan literature to Bembo. He concludes: "Tra Toscani pochissimi vi sono stati, & per dire meglio un solo; il BEMBO dico, hora la Dio merce Cardinale illustrissimo & signor mio: la cui diligenza si come in tutte le forme del dire è stata non men cara che rara" (Among writers in Tuscan there were very few, and to put it better, only one: Bembo, I declare, now, thanks to God, most illustrious Cardinal and my master, whose assiduousness in all forms of discourse was no less esteemed than rare); p. 269.

All of this may make Tomitano appear more orthodox than Speroni's views in the Dialogo delle lingue would have led us to expect. Yet other passages in the Ragionamenti confirm Tomitano's entanglement in Speroni's philosophical biases. Tomitano's prologue asserts, for example, that "sapere et conoscere" — that is, the cognition of things — is what separates men from beasts, not (as the rhetoricians typically claimed) the faculty of speech.^[21]Res, in other words, sits higher in Tomitano's philosophical conception than verbum, or, as he put it: "Things make a man wise, and words make him appear so. The voice makes us similar to beasts, while thoughts, separating us from them, make us resemble God."^[22]

Tomitano's allegiances, like Speroni's, were thus mixed, exalting Tuscan (and Petrarch) for verbum, but demoting language per se in the larger philosophical scheme of res. Owing to this tension, and to a strong dose of Aristotelian encyclopedism, the Ragionamenti fail to develop along hard and fast Bembist lines. The last two of its three books consist of a prolix treatment of style and rhetoric, applying to Italian all the major rhetorical ideas of Cicero and Aristotle and drawing at various times on virtually every major classical writer on language. Despite obeisances to Bembo, the philosophical interests that Tomitano and Speroni cultivated make them more independent than their counterparts in Venice. (We will see that this is also true of Daniello.)

Once again, different preoccupations correspond to differences of audience. Unlike the Paduans, whose audience would look to them for scholarly, or at least schoolmasterly, erudition, Sansovino, Dolce, and Muzio had to attract an urban market of relatively unsophisticated readers through seductive packaging of rhetorical ideas. Each of them did so with varying degrees of selectivity and different formulas, but recognizing that in the economy of vernacular knowledge that circulated in Venice, greater density meant fewer readers.

Sansovino typified this peculiarly Venetian breed of author. Of Florentine descent, he was born in Rome in 1521 but following the Sack of 1527 moved with his sculptor father, Jacopo, to Venice, where he died in 1586. Although Sansovino had studied law at Padua, Florence, and Bologna from 1536, his attraction to vernacular letters drew him back to his adoptive home in 1542. He spent his days in Venice cranking out poetry, fiction, translations, editions, bizarre catalogues, chronicles, genealogies, and popular histories (what Paul Grendler has called "scissors-and-

[21] Ragionamenti, pp. 3-4. The usual rhetoricians' view may be seen at the beginning of Bembo's Prose, p. 5.

[22] "[L]e cose fanno l'huomo saggio, et le parole il fan parer. La voce con le bestie ci rende communi et simiglianti, il pensiero da quelli separandoci, con Iddio ci rassimiglia" (Ragionamenti, pp. 40-41). For a searching evaluation of Tomitano's attitudes about the conflict between res and verbum, its relation to Speroni's thought, and other aspects of Tomitano's Ragionamenti, see Vianello, "Tra velleità di riforma e compromessi con la tradizione per un'identità di competenza," Chap. 6 in Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro, pp. 107-37, and "Nella prospettiva di una nuova mediazione: l'esigenza della 'letterarietà,"' Chap. 7, pp. 139-72.

paste compilations")^[23] and from 1560 managed to make sizable profits by starting his own press. His Arte oratoria of 1546 is one of the earliest rhetorics of its kind, summarizing and simplifying Ciceronian oratory for application to the archaic Tuscan championed by Bembo.^[24] Much of the Arte oratoria addresses questions pertaining specifically to oratory, such as argumentation and ethics. But Sansovino approaches the issue of persuasion largely through the vernacular poets, in keeping with other contemporaneous rhetorics, and shows the same concern for sound typical of the new poetic theorists.

Sansovino's links to vernacular publishing thus resemble Dolce's, as I characterized them briefly in Chapter 4. By 1550, when Dolce published his popular gloss on Bembo's Prose, the similarly titled Osservationi nella volgar lingua, Bembo's work was already a generation old. Developments between 1525 and 1550 had changed conditions for the reception of linguistic and literary theory even among less-educated readers. In 1535 Dolce had added a vernacular translation of Horace's Ars poetica to the growing Horatian literature — one of the vast number of translations he produced before his death in 1568.^[25] A year later Alessandro de' Pazzi put Aristotle's Poetics into general circulation by publishing it in a respectable Latin translation.

Meanwhile critical reaction to Bembo's views was gaining a good deal of weight. By the late decades of the century his program for the Italian language (if not his poetics as a whole) was to win the day. Still to be reckoned with at midcentury, however, were the feisty Florentines, members of the Accademia Fiorentina like Giovambattista Gelli, Vincenzo Borghini, and Pierfrancesco Giambullari, who rejected Bembo's narrow literary boundaries in favor of spoken Florentine (as Machiavelli had done before them).^[26] On top of that Venice itself was sheltering a more biting variety of polygraph than the likes of Sansovino and Dolce — writers like Doni and Niccolò Franco, who had been satirizing Bembist models in print since 1539.^[27]

[23] For a summary of Sansovino's life with attention to his role as a popular historian see Paul F. Grendler, "Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History, 1560-1600," Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 139-80; see also idem, Critics of the Italian World, 1530-1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco & Ortensio Lando (Madison, 1969), pp. 65-69. Further information on Sansovino's life and an annotated catalogue of his works may be found in Emmanuele A. Cicogna, Delle inscrizioni veneziane, 6 vols. (Venice, 1834), 4:31-91.

[24] The full title of the volume was given as L'arte oratoria secondo i modi della lingua volgare, di Francesco Sansovino divisa in tre libri. Ne quali si ragiona tutto quello ch'all'artificio appartiene, cosi del poeta come dell'oratore, con l'autorità de i nostri scrittori (Venice, 1546) and the internal books as Dell'arte oratoria nella lingua toscana di F. Sansovino. Libro primo [-al terzo]. Reprints were issued in 1569 and 1575 and a variant version called "In materia dell'arte libri tre ne quali si contien l'ordine delle cose che si ricercano all'Oratore" was included in an anthology of orations that Sansovino published called Diversi orationi volgarmente scritte da gli huomini illustri de tempi nostri (Venice, 1561). The Arte oratoria may have been intended as the prospectus for an immense work of twenty-three books on the topic, never completed, as the first paragraph of Sansovino's little manual La retorica of 1543 suggests (see Weinberg, Trattati 1:453 and 631).

[25] La poetica d'Horatio (Venice, 1535), dedicated to Pietro Aretino. See Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1:101-2.

[26] See Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 27-35 and passim, and R. G. Faithfull, "On the Concept of 'Living Language' in Cinquecento Italian Philology," Modern Language Review 48 (1953): 278-92.

[27] Among the earliest such writings are Franco's Petrarchista (Venice, 1539), Le pistole vulgari (Venice, 1539), and La Philena (Mantua, 1547). Doni published his Inferni in Venice in 1553. See Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, passim.

By 1550, therefore, an audience was ready-made for Dolce's handbook. Cobbled together with its simply argued defense of Bembo were remarks distilled from the Prose itself, glosses from Gianfrancesco Fortunio's Regole grammaticali of 1516, paraphrases of Donatus's Latin grammar, and (in Book 4) a superficially Aristotelian poetics, all presented with a plainness and simplicity that transformed Bembo's subtle precepts into a sort of folk wisdom. Bembo of course had died just three years before, and in Dolce's heroic account his stature was that of a modern Cicero. "There are some who don't like Bembo's works," he admitted. "To them one can answer in the way Quintilian once answered those overly severe men of his century who didn't like Cicero's works: let each one know without a doubt that he must take great profit from Bembo's lessons in poetry and prose."^[28]

Where Dolce converted Bembo's Prose into a canon for the common man, Muzio exploited the epistle form to bolster his precepts through familiarizing didactic address to a second-person "lettor." Generically the Arte poetica emulated the verse epistle of Horace, which provided both the formal model and poetic principles through which Bembo's linguistic biases were filtered.^[29] But compared with the droll servility with which Dolce's compilation paid homage to the Bembist tradition, Muzio's endorsement in the verse treatise Arte poetica of 1551 was more equivocal. As a Paduan and cosmopolitan courtier who served numerous princes on the peninsula, often carrying out delicate diplomatic missions,^[30] Muzio virulently opposed the arrogation of linguistic authority that he attributed to the Florentines. His position could at times appear comically contradictory, advocating trecento Tuscan (or what he preferred to call "Italian") in some works, while passionately resenting Tuscan elitism in others.^[31] Yet Muzio's defense of non-Tuscans' right to theorize Tuscan literature nevertheless helps explain the Veneto's curious dominance in the revival and codification of a language that was both foreign to it as well as archaic. In a letter to the Florentine literati Gabriello Cesano and Bartolomeo Cavalcanti he bristled:

[P]erhaps you will laugh that I, a non-Tuscan, want to discourse about Tuscan writers. But laugh on, as I too often laugh at those Tuscan writers who, believing

[28] "[S]ono alcuni, aiquali l'opere del Bembo non piacciono. A costoro si puo rispondere nella guisa, che gia rispose Quintiliano a que glihuomini troppo severi del suo secolo, aiquali non piacevano l'opre di Cicerone: conosca indubitatamente ciascuno di dover dalla lettione cosi de' versi, come delle prose del Bembo ritrar grandissimo profitto" (Osservationi nella volgar lingua [Venice, 1550], fols. 9-9'). Dolce later annotated Cicero's works in Opere morali di Marco Tullio Cicerone: cioè tre libri de gli uffici, due dialoghi, l'uno dell'amicitia, l'altro della vecchiezza, sei paradossi secondo l'openione de gli storici, trans. Francesco Vendramin (Venice, 1563).

[29] Modern ed. in Trattati 2:163-209.

[30] Muzio, known as Giustinopolitano, lived at Ferrara, Pesaro, and Urbino among other places and spent his last years in Rome and Tuscany. He wrote manuals for courtiers, including Il duello (Venice, 1550) on duelling and Il gentiluomo (Venice, 1571). Among various discussions of Muzio, see the Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana 4:97-99; Benedetto Croce, Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo rinascimento, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Bari, 1958), 1:198-210; and Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 40-41.

[31] Muzio voiced his strongest resentment in the late Varchina (Venice, 1573), a retort to Benedetto Varchi's L'Hercolano, which had been published in 1570 (see n. 33 below). Some of Muzio's other late writings on language survive in Battaglie . . . per la diffesa dell'italica lingua . . . (Venice, 1582), in which he took Trissino's part against pro-Tuscans like Varchi and Claudio Tolomei.

only themselves suited to write in this language, know less of it than the non-Tuscans. . . . To me it seems that in Tuscany what may come to pass is what used to happen in those countries where the most precious wines were produced: the foreign merchants, buying the best ones, carried them off, leaving the less good ones to the peasants.^[32]

Muzio's anxieties were not groundless. As late as 1564, when Varchi drafted his L'Hercolano, his interlocutor Count Cesare Hercolano was made to say, "It seems to me a strange thing that a foreigner, however learned and talented, should give the rules and teach the way of good writing and graceful composition in the language of others, and I have heard someone say that . . . [Bembo] was bitterly reproved as both presumptuous and arrogant by I don't know how many of your Florentines."^[33]

Yet as strangers to the dialect of the trecentisti, Venetians needed to make systematic, self-conscious guidelines in order to achieve stylistic and grammatical regularity. Their readiness to adapt themselves to an alien mode sets them apart from those champions of the courtly spoken dialect like Castiglione, whose Cortegiano warned against any kind of linguistic affectation.^[34] Bembo's aspirations to courtly grace, purity, classicism, and restraint did not preclude archaisms that seemed intolerably ostentatious to Castiglione-styled courtiers.^[35] Indeed, this tendency, perhaps more than any other, is paradigmatic for the Venetians' reception and transformation of a foreign musical idiom to their own classicizing ends.

Poetry as Ciceronian Oratory

In the sixteenth century no art was more assimilated to oratory than poetry,^[36] and nowhere more than in Venice, where oratorical standards served as the foremost means of poetic prescription, creation, and evaluation. Many have linked the special persistence with which Venice pursued oratorical paradigms to the strangely liminal

[32] "[V]oi forse vi riderete, che io non Thoscano voglia de gli scrittori Toscani ragionare. Ma ridete pure; che anche io bene spesso rido di que' Thoscani, i quali soli credendosi essere atti a scrivere in questa lingua, ne sanno meno che i non Thoscani. . . . À me pare che nella Thoscana sia avvenuto quello, che suole avvenire in que' paesi, dove nascono i vini piu pretiosi: che i mercatanti forestieri i migliori comperando quelli se ne potano, lasciando à paesani i men buoni" (Lettere [Venice, 1551], fol. 99).

[33] "Egli mi pare strana cosa, che un forestiero, quantunque dotto, e virtuoso habbia à dar le regole, e insegnare il modo del bene scrivere, e leggiadramente comporre nella lingua Altrui, e ho sentito dire à qualcuno, che egli ne fu da non sò quanti de' vostri Fiorentini agramente, e come presontuoso, e come arrogante ripreso." This comes from L'Hercolano dialogo di Messer Benedetto Varchi, nelqual si ragiona generalmente delle lingue, & in particolare della Toscana, e della fiorentina . . . (Venice, 1570), p. 19. On Varchi's position with respect to larger issues in the questione della lingua debate see Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 37-40, and Thérèse Labande-Jeanroy, La question de la langue en Italie (Strasbourg and Paris, 1925), p. 169.

[34] See Ettore Bonora, ed., 2d ed. (Milan, 1976), Book 1, Chaps. 28-39, where the view is put forth by Count Giuliano de' Medici.

[35] Some who extended his ideas even systematized these archaisms; see for instance Sansovino, L'Arte oratoria, fols. 55'-56.

[36] Weinberg's essay in Trattati 1:541-61 and the monograph of Ezio Raimondi, Poesia come retorica (Florence, 1980), are instructive on the general question of connections between poetry and oratory (though the latter deals primarily with the later cinquecento).

state in which the city was caught after the shock of the League of Cambrai and before the rising pressures of Inquisition trials, political uncertainty, and the plague of the 1570s forced an awakening of social and political consciousness later in the century. During the second to fifth decades Venetians seemed to ignore much of the political reality that surrounded them, or reshaped it into their own imagined versions. In this state of "Venice Preserved," to borrow William J. Bouwsma's rubric, they clung to an idealized world, defined and authorized by words, that served as a hedge against frightening recognitions of current realities.^[37] The Venetian histories of Gasparo Contarini and Pietro Bembo and the interviews of Triphon Gabriele recorded in Giannotti's Libro della repubblica de' vinitiani attest (as Bouwsma has shown) to ways that Venetians viewed even affairs of the present and recent past through the scrim of civic myth. Literary creation, linguistic theorizing, and history writing all sought out idealized realities not unlike those Tomitano distilled in his letter to Francesco Longo.^[38]

It is not hard to see the kinds of dilemmas this worldview posed for the Prose and works like it. If Bembo's standards exemplified a more general Venetian posture of insulated detachment, what expressive range was allowed to writers aspiring to meet them?^[39] In particular, if writers adapted Ciceronian rhetoric with hardly a trace of its vigorous social side, what attitudes could they hold toward the problems of literary subjects? Since Cicero's teachings urged orators to match style to subject matter, these questions profoundly affected the compositional process from start to finish.

Hidden away in the manuscript letters of Pietro Gradenigo at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is a small corpus of informal poetic criticism that helps clarify the ways in which Venetians confronted such questions, replacing thematic concerns with the problems of rhetoric.^[40] Gradenigo was Bembo's son-in-law and a member of Domenico Venier's innermost circle. He was thus centrally located among Venice's literary elite and, as was the case with his aristocratic peers Venier and Girolamo Molino, his poems were not published in a canzoniere during his lifetime but scattered through midcentury anthologies. Similarly his poetic criticism (such as it is) is preserved only in an epistolary manuscript.

Among the most intriguing items in this corpus are letters exchanged with an otherwise unknown woman named Signora Lucia Albana Avogadria of Brescia. In one of his responses to her Gradenigo offered a critique of a sonnet of hers.^[41] We have only the last two lines (13-14) of the poem she sent him, which he quotes.

[37] See Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), Chap. 3, esp. pp. 135-139 on Bembo, and Preface, nn. 8-10 above.

[38] Preface, nn. 2-7 above.

[39] See Thomas M. Greene on the Ciceronian search for "synchronic purity" in this period and its relation to an atemporal vision of art and language; The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), p. 175. (See also Chap. 1 n. 24 above.)

[40] I-Vnm, MSS It. cl. X, 23 (6526); see Chap. 4 n. 20 above.

[41] Ibid., fol. 74', from a letter dated 7 October 1560 from the Villa Bozza.

Teco havendo portare altiere e sole            With you having to bear proud and alone
Spoglie dal tempo, Mondo, e Morte rea.    The spoils of time, the world, and evil death.

From this fragment we can only guess that Avogadria's poem tried to paint a portrait of bereavement in grand, sweeping tones. Her theme left Gradenigo silent. His attentions focused instead on the rhythmic disposition of the lines, for which he suggests a revision.

Teco spoglie portando altere: e sole            With you bearing spoils proud and alone,
il Mondo, e'l Tempo vinto, e Morte rea.      The world and time overcome, and evil death.

or:

Vinto il Mondo e'l Tempo, et Morte rea.      Overcome the world and time and evil death.

These changes, he claims, will alter "only a little the arrangement of the words."^[42] By collapsing the phrase "havendo portare" of v. 13 to simply "portando" and introducing the past participle "vinto" in v. 14, Gradenigo replaced the clear, symmetrical syntax of the original versification with weightier, proselike diction to strengthen the rhetorical momentum in the approach to the final verse. To justify these changes he adduced the wisdom of Petrarch and Bembo, who "used the form very often, . . . along with all the good writers and . . . the Latins as well."^[43] He suggested one further change, to alter the words "la vede" to "la scorge" in the fourth verse, "in order to vary the locution" (per variar la locutione). In closing, Gradenigo praised the sonnet for "being in all ways lovely, charming, and beautiful, having beautiful invention, lovely disposition, and charming locution."^[44]

With that triple accolade Gradenigo gives away his game. In keeping with his other concerns, these were the three components of Cicero's compositional process on which every modern Ciceronian dwelt.^[45] Invariably, they were preceded in theoretical discussions by a distinction made between materia and forma — essentially things (subjects) and words. And it was the latter that occupied Gradenigo.

Bembo's Prose sheds light on what is at stake here. Book 2 begins with the initial Ciceronian distinction between materia and forma but quickly introduces an additional division of forma into elezione and disposizione — the procedures of choosing

[42] "[S]arano però quei suoi istessi versi, mutata, se non un poco la collocatione delle parole" (ibid.).

[43] "[A]ssoluto modo usata frequentissimo dal Petrarca, dal Bembo, e da tutti i buoni Scrittori; et da i Latini anchora" (ibid.).

[44] "[A] tutte le vie vago, leggiadro, e bello, havendo bella inventione; vaga dispositione, et leggiadra locutione" (ibid.).

[45] Note, for instance, Muzio: "Drizzate gli occhi con la mente intenta / Ai chiari esempii che d'ingegno e d'arte / V'ha sì ben coloriti il secol prisco. / Gli scrittori d'Atene e quei di Roma / Daranno al vostro dir materia e forma" (Arte poetica, fols. 68'-69, vv. 50-55). See also Daniello, Poetica, pp. 69-70. The distinction entirely underlies Giulio Camillo Delminio's Trattato delle materie che possono venir sotto lo stile dell'eloquente, [ca. 1540]; modern ed. in Trattati 1:319-56.

and arranging words. It then subdivides disposizione into the processes of ordine, giacitura, and correzione (ordering, arranging, and revising words) and finally spends the rest of the book on a detailed consideration of elocution. In other words, the purportedly generative element in Cicero's threefold compositional process, invention — the production of, or settling on, the material itself — barely appears in Bembo's system, an absence that repeats itself tellingly in Gradenigo's criticism and in aspects of Bembo's discussion that we will encounter elsewhere.^[46]

Other poetics produced in and around Venice also ran the risk of being eviscerated thematically by their heavy dependence on oratory.^[47] In Daniello's Poetica rhetorical traditions not only furnish compositional procedures for poetry writing but give poetry its form. According to Daniello, a poem should consist of a prologue, an argument, and a conclusion, designed respectively to draw the reader into the topic, to instruct, and to move. The last is fundamental — the orator's art of persuasion — for as Bembo wrote following Cicero, "to define and describe well and completely the nature [of persuasion] it would be necessary to recount all that has been written of the art of oratory, which is . . . a great deal, since that whole art teaches us nothing else and strives for no end but to persuade."^[48]

This perspective owed its conception to Horace as well as to Cicero, since Horace's Ars poetica largely translated Ciceronian rhetoric into poetic principles.^[49] First printed in Italy around 1470, the Ars poetica became widely known in Cristoforo Landino's annotated Florentine edition published in 1482. Landino's annotations established the pattern for a hermeneutics that mixed more and more of the rhetorical tradition (as well as bits of Plato and Aristotle) into the Ars poetica.

[46] Bembo explicitly discussed elezione under the category of the "modo col quale si scrive" (the way in which one writes), i.e., forma — by Bembo's admission the only one of the two major Ciceronian terms with which he concerns himself (Prose, p. 54). As Tomlinson points out, Bembo's word elezione corresponds schematically to Cicero's inventio, but "inventio embraces for Cicero broad decisions about subject matter which are not broached by Bembo" ("Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi," p. 44 n. 99). See also Weinberg on Daniello, who claims that "in Daniello's system nothing is invented," that instead "art consists in the judicious handling of fairly fixed materials" (A History of Literary Criticism 2:723, and my critique of Weinberg, nn. 91-92 below).

[47] It is just as true that rhetorically styled grammars like Niccolò Liburnio's Tre fontane of 1526, handbooks like Sansovino's Arte oratoria and La retorica, and even the more Aristotelian Della eloquenza of the Venetian Daniele Barbaro (drafted in 1535) draw most or all of their illustrations from poetry, especially Petrarch's. Barbaro's work was published in Venice in 1557 with a dedication by Girolamo Ruscelli to the Accademici Costanti (of which the Paduan composer Francesco Portinaro was a member). Ruscelli dated the work from Padua around 1535, but it shows evidence that later writings were subsequently incorporated too (see Weinberg's notes, Trattati 2:673-80, and his mod. ed., ibid., 2:335-451). On Liburnio's Tre fontane see Carlo Dionisotti's illuminating "Niccolò Liburnio e la letteratura cortigiana," Lettere italiane 14 (1962): 33-58.

[48] "[A] dissegnarvi e a dimostrarvi bene e compiutamente, quale e chente ella è, bisognerebbe tutte quelle cose raccogliere che dell'arte dell'orare si scrivono, che sono . . . moltissime, per ciò che tutta quella arte altro non c'insegna, e altro fine non s'adoperà, che a persuadere" (Prose, pp. 85-86). Compare Daniello's paraphrase of Horace: "Ne basta solamente che il Poema sia grave, sia vago, sia di ciascun colore, & arte ornato del dire: s'egli non havera poi seco la Persuasione, nella quale tutta la virtú et grandezza del Poeta è riposta" (Nor is it sufficient that the poem be grave, lovely, adorned with color and art of speech if it does not also encompass in itself persuasion, in which the whole power and greatness of the poet dwells); Poetica, p. 40.

[49] Note, for example, vv. 38-45 and 104-18 on decorum; vv. 24-31 and 48-53 on moderation; and vv. 323-46 and passim on eloquence.

Cicero's ideas on decorum and variety, as well as the inventio-dispositio-elocutio process, all found their way there until Ciceronian and Horatian ideas became nearly indistinguishable by the mid-sixteenth century.^[50] The particular set of stylistic axioms codified by Horace were especially fruitful for the Italian poetics that emanated from northern Italians like Trissino, Daniello, and Muzio.^[51]

From Horace, in addition, came the premise that poetry should both instruct and delight, a notion that became universal with humanistic consolidations of wisdom and eloquence. Even in a lighthearted work like Parabosco's Diporti, one of the interlocutors, Federico Badoer, exhorts the others to this principle before the novelle begin.^[52] To draw again from Tomitano's richly argued letter to Longo, "utility without pleasure is cold, just as pleasure without profit is vain." For Tomitano the components of this Horatian bond were indivisible — so commonplace by midcentury that he credits it simply to the "antichi" — requiring that "the praise of one" depend on "the perfection and sweetness" of the other. Implicitly, Tomitano ties the notion to the dynamics of aural performance: one who tries to write in many languages without a taste for noble arts and without possession of the kind of knowledge that brings him closer to God is like one whose fingers play a lute with perfect technique and tuning but without any knowledge of its art; and conversely, one who has knowledge without the eloquence to make it perceptible to others resembles an excellent organist who plays the pipes, touching the keys with great skill, but without being heard.^[53] Tomitano returns from these analogies to the conclusion that equal measures of profit and pleasure are as essential to all the "scienze" as they are to the playing of instruments. With typically philosophical bent he claims to favor "nourishing the mind with laudable arts rather than delighting the ears with the words of a false Siren." But his ultimate compromise would have sat well with any Horatian: "I would still rather combine a medium level of knowledge with a middling eloquence than have a full measure of either separately, since everything that is understood with the mind must at last be explained and expressed with the voice."^[54]

[50] On this process see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1: Chaps. 14 and 15.

[51] For individual discussions of Horatian concepts in their writings see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2: Chap. 14, 719-24, 729-31; see also 1: Chaps. 3 and 4.

[52] "[A] me parebbe, se così a voi fosse il piacere, che tra noi divisassimo qualche ragionamento utile e piacevole, il quale avesse lungo spazio a rimaner fra noi; onde ciascuno parli di qual soggetto più gli pare a proposto che si ragioni, ché poscia tutti insieme eleggeremo quello che più a tutti parrà che ci arrechi utilità e diletto" (Parabosco, I diporti [Venice, ca. 1550], p. 15).

[53] "Certo a me pare colui, che si dà tutto dì ad imparare molte lingue, scrivendo in quelle di molte composizioni senza gusto delle arti nobili, e senza la illustre possessione di quella cognizione che tanto ci rende vicini alla perfezione di Dio, ch'egli sia simile ad uno, che con le dita tocchi un liuto perfettissimo e bene accordato senza aver alcuna cognizione dell'arte, con la quale si suona quell'istrumento. E pel contrario chi tiene la cognizione senza saperla con eloquenzia spiegare e far sentire, stimirei a niun'altra cosa esser più simile, che ad un eccellente sonatore di organo, il quale, levate le canne, tocasse nondimeno i tasti con grand'arte senza esser sentito. Dove appare che molto più ci contentarebbe udire un mediocre sonatore, il quale con mediocre arte tocasse uno di quegl'istrumenti ch'io dissi; imperocchè l'uno non giova, e l'altro non diletta, siccome fa in qualche particella il temperamento del terzo" (Tomitano, in Operette, ed. Jacopo Morelli, vol. 3 (Venice, 1820), p. 391).

[54] "[E]leggerò piuttosto di pascer l'animo con l'arti lodevoli che dilettare l'orecchie con voci d'una fallace Sirena. Stimerò ancora che sia da antiporre una mediocre cognizione con mezzana eloquenzia al colmo dell'una e dell'altra separatamente. Adunque tutto quello, che nell'animo con la cognizione s'intende, si deve ottimamente con la voce spiegare, ed esprimere " (ibid., p. 393).

All of this reinforces a picture of the writer as a performer, one that sent some theorists scurrying for existential clarity. What role, they wondered, would the poet play? Tomitano's Ragionamenti struggled at length to carve out a separate niche for poets by proposing that "the first distinction born between the orator and the poet is that one seeks to persuade and the other to imitate, from which proceeds the rule and norm of speech, inasmuch as the orator uses words loosed from the ties of feet and free from the obligation of syllables and rhyme while the poet is constrained by both laws."^[55] Here Tomitano distinguishes poets for their role as imitators and for the rhythmic aspect of their art. A later amplification on the question reduced differences between poets and orators to just one: while the orator avoids the use of fables and embraces instead laws, customs, examples, and histories, the poet makes the false appear true.^[56]

Tomitano was broaching the delicate subject of the poet's relation to truth that had been newly animated by the rediscovery of Aristotelian poetics. Aristotle's own formulation had revolved around a comparison of the poet to the historian, which saw the former as representing universal truths, what people would probably or necessarily do, and the latter as relating absolute truths, what people had done.^[57] The historian performed the less noble function. Otherwise both were rhetoricians of a sort, as Daniello had argued nine years earlier.^[58] If poets and historians differed little, it was because Venetian rhetoricians conflated both their disciplines with the rhetorical arts, with equal emphasis on styles of expression and their effects on listeners.

Decorum, Imitation, and the Canonization of Petrarch

In tying all this to the question of decorum, it makes sense to start where cinquecentisti did, with Cicero, by recalling two tenets that he asked his orator to heed in order to claim the listener's attention and goodwill. He illustrated the first of these, decorum, with the declaration that "perfumes compounded with an extremely

[55] "La prima differenza che tra l'oratore nasce, et il poeta è che l'uno ricerca il persuadere, et l'altro l'imitare, à cui succede la regola, & norma di parlare, in quanto che l'oratore usa parole sciolte da legami de i piedi, & libere dall'obligo delle sillabe & delle rime, & il poeta è astretto all'una & l'altra legge" (Ragionamenti, p. 273).

[56] "L'oratore fugge l'uso delle favole, & in vece di quelle abbraccia le leggi, i costumi, gli esempi & l'historie; la dove che il poeta dando co 'l penello della persuasione colore alle menzogne, ci fa parere il falso verosimile" (ibid., p. 281).

[57] Aristotle drew the distinction in Poetics 9.4. On the close links between rhetoric, poetry, history, and other arts of discourse see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1: Chap. 1.

[58] Daniello's lengthy comparison between poets and historians confined differences between the two to Aristotelian criteria of truth, but otherwise portrayed both as rhetoricians. "Sono così dell'uno, come dell'altro proprie l'Amplificationi, le Digressioni, le Varietà. Ambo studiano in muover gliaffetti, il decoro di ciascuna cosa in ciascuna cosa, et materia servando. Ambo insegnano, dilettano, & giovano parimente. Ambo le cose ne dipongono; & quasi davanti a gliocchi le ci pongono" (Proper to both are amplifications, digressions, and variety. Both study how to move the affections, each of them having decorum and serving the subject matter. Both teach, delight, instruct equally. Both depict things and virtually place them before our eyes); Poetica, p. 42.

sweet and penetrating scent do not give us pleasure for so long as those that are moderately fragrant."^[59] Along with many other examples, this one aimed to show that a good thing too much indulged in would ultimately lose its allure. The second tenet follows naturally from the first: in order to ensure that the listener not become overly satiated with a particular effect, the orator must always seek variety in his rhetoric. For as Crassus warns in De oratore, "a style . . . that lacks relief or check or variety cannot continue to give pleasure for long, however brilliantly colored the poem or speech may be."^[60] Both poets and musicians, Cicero claimed, appreciate the necessity of modulating their works through variation.^[61] Related to these two tenets was the notion of the three stylistic levels, plain, middle, and high (or vigorous), which allow the orator to "decide what is needed at any point" and "be able to speak in any way the case requires."^[62]

These are the intersecting principles I have pointed to in connection with decorum — in both senses of moderation and of matching styles to subjects — and variety. Modern-day critics easily miss the interdependencies between them precisely because they were taken for granted and intermingled by cinquecento thinkers. Dolce exemplifies this in an amusing explanation of how to match styles to subjects, as he haughtily admonishes poets to maintain propriety by preserving each of the three levels. By varying slightly and thus alleviating a too-strict adherence to any one level, a shrewd poet could succeed in striking a decorous stylistic balance.

The wise poet must try with all his might while writing about humble material not to debase himself too much and go crawling around like a child on all fours — which can easily happen, every virtue having within its bounds vice — and likewise, when writing in the middle style not to enter the high, or writing in the high style not to spill over into bombast, as so many do.^[63]

Dolce warns the poet to pursue all stylistic levels with restraint in order to avoid extremes.^[64] Lurking behind this Ciceronian advice is the now familiar idea that an admixture of devices belonging to different styles should be called on to help

[59] De oratore 3.25.99. On Cicero's probable borrowing of the term decorum from Aristotle's Rhetoric see Marvin T. Herrick, "Decorum," Chap. 5 in The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531-1555, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 32, no. 1 (Urbana, Ill., 1946).

[60] De oratore 3.25.100.

[61] Ibid. 3.26.102: "Neque id actores prius viderunt quam ipsi poetae, quam denique illi etiam qui fecerunt modos, a quibus utrisque summittur aliquid, deinde augetur, extenutur, inflatur, variatur, distinguitur."

[62] Orator 21.70.

[63] "[D]ee l'accorto Poeta a tutta sua forza procurar, che mentre egli scrive di materia humile, non s'abbassi tanto, che a guisa di fanciullo, vada carpone per terra; ilche puo avvenir facilmente, havendo ogni virtù per confino il vitio. è così volendo darsi allo stil mezano, non trappassi all'alto; o applicandosi all'alto, non passi alla gonfiezza; vitio, dove di leggero sono trabboccati, e trabboccano molti" (Osservationi, fol. 94).

[64] Cf. De oratore 3.25.100 and Ars poetica 24-31. Bembo had set this precedent in vernacular literature by cautioning that the "extremes of virtue" are wont to resemble the "beginnings of vice" (La vicinità e la somiglianza che aver sogliono i principi del vizio con le stremi della virtù); Prose, p. 85.

temper each one, with one main level predominating. In compositional terms this is what early modern writers generally had in mind by "variety" and why they dwelt at the local levels of words and phonemes in trying to guide aspiring writers toward stylistic success. In talking about elezione, disposizione, and ordine Bembo had alluded to just this process of simultaneously keeping styles separate while intermixing them to avoid extremes.

One must then choose the words; if speaking of lofty material, grave, high, resonant, clear, and brilliant ones; if of low and vulgar material, light, flat, humble, popular, quiet ones; if of material in between these two, then likewise middle and temperate words which incline as little toward one or the other of these two poles as possible. It is necessary, nonetheless, in these rules, to observe moderation and avoid above all satiety.^[65]

In other words, since the devices proper to any given style must not be pursued too far, the secret to good writing is to emphasize one stylistic level while judiciously borrowing words and devices from others.

As growing attention to genre made it necessary to decide how propriety should be applied to epic and dramatic poetry, commentators following Bembo extended his ideas to include characters. Daniello warned that one needed not only to see that "the parts of the material treated have propriety among them but that those assigned to persons also be most suitable, proper, and fitting; and beyond those, that the speech given to them be of a smoothness, mildness, gravity, happiness, grief, and in sum, full of all the affects according to the quality, dignity, habits, office, and age of each one."^[66] This, Daniello explained, was what the Latins called "decoro" and the moderns "convenevolezza" (fittingness).

Later theorists articulated more clearly the relations between the concept of stylistic levels and new Aristotelian notions of genre. In working out such ideas, they tried to determine which characteristics were essential to different genres, especially whether they were inherently low, middle, or high, and what sorts of circumstances allowed departures from the norms. Among the earliest to publish works attending specifically to questions of genre were Girolamo Ruscelli and Francesco Sansovino. Ruscelli's Del modo de comporre in versi nella lingua italiana, published in Venice in 1559, offered separate chapters describing each of the different lyric types: stanze, terze rime, madrigals, ballate, canzoni, and sonnets.^[67] One year later Sansovino's

[65] "Da scegliere adunque sono le voci, se di materia grande si ragiona, gravi, alte, sonanti, apparenti, luminose; se di bassa e volgare, lievi, piane, dimesse, popolari, chete; se di mezzana tra queste due, medesimamente con voci mezzane e temperate, e le quali meno all' uno e all' altro pieghino di questi due termini, che si può. E di mestiero nondimeno in queste medesime regole servar modo, e schifare sopra tutto sazietà" (Prose, p. 55).

[66] "[L]e parti delle materie che si prendono a trattare, habbiano fra loro convenientia, ma che quelle ancora che alle persone si mandano, convenientissime, proprie, & accommodate siano; et oltre a ciò, che il parlar che si dà loro sia di soavità, di mansuetudine, di gravità, d'allegrezza, di dolore, e finalmente pieno degli affetti tutti, secondo però la qualità, la degnità, l'abito, l'ufficio e l'età di ciascuna" (Poetica, pp. 35-36).

[67] This direction was widely taken up later in the century in endeavors like Cesare Crispolti's "Lezione del sonetto," presented to the Accademia Insensata of Perugia about 1592. See the ed. and commentary in Trattati 4:193-206 and 420-21. On the relation of this phenomenon to Aristotelian criticism as it applies to the last two decades of the century see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2: Chap. 13, "The Tradition of Aristotle's Poetics V: Theory of the Genres." For a critique of Weinberg's explanation how genre theory came to emerge in the mid-sixteenth century and an attempt to account for it through attention to contemporary poetic practice (and not just the new understanding of Aristotle's Poetics ) see Daniel Javitch, "Self-Justifying Norms in the Genre Theories of Italian Renaissance Poets," Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 195-217.

little Discorso sopra la materia della satira drew stylistic boundaries for a genre that was fundamentally defined by the nexus between literary topic and tone.^[68]

Deep at the heart of all these commentaries on stylistic levels and propriety lay a horror that gonfiezza (bombast) and asprezza (harshness) might invade the official literary language — qualities even less readily accommodated in the simplifying poetics of popularizers like Dolce than in Bembo's poetics. The insurgence of Petrarchan satirists at the presses during the 1540s made members of the Bembist establishment increasingly nervous — so much so that Dolce could chastize Giulio Camillo (Delminio) for gonfiezza with a verse as innocent as "Quando l'alta salute de le genti" and even censure Petrarch for the swollen vowels of "Giunto Alessandro a la famosa tomba."^[69]

Although few theorists fired off criticisms with as little provocation as Dolce, the impulse to expel any gesture that seemed immodest, unpretty, raw, or harsh, or could in any way be accused of excess, was widespread. In the last analysis it accounts for the tendency among Venetian theorists to make aesthetic dogma out of edicts that in Cicero had stemmed more from practical exigencies. Bembists supplanted the pragmatics of oratory with unbudging expressive biases that ossified the demands imposed on Castiglione's courtier to uphold codes of modesty, elegance, and charm.

These biases led Bembo to his now famous condemnation of Dante, whose writing he claimed allowed unacceptable breaches of decorum.^[70] Reproving linguistic transgressions in the Inferno, Bembo insisted that Dante would have been better off avoiding horrifying subjects than resorting to the gruesome language he sometimes used to describe them.

And if it still sometimes happens that that which we intend to write about cannot be explained with proper words, but rather it is necessary to bring in vile or harsh or spiteful ones — which I scarcely believe can happen, there being so many ways and modes of speaking, and so much variety, and the human tongue being suited to taking diverse forms and diverse likenesses, and almost colors — but if it nonetheless

[68] In Sette libri di satire . . . Con un discorso in materia della satira, first published in 1560 (Venice, 1573), fols. [5]-[7], esp. fols. [6']-[7]; mod. ed. of the "discorso" in Trattati 2:513-18.

[69] Osservationi, fol. 94'.

[70] For other sixteenth-century attitudes toward Dante, especially late in the century, see Michele Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI (Pisa, 1890); Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2: Chaps. 16 and 17; Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale (Naples, 1967), pp. 221-62; and most recently Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham, 1993). This polemic, and particularly the opposed sides that literati in Florence and Venice took in the debate, forms a backdrop to my "Rore's 'selva selvaggia:' The Primo libro of 1542," JAMS 42 (1989): 547-603; see esp. pp. 547-50 and 589-91.

happens, I declare that whatever part cannot be expressed properly should be left silent rather than marring the rest of the writing by expressing it, especially where necessity does not press or force the writer — from which necessity poets, above all others, are far removed.^[71]

With this Bembo set the stage for a poetics tyrannically ruled by the demands of a puristic elocutio. By going so far as to eliminate particular subjects, he imposed a highly restrictive view of the oratorical poet as a kind of virtuosic manipulator of words, rather than thoughts — a poet with virtually no philosophy.

Bembo's view was later more gently reasoned in Tomitano's Ragionamenti, which reflected that, though Petrarch was indeed the better poet, Dante was the better philosopher.^[72] The problem as Tomitano formulated it was that Dante so greatly excelled in invention and understood so well the various states of the soul and the issues of theology and philosophy that "he forgot many times to be a poet."^[73] Petrarch, by contrast, had much in his heart with which to grace language but only hinted at a concrete knowledge of the natural world. When one interlocutor questions whether, since philosophy is a necessary gift of a poet, the better philosopher is not the better poet, Tomitano counters (through the mouth of Speroni), "I do not concede that Dante, although he may be a better philosopher, is a more serious poet than Petrarch. For Petrarch understood as much of philosophy as is necessary to bring spirit and fullness to his rhymes, so that in beautiful elocution, from which a poet takes his name, . . . he was better than Dante. From which one must conclude that he was a better poet than Dante" (emphasis mine).^[74]

Tomitano's compromise notwithstanding, Bembo's indictment of Dante became axiomatic in Venetian academies. By 1551 Muzio was singing the Petrarchan line in catechistic verse: "a pure and graceful writer was Petrarch/above all others . . ./ audacious to excess was Alighieri."^[75] Not surprisingly, it was Dolce who took up the gauntlet, discounting Dante's poetic judgment — and just at the time when members of the Accademia Fiorentina were launching a public defense of Dante's poetic reputation.^[76]

[71] "E se pure aviene alcuna volta, che quello che noi di scrivere ci proponiamo, isprimere non si possa con acconce voci, ma bisogni recarvi le vili o le dure o le dispettose, il che appena mi si lascia credere che avenir possa, tante vie e tanti modi ci sono da ragionare e tanto variabile e acconcia a pigliar diverse forme e diversi sembianti e quasi colori è la umana favella; ma se pure ciò aviene, dico che da tacere è quel tanto, che sporre non si può acconciamente, più tosto che, sponendolo, macchiarne l'altra scrittura; massimamente dove la necessità non istringa e non isforzi lo scrittore, dalla qual necessità i poeti, sopra gli altri, sono lontani" (Prose, pp. 55-56).

[72] "Il Petrarca [è] maggior poeta di Dante, si come Dante miglior philosopho di M. Francesco" (Ragionmenti, p. 286).

[73] "[S]i dimenticò più volte d'esser poeta" (ibid., p. 285).

[74] "Non vi si concede, che Dante quantunque sia maggior philosopho: venga ad esser piu grave poeta del Petrarca. Percio che il Petrarca quel tanto di philosophia intese, che a recar spirito & fermezza alle sue rime bastava: la dove che poi nella bella elocutione, della quale si denomina il Poeta, . . . fu di Dante migliore. Onde conchiuder si dee egli esser stato di Dante miglior poeta" (ibid., p. 287).

[75] "Fu 'l Petrarca scrittor puro e leggiadori/Sopra ad ogn' altro . . . / Di soverchio fu audace l'Aldighieri" [sic ] (Dell'arte poetica, vv. 183-84 and 187).

[76] On the issue of style Dolce claimed that "l'autorità di Dante . . . non vale. percioche egli cosi nella elettion della lingua, come anco d'intorno alle bellezze Poetiche, non hebbe quel buono & perfetto giudicio, che si vede havere havuto il Petrarca: come bene e dottamente è mostrato dal Bembo nelle sue prose" (The authority of Dante . . . does not count. Because in the choice of language, as in the matter of poetic beauty, he did not have that good and perfect judgment that one sees Petrarch to have had, as has been shown well and learnedly by Bembo in his Prose ); Osservationi, fol. 7'.

In a general way the pro-Petrarchan position depended on imitation theory, which once again took inspiration from classical rhetoricians.^[77] The Veneto led sixteenth-century Italy in trying to standardize vernacular practices of imitation.^[78] As early as 1513 Niccolò Liburnio discussed imitation in the third of his dialogues Le selvette. But neither Liburnio, here or in his later Tre fontane of 1526,^[79] nor Gianfrancesco Fortunio, in his Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua of 1516, tried to exalt a single exclusive model. Unlike Bembo, who reduced the number of acceptable models to two (Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose),^[80] Liburnio and Fortunio sanctioned the whole trecento triumverate. They agreed with Bembo only in rejecting contemporary authors as models — authors whose practices were less susceptible to totalizing description and reproduction by their contemporaries. In this sense all three were taking part in a trend toward linguistic standardization that both promoted and was inspired by projects of editing and publication.

Bembo's ostensible claim was for two models, but in fact he relied almost solely on Petrarch for prosody, diction, themes, genres, and lexicon. Bembo's single-model position raised theoretical hackles early in his career, setting him apart from more flexible, empirically minded courtiers whom he otherwise often resembled. It was in part this difference that stood behind the famous dispute on imitation between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, as preserved in a Latin epistolary exchange from the second decade of the sixteenth century.^[81]

Pico insisted that the author of original texts had to sort through a wide range of models, selectively commandeering what suited his own nature and guarding against the appropriation of anachronistic, ill-fitting aspects of others' works. Each person was endowed with an individualized mental simulacrum of beauty, which could be violated only at one's peril.^[82] In countering Pico's argument, Bembo claimed to have sought in vain for this simulacrum, for some Neoplatonic mirror of

[77] For further on theories of imitation, rhetoric, and their relation to Petrarchism see Greene, "Sixteenth-Century Quarrels: Classicism and the Scandal of History," Chap. 9 in The Light in Troy; Hathaway, "Poetry as Imitation," Part One in The Age of Criticism; and for related musical issues, Howard Mayer Brown, "Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance," JAMS 35 (1982): 1-48.

[78] For general treatments of the topic see Greene, The Light in Troy, and G. W. Pigman III, "Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance," RQ 33 (1980): 1-32, and the copious literature cited there.

[79] See Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 54-57 and 65-67, and Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici," pp. 164-65.

[80] For further on this point see Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici," pp. 141-43.

[81] For analyses of the dispute see Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano, pp. 11-27; Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 171-76; and the introduction to Giorgio Santangelo, Le epistole "De imitatione" di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola e di Pietro Bembo (Florence, 1954).

[82] See the edition of Santangelo, pp. 27-28: "[Natura] Ideam igitur ut aliarum virtutum, ita et recte loquendi subministrat, eiusque pulchritudinis affingit animo simulachrum; ad quod respicientes identidem et aliena iudicemus et nostra" (Nature supplies us with a pattern for speaking well, as for the other virtues, and creates in our mind a similacrum of this beauty with reference to which we habitually judge both what is not ours and what is); trans. from Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 172.

perfection, in his own youthful mind.^[83] Having failed, he turned to the models of Cicero for prose and Virgil for verse. At first he tried merely to mimic them, but said he could later emulate them — a higher and ostensibly more creative act. Lesser models, according to Bembo, would have been useless in implanting this consummate paradigm in the mind of the aspiring poet.^[84] And what did he try to imitate? Only style. "The activity of imitating is nothing other than translating the likeness of some other's style into one's own writing."^[85] As Bembo describes him, the imitator offers no heuristic resistance, no challenge to the model, but surrenders himself as a passive medium, a clear pool of water ready to take the dye.

Bembo's recommendation that a writer copy another authoritative author, widely accepted by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, resulted in an academized rigor that exceeded even his own prescriptions. As taken up by critics like Delminio — and inveighed against by Aretino — the notion of imitation was flattened into a deadly sort of thieving.^[86] To be sure, Daniello sought to enrich the idea with Aristotle's theory of mimesis, a more imaginative notion of poetry as an imitation of the actions of men and thus of nature itself.^[87] Others, like Tomitano, sounded the same call, but their contexts were tacitly Horatian. Tomitano exemplified this in describing the poet as an "imitator of human actions who arouses admiration in the listener" (emphasis mine).^[88] In a adhering to Horatian concerns for sonorous effects — and of necessity its rhetorical adjunct of imitation-as-emulation — Tomitano typified the midcentury fusion of Horace and Aristotle that Marvin T. Herrick has characterized.^[89]

Even as late as 1560, Bernardino Parthenio's dialogue Della imitatione poetica avoided dealing centrally with Aristotelian imitation.^[90] Parthenio was a former stu-

[83] On the idea of the mirror in Renaissance literary imitation see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953), esp. pp. 30-42.

[84] On the problematic question of imitating lesser models see JoAnn Della Neva, "Reflecting Lesser Lights: The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissance," RQ 42 (1989): 449-79.

[85] "Nihil est enim aliud totum hoc, quo de agimus, imitari; nisi alieni stili similitudinem transferre in tua scripta" (Santangelo, Le epistole, p. 45).

[86] On this aspect of Delminio see Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 177. In a letter to Dolce of 25 June 1537 Aretino compared such "thieves" to those who "trample herbs to gather condiments" (gli ortolani sgridano quegli: che calpestano l'herbicine da far' la salsa, e non coloro; che bellamente le colgano); Lettere, 6 vols. (Paris, 1609), 1:122.

[87] See E. N. Tigerstedt, "Observations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin West," Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968): 7-24, for a discussion of this aspect of the Renaissance tradition of Aristotle's Poetics. On Aristotelian verisimilitude see Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, pp. 9-19 and Part 2. For a clarification of issues relevant to music late in the century see Gary Tomlinson, "Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's via naturale alla immitatione, " JAMS 34 (1981): 60-108.

[88] Tomitano, Ragionamenti, p. 226; see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1:384.

[89] Herrick's The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Criticism remains the best treatment of the subject.

[90] On the two types of imitation Parthenio says there is "Una, la qual consiste nell'esprimere eccellentemente le nature & i costumi di quelle persone, che ci proponiamo d'imitare. . . . Ma di queste sorti di imitation lasciando la cura ad Aristotele, solamente tratteremo dell'altra, laquale consiste nelle parole & ne modi di dire" (There is "one, which consists in expressing excellently the natures and habits of those persons whom we propose to imitate. And this is the end goal of poetry, which is meant to express human actions. . . . But leaving the care of this sort of imitation to Aristotle, we treat only the other type, which consists in words and modes of discourse"); Bernardino Parthenio, Della imitatione poetica (Venice, 1560), pp. 93-94.

dent of Giovanni Battista Egnazio (the teacher of Venier and his circle), and his interlocutors included literati from the region: Gabriele, Paolo Manuzio, and Trissino. Unlike theorists late in the century for whom Aristotle's poetics of mimesis became the primary theoretical matrix, Parthenio gave only cursory attention to the imitation of nature, and this mainly as a byway to the main issues of sound and meter.

The foremost modern historian of these texts, Bernard Weinberg, was dismayed by what he perceived as the sullied fusions of ancient sources devised at midcentury and the indifference of midcentury theorists toward the integrity of canonical ancient texts.^[91] This put him at odds with the basic working methods of writers like Tomitano and Parthenio, who habitually compiled their arguments by drawing loosely from ancient texts. For Weinberg that spelled damning impurity, philological sloth and ignorance, and lack of resources — icing without cake. More than this Weinberg viewed the replacement of Ciceronian imitation of models by Aristotelian imitation of nature as a teleological victory of the late sixteenth century that midcentury authors, with their constant backsliding into rhetoric, had failed to pull off. Rhetoric, as he viewed it, simply lacked substance.

Yet in turning everything to rhetorical account, treatises like Parthenio's were not so barren as Weinberg made out. The rhetorical vision that led Venetians to read in universally Ciceronian-Horatian terms also prompted them to innovative meditations on rhythmic and musical properties of verse.^[92] In searching for listener appeal, Venetians hoped to convey meaning through sound and awaken readers to interactions between sound and meaning. These interactions were the musical basis of their attraction to Petrarch's verse and their theoretical basis for conflating it with Ciceronian oratory. By careful attention to sound, theorists invigorated the decorum/variation conjuncture thought to form common ground between Petrarchan poetics and Ciceronian rhetoric, explaining how meanings were manipulated through variations of sonorous effects.

Variazione as Musical Dialectic

Variazione is the process by which Bembist thinking finds its implementation in real compositional practice. In analyzing how the principle operated, Bembo and others presented readers with the means to create their own Petrarchan styles, their own simulacra of ideal models. For students of lyric and madrigal, these discussions offer remarkably detailed hints for understanding the sanctioned processes of generating new texts — or, in the case of music, new text settings.

Variazione as a precept proceeds from the stylistic levels delineated in ancient theory. Cicero's Orator rejected the plain, severe style of the Attic logicians (chiefly Brutus and Calvus) by boasting brilliant results for his three oratorical styles. In the

[91] See Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1:145-47 and 280-81.

[92] Indeed, Weinberg discusses this contribution of Parthenio in A History of Literary Criticism 1:281.

plain style the orator would adhere to common words and modest metaphors; his speech would be subdued in ornament, with few figures of speech, and "sprinkled with the salt of pleasantry."^[93] The orator of the middle style would minimize vigor and maximize charm; though all figures of speech and ornaments could lie at his disposal, his language had above all to be "brilliant and florid, highly colored and polished."^[94] The orator of the grand style was "magnificent, opulent, stately, and ornate."^[95] But it was the diversity that the orator brought to each of these that gave the new brand of oratory its great appeal, as Cicero claimed in explaining the effects of his early attempts: "The ears of the city . . . we found hungry for this varied style of oratory, displayed equally in all styles, and we were the first, however poor we may have been and however little we may have accomplished, to turn them to an amazing interest in this style of oratory" (emphasis mine).^[96]

A lucid reading of Bembo's Prose depends on understanding how far its seemingly disparate themes relate similarly to variation. Early in Book 2, Bembo explains the three styles and recasts variazione as a dialectical principle intended to guide all composition and criticism. "One could consider how much a composition does or does not merit praise, . . ." he claimed, "by means of . . . two aspects . . . that make all writing beautiful, gravità and piacevolezza " (gravity and pleasingness).^[97]Gravità contains honesty, dignity, majesty, magnificence, and grandeur ("l'onestà, la dignità, la maestà, la magnificenza, la grandezza"), while piacevolezza encompasses grace, smoothness, loveliness, sweetness, playfulness, and games ("la grazia, la soa-vità, la vaghezza, la dolcezza, gli scherzi, i giuochi").^[98]

The schemata by which gravità and piacevolezza intersect with high, middle, and low styles are deliberately imprecise — and nowadays widely misunderstood. Theoretically, each stylistic level is discrete and dependent on subject matter, while gravità and piacevolezza in turn function as extreme dialectical poles within any one of them. In explaining how various authors have actually used gravità and piace-volezza, however, Bembo implicitly links gravità, to the high style and piacevolezza to the middle or low. Some authors, he says, have dwelt excessively on one or the other — Dante on a style too often unrelieved in its gravità, Cino da Pistoia on one too piacevole. Only Petrarch had moderated the two with a perfect feel for variety, attaining "each of these qualities marvelously, to such a degree that one cannot choose in which of the two he was the greater master."^[99] Ideally every author

[93] Orator 24.81-26.90.

[94] Ibid. 26.91-28.96.

[95] Ibid. 28.97.

[96] Ibid. 30.106. Cicero elaborates the performative aspects of this style not only in terms of varied language but of modulation of the voice, physical gestures, and facial expressions (ibid. 17.55-18.60).

[97] "Dico che egli si potrebbe considerare, quanto alcuna composizione meriti loda o non meriti . . . per . . . due parti . . . che fanno bella ogni scrittura, la gravità e la piacevolezza" (p. 63). These resemble the "mild and pleasing" and "emotional and vehement" styles in Cicero's De oratore 2.42.179-53.215, as Tomilnson observes, "Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi," p. 47 n. 104.

[98] Bembo, Prose, p. 63.

[99] Ibid.

would achieve the same equilibrium, choosing from the three styles "at times grave words tempered with light ones and temperate ones with light ones, and vice versa — the latter with some of the former, the former with some of the latter, neither more nor less."^[100]

Slipping freely between the three styles and between gravità and piacevolezza, Bembo confounds the reader in search of a systematic theory. His treatment conflates two outwardly different systems — the one vertical and rigidly hierarchical, the other lateral and inherently dialectical. Yet in so doing he made tangible the real purpose of introducing gravità and piacevolezza in the first place: only through them is the constant intermixing and tempering process that Bembo believed necessary to the proper working of separate levels set in motion. The dual system enabled him to grant the concept of stylistic levels a certain dynamism, as long as each level maintained a baseline of decorum. In later adaptations of Bembo's model, paired, intersecting systems became a normative means to support the principle of variation, even for eclectics like Tomitano.^[101]

Even though Bembo linked gravità and piacevolezza clearly to variazione, he reiterated the latter theoretically in enumerating three qualities that "fill out and comprise" the former pair: namely, "il suono, il numero, la variatione"^[102] — a schematic duplication that suggests at once how much variation counted in Bembo's system and how very loose that system was. It will be useful to examine suono and numero more closely, since the rest of Book 2 is mainly devoted to an explanation of them.

Suono in Bembo's definition is "that concord of sounds and that harmony that is generated in prose by the arrangement of the words and in verse also by the arrangement of the rhymes."^[103] Bembo built explanations of suono 's musical effects on a tradition that goes back to ancient times with Cicero,^[104] and in the Renaissance to grammars like Fortunio's Regole grammaticali. Yet Fortunio had regarded sound mainly within the restricted sphere of orthographical and morphological questions.^[105] For Fortunio gemination, for instance, was permissible in prose but not in poetry; without it the latter could "flow more sweetly" since "gemination of

[100] "[V]ariando alle volte e le voci gravi con alcuna temperata, e le temperate con alcuna leggera, e così allo 'ncontro queste con alcuna di quelle, e quelle con alcuna dell'altre né più né meno" (ibid., p. 55).

[101] See, for instance, the Ragionamenti, pp. 466-67: "Il poeta dovere co 'l giudicio dell'orecchie mescolare insieme le voci rotonde, con l'humili, l'humili con le sonore, le sonore con le languide, & queste con le gravi. onde la grandezza dell'una temperata con la humilità dell'altre venga à fare una mescolatura perfetta, & un condimento soave" (The poet must, with the judgement of the ear, mix together full-toned words with humble ones, humble with sonorous, sonorous with languid, and languid with grave; so that the loftiness of one tempered with the humbleness of another comes to make a perfect mixture and sweet seasoning). Further comments on variazione occur on p. 474.

[102] "[E] le cose, poi, che empiono e compiono queste due parti, son tre, il suono, il numero, la variazione" (Prose, p. 63).

[103] "[Q]uel concento e quel armonia, che nelle prose dal componimento si genera delle voci; nel verso oltre a ciò del componimento eziando delle rime" (ibid.).

[104] For Cicero's use of these terms see Orator, 48 to the end.

[105] Carlo Dionisotti contextualizes the orthographical questions raised by Fortunio in "Marcantonio Sabellico e Giovan Francesco Fortunio," Chap. 2 in Gli umanisti e il volgare fra quattro e cinquecento (Florence, 1968), pp. 23ff.

consonants is not without some harshness" and was thus to be avoided, "especially in amorous verse."^[106] This is as far as Fortunio would go in connecting sound with meaning. Quite new in Bembo, by contrast, is the extension of sound's importance from simply a bearer of sensory traits to an actual signifier.^[107]

Suono operated for Bembo through two main vehicles: the phonetic (letters) and the metric (rhymes). Letters make their effects both separately and in various combinations, with different criteria applied to vowels and consonants. Gary Tomlinson has shown how Bembo's hierarchical ranking of vowels according to the amount of air expelled to pronounce them followed the Ficinian theories with which Bembo had grown up, and which he had already popularized in Gli asolani.^[108] The letter "A makes the best sound because it sends forth the most air, since this air is expelled with more open lips and more towards Heaven."^[109] The other vowels descend from A in the order E, O, I, U, all of them making "a better sound when the syllable is long than when it is short."^[110] The rules, however, are complex and contingent, dependent on context. Open O's, for instance, resound more than closed ones and hence sit higher in the hierarchy, accented E's sit higher than unaccented ones, and so forth.

Bembo also graded consonants for affect and in some cases for "spirito." The L is "soft and agreeable and the sweetest of all the letters in its family." The R has the opposite quality, "harsh," although of a "generous breath." Located somewhere between the two are the M and the N, the sound of which Bembo mysteriously describes as "almost crescent- and horn-shaped" within words — apparently a metaphor for their nasal, prolonged quality.^[111] The sound of the F is "somewhat dense and resonant" but "quicker" than that of the G. C is equally dense and resonant but more "halting than the others." B and D, on the other hand, are "pure, graceful, and fluent," and P and T are even more so. Q has a "poor and dead" sound, but adds "resonance and flesh" to the letter by which it stands as kind of servant, that is, the U.^[112]

[106] In verse "più dolcemente corrano: perche la geminatione delle consonanti non è senza alcuna durezza; & specialmente nell'amorose rime è da doversi schifare" (fols. 39-39'); quoted from the rev. ed. published by Manutius in 1545.

[107] The generalization also holds for Cicero, for whom "good" sonus meant euphony and smoothness in speech and numerus meant prosody structured in balanced metrical arrangements — both designed to win over the audience. In Cicero's usage the terms lack the quantitative, semantic, and dialectical dimensions that their equivalents have for Bembo.

[108] See "Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi," pp. 17-55, esp. p. 48.

[109] "Di queste tutte miglior suono rende la A; con ciò sia cosa che ella più di spirito manda fuori, per ciò che con più aperte labbra nel manda e più al cielo ne va esso spirito" (Prose, p. 100).

[110] Ibid.

[111] For Bembo's figurative usage of "lunato e cornuto" see the Nuovo dizionario della lingua italiana. The two terms had wider planetary associations that may relate to Bembo's Neoplatonic cosmologies.

[112] The complete passage on consonants reads: "Molle e dilicata e piacevolissima è la L, e di tutte le sue compagne lettere dolcissima. Allo 'ncontro la R aspera, ma di generoso spirito. Di mezzano poi tra queste due la M e la N, il suono delle quali si sente quasi lunato e cornuto nelle parole. Alquanto spesso e pieno suono appresso rende la F. Spesso medesimamente e pieno, ma più pronto il G. Di quella medesima e spessezza e prontezza è il C, ma più impedito di quest' altri. Puri e snelli e ispediti poi sono il B e il D. Snellissimi e purissimi il P e il T, e insieme ispeditissimi. Di povero e morto suono, sopra gli altri tutti, ultimamente è il Q; e in tanto più ancora maggiormente, che egli, senza la U che 'l sostenga, non può aver luogo. La H, per ciò che non è lettera, per sé medesima niente può ma giugne solamente pienezza e quasi polpa alla lettera, a cui ella in guisa di servente sta accanto" (Prose, p. 66). Bembo discusses the problems of S and Z on pp. 65-66, mainly in historical-linguistic terms.

On another structural level — that of multiple lines of poetry — a poem's relative weight results from the distance between rhyme words. More distant rhymes have a graver quality, closer ones are more pleasing.^[113] By this reckoning sestine, lacking rhymes within stanzas, are the gravest of all. In all other verse forms, rhymes must not be farther apart than three to five lines, so as "to serve the propriety of time."^[114] Unlike the fixed sestina and the nearly fixed sonnet and ballata, suono imparts considerable variety to canzoni and madrigals because their rhyme schemes and verse lengths can differ so much.^[115]

Bembo explains numero in similarly hierarchic terms: "Number is none other than the time given to syllables, either long or short, created by virtue of the letters which make up the syllables or by reason of the accents which are given to the words, and sometimes by both."^[116] Quantity in Italian is determined by accent, with tonic accents being long and syllables preceding them short. The arrangement of accents at the ends of verses also affects verses' numero. Antepenultimate accents give lightness ("leggerezza"), while final accents make verses heavy ("peso") — hence versi sdruccioli create piacevolezza and versi tronchi create gravità. Furthermore, words whose syllables abound in vowels and consonants lend verses a certain gravità those that have few create piacevolezza.^[117] To exemplify the grave style, Bembo cited the second verse from the opening sonnet of Petrarch's Canzoniere, Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, for its diphthongs and consonantal clusters: "Di quei sospiri, ond'io nudriva il core," and at a far greater extreme the famous "Fior', frond', erb', ombr', antr', ond', aure soavi."^[118]

The principal job of the poet, in short, is to create well-proportioned, felicitous mixtures of sonorous and articulative elements. In a charming analogy Daniello compares this process with the work of a mason.

[113] "[P]iù grave suono rendono quelle rime che sono tra sè più lontane; più piacevole quell'altre che più vicine sono" (ibid., p. 68).

[114] "[A] servare ora questa convenevolezza di tempo" (ibid. p. 70).

[115] "[L]e canzoni, che molti versi rotti hanno, ora più vago e grazioso, ora più dolce e più soave suono rendono, che quelle che n'hanno pochi" (ibid.). As examples of light canzoni with a proliferation of seven-syllable lines Bembo cited Petrarch's Chiare, fresche e dolci acque, no. 126, and Se 'l pensier che mi strugge, no. 125 (ibid., p. 71). Along these lines Dolce noted that even sonnets could have more or less "grandezza," depending on whether the tercets used three different rhymed endings (e.g., cde dce) or two (e.g., cdd dcc) (Osservationi, fol. 99). In the latter case the more frequent rhymes make the sonnet less high and grave.

[116] "Numero altro non è che il tempo che alle sillabe si dà o lungo o brieve, ora per opera delle lettere che fanno le sillabe, ora per cagione degli accenti che si danno alle parole, e tale volta e per l'un conto e per l'altro" (Prose, p. 73).

[117] "Gravità dona alle voci, quando elle di vocali e di consonanti, a ciò fare acconce, sono ripiene; e talora piacevolezza, quando e di consonanti e di vocali o sono ignude e povere molto, o di quelle di loro, che alla piacevolezza servono, abbastanza coperte e vestite" (Gravità is imparted to words when they are full of vowels and consonants that are conducive to it, and at times piacevolezza [is imparted] when they are stripped and destitute of vowels and consonants, or are sufficiently clothed and dressed with those that produce piacevolezza ); ibid., p. 74.

[118] Ibid., pp. 80-81. The line is v. 5 from no. 303, Amor che meco al buon tempo ti stavi.

I declare that number is none other than a disparate parity [or, balance of disparates] and harmony that results from speech. And therefore, I would commend you, lads, were you not to disdain to imitate in your writings the master stonemasons who, before setting themselves to the task of building . . . choose those stones or tiles which seem to them most suited to the composition of the wall. . . . And then, having chosen them, begin to adapt and compose them with one another — now a large with a small, now a narrow with a wide; now a whole with a broken; sometimes one lengthwise, another one crosswise, placing one one way, another another way, until the wall reaches that height which it must in order to be beautiful and well proportioned.^[119]

Like Bembo, Daniello expected the poet to create suitable poetic mixtures, more sonorous words with less sonorous, "high and grave" with "low and light," and final accents with penultimate accents.^[120] Nouns and verbs were to be used in different positions, with different vowels, persons, numbers, and in different guises. Even the positions of caesurae — like the landings placed every ten or fifteen steps apart to allow one to catch one's breath on the staircases of great palaces — should be variously interspersed depending on the accentual positions of the particular words found in the vicinity of the caesurae. With comune words (penultimate accented), caesurae will fall after the third, fifth, or seventh syllables; with mute (final accented) after the fourth or sixth; with sdrucciolose (antepenultimate accented) after the sixth or the eighth.^[121]

All of this wisdom leads to a single broad axiom: that just as we praise youth for maturity and the aged for youthful delicacy, so we should greatly extol verse that resembles prose and prose that reflects the numero of verse.^[122] Bembo had not made the equation between poetry and prose so precise. In doing so Daniello captured a great tangle of Bembist criticism in a single net, suggesting much about the proselike shape madrigals were to assume at the hands of Venetian composers.

By the 1540s theorists were expanding Bembo's observations on sound and number to account for ever more specialized cases, some of which will become relevant

[119] "[D]ico, il numero non esser altro che una dispari parità & harmonia, che risulta del parlare. Et per tanto vi loderei io figliuoli, che voi non vi deveste sdegnare d'imitare nelle vostre scritture i maestri di murare, i quali prima ch'a fabricar si ponghino . . . eleggono quelle pietre o que matoni, che loro pare che piu si confacciano alla composition del muro . . . . Et poi ch'essi scielte l'hanno, incominciano ad adattarle & comporle insieme l'una con l'altra, hora una grande, con una picciola, hora una sottile, con una grossa; hora una intera con una spezzata; quando questa per lungo, quando attraverso quell'altra & quale in una, & qual in altra guisa ponendo, insino a tanto che il muro a quella altezza che dee bello & uguale ne cresce" (Poetica, pp. 118-19).

[120] "[V]engasi . . . alla compositione di esse voci, ponendone quando una piu sonora, con una meno; & mescolandone hora un'alta & grave; con una bassa & leggieri; & le tronche con l'intere" (ibid., p. 119; cf. also p. 121).

[121] Ibid., pp. 123-24.

[122] "Oltre a tutto cio cosi come noi sogliamo spesse fiate molto commendar quel fanciullo, ch'alcuna maniera & costume di canuta etade in se ritiene: Et allo'ncontro quel vecchio nel quale alcuna cosa si scorga di giovenile delicatezza. Cosi etiando è da grandemente commendar quel verso che tiene della prosa: Et conseguentemente quella prosa che numero si veda havere di verso" (ibid., p. 126).

to my interpretations in later chapters. Tomitano for one noted that words having the consonants R, S, and T and the vowel O create greater numero, or, as he gives us to understand, greater gravità — words like "soggiorno, rapido, antro, ardori, acerbo," and so forth.^[123]Collisioni also make lines more numerous, as in

Deh porgi mano all'affannato ingegno,

or the "full, melodious, grave, and magnificent"

Rodan' Hibero, Rhen, Sen' Albi' Her' Ebro.^[124]

Sometimes a poet has to avoid ending with a sound with which the next word begins, since this creates too much noise. Thus it is better to say

Quand'io son tutto volto in quella parte

than to have the two words with T 's side by side, as in

Quand'io son volto tutto,

which generates a strange, bad sound.^[125] At other times a poet will purposely draw a verse out so that it doesn't gather too much speed, as in

Aspro core, & selvaggio, & cruda voglia,

which is more hesitant than

Aspro, selvaggio cor' & cruda voglia.^[126]

Occasionally a writer wants to "split the ears with noise" and at other times to create a "numero tranquillo," as at the beginning of an oration in order to "make listeners attentive." Tomitano exemplifies "tranquil number" with the start of Petrarch's canzone Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade.^[127] At other times one should slip along with haste, which happens in a verse having two "voci sdrucciolose."

L'odorifero e lucido Oriente.^[128]

[123] Ragionamenti, p. 469. Tomitano cited as poems that exemplify this Petrarch's sonnets Rotta è l'alta colonna, e'l verde lauro (no. 269) and Ite rime dolenti al chiuso sasso (no. 333).

[124] Ibid., p. 470. As Daniello explains, the poet may (in some cases) adjust the orthography and (in most cases) drop vowel endings of words so as to make them mute, comune, or sdrucciolose, and thus more or less grave, as happens here (Poetica, p. 122).

[125] Ragionamenti, p. 471.

[126] "Tiene alcuna volta il poeta il verso a bada co 'l sostenerlo in maniera, che non venga à precipitarsi per la troppa velocità, 'Aspro core, & selvaggio, & cruda voglia', che piu riposata divenne, che il dire 'Aspro, selvaggio cor'& cruda voglia', Il qual verso tanto divenne volgare, quanto quell'altro fu degno de gli orecchi di M. Francesco" (ibid., pp. 471-72).

[127] Ibid., p. 472.

[128] Ibid., pp. 472-73. The line is v. 2 from no. 337.

Petrarch never composed a whole verse out of these sdrucciolose words, Tomitano cautions — as here where he tempered "odorifero" and "lucido" with a word of "numero grave," "Oriente."^[129] An excess of voci sdrucciolose could cause "languidezza" (poetic languor), so serene effects had to be achieved in alternative ways. Tomitano's perfect example of this is the famous opening quatrain from Petrarch's sonnet no. 164, Hor che 'l ciel et la terra e 'l vento tace. He described the evocative gloss on Theocritus's calm sea and silent night that opens the poem as lacking "noise." Even though inherently the material was prone to "languidezza,"^[130] it embodied a "perfect tranquillity" through its ideal balance of gravità and piacevolezza.

The question of languor brings Tomitano to structural and affective questions involving caesurae. Although caesurae commonly occur at either the fourth or sixth syllable in an endecasillabo, the first of these is "the more magnificent and grave" and thus (implicitly) superior.^[131] A caesura on the fifth syllable should be disdained as too languid.^[132]

Additional structural repetitions, finally, may add to a verse's beauty. Alliteration generally creates greater number. Words not participating in the alliteration may be interpolated between those that are, and the effect is quite graceful when one alliterated word finishes a line and another starts the next.^[133] This prose-like device calls to mind Daniello's claim that resemblance to prose is an asset to verse. Further, words that divide other words from one another, such as "et, hor, ne, si come," make a verse beautiful, as in the line "Et temo Et spero Et ardo Et sono un ghiaccio."^[134]

Even Sansovino's Arte oratoria added to the wisdom on sound and number, although Sansovino was more concerned with rhetoric and less with poetry than Daniello or Tomitano had been. He affirms that the guidelines designating which words are naturally grave, pompous, base, and so forth — based largely on sound — had their origins in oratory. Despite the fact that it treats oratory, the Arte oratoria (like other rhetorics) exemplifies these guidelines with poetry. Sansovino concludes that old Tuscan words may add a certain gravità to one's style exactly because of their antiquity and their foreignness. Some words, such as "troba, heroe, anno, frôba," carry with them a natural grandeur that is pompous ("gonfie") by nature, while others, like "sante, veste, cinto, via fuoco," call up a base quality because of their languid sound.^[135]

Like Daniello, Sansovino shows how words that are "mute," "comune," and "sdrucciolose" can be used by the orator to make greater or lesser harmonia.^[136] Even

[129] Ibid., p. 478. In fact Petrarch never ended lines with parole sdrucciole.

[130] Ibid., p. 473.

[131] Cf. Ruscelli, Del modo de comporre, on accents; he assigns the principal accents in endecasillabi to the fourth, sixth, or eighth positions, in addition to the tenth (p. xlix).

[132] Ragionamenti, pp. 474-76.

[133] Ibid., pp. 486-87.

[134] Ibid., p. 489.

[135] L'arte oratoria, fol. 56.

[136] Ibid., fol. 56'.

more important, he explains the division of sentences and the formation of cadences. A cadence is "none other than a harmonious and sweet finishing of the period, more conclusive and easier in verse than in prose. This is because in verse one must not leave the listener in any doubt or in any way less than fully satisfied from a lack of number or a paucity of sound ["harmonia"]. And this sound depends on a well-proportioned joining of words, one with another."^[137]

In the decade after 1550 Venetian rhetorics and poetics maintained a lively interest in Bembo's aesthetics, and this at a time when Willaert's students were still setting scores of Petrarchan sonnets. Parthenio's Della imitatione poetica, though not pitched to a vernacular readership, borrowed much of what Bembo had to say about sound, since (it explained) "words are chosen according to variety."^[138] Marco Valerio Marcellino's first "Discorso" in Il diamerone invoked Bembo's authority in citing Petrarch and Boccaccio as vernacular models. Couched as an old-styled apologia, it defended the Tuscan vernacular for its especially melodious character.^[139] The most ambitious of the midcentury writings was Ruscelli's Del modo de comporre in versi nella lingua italiana (signed in 1558 although not published until 1559), which applied Bembist norms to a wide range of lyric genres. A Viterban polygraph based in Rome before his move to Venice in 1548, Ruscelli was among the best known and respected of vernacular theorists in the city.^[140]His Del modo de comporre tried to

[137] "[La] cadenza . . . altro non è che harmonico e dolce finimento del periodo, tanto piu nella prosa difficile, quanto nel verso è piu terminato e piu facile; perche in quello conchiudendo attamente non si dee lasciar l'ascoltatore dubbio e non a pien sodisfatto, o per il mancamento del numero, o per la poca harmonia che vi si ode; laqual harmonia risulta dalle commessure delle parole, l'una all'altra proportionalmente congiunte" (ibid., fol. 57').

[138] "Le parole secondo la varieta s'eleggerano" (p. 241). Thus, for example, A and O are the fullest, hence weightiest, vowel sounds; clusters of consonants make for gravità, sparseness of consonants makes for piacevolezza (see esp. p. 80 and in Book 4, pp. 191-93 and 199-201).

[139] The work was dated 10 April 1561 and published three years later. The discorsi published in Il damerone (Venice, 1564) were set in ca' Venier (cf. Chap. 4 above, nn. 31 and 65). For Bembist allusions see fols. [c], [c ii]-[c ii']. On the melodious quality of the vernacular, note the following: "le nostre voci volgari, sono quasi tutte composte d'una cosi ordinata mescolanza di vocali, & di consonanti, che acquistano un dolce cominciamento, un regolato mezzo, & un soavissimo fine. Per la qual cosa, se queste parole sono con giudicio da dotta, & leggiadra mano composte, & con una politezza gentile congiunte, & serrate insieme: il loro congiungimento, non puo divenir nè duro, nè aspro, nè molle, nè languido: ma fa riuscire l'oratione dolce, soave, composta, unita, & tutta uguale: in maniera, che ogni nostro concetto puo esser da noi partorito vivo, et quasi vestito di carne & d'ossa; quando egli ci comparisce avanti vestito di cosi ricca, & cosi ben tessute veste" (Our vernacular words are almost all made up of an ordered mixture of vowels and consonants, which acquire a sweet beginning, a regulated middle, and a most smooth end. For which reason, if these words are composed by a learned and graceful hand and joined and bound with a courtly polish, then their conjoining can become neither hard nor harsh, nor soft nor languid, but rather the speech will succeed in being sweet, smooth, poised, unified, and completely consistent in such a way that our every concept can be endowed with life and virtually clothed in flesh and bones, since it appears before us dressed in such a rich and well-woven vestment); ibid., fols. [b v]-[b v']. Following this, Marcellino gives examples of all the different sounds that Italian can make — long and short syllables in different combinations, different vowels, accents, and so forth — concluding that "da questo si puo comprendere . . . che la nostra favella ha perfettamente tutta questa numerosa armonia; che in essa i nostri moderni . . . hanno cominciato à scrivere" (from this one can comprehend . . . that our tongue contains perfectly all this numerous harmony with which our moderns have begun to write); fols. [b vi]-[b vi'].

[140] Parabosco was among those acquainted with him, as indicated in a letter to Anton Giacomo Corso discussing Corso's sonnet in Bembist terms: "Io hebbi dal dottissimo, & gentilissimo Ruscello, una di V.S. con la risposta al sonetto ch'io le mandai. io l'ho molto bene essaminato, & considerato; perche egli è degno di molta consideratione, & hollo giudicato degno d'infinita lode; ne voglio in questo caso cedere, di giuditio a nessuno, & non gli defraudere in parte nessuna il nome della sua bellezza, gravità, leggiadria, & facilità" (I received from the most learned and kind Ruscelli one of yours with the risposta to the sonnet that I sent him. I have examined and considered it well, for it is worthy of much consideration, and I have judged it worthy of infinite praise. In this case I do not want to cede judgment to anyone, and deprive it in any way of the labels of beauty, gravity, loveliness, and facility); Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari . . . (Venice, 1551), p. 6.

show how to write in all the standard lyric forms, as well as in versi tronchi and versi sdruccioli. The thoroughness with which he embarked on this task, with chapters devoted to each form, remains his most useful contribution and, for students of contemporaneous madrigals, his attention to the sonnet is especially helpful.^[141]

Ruscelli mainly occupied himself with the sonnet's prosodic possibilities, principally enjambment. For, as he stated, "the breaking of the verse and then finishing the construction of the thought is the principal [source of] grandeur in style."^[142] Because of this, a sonnet devoid of enjambments, like Piangete donne, et con voi pianga Amore (no. 92), embodied simplicity, or the humble style. Petrarch's Mentre che 'l cor dagli amorosi vermi (no. 304), broken as it is by continual enjambments, embodied the high style.^[143] As a rule, however, enjambments were not to be made one after another in either sonnets or capitoli, since this "could generate a vexing continuousness of style. But above all one eschews [enjambments] in the first verses of quatrains [and] tercets."^[144]

All these elaborations of variazione along Bembo's dialectical lines suggest we rethink Weinberg's dismissal of midcentury arts of poetry. The years 1525-60 produced some preliminary challenges to Bembo's views on models, imitation, and the choice of language; but more than that they produced a wealth of embellishments on the sonorous functions of vernacular poetry. The rhetorical concerns for harmony, number, sound, and structure all stood at the center of poetic criticism, since language and especially poetry had come to be conceived as vehicles for performance more than cognition and contemplation. Indeed there is a striking resemblance between the focus of cinquecento theorists and of modern ones (most notably Gianfranco Contini, as reflected in a famous essay of 1951), who have been

[141] A chapter on the sonnet may also be found in Dolce's Osservationi, fols. 96'-100', but Dolce's treatment is more perfunctory than Ruscelli's.

[142] "Lo spezzar . . . in verso, e quivi venir à finir la costruttione della sentenza, è la principal grandezza dello Stile"; Del modo de comporre, p. 113.

[143] "Et queste spezzature, che non lascino andar à finir le costruttioni, e le sentenze tutte piane nel fin de' versi, son quelle, che, come ho detto, hanno le principal parte nella gravità dello stile" (ibid., p. 115). Torquato Tasso's Lezione recitata nell'Accademia Ferrarese sopra il sonetto "Questa vita mortal" ecc. di monsignor della Casa, written ca. 1565-72, praised della Casa's O sonno, o della queta, umida ombrosa Notte precisely for its frequent enjambments. On the question of enjambment in this work see Edoardo Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario e i lirici veneziani del tardo cinquecento (Rome, 1974), pp. 233-37; and Tomlinson, "Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi," pp. 55-57. Tasso had met Ruscelli in Venice during a journey of 1559-60, after which he made Ruscelli an interlocutor in his Minturno.

[144] "[Q]uesto spezzar di versi si faccia spesso, ove commodamente può farsi, ma che non però si faccia sempre, cioè, in tutti i versi d'un Sonetto, ò d'un Capitolo, che, come dissi, potrebbe generar fastidio la continuata somiglianza dello stile. Ma che sopra tutto si fugga di non farlo ne' primi versi de' Quatternarii, nè de' Terzetti, che allora . . . parebbe importantissimo vitio, & con molta cura fuggito da tutti i Scrittori per ogni tempo" (Del modo de comporre, p. 117). (Note, however, that this is not true of Mentre che 'l cor nor of della Casa's O sonno. )

Aside from Ruscelli and Tasso, considerations of enjambment are rare in the sixteenth century. See also Weinberg's discussion of Vincenzo Toralto's La Veronica, o del sonetto (Genoa, 1589), in A History of Literary Criticism 1:228, and Crispolti's Lezione on "Mentre che 'l cor," mod. ed., Trattati 4:193-206.

gradually more receptive to recognizing the priority of rhythmic over semantic properties in Petrarch's poetics, or at least their interdependencies.^[145]

Much of the motivation behind Venetians' literary theorizing during the first half of the sixteenth century stemmed of course from their anxiety to elevate the vernacular The new local culture linked with the press was shaped increasingly by Italian and less and less by Latin. Steps had to be taken to secure acceptance of the vernacular, improve it as a vehicle of communication, and give it a certain cachet. This way learned writers, once in print, could be made accessible to a less-learned reading public, and aspiring writers of humble origins could, conversely, be groomed for higher realms of literary discourse.^[146] The welcoming attitude toward foreignness and archaism that Venetians assumed in codifying trecento Tuscan sprang from a desire to add luster to their adopted tongue. Such arcana were anathema to proponents of the lingua cortigiana who prized unruffled elegance. But in Venice a writer like Parthenio could claim (with Sansovino and others) that strange and little-used words gave living language a heightened gravitas.^[147] Even though Parthenio was writing about imitation and drew examples from Latin and Tuscan, he shared with collectors and patrons like Antonio Zantani widespread attitudes that sought elite status by appropriating the cultural objects and instruments of distant times and places.

More than any other Italian city, Venice domesticated a foreign idiom for vernacular music, using a full-blown northern polyphony that was fundamentally sacred, austere, hieratic, and complex with which to set high-styled Tuscan texts. The linguistic equal of this polyphony was Petrarchan syntactic complexity, which endowed the new vernacular with its needed cultural capital.^[148] The cachet attached to complex syntax goes a long way toward explaining the new status of the sonnet among midcentury poets, who often published almost nothing else in the copious anthologies issued around 1550 from the Venetian presses.^[149] Many of these sonnets were conventional by literary standards, yet settings of them by Willaert and Rore adapted their linguistic possibilities to music in novel ways that transformed the symbolic relations of sacred and secular. Before considering this phenomenon more closely, we will attempt to mediate between theories of words and settings of words by considering how they were reconciled by Venetian music theorists.

[145] See Gianfranco Contini, "Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca," in Varianti e altra linguistica: una raccolta di saggi (1938-1968) (Turin, 1970), pp. 169-92. For related views see Umberto Bosco, "Il linguaggio lirico del Petrarca tra Dante e il Bembo," Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1961): 121-32; Giulio Herczeg, "La struttura delle antitesi nel Canzoniere petrarchesco," Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1961): 195-208; idem, "La struttura della frase nei versi del Petrarca," Studi petrarcheschi 8 (1976): 169-96; Fredi Chiapelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Petrarca: la canzone delle visioni (Florence, 1971); and Robert M. Durling, ed., Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The "Rime sparse" and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 11-18.

[146] On the relationships between the press, the standardization of the vernaculars, and their links to national identities see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, "Printing and Language," Chap. 8, pt. 4 in The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and David Wooten (1958; London, 1976), pp. 319-32.

[147] "Le parole nuove, et inusitate aggiungono gravità, et maraviglia come anchora ricordò Aristotele" (Della imitatione poetica, p. 192).

[148] On this point see Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici," p. 165.

[149] I refer here especially to those in the Rime di diversi series; see Chap. 4 above, n. 21 and passim.

Chapter 6—
Currents in Venetian Music Theory—
The Consolidation of Music and Rhetoric

As a preface to his remarks on numero, Bernardino Tomitano wrote in the Ragionamenti della lingua toscana that words made in time delight us because they are rhythmic ("numerose") and fill the soul with endearing intervals and musical proportions.^[1] Tomitano went on to explain the ramifications of numero in both poetry and music. Strings, reeds, and human voices all produce number and harmony through high and low pitches that delight the ears. These in turn generate many other musical parts ("voci") by which the intervals and their proportions can combine to satisfy the listener and bring forth a more perfect sound.^[2] To signify the harmonious sounding of unlike tones Tomitano depicted "[t]his loving discord or discordant lovingness" as "a most sweet procuress who, with the enticements of her sweetnesses, lures the soul into that happiness with the state of loving an unknown ['un non so che'], whom we know not well."^[3] The conceit of the sweet procuress is an allegory of beauty, who charms the soul into a contentment with loving. The love thus inspired in the listener resembles the one described by Renaissance Neoplatonists, that is, a love for God as yet vaguely and dimly realized. It corresponds more precisely — if only by suggestion — to the Neoplatonic construct of earthly beauty as a seductive manifestation of the ideal proportions of the divine and of beautiful music as an aid to souls in traversing the series of emanations that lead them back to their divine origins.^[4]

[1] "Le parole, che noi diciamo, fatte a tempo cotanto ci dilettano, non per altro, che perche sono numerose, & empiono l'anima nostra di amichevoli intervalli & musiche proportioni" (Tomitano, Ragionamenti della lingua toscana [Venice, 1546], p. 460). As in Chap. 5, I cite from the second edition.

[2] Ibid., p. 461.

[3] "Questa amichevole scordanza, ò discorde amicitia, è una ruffiana dolcissima, laquale con le lusinghe delle sue dolcezze tira l'anima in quel contento ad amare un non so che, che noi non bene sappiamo" (ibid.).

[4] In the next breath Tomitano acknowledges Pythagoras and Plato as his sources (ibid.). The idea relates, of course, to the notion of discordia concors, which recurs throughout medieval and Renaissance theory, but finds a particularly avid reformulation at the hands of Florentine Neoplatonists. On this idea see Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), pp. 17-21 and Chap. 8, "Harmonies and Disharmonies of the Spheres."

These proportions, Tomitano went on to explain, represent only one type of numero, however. There is another type in the measure of sound produced by human voices. This is a gauge not of pitch but of how words are properly timed and weighed to delight the soul of the listener or reader. In stressing the aural aspect of a spiritual ontology Tomitano was taking up Bembo's lead in Gli asolani, which had followed Ficino in attributing supernatural powers to sung words. As described by Lavinello in Bembo's dialogue, love displayed itself as the dual desires for beauty of the body and beauty of the soul, the one attained through sight, the other through sound.^[5]

In one crucial respect Tomitano's discussion differs from those in either Gli asolani or in Bembo's Prose, namely in connecting directly sonorous aspects of verse with their translations into musical settings. One of the main reasons Tomitano exhorts poets to pay close aural attention to the verses they write is that well-timed verse makes music sweeter: "Musicians will sing beautiful and well-measured verses more sweetly and they will delight us more than when singing rough and badly composed ones."^[6] This prefatory axiom grounds and justifies Tomitano's unusually detailed account of poetic sound and number as I have summarized it in the previous chapter.

Like Tomitano and other writers on language, theorists of music in midcentury Venice were trying harder and harder to forge the link between language and sound. The first notable attempt comes from the priest Giovanni del Lago, who showed a striking recognition of rhetoric's growing importance to musical developments. This is something of a surprise, for del Lago's contributions to music theory were otherwise largely unoriginal. They lay mainly in his assembling a vast collection of correspondence to which his own offerings are the least ingenious part. In fact del Lago's mind was not only derivative but almost totally speculative, since he lacked experience in composition. The real practical and theoretical consolidation of words and notes did not come until the monumental Istitutioni harmoniche of Gioseffo Zarlino, published in its first edition in 1558, which showed Zarlino as a keen observer of contemporaneous polyphonic practice. Between these two sources, with del Lago's preliminary attentions to language and Zarlino's massive speculative theories and analytical assessments of contemporary compositional practices, I attempt to reconstruct

[5] "È adunque il buono amore disiderio di bellezza tale, quale tu vedi, e d'animo parimente e di corpo, et allei, sì come a suo vero obbietto, batte e stende le sue ali per andare. Al qual volo egli due finestre ha: l'una, che a quella dell'animo lo manda, e questa è l'udire; l'altra, che a quella del corpo lo porta, e questa è il vedere. Perciò che sì come per le forme, che agli occhi si manifestano, quanta è la bellezza del corpo conosciamo, così con le voci, che gli orecchi ricevono, quanta quella dell'animo sia comprendiamo" (Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Gli asolani, Rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti [Turin, 1966], p. 468). On Ficino's philosophies of magical songs see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, 1993), Chap. 4, and for a summary of Bembo's adaptations of Ficino's theories idem, "Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi, and the Humanist Heritage of Opera" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1979), pp. 37-43.

[6] "[P]iu dolcemente canteranno i musici i belli & misurati versi, & piu ci diletteranno, che cantando i rozzi & mal composti" (Ragionamenti, p. 462).

an emergent consciousness of rhetorical issues in music among Venetian musicians and trace their growing confidence about how to apply them.

The Nascent Ciceronianism of Giovanni Del Lago

Del Lago was born sometime in the late fifteenth century during the heyday of courtly song.^[7] His teacher, as he related in a letter of 15 September 1533, was the Paduan frottolist Giovanni Battista Zesso. By 1520 del Lago had become a priest at the tiny parish church of Santa Sofia in the Venetian sestiere of Cannaregio and had begun what was to become a copious correspondence with other music theorists. As Bonnie J. Blackburn has discerned, the addresses of various of these letters show that del Lago lodged in a series of unassuming neighborhood quarters, one near the dump by Santa Sofia, another by the barbershop there, and another presumably near the church of Santa Eufemia on the Giudecca.^[8] In the course of his professional life del Lago also received mail at three different churches (Santa Sofia, Santa Eufemia, and San Martino delle Contrade in Castello), though his only lifelong association remained the tiny Santa Sofia. Even there, del Lago had to climb laboriously through the church hierarchy, where (as Blackburn has noted) he was promoted from subdeacon to deacon in 1527 and from deacon to titular priest in 1542, but never reached the highest post of curate by the time he died on 8 March 1544.

Del Lago's correspondence is preserved today in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 5318.^[9] This manuscript consists of three distinct layers. One contains primarily correspondence del Lago received from Pietro Aaron, Giovanni Spataro, Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and various minor musicians;^[10] another, letters from Spataro and other theorists to Aaron (these make up layers two and three). Only one layer (the first) collects del Lago's own letters and in a most intriguing form: with one exception the items there have been transcribed by a scribe in a fair copy with the clear intention of readying them for publication. Appended to the many letters contained therein is a dedication preceded by a full title page.

[7] I am grateful to Bonnie J. Blackburn for sharing with me much information and many insights about del Lago over a number of years. The biographical notices that follow are largely indebted to her. For del Lago's collected correspondence see Bonnie J. Blackburn, Edward E. Lowinsky, and Clement A. Miller, eds., A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford, 1991) (here after Correspondence ).

[8] For a precise and chronological identification of these see Blackburn et al., Correspondence, Chap. 6. Much of this information is the result of Blackburn's successful foray through the church archives, which had been given up by earlier scholars.

[9] Prior to the Correspondence the most important inventories of this manuscript were those of Raffaele Casimiri, "Il codice Vatic. 5318: carteggio musicale autografo tra teorici e musici del sec. XVI dall'anno 1517 al 1543," Note d'Archivio per la Storia Musicale 16 (1939): 109-31, with an annotated chronological listing of its contents and an index of persons, and especially Knud Jeppesen, "Eine musiktheoretische Korrespondenz des früheren Cinquecento," Acta musicologica 12 (1940): 3-39, which provides information on other copies of these letters and sources of the manuscript.

[10] These include Joannes Legius, Paulo de Laurino, Pietro de Justinis, Don Laurenzio Gazio, Nicolaus Olivetus, Francesco di Pizoni, Fra Seraphim, Francesco Lupino, Hieronymo Maripietro, and Bernardino da Pavia. See the Correspondence, pp. 979-1020.

Epistole composte in lingua volgare nellequali si contiene la resulutione d'e molti reconditi dubbij della Musica: osscuramente trattati da antichi Musici, et non rettamen te intesi da Moderni a comune utilita di tutti li studiosi di tale liberale arte novamente in luce man date dal molto di cio studioso Messer Gioanne del Lago dia cono prete nella chiesa di Santa Sophia di Vinegia. Et scritte al Magnifi co Messer Girolamo Molino patricio Venetiano. (fol. [I])

Epistles composed in the vernacular language in which are contained the resolution of many recondite questions on music, obscurely treated by the ancient musicians and not fully understood by the moderns, for the common use of all the students of such liberal art, newly brought to light by the most learned Messer Giovanni del Lago deacon priest in the church of Santa Sofia of Venice. And written to the magnificent Messer Girolamo Molino, Venetian patrician.

Del Lago fashioned his title in the rhetoric of printed volumes, deploying phrases like "novamente mandate in luce" and "non più vedute" that first editions typically used to attract buyers. Other components of the title tried to pitch the contents to a wide readership, noting its use of the vernacular and the simplified explanations of complex theoretical problems that interested "studiosi" would find in it. Perhaps most notably, del Lago assembled his various explications into one of the "dialogic" forms that had just recently emerged in the era of high-volume printing, the epistolary anthology — a genre that had had its debut in print only with Pietro Aretino's Primo libro delle lettere of 1537.^[11]

We have already encountered the dedicatee of these literary-styled "Epistole," Girolamo Molino, among the literary patriarchs who gathered at ca' Venier in the company of Domenico Venier, Federico Badoer, Lodovico Dolce, Girolamo Muzio, Girolamo Parabosco, and scores of other literati. Contemporary theorists such as Dolce and Bernardino Daniello listed Molino as one of the city's cardinal poets, but del Lago's dedication chronicles for the first time the nature of Molino's curiosity and skill in music.^[12]

To the magnificent Mr. Girolamo Molino, Venetian patrician, most honored patron.

It is a natural instinct, magnificent sir, to desire that which one knows to be similar to oneself. Being yourself then full of virtue and celebrated among others for that, you merit not only the dedication of the present epistles in which are contained vari-

[11] On the genre as a whole, including a catalogue of epistolary collections by men and women of letters, see Amedeo Quondam, Le "carte messaggiere": retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare, per un indice dei libri di lettere del cinquecento (Rome, 1981). See also Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), Chap. 3; various essays in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston, 1989); and on seventeenth-century France Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1988).

[12] For the literary references see Chap. 4 nn. 15 and 31 and the Afterword to Chap. 4. On Molino's musical side, see Chap. 4 nn. 81-88, esp. the letter of April 1535 from Tromboncino to del Lago, cited in Chap. 4 n. 85, which sends regards to Molino.

ous questions about music, but you are to be esteemed for every other honor. And certainly one sees that few today are found (like you) gifted not only in such a science but also adorned with kindness and good morals. Therefore not finding to whom one could better submit such questions to be judged, and you being one who holds the first degree in the art of music among your other virtues, and also to show you some sign of the love and benevolence that I bear to you for infinite obligations, I make you a present. Even if it is a small gift to you (to whom much more worthy ones are due), nonetheless owing to your benign kindness it will please you to accept this little gift and it will indeed be welcome coming from one of your most faithful servants.^[13]

As further confirmation of Molino's understanding of music, del Lago addressed to him a lengthy treatiselike letter, undated, giving assorted technical definitions of intervals and musical genera.^[14]

It may be that Molino's patronage did not materialize into the subvention del Lago needed to publish the "Epistole"; as Blackburn notes, much of Molino's life was passed in a state of financial embarrassment owing to a family dispute over money, which he spent years fighting in court.^[15] Or it may have become clear to del Lago that Molino, who kept his own works from public view, would be better honored by a gift in manuscript.

Precisely when del Lago first assembled the "Epistole" that make up layer one is not entirely clear. The fair copy was presumably made sometime between May 1535, the date of the latest letter in the "Epistole," and June 1538, that of the first letter in the following series. It seems likely that del Lago was inspired to assemble an epistolary volume only after Aretino's letters had their riveting effect on Venetian readers — that is, between 1537 and early 1538. In 1540 del Lago incorporated parts of the "Epistole"'s contents into what was to be his only published work, the treatise Breve

[13] "Al Magnifi co Messer Girolamo Molino patricio venetiano patrone Honorandissimo. É instinto naturale Magnifi co Signo re , desiderare quello, che a sé proprio si conosce simile. [Es]sendo adunque vost ra segnoria di virtu piena, et tra gli altri per cio celebrata, merita nonsolamente la dedicatione delle presenti epistole, nellequali si contengono diversi dubbij di Musica, ma esser essaltata ad'ogni altro honore. Et certo si vede che pochi, al di d'hoggi si trovano (come voi) dottata non solamente di tale scienza, ma anchora di gentilezza, et costumi ornato. Onde per non trovare à chi meglio si possino tali dubbij rimettere ad esser giudicati, et per esser voi quello, il quale nell'arte di Musica tiene il primo grado fra le altre virtute, et anchora per mostrare alcuno segno de l'amore, et benivolentia ch'io vi porto per infinite obligationi, ve ne fo uno presente, il quale anchora che sia picciol dono a' vost ra Signoria (alla quale maggior più degni si conviriano) non dimeno per vostra benigna cortesia vi piacerà, [di a]ccetare questo picciolo dono et sara poi grato venendo da uno suo fedelissimo servitore" (fol. [I']).

[14] The letter appears without date on fols. 110'-115'.

[15] For reference to this see Molino's posthumous biographer Giovan Mario Verdizzotti, in Girolamo Molino, Rime (Venice, 1573), who wrote that he was "per lo spatio di trenta & piu anni di continuo con fiera crudeltà fin al punto estremo della sua vita a gran torto travagliato, & lacerato con molti litigii, & insidie dalla malignità & perfidia di chi gli era piu congiunto di sangue" (p. [8]). Relevant archival documents are noted in Elisa Greggio, "Girolamo da Molino," Ateneo veneto, ser. 18, vol. 2, pt. 1 (1894): 194-95, and a lengthy "Difesa di se stesso al Consiglio di Dieci" survives at I-Vmc, Cod. Cic. 1099, fols. 70-92. Molino's letter to Bernardo Tasso of January 1558, partially quoted at the end of Chap. 4 above, n. 97, begins by describing the legal resolution of the battle (Delle lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso, 3 vols. [Padua, 1733-51], 2:358-59).

introduttione di musica misurata.^[16] Afterward he continued to make additions and revisions to the manuscript letters, as indicated by the textual relationship of many marginal additions to them to portions of the treatise.^[17] In fact, Blackburn's biographical sleuthing allows us to take del Lago's change of title from "diacono" to "prete" on the manuscript's title page as verification that he was still going about revisions in 1542 when he got his last promotion.

Originality and philological rigor fell low on del Lago's list of priorities and bore almost no relevance to the kind of publication planned for the "comune utilità di tutti li studiosi di [musica]" that he hoped to launch. Much of what found its way into the "Epistole" was cobbled together from letters del Lago had arrayed before him, some of which were actually addressed to him and others of which he had simply gotten hold. He took this miscellanea and added cribbings from any number of classical and modern sources, freely patching together each letter to form his final version. All of his writings are highly derivative as a result, as the patient philological work of Blackburn et al. now makes clearer than ever.

Despite this, the "Epistole"'s opening letter, addressed to an obscure Servite monk named Fra Seraphin and first discussed in modern times by Knud Jeppesen in 1940, commands interest as one of the earliest efforts to lay out the linguistic and grammatical principles necessary to a composer of music. Styled as a little tract, the letter occupies a sizable nine folios (fols. 2-10) complete with marginal rubrics marking the various topics. The letter is not the work of the scribe who copied the rest of the "Epistole," but an autograph. Del Lago evidently added it to the front of the corpus after the creation of layer one and affixed the date 26 August 1541, thus postdating the publication of the Breve introduttione as well as his initial assembling of the "Epistole."

Like many other letters in the "Epistole" — and in epistolary collections generally — the date is at least partly fictitious, since much of the letter had already been written much earlier. Several textual and physical factors help clarify the history of the letter's compilation. Only the initial section on the modes responds to queries by Fra Seraphin, who replied in turn on 30 April 1538.^[18] In 1540 it became one of two major sections that del Lago incorporated into his Breve introduttione, the other ostensibly dealing with composing music in parts.^[19] In the treatise the second of

[16] Full title: Breve introduttione di musica misurata, composta per il venerabile Pre Giovanni del Lago Venetiano: scritta al Magnifico Lorenzo Moresino patricio Venetiano patron suo honorendissimo (Venice, 1540); facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 17 (Bologna, 1969). Connections between the two are investigated in Don Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago: A New View of the Man and His Writings," Musica disciplina 27 (1973): 107-51.

[17] See Martha Feldman, "Venice and the Madrigal in the Mid-Sixteenth Century," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1987), 1:80-81.

[18] MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 74.

[19] See Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," pp. 121-29. The two sections appear on pp. [29]-[30] and [39]-[43] of the treatise.

these was called "Modo, & osservatione di comporre qualunche concento," but it had more to do with text setting and grammar than counterpoint.

The letter also contains two lengthy interpolations that were not part of the Breve introduttione, in addition to the minor reworkings of numerous treatise-derived sections that occur throughout. The first interpolation (on fol. 5) presents definitions of "accento, discritione, pronuntiatione, [e] modulatione." The next (on fols. 7-8') offers a grammatical summary of syllables, syllable length, the qualities of letters, and so on. Both interpolations were compiled separately from the main body of the letter: written on paper of a smaller size, the verso of the first interpolation (fol. 5') has been left entirely blank, while the end of the second interpolation is mostly blank (fol. 8), and both lack the marginal rubrics that run throughout the large-format portions of the letter. Most likely del Lago first authored all the parts in large format, probably before 1540, included them in his Breve introduttione, and subsequently inserted new sections when preparing the letter version, which he then dated 1541.^[20] This hypothesis is supported by the numerous insertions of smaller passages that were added to the side and bottom margins of the original folios — glosses to the main text that qualified or enlarged on the topics at hand — all of which the printed treatise lacks.

What was the point of such a seemingly inchoate text? No easy answer suggests itself, but some clues are hidden in its clumsy structure. Immediately after his exposition of the modes, del Lago shifted without warning into an explanation of composing music for a text. "As to the observation on composing a harmony, it should be noted that every time you wish to compose a madrigal, or sonnet, or barzelletta, or other canzone, it is first necessary, searching diligently with the mind, to find a melody suited to the words . . . that is, one that suits the material."^[21] This is a simple recasting of the traditional rhetorical maxim of propriety, the fitting of style to subject so often taken up by contemporaneous literary theorists. It was one voiced by medieval musicians from Guido d'Arezzo and Jacques de Liège to Franchinus Gaffurius and Martin Agricola in more recent decades.^[22] Del Lago formulated it in conventional Ciceronian language by calling for an "aëre conveniente " able to match ("convenire") the "materia."^[23] Unlike earlier theorists, he made no mention of Latin texts but conceived propriety in specific connection with vernacular forms. In fact

[20] Harrán, working from a copy of Vat. lat. 5318 in I-Bc, MS B. 107, 1-3, was unaware of these physical differences in the original and, therefore, of the fact that each must have been compiled at a separate time.

[21] "Quanto alla osservatione di comporre un concento primieramente è da notare, ogni volta che vorrete comporre un madrigale, o sonetto o barzeletta, o, altra canzone, prima bisogna con la mente diligentemente cercando ritrovare uno aere conveniente alle parole . . . cioè che convenga alla materia" (fol. 3; = Breve introduttione, p. [39]).

[22] See the references to these and other theorists' statements in Don Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 40 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986), Appendix, Nos. 15-4-2, pp. 364-73. Many of these theorists advocate propriety in connection with modal ethos; we will see that del Lago did the same.

[23] Zarlino also consistently used forms of the verb convenire. This idea is discussed in the context of Aristotelian imitation by Walther Dürr, "Zum Verhältnis von Wort und Ton im Rhythmus des Cinquecento-Madrigals," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 15 (1958): 89-90 and passim.

del Lago took over the preoccupation of his literary counterparts with the proper accommodation of Italian (and, by extension, secular vocal genres). By madrigale he means the sixteenth-century poetic form and adds the sonetto, the barzelletta — that lower-brow and shorter version of the ballata common in frottola settings — and other canzoni (that is, lyric poems in general). Like contemporaneous madrigalists, del Lago viewed these Italian forms as discrete and essentially poetic categories — by implication representing different poetic levels — to which appropriate musical styles would be matched.^[24]

Outwardly del Lago's sudden transition from modal issues at the beginning of his letter to grammatical ones seems disjointed, but the juxtaposition may have had more to it than meets the eye. Once the reader knows the modes, he or she is then taught to make the (modal) melodies of each part fit the kinds of texts that will be set. The next passage clarifies the logic of this pedagogy. Proceeding from the explanation of the modes to the Ciceronian dictum on secular text setting cited above, del Lago returns immediately to the matter of modal properties. "Whenever learned composers have to compose a song, they are wont first to consider diligently within themselves to what end and to what purpose they create and compose it, that is, what affects of the soul they ought to move with their composition, or in what tone [or mode] they ought to compose it."^[25] Not only are mode and secular music linked, but the two of them specifically with modal ethos. These linkages point suggestively toward developments in Venetian secular music of the time, which was just then starting to pay special attention to mode through modal orderings of madrigal prints.^[26] The textual history behind del Lago's advice to "learned composers" sheds still more light on this question. As Claude V. Palisca discovered, del Lago lifted the passage just cited from Mattheo Nardo, probably a Florentine resident in Venice and an acquaintance of Aaron;^[27] and Nardo, as it happens, was a student of Giovanni Battista Egnazio, the same humanist who taught Venier and others in Venier's circle.^[28] Following the transmission of knowledge forward, a line descends in the early sixteenth century from Egnazio's schoolroom, with Nardo,

[24] On the phenomenon of identifying Italian musical genres by poetic forms in this period see the classic essay of Don Harrán, "Verse Types in the Early Madrigal," JAMS 22 (1969): 27-53.

[25] "Quante volte, che i dotti compositori hanno da comporre una cantilena, sogliono prima diligentemente fra se stessi considerare a che fine, et a che proposito quella potissimamente instituiscono, o componghino. Cioè quali affetti d'animo conquella cantilena movere debbino, cioè di qual tuono si debba comporre" (fol. 3).

[26] In the next years several prominent books would be ordered by mode: the Madrigali a cinque voci of Cipriano de Rore published in 1542, the Madrigali a cinque voci of Perissone Cambio published in 1545, and Perissone's Primo libro dei madrigali a quatro voci of 1547 (see Chaps. 8 and 9 below and Tables 6, 10, and 12). Harold S. Powers, "Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony," JAMS 34 (1981): 428-70, speculates that there may have been a connection particular to secular music between modal ordering of prints and the general desire for what he calls "pathic and ethic effects" (p. 446).

[27] See Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, p. 342, where Nardo's statement (preserved in I-Rvat, MS Vat. lat. 5385) appears in columns parallel to del Lago's.

[28] Palisca, arguing that Nardo's text probably preceded that of del Lago, tentatively dates it between 1522 and 1536 when Nardo's friend, Pietro Aaron, was involved (along with Egnazio) in the Aldine intellectual circle in Venice. According to his funeral oration, Egnazio was learned in music (see Palisca, ibid., p. 344 n. 30), though it seems unlikely that his learning surpassed the general knowledge that was imparted in any standard account of the seven liberal arts.

Venier, and his circle, and divides laterally to Aaron and del Lago by the late 1530s — a tantalizing crossing of musical and literary genealogies.

From this point onward, del Lago's letter sticks closely to matters of text setting, grammar, and rhetoric, all the while borrowing freely and abundantly to expand material from the Breve introduttione. In a continuation of themes bearing on modal ethos, del Lago next appears to paraphrase (unacknowledged) a passage from Sebald Heyden's De arte canendi (Nuremberg, 1540) to explain why composers ought to consider the affects of various modes.^[29] "Some [modes] are happy, others pleasant, others grave and sedate, others mournful and lamenting, still others wrathful and others impetuous. And so too the melodies of the songs — one moving in one way, one in another — are variously distinguished by musicians."^[30] Here del Lago sets out more clearly the Greek theory of modal ethos, which had already emerged in medieval writings on chant and was reconstituted for various discussions of Renaissance polyphony. Neither Heyden nor del Lago had a special hand in reviving the direction, of course: Gaffurius and Aaron had already made the traditional medieval juxtaposition between suiting words to music and moving the passions of the soul through various modal affects.^[31] Once again, the only unique aspect of del Lago's discussion is his pointed effort to relate modal ethos to secular music.

In a somewhat later passage, del Lago extended the underlying principle of propriety, insofar as it pertains to affect, to the succession of intervals in a polyphonic composition. "Force yourself to make your harmony such that it may be happy, soft, full, sweet, resonant, grave, and fluid when sung, that is, composed of consonants in common usage, as are thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and octaves."^[32] Even though the framework for his discussion here is propriety, del Lago tacitly assumed that proprietas was symbiotically hinged to its classical and modern twin in literary sources, varietas. Being no composer himself, he made no effort to turn the idea into a workable compositional principle but simply tossed it into the shuffle of general admonishments. Nevertheless, his naming of contrasting, even opposed, qualities ("allegro," "grave"), conceived at the level of individual intervallic progressions, indicates that local attention to variety and a belief in adapting properly the available compositional materials were beginning to spill over from literary into musical theory. Like his literary counterparts — and we will see the same to be overwhelmingly

[29] Ed. and trans. Clement A. Miller, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 26, AIM ([Rome]; 1972), Book II, Chap. 8. The relationship between the two passages is pointed out by Blackburn et al., Correspondence, p. 877 n. 4.

[30] "[P]erche altri sono allegri, altri plausibili, altri gravi, et sedati, alcuni mesti, et gemibondi, di nuovo iracondi, altri impetuosi, così anchora le melodie de canti, perche chi in un modo, et chi in un'altro commuovono, variamente sono distinte da Musici" (fols. 3-3'; = Breve introduttione, p. [39]).

[31] Citations are given in Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," p. 115 nn. 32-33; see also a similar statement by Martin Agricola from his Rudimenta musices (Wittenberg, 1539), fol. D ij. Palisca provides a useful table contrasting the attributions of affect to various modes made by Aaron, Nardo, and Gaffurius in Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, p. 345, with a comparison of the role of modal ethos in each of their writings on pp. 345-47.

[32] "Sforzatevi di far il concento vostro che sia allegro, suave, pieno d'harmonia, dolce, resonante, grave, et [a]gevole nel cantare, cioè di consonantie usitate, come sono terze, quarte, quinte, seste, et ottave" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 4'; = Breve introduttione, p. [40]).

true of Zarlino — del Lago pointedly confined the principle to pleasant, consonant intervals. Dissonant ones he discouraged as "mali agevoli a pronuntiar[e]," awkward to declaim.^[33]

From comments relating to mode and affect, del Lago slipped into a lesson on musical and verbal cadences. However limited in understanding the subtleties of compositional procedures, he nevertheless tried here to recognize the syntactic importance of cadences, an effort in which he implied his contemporaries were often negligent.

Cadences are truly necessary and not optional, as some thoughtlessly say, especially in songs composed on words; and this is so as to distinguish between the parts of the text, that is, to make the distinctions of comma, colon, and period, so that the meaning of the complete text may be understood, both in verse and in prose — because the cadence in music is like the full stop in grammar.^[34]

The distinctions of comma, colon, and period that del Lago advocated were ageold,^[35] but a certain disparity of opinion over whether, or how much, contrapuntists needed to respect them had arisen once, after Josquin's time, the linear aspect of music became complicated by the vertical dimension and overlapping mechanisms of continuous, equal-voiced (or what is sometimes called "simultaneous") polyphony. In 1533 the Brescian theorist Giovanni Lanfranco had declared in his Scintille di musica that divisions of words in plainchant were made according to their meaning, whereas in polyphony such divisions were made according to the arrangement of the counterpoint and the need for rests. Only as an afterthought did Lanfranco add that even polyphonists should show some concern for verbal meaning.^[36] Del Lago tried to counter such views with his insistence that cadences gauged to grammar and sense were "necessary and not optional," especially in texted music

[33] MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 4.

[34] "Le cadentie veramente sono necessarie et non arbitrarie, come alcuni inconsideratamente dicono, massimamente nel canto composto sopra le parole, et questo per distinguer le parti della oratione, cioè far la distintione del comma, et colo, et del periodo, accio che sia intesa la sententia delle parti della oratione perfetta, si nel verso, come nella prosa. perche la cadentia in musica è come il punto nella Gramatica" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 4; = Breve introduttione, p. [40]).

[35] For medieval and Renaissance sources voicing similar ideas see the various statements on syntax compiled in Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, Appendix, Nos. 89-115, pp. 388-97. See also Palisca's brief discussion of the relationship between articulation in grammar and in music as discussed by Guido d'Arezzo and John Cotton, in Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, pp. 338-39. Ritva Jonsson and Leo Treitler, "Medieval Music and Language: A Reconsideration of the Relationship," in Music and Language, Studies in the History of Music, vol. I (New York, 1983), pp. 1-23, clarify the importance of medieval theory in upholding such basic correspondences between grammar and music.

[36] "Or e da sapere, che le distintioni delle parole si fanno nel canto Misurato: ma non come nel Fermo: perche in questo la distintione si fa secondo la sentenza delle parole: & in quello secondo che porta l'ordine del contrapunto, & la necessita delle Pause, benche il Compositore de avertire di far la cadenza, overo distintione generale secondo la sentenza, & distintione delle parole" (Now it should be known that divisions of words are made in mensural music, but not as in plainchant, because in the latter the division is made according to the meaning of the words and in the former according to the arrangement of the counterpoint and the necessity for rests, although the composer should pay heed to making cadences or general divisions according to the meaning and division of the words); Scintille di musica (Brescia, 1533), p. 68; facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 15 (Bologna, 1970).

where words had to be made intelligible. He adduced the idea while discussing polyphony and applied it equally to settings of poetry and of prose: "Be careful then to make cadences where the parts of the text (or one of its portions) finish and not always in an identical place — because the proper place for cadences is where the thought within a group of words finishes, since it is fitting to extend and conclude together [i.e., simultaneously] the articulations of the words and notes."^[37] In other words, it is the composer's duty to see that his musical composition corresponds to the grammatical structure of the texts he sets; composers should heed syntax over prosody in setting verse since syntactic settings are rhetorically clearer. His reason ("la sententia . . . delle parole"), only alluded to here, was made explicit in an earlier passage which upheld the necessity "that the meaning of the words sung be understood."^[38] Del Lago's view represents a turn away from the practice of composers like his teacher Zesso and toward the proselike readings of the most recent Venetian madrigalists.

Despite del Lago's apparent lack of sophistication with polyphonic composition, not all the subtleties of a syntactically based polyphony were lost on him. Witness, for example, his discussion of "feigned cadences," roughly comparable to what Zarlino would later call "evaded cadences." "Sometimes feigning the cadence and then, at the end of it, arriving at a consonance not near to that one is commendable." This, he adds, "is intended for the soprano or another part, but the tenor in that case always makes the cadence, or division, so that the sense of the words may be understood."^[39] The mechanics of del Lago's contrapuntal strategy — that when one of the cadential voices avoids the final consonance it should not be the tenor (or perhaps bass) voice — are straightforward enough. More striking is the underlying objective of clear text expression that led him to propose the idea in the first place.

[37] "Siate adunque diligente di far le cadentie, dove la parte dell'oratione, overo il membro finisce, et non sempre in un medesimo luoco, perche il luoco proprio delle cadentie è dove finisce la sententia del contesto delle parole, perche gliè cosa conveniente tendere, et parimente insieme finire la distintione, et delle parole, et delle notule" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 4; = Breve introduttione, p. [40]). As noted by Blackburn et al. in the Correspondence (pp. 878-79 nn. 6-7), this passage resembles one in Stefano Vanneo's Recanetum de musica aurea (Rome, 1533): "Cadentiarum denique numerus, maior quam deceat, non fiat, mira enim debet esse paucitas, nec in eodem semper loco. . . . Legitimus autem peculiarisque Cadentiarum locus est, ubi verborum contextus desinit sententia, nec immerito, decet enim et verborum et notularum distintionem pariter tendere, unaque desinere" (fol. 93'; fasc, ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 16 [Bologna, 1969]). Harrán cites the two passages in close proximity in Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, pp. 391-92.

[38] "Che sia intesa la sententia delle parole cantate" (ibid., fol. 3'). Palisca (Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, p. 341) reads the passage on fol. 4 differently, relating the phrase "non sempre in un medesmo luoco" (see n. 36 above) to Johannes Tinctoris's seventh rule of counterpoint in the Liber de arte contrapuncti stating that two cadences should not be made on the same note. But I would argue that the continuation of del Lago's passage, "perche il luoco proprio delle cadentie è dove finisce la sententia del contesto delle parole," suggests instead that del Lago is thinking of the place in the text where cadences ought to occur, not the pitches in the melody. (See also Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," p. 117.)

[39] "Alcuna volta finger di far cadentia, et poi nella conclusione di essa cadentia pigliare una consonantia non propinqua ad essa cadentia per accommodarsi è cosa laudabile, et questo se intende con il soprano, o altra parte, ma bisogna che sempre il tenore in questo caso, faccia egli la cadentia, o ver distintione, accio che sia intesa la sententia delle parole cantate" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 3'; = Breve introduttione, p. [39]). Harrán's rendering of the passage in "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," p. 111 n. 19, based on the Bologna copy of the manuscript, is misleading.

Del Lago's grammatical digest continues with a lengthy discussion of accent under the marginal caption "Che cosa è Gramatica?" Here he tried to cover the meaning, derivation, and function of accent, the three types in Latin and Italian, respectively, and the locations of accents in Italian verse.^[40] In the way typical of ancient grammars, he formulated much of his pedagogy as admonishments to avoid errors ("barbarismi" he calls them in traditional grammatical jargon).^[41] In all of this del Lago was eager to demonstrate his erudition through an eclectic rehearsal of different sources; yet in amassing them to raise his prestige, he often clouded his meanings for the same readers he was trying to impress. An ironic and maddening instance of this occurs in his caveat against the "barbarismi" of setting long syllables with short notes and vice versa. "Take care not to commit barbarisms in composing notes to words; that is, do not place long accents on short syllables or short accents on long syllables, which is against the rules of grammar, without which no one can be a good musician. Grammar teaches how to declaim and write correctly."^[42] Del Lago adduces the authority of the Latin grammarian Isidore of Seville to defend the rule, stating that accent has "quantità temporale."^[43] Are we to infer from this that del Lago was thinking of quantitative accent and that his sources were anachronistic for the purposes of his case? Probably so, but he is characteristically vague about the precise context at hand. We will see that he subsequently attempts a discrete treatment of vernacular accent that unwittingly confuses quantitative with qualitative accent.

This notwithstanding, del Lago's most inventive contribution to music theory comes in connection with accent and text underlay as they relate to vernacular verse. The three types of final accents, he explains, include antepenultimate, which makes the sound "sdruccioloso"; ultimate, which makes it "grave"; and penultimate, which makes it "temperato."^[44] This occurs in one of the few passages in which del

[40] MS Vat. lat. 5318, fols. 4'-6'; = Breve introduttione, pp. [40]-[42].

[41] See, for example: "siate cauto di non far barbarismi nel comporre le notule sopra le parole" (fol. 4', and the related statement at the end of fol. 6'); and later, "schivatevi adunque dal barbarismo il quale . . . è enuntiatione di parole corrota la letera, over il suono." On the fixation of ancient and Renaissance grammarians on avoiding errors see Keith W. Percival, "Grammar and Rhetoric in the Renaissance," in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 324-25. For an essay that traces reactions against barbarism in sixteenth-century musical criticism see Don Harrán, "Elegance as a Concept in Sixteenth-Century Music Criticism," RQ 41 (1988): esp. 420ff.

[42] "Siate cauto di non far barbarismi nel comporre le notule sopra le parole, cioè non ponete lo accento lungo sopra le sillabe brevi, o ver l'accento breve sopra le sillabe lunghe, quia est contra regulam artis grammatices, senza la quale niuno po esser buono Musico, la quale insegna pronuntiare et scrivere drittamente" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 4'; = Breve introduttione, p. [40]). On this aspect of the letter see Dürr, "Zum Verhältnis von Wort und Ton," pp. 91ff.

[43] As noted by Blackburn et al., it comes from the Etymologariae, 1.32.1 (Correspondence, p. 880 n. II); originally cited by Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," p. 118 n. 42.

[44] "Quanto à gli accenti nel verso volgare, sono tre modi: primo, quando cade nella sillaba ante-penultima, quale rende il suono sdruccioloso; quando cade poi sopra l'ultima sillaba, rende il suono grave; et quando cade sopra la penultima, rende il suono temperato" (As to accents in vernacular verse, there are three types: first, when one falls on the antepenultimate syllable, which makes the sound slippery; then when it falls on the final syllable, making the sound grave; and when it falls on the next to last, making the sound temperate); MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 6'; = Breve introduttione, p. [41].

Lago broaches the question of affective function, and it clearly derives from current literary theory as found in Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua and in Daniello's La poetica.^[45] Next he notes, after Bembo, that a line of vernacular poetry — by which he actually meant an eleven-syllable line — cannot have accents except in three syllabic positions, the fourth, sixth, or tenth:^[46] lines with their accents arranged otherwise risk not being verse at all.^[47] This much is clear enough, but in an unhappy conflation of his meager Latin learning with Bembo's vernacular theory, del Lago goes on to claim that "one does not place accents except on long syllables."

Ostensibly, del Lago here is still simply describing the nature of the endecasillabo in poetic terms. Yet Bembo himself had said something quite different — first, that numero has to do with the amount of time given to syllables, and second, that this is a function both of the letters that make up syllables and of the accents they receive. For Bembo vernacular accent existed a priori, and he went out of his way to make the point that the vernacular language differs from classical languages in this respect. "Speaking of accents, I do not wish to say what the Greeks do about them, more suited to their language than to ours. But I do say just this: that in each word in our language that syllable is always long on which the accents fall and all those [syllables] that precede them [are] short (emphasis mine)."^[48] If del Lago really meant to tell musicians where they should place musical accents, he might have said either that musical accents must fall on accented syllables, since length in real terms could only

[45] Cf. the Prose, where Bembo says that accents should be arranged so as to fall in one of three syllabic positions: "uno di tre luoghi suole avere nelle voci, e questi sono l'ultima sillaba o la penultima o quella che sta alla penultima innanzi, con ciò sia cosa che più che tre sillabe non istanno sott'uno accento comunemente, quando si pone sopra le sillabe, che alle penultime sono precedenti, ella porge alle voci leggerezza; per ciò che . . . lievi sempre sono le due sillabe, a cui ella è dinanzi, onde la voce di necessità ne diviene sdrucciolosa. Quando cade nell'ultima sillaba, ella acquista loro peso allo 'ncontro; per ciò che giunto che all'accento è il suono, egli quivi si ferma, e come se caduto vi fosse, non se ne rileva altramente"; p. 74 in the ed. of Mario Marti (Padua, 1967). See also Bernardino Daniello, La poetica (Venice, 1536), on the three accentual types with respect to individual words: "le voci tutte o sono sdrucciolose, o comuni, o mute: (Sdrucciole quelle sono che hanno sempre nella loro innanzi penultima l'accento: Comuni quelle, che nella penultima: Mute quelle che l'hanno nell'ultima)" (p. 121); mod. ed. in Bernard Weinberg, ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento, 4 vols. (Bari, 1970-74), 1:308.

[46] Cf. Bembo: "a formare il verso necessariamente si richiegga che nella quarta o nella sesta o nella decima sillaba sieno sempre gli accenti" (Prose, p. 78). This idea may be compared with the exposition of accents within verse by Giovan Giorgio Trissino, La poetica, pts. 1-4 (Vicenza, 1529), fols. xix'-xx', which relates these accentual positions to the positions of caesurae (repr. in Trattati 1:62-64). See also the remarks of Daniello dealt with in Chap. 5 above, n. 121, and of Girolamo Mei on accent, summarized in Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, pp. 348-55, as well as the more general comments on accent in idem, Girolamo Mei (1519-1594): Letters on Ancient and Modern Music to Vincenzo Galilei and Giovanni Bardi, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 3, AIM ([Rome], 1960; 2d ed. 1977), 117.

[47] Bembo continues: "ogni volta che qualunque s'è l'una di queste due positure non gli ha, quello non è più verso, comunque poi si stiano le altre sillabe" (Prose, p. 78).

[48] See Bembo (partially quoted in Chap. 5 n. 116, above): "Numero altro non è che il tempo che alle sillabe si dà, o lungo o brieve, ora per opera delle lettere che fanno le sillabe, ora per cagione degli accenti che si danno alle parole, e tale volta e per l'un conto e per l'altro. E prima ragionando degli accenti, dire di loro non voglio quelle cotante cose che ne dicono i Greci, più alla loro lingua richieste che alla nostra. Ma dico solamente questo, che nel nostro volgare in ciascuna voce è lunga sempre quella sillaba, a cui essi stanno sopra, e brievi tutte quelle, alle quali essi precedono" (Number is none other than the time that is given to syllables, either long or short, now because of the letters that make up the syllables, now by reason of the accents that one gives to words, and sometimes on both accounts. And, first speaking of accents . . . [here begins the passage translated in my main text]), ibid., p. 73.

have been at issue in setting Latin texts; or (better) that in setting the vernacular they should reconcile the demands of quantity — heuristically determined by vowel and consonantal weight, consonantal clusters, and the like — with those of stress.^[49]

Del Lago's tendency to stray from compositional praxis was both his bane and his boon. His injunctions on "measuring" accent roved far from any practical realities of Italian verse settings; yet, taken in sum, his attentions to vernacular prosody and its rhetorical links to text setting did at least recognize some of the ways in which accent served to articulate musical rhetoric. As we saw, he thought it necessary to acknowledge the three final accentual positions in Italian verse. And in addition, he dealt in a later passage with caesurae as defined by internal accentual positions — an issue treated by several literary theorists of the time. To this end del Lago concluded his discussion of prosody by contriving a principle, unique to his writings, to govern the setting of three Italian verse types, settenario, ottonario, and endecasillabo.

Note finally this rule: that in vernacular verses of seven syllables the penultimate always receives [the accent], and in all those of eight, the third and penultimate, and in all those of eleven, the sixth and penultimate, and sometimes the fourth, but rarely both. But when it should happen to rest on the fourth, do not hold the sixth but rather the fourth and the penultimate. And this is done because of the verse and in order to avoid and escape the barbarism that can occur in composing notes to words.^[50]

The final folios of del Lago's letter (fols. 7-10) cover a wide array of linguistic and metrical topics common to virtually all works on the questione della lingua and on rhetoric and poetics in the early sixteenth century. In its final form, this last section begins with the longest of the letter's interpolations, that on syllables and letters.^[51] Syllables are defined by their "tenore" (accent), "spirito" (mood), "tempo" (unit of time), and "numero" (number, that is, of letters). Del Lago attributes affect only to "spirito," which may be either "aspero" (harsh) or "lene" (delicate, or sweet). Nothing is said about how syllables are made so by poets or composers, or even why composers might try to discern their affect; presumably the materials in this section were submitted as general wisdom for musicians' edification.

[49] This is much like what Thomas Campion tried to do in Elizabethan England; see my "In Defense of Campion: A New Look at His Ayres and Observations," Journal of Musicology 5 (1987): 226-56.

[50] "Notate ultimamente questa regola, che in tutti i versi volgari di sette sillabe, sempre la penultima si tiene, et in tutti quegli di otto, la terza, et la penultima, et in tutti quegli de undeci, la sesta et la penultima, et qualche volta la quarta, ma rare volte accade. Ma quando accadesse tenere la quarta, non terrete la sesta, ma la quarta et la penultima. Et questo si fa per la ragione del verso, et per schivare et fuggire il barbarismo che po accadere, componendo le notule sopra le parole" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 6'). Bembo makes a similar statement with respect to vernacular mertics in the Prose, pp. 77-78. See also Palisca on Mei cited in n. 46 above.

[51] See the translation in Harrán, "The Theorist Giovanni del Lago," pp. 123-24. As shown by Blackburn et al., the sources of this passage include Priscian, Bede, Sulpicius, and Diomedes (Correspondence, pp. 882-83).

Next del Lago returned to the structure of Latin verse, advising that the composer "have a knowledge of meter or verse, that is, know what a foot is and how many syllables it can have, which are long, which are short, and which are common; and know how to scan a verse and where one makes caesurae and elisions between vowels; and similarly, know where the comma, and the colon, and the period fall, both in verse and in prose."^[52] He wanted to make all of these tools basic to the composer's trade and threw in the caveat that the composer must be familiar with linguistic meter and rhythm, underscoring the point (as usual) with a string of borrowed definitions.^[53] Of greatest interest here again is his reiteration that such knowledge applies equally to poetry and prose.

With his usual detachment from real practice, del Lago made little serviceable use of his formidable inventories. Rather inanely he made himself out as a kind of apostle, come to proselytize the unconverted to a higher consciousness of language. His preaching probably fell on few ears, for those who would convert were engaged in more profound reconciliations of musical and linguistic phenomena than del Lago was able to reckon with. He played a role that was not proactive but reactive — not a molder of his time, but a measure of it, a gauge of the new interdependencies between language and music that were already being formed within Venetian academies and private homes. If del Lago now seems to have been incapable of formulating a coherent musical poetics, we must remind ourselves that this was never his importance among theorists or composers of his day.

Nevertheless, in the late 1530s the practical recognition of these interdependencies still lay largely outside the discourses of music theory. Aaron had adumbrated some of the issues, as revealed in Spataro's 1531 letter answering Aaron's criticisms of text setting in Spataro's Virgo prudentissimo.^[54] Spataro's retort argues the conservatist party line for a kind of Absolutmusik, accusing Aaron of wanting to "take the free will from music and make it subject to grammatical accents," and chiding him for his pickiness, since neither of them was a grammarian.^[55] At that point Aaron had been in Venice for about nine years, during which time he had periodically served

[52] "E necessario chel compositore habbia cognitione del metro, o, verso cioè saper che cosa è piede, et quante sillabe può havere, et quali sono lunghe, et quali sono brevi et quali sono comune. Et saper scandere il verso et dove si fa la cesura, et la collisione. Et similmente saper dove cade lo coma, et lo colo, nel periodo, si nel verso, come nella prosa" (MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 9; = Breve introduttione, p. [42]).

[53] Much of this is taken from Gaffurius, Practica musicae, who provided translations (not of his own making) of the Greeks Aristoxenus and Nichomachus (cf. MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 10'; = Breve introduttione, p. [43]). For further details see Blackburn et al., Correspondence, no. 93 nn. 39-40.

[54] MS Vat. lat. 5318, fols. 228-29'; Correspondence, no. 36, pp. 445-55.

[55] Spataro wrote, "voleti tore el libero suo arbitrio al musico et farlo subiecto a li accenti grammatici" and later, "Io non scio dove proceda che hora in le compositione de li altri andati con tanti respecti grammatici, ma credo chi bene cercasse per le vostre compositione se trovaria che non haveti havuto tanti respecti, perché la gramatica non è vostra nè mia professione."

as a courier for Willaert, fetching and delivering pieces of music.^[56] In addition to his views on text setting, Aaron's writings seem to anticipate other strains in Venetian thinking that are only fully played out in Zarlino. In his Lucidario he justified his use of Italian — in reality the only language he was equipped to handle — by submitting praises of the tre corone of the trecento and a defense of Italian music and musicians.^[57] Situated thus in the questione della lingua, Aaron's discussion followed directions generally set by Venetians. But he was also the first to present, in Book 2 of his Toscanello in musica,^[58] a comprehensive view of simultaneous composition and triadic chords, redolent of Venetian ideals of sonority and harmony; and he showed a decided absorption with the modal questions that were to become a preoccupation of Venetian writings and musical collections soon after his Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni di canto figurato appeared in 1525.^[59] In recalling these incipient signs of a Venetian mindset in Aaron's writings, we should remember too that Aaron published with Venetian presses. Like Zarlino he was trying to resolve practical compositional problems for a fairly broad group of Italian readers that only the vernacular press could reach. Undoubtedly, del Lago hoped for the same, and through a much more voluminous, innovative form than he ever saw to fruition.

Ciceronianism Matured in Le Istitutioni Harmoniche of Gioseffo Zarlino

For the observer some four and a half centuries hence, Gioseffo Zarlino explains the compositional practice of Willaert and ratifies its humanistic basis more thoroughly than any other musician of the sixteenth century. Zarlino defined his mission in his first and most ambitious publication, the massive Istitutioni harmoniche of 1558. His title glossed Quintilian's encyclopedic rhetorical treatise Istitutio oratoria, which had similarly served to codify the practice of Quintilian's master and model, Cicero. The

[56] The evidence about his connections with Willaert comes from the letters of Spataro. See Peter Bergquist, "The Theoretical Writings of Pietro Aaron" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1964), pp. 45 and passim; on Aaron's years in Venice from 1522 to 1535, see pp. 35-49.

[57] For the justification of the Italian language see the preface "a lettori" to his Lucidario in musica (Venice, 1545); fasc. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 12 (Bologna, 1969). Aaron's list of Italian musicians, in Book IV, Chap. 1, fols. 31-32, including "Cantori a libro," "Cantori al liuto," and "Donne a liuto et a libro," shows above all how little Italian musicians of the first decades of the century had entered the polyphonic mainstream (Costanzo Festa, Marc'Antonio Cavazzoni, Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and Marchetto Cara are the only well-known contrapuntists mentioned). The Italians' fame was instead as singers and improvisors.

[58] Title of the 2d ed. (Venice, 1529); the first ed. was called Thoscanello de la musica (Venice, 1523).

[59] Aaron wanted to regularize modes by emphasizing "regular" cadences over "irregular" ones. See the discussion in Bernhard Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony Described according to the Sources, trans. Ellen S. Beebe, rev. ed. (New York, 1988), Pt. 1, Chap. 4, pp. 105-6; orig. Die Tonarten der klassischen Vokalpolyphonie (Utrecht, 1974). He also connected mode to secular music, if indirectly, by specifically claiming that tenors could determine mode in any kind of composition, even those sorts unrelated to psalmody like the madrigale (Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni di canto figurato [Venice, 1525]; facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 9 [Bologna, 1970], Chap. 2).

Mode figures as well in the supplement added to the 1529 edition of Toscanello. Essential on Aaron's concept of mode is the article by Harold S. Powers, "Is Mode Real? Pietro Aron, the Octenary System, and Polyphony," Basler Jahrbuch fir historische Musikpraxis 16 (1992): 9-52 (which relates Aaron's Trattato to the Venetian context on p. 20).

title page, conspicuously learned with its Greek motto, recorded his concern for musical issues pertaining to poets, historians, and philosophers (Plate 19):

The harmonic institutions of Mr. Gioseffo Zarlino of Chioggia in which, beyond materials pertaining to music, one finds explained many passages by poets, historians, and philosophers, as may be clearly seen in reading them.

Zarlino's choice of disciplines affirms his broader orientation toward the fivefold curriculum of the studia humanitatis, including poetry, history, and moral philosophy in addition to grammar and rhetoric, which were necessary to the first three. He emphasized both the practical and the philosophical — writing and thinking — and it is surely no coincidence that, like Tomitano, he opted to impart his teachings through the "reasoned" genre of treatise rather than the discursive one of dialogue. Zarlino's admission to the ranks of the short-lived Accademia Veneziana about the same time the Istitutioni were issued undoubtedly showed its founders' perception of him as a figure of wide learning, not only in music but in logic, philosophy, and ancient philology.

Despite these philosophical and encyclopedic leanings, Zarlino invoked in the proem to the Istitutioni the traditional humanistic tenet that man's superiority rests in speech: as speech was perfected and made beautiful over time, music was gradually added to it. In this way, through praises chanted to the gods, men could redeem their souls, move their wills, and reduce their appetites in order to lead a more tranquil and virtuous life. Zarlino's claim for music's power lying in its ability to persuade men to a better life with beautifully ornamented speech corresponds to that traditionally advanced by humanistic teachers.^[60] As the study and practice of music eventually brought it to a separate disciplinary status from language, Zarlino continued, it fell on hard times, losing its former "veneranda gravità."^[61] In modern times, however, music had found a redeemer: "The great God . . . has bestowed the grace of making Adriano Willaert born in our time, truly one of the rarest intellects who has ever practiced music, who . . . has begun to elevate our times, leading music back to that honor and dignity that it formerly had."^[62] The agenda of the Istitutioni was thus to demonstrate how and why Willaert's method of composing had restored music to its ancient status.

In settling so fixedly on one composer Zarlino tacitly embraced Bembo's single-model theory of imitation as argued in De imitatione, which had largely held sway

[60] For a fundamental essay arguing the view that a belief in eloquence and the power of persuasion was the most distinctive aspect of humanistic thought see Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence," Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497-514; repr. in Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Weiner (New York, 1968), pp. 199-216.

[61] Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 1.

[62] "L'ottimo Iddio . . . ne ha conceduto gratia di far nascere a nostri tempi Adriano Vuillaert, veramente uno de più rari intelletti, che habbia la Musica prattica giamai essercitato: il quale . . . ha cominciato a levergli, & a ridurla verso quell'honore & dignità che già ella era" (ibid., pp. 1-2).

19.
Le istitutioni harmoniche  (Venice, 1558), title page.
Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago, Special Collections.

in Ciceronian circles over the multiple-model theory of Pico. It is no surprise that Zarlino based his teaching on a modern-day master and not on one two centuries past, as champions of the lingua toscana had done, for even more than verbal languages, musical idioms were inextricably bound up with available technologies of composition.^[63] Happily for Zarlino, his aged paragon had already been elevated to Parnassus in his own lifetime.^[64]

Zarlino's Ciceronianism reached beyond the questions of technical or idiomatic imitation, however, into the deeper aesthetic crevices of his theoretical constructs. As for Bembo, beauty for Zarlino required elegance, purity, and restraint, all of which superseded other expressive demands. For this reason Zarlino issued several stern lectures to singers, cautioning them to perform only "with moderated voices, adjusted to the other singers." By singing in any other way, he warned, they would only create more "noise than harmony," and harmony could only be found by "tempering many things in such a way that no one [thing] exceeds the other."^[65] For Zarlino these principles were universal. He assured singers that composers would try to outfit them with easily singable parts, organized by "beautiful, graceful, elegant movements," so that those who hear them might be "delighted rather than offended."^[66] At this point in the Istitutioni he had already canonized beauty and grace in enumerating the six basic requirements of good composition: the second requirement dictated that music "be composed principally of consonances and only incidentally of a number of dissonances," and the third, that the voices "proceed properly, that is, through true and legitimate intervals born of the sonorous numbers, so that we acquire through them the use of good harmonies."^[67]

The theme of avoiding offense resounds all through the Istitutioni. Some of Zarlino's famous observations on text setting seem superficially to free him from this Ciceronian straitjacket. A well-known passage (to which I will return), for instance, enjoins composers to match each word with the right musical sentiment

[63] On this issue see Howard Mayer Brown, "Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance," JAMS 35 (1982): 1-48.

[64] The data presented by Creighton Gilbert, "When Did a Man in the Renaissance Grow Old?" Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967): 7-32, indicate that by 1558, when Willaert was at least sixty-five, he would have been considered quite aged. For a summary of ways Willaert was mythologized during and after his lifetime see Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:321-24.

[65] "Ma debbe cantare con voce moderata, & proportionarla con quelle de gli altri cantori, di maniera che non superi, & non lassi udire le voci de gli altri; La onde più presto si ode strepito, che harmonia: conciosia che l'Harmonia non nasce da altro, che dalla temperatura di molte cose poste insieme in tal maniera, che l'una non superi l'altra" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 204). Zarlino also admonished in this chapter against excessive physical gestures by singers (ibid.), as Cicero had done for orators (Orator 17.55-18.60), with an emphasis on the impact on audience. See Hermann Zenck, "Zarlinos Istitutioni harmoniche als Quelle zur Musikanschauung der italienischen Renaissance, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 12 (1929-30): 577.

[66] "Cercarà . . . il Compositore di fare, che le parti della sua cantilena si possino cantar bene, & agevolmente; & che procedino con belli, leggiadri, & eleganti Movimenti; accioche gli auditori prendino diletto di tal modulationi, & non siano da veruna parte offesi" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 204).

[67] "La Seconda è, che sia composta principalmente di consonanze, dipoi habbia in sè per accidente molte dissonanze, collocate in essa con debiti modi. . . . La terza è, che le parti della cantilena procedino bene, cioè che le modulationi procedino per veri, & legittimi intervalli, che nascono da i numeri sonori; accioche per il mezo loro acquistiamo l'uso delle buone harmonie" (ibid., p. 172).

and to allow enough dissonance "so that when [the text] denotes harshness, hardness, cruelty, bitterness, and other similar things, the harmony may be similar to it, namely rather hard and harsh." Yet even here Zarlino continued with the caveat "but not to the degree that it would offend."^[68] The expressive boundaries that had impelled Bembo some decades earlier to repudiate the "harsh, vile, and spiteful words" he perceived in Dante's Inferno were still firmly drawn.^[69]

The same views led Zarlino to reject vehemently the claims of the chromaticists voiced in Nicola Vicentino's L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555). In Part III, Chapter 80, Zarlino took passionate exception to the chromaticists' readiness to admit all the various intervals for what they professed were the oratorical ends of moving the affections. This was "most improper, for it is one thing to speak 'familiarly' and another to speak in song."^[70] Nondiatonic steps, he argued, destroy modal identity — a pressing concern for contrapuntists who built their systems on the firm ground of diatonic modality.^[71] In response to those who had warmed to chromatic theory he blustered, "I have never heard an orator . . . use in his speech such strange, garbled intervals as they use, and if they did I can't see how they could sway the mind of the judge and persuade him to their will, as is their goal; rather the contrary."^[72] Perhaps this was Zarlino's sticking point with Rore, whose style on the whole would seem to have supported his precepts well; in any case, it is surprising that he cited — and perfunctorily at that — a mere three of Rore's works in the whole Istitutioni.

Like literary Ciceronians, for whom Bembo hovered censoriously in the background, Zarlino constantly advocated "variation" as insurance against excess. This principle grounds Part III, Chapter 29, which entreats musicians "to vary constantly the sounds, consonances, movements, and intervals," and thus "through diversity . . . attain a good and perfect harmony."^[73] Zarlino's purpose in conveying these ideas is especially clear in Part III, Chapter 41, on the need to avoid parallel unisons

[68] "Debbe avertire di accompagnare . . . ogni parola, che dove ella dinoti asprezza, durezza, crudeltà, amaritudine, & altre cose simili, l'harmonia sia simile a lei, cioè alquanto dura, & aspra; di maniera però che non offendi" (ibid., p. 339).

[69] Cf. Chap. 5 below, nn. 70-71, and for the views of Tomitano, Girolamo Muzio, and Lodovico Dolce, nn. 72-76.

[70] "E grande inconveniente: imperoche altro è parlare famigliarmente; & altro è parlare modulando, o cantando" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 291).

[71] In addition to Zarlino's theoretical remarks see Mary S. Lewis on Zarlino's designation of the modes in the tenor part books of his 1549 book of motets, "Zarlino's Theories of Text Underlay as Illustrated in His Motet Book of 1549," Music Library Association Notes 42 (1985-86): 239-67. Zarlino's adherence to modal diatonicism should not be confused with his attitude towards modal ethos. For good reason Palisca has seen Zarlino's belief in modal ethos as half-hearted (On the Modes: Part Four of "Le Istitutioni Harmoniche," 1558, trans. Vered Cohen and ed. with an introduction by Claude V. Palisca [New Haven, 1983], p. xv).

[72] "Ne mai hò udito Oratore (poi che dicono, che bisogna imitar gli Oratori, accioche la Musica muova gli affetti) che usi nel suo parlare quelli cosi strani, & sgarbati intervalli, che usano costoro: percioche quando li usasse, non so vedere, in qual maniera potesse piegar l'animo del Giudice, & persuaderlo a fare il loro volere; si come è il suo fine; se non per il contrario" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 291). Cf. the passages from Cicero cited in Chap. 5 nn. 59-62, above.

[73] "[C]ercare di variar sempre li Suoni, le Consonanze, li Movimenti, & gli Intervalli; & per tal modo, dalla varietà di queste cose, verremo a fare una buona, & perfetta harmonia" (ibid., p. 177).

and octaves. Poetry, grammar, and rhetoric, he began, have all taken their cue from music, which teaches about good order and the hazards of repetition. To exemplify this in language one may consider a verse like "O fortunatam natam me consule Romam," where the reiteration of the syllables "natam," combined with the like-sounding final syllable "-mam," "give the listener little pleasure."^[74] Repetition precludes beauty. "It is not permissible to use these strange modes of speech [i.e., repetition] either in prose or in poetry, except as used artificially or for special effects. The musician most particularly must eliminate from his works every unpleasant sound and whatever might offend the hearing. . . . He must regulate [his compositions] in such a way that one hears in them only good things."^[75] Beauty, then, can only be grasped through the merging of elegance with diversity — that is, of decorum with variation.

Zarlino's Pedagogy of the Soggetto and Imitatione

Several of Zarlino's most insightful formulations stemmed from a desire to explain the localized contrapuntal heterogeneity that pervaded the Willaertian style of his day in terms of rhetorical varietas. Two major and interrelated instances of this play themselves out in his innovative discussions of the soggetto and of imitatione, procedures that form the aesthetic nucleus of the new style.

At its initial appearance as the first of the six requirements for good composition enumerated in Part III, Chapter 26, the soggetto corresponds simply to the rhetorical idea of materia. It is analogous to the "story or fable" of an epic poem. The soggetto in music, as in literature, may be either borrowed or invented anew. Zarlino followed Horace in advising that the soggetto should also "serve and please the listener," forming the very basis "on which the composition is founded . . . , [and] adorning it with various movements and various harmonies."^[76] Up to this point the notion of the soggetto seems almost metaphorical, but when Zarlino resumes his characterization of it at the end of the chapter it becomes more concrete. A soggetto that comes from another composition may be a plainchant serving as tenor or as cantus firmus in another part, or it may be taken from canto figurato, that is, from a

[74] "[Il] Grammatico, il Rhetore, & il Poeta hanno dalla Musica questa cognitione, che la continovatione di un suono, cioè il replicare molte volte una Sillaba, o una littera istessa in una clausula di una Oratione, genera . . . Cativo parlare, o Cativa consonanza; come si ode in quel verso, O fortunatam natam me consule Romam; per il raddoppiamento della sillaba Natam, & per la terminatione del verso nella sillaba Mam, che porgono all'udito poco piacere" (ibid., p. 194).

[75] "[Repetitione] non è lecito, ne in Prosa, ne in Verso (salvo se non fusse posto cotal cosa arteficiosamente, per mostrar qualche effetto) porre questi modi strani di parlare; maggiormente il Musico debbe bandire dalle sue compositioni ogni tristo suono, & qualunque altra cosa possa offendere l'udito. . . . ma debbe regolare in tal maniera li suoi concenti, che in loro si odi ogni cosa di buono" (ibid.).

[76] Ibid., pp. 171-72.

polyphonic work. It may be placed in more than one voice and may take any number of forms, including canon.^[77]

Once Zarlino begins to explain how counterpoint relates to a soggetto that is not borrowed, however, things become rather stickier. If there is no soggetto to start with, then "whatever part is first put into action or starts the composition — whatever it may be or however it may begin, low, high, or middle — that will always be the soggetto. "^[78] The composer will adapt the other parts in canon (fuga ), as answers (consequenze ), or however he likes, "matching the harmonies to the words according to their content (materia )."^[79] So far so good. But which part is to be understood as the soggetto in the very free method of "simultaneous" composition prevalent in Zarlino's orbit? His answer, decidedly indeterminate, begins now to touch the heart of the elusively varied style he aimed to describe.

When the composer draws the soggetto from the parts of the composition — that is, when he obtains one part from another and gets the soggetto that way, composing all the parts of the work together . . . — then that portion that is obtained from the other parts, on which he then composes the parts of the composition, will be called the soggetto. Musicians call this method "composing by fantasy"; one could also call it counterpointing [contrapuntizare ], or making counterpoint, as one likes.^[80]

Here the tangibility of the soggetto threatens to vanish once again. Zarlino only clarifies the passage in Chapter 28 by stating outright, in a reversal of his earlier assertion, that the soggetto is not necessarily the first voice to sound, "but the one that observes and maintains the mode and [the one] to which the other voices are adapted, whatever their distance from the subject."^[81] In the same place he refers the reader to his own seven-voice setting of the "Ave Maria" salutation from the Lord's Prayer (Ex. 3). (Zarlino included no quotations of the repertory that he cited, so it seems he expected students either to know it or, if not, to learn it.) According to his

[77] "[P]uò essere un Tenore, overo altra parte di qualunque cantilena di Canto fermo, overo di Canto figurato; overo potranno esser due, o più parti, che l'una seguiti l'altra in Fuga, o Consequenza, overo a qualunque altro modo: essendo che li varij modi di tali Soggetti sono infiniti" (ibid., p. 172).

[78] "[Q]uando non haverà ritrovato prima il Soggetto; quella parte, che sarà primieramente messa in atto; over quella con la quale il Compositore darà principio alla sua cantilena, sia qual si voglia, & incomincia a qual modo più li piace; o sia grave, overo acuta, o mezana; sempre sarà il Soggetto" (ibid.).

[79] "[A]ccommodando le harmonie alle parole, secondo che ricerca la materia contenuta in esse" (ibid.).

[80] "[Q]uando il Compositore andrà cavando il Soggetto dalle parti della cantilena, cioè quando caverà una parte dall'altra, & andrà cavando il Soggetto per tal maniera, & facendo insieme la compositione . . . ; quella particella, che lui caverà fuori delle altre, sopra laquale dipoi componerà le parti della sua compositione, si chiamerà sempre il Soggetto. Et tal modo di comporre li Prattici dimandano Comporre di fantasia: ancorache si possa etiandio nominare Contrapuntizare, o Far contraponto, come si vuole" (ibid.).

[81] "Ma si debbe avertire, che io chiamo quella la parte del Soggetto, sopra la quale sono accommodate le altre parti in consequenza, & è la principale, & la guida di tutte le altre. Io non dico quella, che prima d'ogn'altra incomincia cantare; ma quella dico, che osserva, & mantiene il Modo sopra laquale sono accommodate le altre distanti l'una dall'altra per qual si voglia intervallo" (ibid., p. 175).

Ex. 3.
Zarlino, Pater noster  (secunda pars): Ave Maria,  mm. 1-7; 
Musici moduli liber primus  (Venice, 1549), p. 33.

explanation, the soggetto in this excerpt is not the first but the second of the three voices to "sing in fugue" — presumably not the quintus but the altus. This verifies (as he has already argued) that it is possible to have opening voices that do not carry the soggetto, voices that may in some cases be "discordant" with one another. That is to say, such voices may utilize nonessential steps of the mode, although, he warns, it will bother the singers if the composer does this too much. (In this instance, the opening voice departs from the essential soggetto halfway through the second measure, but it adheres to scale degrees that unambiguously define the mode.)

Chapter 43 pushes this discussion further into the complexities of real practice by trying to teach how to write diminished counterpoint either on a diminished subject derived from a polyphonic work or on one newly composed. Zarlino now summarizes the situation very simply: the subject can in fact be "either the first part to be written or the first to be imagined by the composer " (emphasis mine).^[82] His account of free counterpoint on given soggetti has awaited this chapter and the following one, Chapter 44, which deals essentially with rhythmic possibilities. Chapter 43 is quite terse. It begs the question of how such counterpoint actually works, claiming that "one cannot give particular rules, since the individual cases are infinite." Instead Zarlino refers the reader to two two-part examples, the second of which demonstrates the technique of contrapuntizare on an original subject (Ex. 4).^[83] This musical example clarifies what Zarlino's text does not tell us explicitly, namely that soggetti heard over the course of an extended composition are multiple, as we would expect. There are three distinct soggetti in the passage, as marked, each of them part of overlapping contrapuntal expositions. Each exposition has a separate motivic identity and ends with a cadence. A given exposition may contain repeated statements of the soggetto, as in the lower voice of the second one, mm. 13-16. Or, in typical motet style, transformed versions of the soggetto may supplant the original one; witness the motive first sounded in the upper voice at the upbeat to m. 17.

In such a simple two-voice passage, one voice will often imitate the other's opening motive exactly, or almost exactly. Since each is equally melodious, at least at the start, the guide (or initiating) voice can be thought to present the essential form of the soggetto, unless it explores "discordant," nonessential areas of the mode. An interesting exception to this exists in the third soggetto. There the lower voice leads off in m. 21 with a version that is rhythmically slightly diminished compared with the one subsequently sounded in the upper voice at m. 22. Retrospectively the lower-voice version sounds like a varied form of the upper voice of mm. 22ff., especially once the lower voice brings the soggetto back in its seemingly more essential form at the upbeat to m. 28.

Much of the difficulty we now have in determining what is "supposed" to be the soggetto in a given passage stems from the fact that Zarlino described the soggetto as a precompositional construct for use by composers. He named and explained it as a real procedural part of the precompositional toolkit for use at the most preliminary stages of the creative act, thus elusive to the observer after the fact. Once set down in finished form, compositions in an idiom like Willaert's, with their continual shifting of materials, naturally tend to confound our attempts to "discover" the "essential" materials that went into crafting them early in the compositional process. Zarlino reiterates that the voice(s) bearing the soggetto will use essential degrees of

[82] "Soggetto io chiamo quella parte, che si ponen avanti le altre parti nella compositione; overamente quella parte, che il Compositore si hà primieramente imaginato di fare" (ibid., p. 200).

[83] The examples offered here from Le istitutioni harmoniche are transcribed without reduction of note values so as to aid in following Zarlino's discussions.

Ex. 4.
Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche  (Venice, 1558), p. 201.

the given mode, but the question remains what sort of rhythmic profile each voice assumes — whether a so-called primary form or altered — and the answer to this can be less obvious.

Chapter 44 offers some rhythmic guidelines. By and large they bear little clear relation to questions involving the soggetto but illustrate instead other aspects of his thinking relevant to variation principles. In a discussion of the duration of rests between entries of parts, for instance, Zarlino explains that in an exposition the

second voice may enter off the tactus when minims are involved — even at the minim immediately following the entrance of the first voice. Such a device he calls a "sospiro" (sigh); an example is shown in Ex. 5, not taken from the Istitutioni but from Willaert's setting of O Invidia from the Musica nova.

Had Zarlino's definition of the soggetto aimed to describe an idiom with less motivic flexibility than Willaert's, it undoubtedly would have been easier to explain. Owing to this flexibility, the soggetto can best be understood when viewed in conjunction with Zarlino's novel reflections on imitatione.^[84] In traditional discussions of imitation, theorists had enumerated a precise series of technical procedures connected with fuga. Yet fuga denoted techniques that were inherently fixed and restrictive.^[85] Zarlino intended with imitatione to include freer techniques through which the composer could explore a variety of motivic possibilities.^[86] The difference between the two, as revealed in Part III, Chapters 51 and 52, respectively, was that fugue involved strict reflection of the intervals in a dux (in his lexicon, the "guide"), whereas imitation did not. Either could be made in parallel or contrary motion. But imitation, as Zarlino defined it, did not "show in its course intervals in the consequent voices identical to those formed in the guide."^[87] The consequent voices in imitation would "proceed only with the same steps " as the guide, but not necessarily with "regard for the precise intervals " (emphases mine).^[88]

Zarlino claimed that both fugue and imitation could be made in continuous form, called legata, or in passages that are broken off from one another, called sciolta. In reality, although both types of fugue can readily be found in contemporaneous Venetian repertory, imitatione legata is a rarity.^[89] As James Haar has noted, the kind of procedure that is characteristic of Willaert's freely varied contrapuntal technique is the kind that Zarlino called imitatione sciolta.

To make this kind of "loosed" imitation, Zarlino says, "one may extract the consequent from the guide partly through imitation [i.e., sciolta ] and partly through consequence [presumably, exact imitation], partly in similar and partly in contrary motion."^[90] In Chapter 51 he had explained specifically that in imitation (again,

[84] On this question see the fundamental study of James Haar, "Zarlino's Definition of Fugue and Imitation," JAMS 24 (1971): 226-54.

[85] See ibid., pp. 231-34, on the comments of theorists who preceded Zarlino.

[86] For a discussion relating these distinctions to mannerist tendencies see Maria Rika Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1630 (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 196-97.

[87] "Imitatione . . . non camina per quelli istessi intervalli nelle parti consequenti, che si ritrovano nella Guida" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 217).

[88] "[I]l consequente imitando li movimenti della Guida, procede solamente per quelli istessi gradi, senza havere altra consideratione de gli intervalli" (ibid.).

[89] Zarlino gives a rather theoretical example of it, Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 218 (transcribed in The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of "Le istitutioni harmoniche," 1558, trans. Guy A. Marco and Claude V. Palisca [New York, 1976], as Ex. 94, p. 137), which in fact is a strict canon at the third. The relationship of comes and dux is inexact because imitation is at an imperfect interval.

[90] "Si debbe dipoi avertire, che nelle Sciolte si può cavare il Consequente dalla Guida, parte per imitatione, & parte in consequenza. Cosi parte in movimenti simili, & parte in movimenti contrarij; dilche sarebbe troppo lungo, se'l si volesse dar notitie particolare di ogni cosa minima" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 218).

Ex. 5.
Willaert,  O Invidia, e con quali arti il mute  (Petrarch, no. 172), mm. 10-14;
Musica nova  (Venice, 1559), no. 5.

sciolta ) the rhythmic and melodic figures of the two parts, like their intervallic relationships, are only similar, not identical.^[91] Indeed, as Zarlino's extended two-voice example shows (Ex. 6), they are often quite different in melodic direction, diminutions, interval size, and cadential rhythms. As he had done with the soggetto, Zarlino claims it would take "too long, even if one wanted, to explain every minute particular" of how these freed-up imitations work, but much of it we can deduce from the passage itself. The upper-voice consequent at m. 3 alters the opening soggetto by syncopating the entry and inverting the melody. In m. 10 the imitation begins in contrary motion with dissimilar intervals and immediately switches by m. II to similar motion; in the continuation some intervals differ from those of the guide voice by as much as a perfect fifth (in m. II compare the aa-e drop in the guide with the e-E drop in the consequent). In the final imitation, starting at mm. 17-18, only the rhythmic shape is common to both voices and the upper voice dissolves into a series of semiminims in mm. 19-20 that are not found in the guide. Typically, Zarlino concentrates the imitative process at the beginning of each exposition and makes the approach to the cadence more episodic (as in the second half of mm. 19 to the end). The basic rhythmic and (especially) metric design of the guide generally turns out to be mimicked most exactly in the consequents. (We will see in the Venetian

[91] See, for example, "Et in cotesto modo di comporre, il Compositore non è obligato di osservare la equalità delle figure, & di porre le Pause simili, ne osservare altri simili accidenti; ma può far quello, che più li piace; si come, che una parte proceda per Minime, & l'altra proceda per altre figure, cioè per Semibrevi; & similmente per Minime & Semiminime insieme mescolate; come si osserva di fare nelli Contrapunti fatti sopra'l Canto fermo" (ibid., p. 213).

Ex. 6.
Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche  (Venice, 1558), p. 217.

repertory of Willaert and his followers that motivic expositions often start not with precise pitches imitated but with all the parts imitating a particular textual rhythm.)

Zarlino's reluctance to systematize his explication of free imitation carries a crucial message, since the expressivity of the repertory he aimed to explain depends on a level of motivic and contrapuntal variation that eludes formulaic prescription. It may be telling, as Haar suggests, that the only theorist prior to Zarlino who made a point of confining the word fugue to strict intervallic imitation was Pietro Aaron, who spent many years at Venice.^[92] Without actually using the word imitation, Aaron cautioned in his Lucidario of 1545 against calling inexact imitative writing "fugue."^[93] "Among us [i.e., Venetians?]," he claimed, "there has often been talk of the heedlessness and wrong opinion of those who believe themselves to be writing in their music what musicians call fugue."^[94] As an example of nonfugal writing, Aaron gave a brief passage that corresponds to what Zarlino later named "imitatione sciolta."^[95]

[92] "Zarlino's Definition of Fugue and Imitation," pp. 232-34.

[93] Lucidario, Book 2, fol. ix.

[94] "Gia dannoi molte volte fu havuto consideratione alla poca avertenza, & vana oppenione di alcuni, i quali si credono creare nelle loro compositioni quello, che dal musico è chiamato Fuga" (ibid.).

[95] Haar also points out that this sort of imitative thinking is conceived within a diatonic modal framework and does not warrant chromatic alterations through ficta to create precise imitations of motives ("Zarlino's Definition of Fugue and Imitation," pp. 248-53). In doing so Haar counters the opinion of Edward E. Lowinsky, ever the chromatic maximalist, who had advocated preserving solmizations through the addition of ficta in transpositions of motives one or two fifths downward in Willaert's ricercars; see Lowinsky's foreword to H. Colin Slim, ed., Musica nova accommodata per cantar et sonar . . . , Monuments of Renaissance Music, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1964), p. ix.

In confronting both the soggetto and the question of imitation, then, Zarlino was attempting to make sense of a highly mutable system of motivic construction. In both domains he analyzed the application of an old contrapuntal pedagogy to new compositional principles. Like contemporaneous paradigms of variazione articulated by Ciceronian literati, the processes he was examining involved ongoing, local transformations. Ciceronians writing on rhetoric and poetics similarly imagined variation in terms of contrasting, paired qualities, as epitomized by Bembo's gravità and piacevolezza. Theories of words and notes resemble one another at this conceptual level, within which style functions as a dialectical system of contrasts.

Zarlino's proclivity toward dualistic thinking may be inferred from the way he linked affects with intervals in Part IV, Chapter 32, "In what way harmonies may suit the words set." There Zarlino obliquely associated imperfect minor intervals with qualities Bembo connected with piacevolezza and major intervals with gravità. Yet in delineating harmonic effects appropriate to different kinds of words Zarlino initially set up his own dichotomy as one of harshness versus sorrow. As we saw earlier, he advised that the composer "be careful to accompany each word in such a way that when the word denotes harshness, hardness, cruelty, bitterness, and other things of this sort the harmony will be similar to these qualities, namely somewhat hard and harsh." By contrast, "when any of the words expresses complaint, sorrow, grief, sighs, tears, and other such things, the harmony should be full of sadness."^[96] The schematics of Bembo's and Zarlino's affective dichotomies might be compared as follows:

While seeming to differ substantially from Bembo's, Zarlino's descriptions of the intervals that contribute to each of these two types reveal that the reason minor intervals are associated with sorrowful affects is that they create the qualities of dolcezza and soavità — qualities Bembo had ascribed to piacevolezza. In expressing grief

[96] "Debbe avertire di accompagnare in tal maniera ogni parola, che dove ella dinoti asprezza, durezza, crudeltà, amaritudine, & altre cose simili, l'Harmonia sia simile a lei, cioè alquanto dura, & aspra. . . . Simigliantemente quando alcuna delle parole dimostrarà pianto, dolore, cordoglio, sospiri, lagrime, & altre cose simili, che l'harmonia sia piena di mestitia" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 339).

and sorrow, Zarlino advised composers to use linear movements of minor seconds, minor thirds, and "similar intervals" and minor sixths or minor thirteenths above the lowest note of the composition, "these being by nature sweet and soft."^[97] In other words, he identified melodic minor seconds and thirds and harmonic minor sixths and thirteenths with sorrowful expressions, tears, plaints, and the like.^[98] But in calling them "dolci, et soavi" he suggested a kind of wistfully lyrical complaint, rather than a dramatic lament.^[99] His qualities of "asprezza, durezza, crudeltà, [and] amaritudine," conducive to virile expressions of anger, pomp, scorn, excitement, and even bombast presumably by means of melodic major seconds, major thirds, harmonic major sixths, and so forth, have seemingly little to do with this melancholy affect.^[100] Bombast was precisely the quality literary theorists often dreaded in Ciceronian gravity (recall that Lodovico Dolce even decried it in Petrarch's "Giunto Alessandro alla famosa tomba").^[101]

In Zarlino's musical conception, then, the antipole to gravità seems to have been partially redefined for musical purposes. Zarlino clearly linked accidental flat signs with affects of sweet sorrow and not with any chromatic dissonance that we might more readily have connected with expressive harshness. While Bembo's piacevolezza may embrace the sweetly sorrowful qualities Zarlino is thinking of, it also embodies quite different notions of playfulness ("gli scherzi" and "i giuochi") and enchanting beauty ("la vaghezza").

In addition to conceiving variazione as a means to expressive contrast, Zarlino also tied it to a general aspiration toward natural musical symmetry and proportion — one of the ways that it related to the notion of decorum. In this his explanations call to mind Daniello's simile of the mason who builds a well-proportioned wall from a varied assortment of stones.^[102] "Variety," Zarlino wrote, "gives our emotions great

[97] "Quando vorrà esprimere li secondi effetti, allora usarà . . . li movimenti, che procedeno per il Semituono: & per quelli del Semiditono, & gli altri simili; usando spesso le Seste, overo le Terzedecime minori sopra la chorda più grave della cantilena, che sono per natura dolci, et soavi" (ibid., p. 339).

[98] Even though Zarlino omitted to mention melodic minor sixths (and thirteenths) in the Istitutioni, Venetian composers, as we will see, clearly associated them too with expressions of sweet sorrow. Words like dolcezza and soave are nearly always set with flatted inflections, imperfect minor leaps, and the like.

[99] Note, for example, the minor seconds on "dolcezza" in the well-known exordium of Willaert's setting of Cantai, hor piango, as in the cantus of m. 11 (Opera omnia, vol. 13, Musica nova, 1559: Madrigalia, ed. Hermann Zenck and Walter Gerstenberg [{Rome}, 1966], pp. 73-79 and Ex. 45a below).

[100] In practice we know that what Zarlino called "harshness" could also be interpreted by dissonant suspensions, and that the suspensions used to interpret gentler forms of melancholy tended to be less dissonant.

[101] Osservationi nella volgar lingua (Venice, 1550), fol. 94'; see Chap. 5 n. 69 above.

[102] See Chap. 5 above, n. 119. Parabosco troped the same idea in comparing physical and musical beauty: "Non si puo dire, che fa la bellezza le vogliono solamente le parti belle: ma convien dire, che la bisogna una proportion uguale, & una concordanza de' membri, & che questo sia vero comprendetelo in questo che gli occhi neri da ogn'uno sono giudicati i piu belli; nientedimeno in qualche viso compariscono assai meglio gli occhi persi, & in altri gli occhi bianchi, & che talmente della lor bellezza rendono testimonianza, che gli huomini sono sforzati di dire, che tutta la vaghezza di quel viso consista solo nel color di quegli occhi, & è vero, che cosi come il buon Musico meschiando le consonanze perfette con le imperfette, & con le dissonanze, rende più vaga, & più soave la melodia, che non farebbe facendole tutte perfette: cosi ancho alle volte gli occhi, una bocca, un naso renderà nel volto, over si troverà, posto si grato, & si dolce vedere, che farà stupire chiunque lo vederà" (One cannot say that beauty requires only lovely parts: but one can say that it needs an equal proportion and a concord of the parts. That this is true you understand by the fact that black eyes are judged the most beautiful by everyone, but nonetheless in some faces dark eyes look much better and in others light eyes, and they render such account of their beauty that men are compelled to say that all the loveliness of that face consists only in the color of those eyes. And it's true that as the good musician mixing perfect consonances with imperfect and with dissonances makes the melody more lovely and smooth than he would if he made them all perfect, so will eyes, a mouth, or a nose at times seem in a face — that is, one will find something so pleasing and sweet that it will amaze anyone who sees it); Lettere amorose (Venice, 1607), pp. 103-4; see also the Libro primo delle lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco (Venice, 1573), fol. 51.

pleasure. Therefore every composer should follow such beautiful order, for he will be thought good insofar as his procedures resemble nature."^[103] In the idealized world of Neoplatonic harmonies, nature manifests ideal proportions; it "hates things without proportion and delights in those that have propriety between them."^[104] Reasoning countermanded the legitimacy of any music not founded on good proportion and symmetry. Since Zarlino assumed in all beings a primal sympathy for natural proportions, man's senses would necessarily yearn for likeness to nature, and music provided one means to approach it.

Zarlino on Syntax and Cadence

Zarlino wrote in the wake of a tradition that had long assumed a similarity between verbal and musical structures. Among medieval commentators the notion that music reflected grammatical relationships through its cadences was a commonplace. Virtually all commentators related the grammatical hierarchy of comma, colon, and period to musical phrasing. Fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century theorists of polyphony, however, had gone some way toward severing this connection for the sake of counterpoint (as we saw in Lanfranco's Scintille and in Spataro's retort to Aaron). In his writing about cadences in polyphonic music, Aaron therefore had to make a point of advocating (albeit tentatively) that composers resume the old grammatical alliances, arguing in his Trattato that without the proper cadences a texted composition simply could not be well understood: "The cadence is a sign by which composers make an indirect ending ["mediato fine"] according to the sense of the words."^[105]

Extending the recent tradition of rhetorically minded polyphonic theorists (including del Lago), Zarlino insisted repeatedly that the cadence in polyphony needed to correspond to meaningful divisions of words. In the Istitutioni, admonishments appear prominently in Part III, Chapter 53, on cadences, where only after emphasizing several times the need to coordinate musical with verbal cadences Zarlino admits that cadences in polyphony sometimes do "emerge from a certain con-

[103] "Varietà molto piacere porge alli nostri sentimenti. Debbe adunque ogni Compositore imitare un tale, & tanto bello ordine: percioche sarà riputato tanto migliore, quanto le sue operationi si assimigliaranno a quelle della Natura" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 177).

[104] "La natura odia le cose senza proportione, & senza misura; & si diletta di quelle, che hanno tra loro convenienza" (ibid., p. 185).

[105] "Cadenza non è altro che un certo segno del quale gli Compositori per alcun senso delle parole fanno un mediato fine" (Trattato, Chap. 8 [unpaginated]).

trapuntal design initiated by the composer."^[106] Lanfranco had described this circumstance as the norm; for Zarlino it was something to be conceded "out of necessity."^[107] No other theorist of the Renaissance showed as clearly as Zarlino how to reflect textual syntax and (though to a lesser extent) meaning in music. This is not inscribed so much in his rules of text underlay — many of which, as Don Harrán has shown, are derived from Lanfranco^[108] — but in the totality of his teachings on cadences, rests, text repetition, and underlay.

In Part III, Chapter 50 ("Delle pause"), Zarlino theorized questions of rests (like so many others) through the principle of variety. Rests enabled composers to vary the numbers of voices singing at any given point in a work in order to make compositions "lovely and delightful." Just as important, rests functioned like cadences in demarcating text. They were "not to be placed except at the ends of clausule or punti in the text . . . and at the end of every periodo. " Composers were to make sure that rests allowed the parts of the text and the meanings of the words to be fully heard and understood, so that they would have a "true function" and not just be random: "In no case should they be placed . . . in midclause, for anyone who would do so would show himself to be a veritable sheep, an oaf, and an ignoramus."^[109] In Part IV, Chapter 32, on accommodating harmonies to words, Zarlino added that composers should neither make a cadence nor use a rest larger than a minim in any place where the meaning of the words is incomplete.^[110]

The attention Zarlino gave to meaningful divisions of the text included textual repetitions, which he otherwise rarely discussed. The portion of text repeated, he

[106] "[S]i debbe avertire, che le Cadenze nelli Canti fermi si fanno in una parte sola: ma nelli figurati si aggiungono altre parti. Et in quelli si pongono finita la sentenza delle parole; in questi poi non solamente si fanno, quando si ode la Clausula perfetta nella oratione; ma alle volte si usano per necessità, et per seguire un certo ordine nel Contrapunto, principiato da Compositore" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 221).

[107] Gaspar Stoquerus expressed the relationship of words and cadences similarly, at least by implication, in De musica verbali of ca. 1570, also based on Willaert's practice. Stoquerus made the traditional equation of music and speech and exalted those composers who were actually capable of realizing it: "therefore for the more learned and careful musicians, a phrase is the same as for the grammarians" (emphasis mine) (Quare doctis quidem et diligentioribus musicis sententia eadem est cum grammaticis; Chap. 20, fol. 30'; See De musica verbali, libri duo: Two Books on Verbal Music, ed. and trans. Albert C. Rotola, S.J., Greek and Latin Music Theory [Lincoln, Neb., and London, 1988], pp. 204-5).

[108] See "New Light on the Question of Text Underlay prior to Zarlino," Acta musicologica 45 (1973): 24-56.

[109] "[N]on porre tali Pause, se non nel fine delle Clausule, o punti della Oratione, sopra la quale è composta la cantilena, & simigliantemente nel fine di ogni Periodo. Il che fa dibisogna, che li Compositori etiandio avertiscano; accioche li Membri della oratione siano divisi, & la sentenza delle parole si oda, & intenda interamente: percioche facendo in cotal modo, allora si potrà dire, che le Pause siano state poste nelle parti della cantilena con qualche proposito, & non a caso. Ne si debbeno porre per alcun modo, avanti che sia finita la sentenza, cioè nel mezo della Clausula: conciosia che colui, che le ponesse a cotal modo, dimostrarebbe veramente essere una pecora, un goffo, & uno ignorante" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 212).

[110] "Si debbe . . . avertire, di non separare alcuna parte della Oratione l'una dall'altra parte con Pause, come fanno alcuni poco intelligenti, fino a tanto, che non sia finita la sua Clausula, overo alcuna sua parte; di maniera che 'l sentimento delle parole sia perfetto; & di non far la Cadenza; massimamente l'una delle principali; o di non porre le Pause maggiori di quelle della minima, se non è finito il Periodo, o la sentenza perfetta della Oratione" (ibid., p. 340).

insisted, should make sense as a unit. One should therefore avoid single-word and (needless to say) single-syllable repetition, as explained in the eighth of his rules of text underlay, Part IV, Chapter 33: "[I]n mensural music such repetitions are tolerated; I am certainly not talking about one syllable or one word, but of some part of the text whose idea is complete."^[111] Textual repetitions, when they did occur, were to be kept to a minimum and reserved for words bearing "serious thoughts worthy of consideration."^[112]

The same view of symbiotic syntactic and semantic functions that governed Zarlino's recommendations on text repetition and cadence led him to insist on faithful musical accentuations of words. Following theorists from Guido to Gaffurius and beyond, he held that long syllables should be matched to long notes and short ones to short notes,^[113] placing this at the head of his famous decalogue, or ten rules of text setting. Yet in doing so he was not just nodding obediently toward old grammatically based traditions of music theory.^[114] Neither, as Don Harràn has argued, did he mean for the rule to apply only to Latin quantitative verse, as the preponderance of Italian madrigals among his examples attests.^[115] Instead, his attitude corresponded to that of Vicentino's L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, published three years earlier, which lamented that too many composers were inclined to go their own compositional way without considering the nature of words, their accents, and syllable length, whether in the vernacular or in Latin.^[116]

More than Vicentino, though, Zarlino conceived the coordination of syllable and musical length in the specific context of Venetian repertory, as suggested in the wording of rule I: "The first rule then will be always to place on a long or short syllable a corresponding note, in such a way that no barbarism is heard. For in mensural music every note that is separate and not tied (excepting the semiminim and all notes smaller than the semiminim) carries its own syllable."^[117] Here, first of all,

[111] "[N]el [canto] figurato tali repliche si comportano; non dico gia di una sillaba, ne di una parola: ma di alcuna parte della oratione, quando il sentimento è perfetto" (ibid., p. 341). This conforms to what Stoquerus later said, allowing for repeats of sentences, but not individual words. See Harràn, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, p. 460, nos. 380-81.

[112] "[I]l replicare tante fiate una cosa (secondo 'l mio giuditio) non stia troppo bene; se non fusse fatto, per isprimere maggiormente le parole, che hanno in se qualche grave sentenza, & fusse degna di consideratione" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 341).

[113] See Harràn, In Search of Harmony: Hebrew and Humanistic Elements in Sixteenth-Century Musical Thought, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 42 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 92ff.; and idem, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought, pp. 10-15 and 375-87.

[114] See Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae (Milan, 1496), 2.1, fol. 21', who cites the Latin grammarians on the point, ed. and trans. Clement A. Miller, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 20, AIM ([Rome], 1968), pp. 69-72; facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 6 (Bologna, 1972).

[115] In Search of Harmony, pp. 92-97.

[116] "Molti Compositori che nelle loro compositioni attendono à far un certo procedere di compositione à suo modo, senza considerare la natura delle parole, ne i loro accenti, ne quali sillabe siano lunghe ne brevi, cosi nella lingua volgare come nella latina" (L'antica musica, Book 4, Chapter 29, fol. P i'); facs. ed. Edward E. Lowinsky, Documenta musicologica, ser. I, Druckschriften-Faksimiles, no. 17 (Kassel, 1959).

[117] "La Prima Regola adunque sarà, di porre sempre sotto la sillaba longa, o breve una figura conveniente, di maniera, che non si odi alcuno barbarismo: percioche nel Canto figurato ogni figura quadrata si accommoda la sua sillaba" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 341).

Zarlino explicitly exhorts composers to syllabic text setting, which was normative in midcentury Venetian polyphony. As rule 4 specifies, however, only in rare circumstances — justified expressively — could the declamation occur on semiminims and smaller notes; the actual rhythmic structures of the style are such that most of the syllabic declamation occurs on semibreves and minims.^[118] In adding in rule I that each note should carry one syllable as long as the note does not fall within a ligature and is not smaller than a minim, Zarlino presupposed the composite minim rhythm that pulsates at the declamatory surface of Venetian repertory when the voices are configured in their typical staggered relationships. The longs and shorts that he, along with his predecessors, relied on as a traditional means of description hardly pointed to strict quantitative poetics, with two values corresponding to a spoken syllable length. Rather, a system of two surface durations of a 2:1 ratio now reflected local practice, which confined itself almost solely to the declamatory values of semibreve and minim, organizing the syllables in a free arrangement of fluctuating tonic and agogic stresses.^[119]

All of this is considerably simpler than the questions surrounding cadence. Along with rests, cadences formed one of the two main devices articulating verbal syntax. Zarlino surpassed any previous polyphonic theorist in trying to account for the multiplicity, variety, and subtlety of cadential events that were possible in an irregular contrapuntal texture. In such a context the tenor-superius framework on which cadences had traditionally hinged was all but gone or, at minimum, was seriously threatened. The main melodic materials — the soggetti — could not necessarily be found in any particular voice or imitated in any particular form, nor would they necessarily even be imitated at all. Even the way text was divided did not warrant a separate category of articulation, as Zarlino made clear in his definition of cadence at the outset of Part III, Chapter 53, "On the Cadence, what it is, its species, and its use." "The cadence," he explained, "is a certain act that the voices of a composition make in singing together, which denotes either a general repose in the harmony or the perfection of the sense of the words on which the composition is based. Or we could say that it is a termination of a part of the whole harmony at the middle or end, or an articulation of the main portions of the text."^[120] A text-determined environment of

[118] Rule 4 reads: "La Quarta, che rare volte si costuma di porre la sillaba sopra alcuna Semiminima; ne sopra quelle figure, che sono minori di lei; ne alla figura, che la segue immediatamente" (ibid.). In rule 6, Zarlino adds that when one syllable is placed under a semiminim another may be placed under the following note: "La Sesta, quando si porrà la sillaba sopra la Semiminima, si potrà anco porre un'altra sillaba sopra la figura seguente" (ibid.).

[119] See the respective Latin- and Italian-texted musical examples from the Musica nova in Harrán, In Search of Harmony, pp. 96-97.

[120] "La Cadenza adunque è un certo atto, che fanno le parti della cantilena cantando insieme, la qual dinota, o quiete generale dell'harmonia, o la perfettione del senso delle parole, sopra le quali la cantilena è composta. Overamente potemo dire, che ella sia una certa terminatione di una parte di tutto 'l concento, & quasi mezana, o vogliamo dire finale terminatione, o distintione del contesto della Oratione" (Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 221).

the kind Zarlino describes here made it difficult to distinguish the purely musical components of cadences. Zarlino opted to define cadential events as comparable syntactically (at least in theory), whether they brought to an end harmony or text (or both). Thus, certain passages might be deemed cadences that were not articulative in contrapuntal terms. In principle, cadences could even include events involving neither the suspended dissonances nor the imperfect-to-perfect intervallic movements that we normally associate with classic Renaissance polyphony.

Nevertheless, cadences that consist of contrapuntally discernible structures do have clearly defined musical features.^[121] According to Zarlino's description, they routinely consist of two voices moving through three successive dyads, with at least one of the simultaneities progressing in contrary motion. Zarlino first says that cadences arrive on unisons or octaves, then admits that they may also arrive on other intervals, such as fifths or thirds (and even additional ones). Cadences on octaves and unisons are perfect (i.e., with a major sixth to octave progression for the last two of the three dyads, or a minor third to a unison), while those on other intervals are imperfect since they are not strictly speaking cadences ("non assolutamente cadenze"). Later on Zarlino adds that an imperfect cadence is a "cadenza impropiamente" (improper cadence).^[122] Either type, perfect or imperfect, may be simple — that is, unornamented, homophonic, and fully consonant; or diminished — that is, varied rhythmically and including dissonant suspensions.

Once Zarlino begins to discuss specific cases he implicitly calibrates cadences from strong to weak, though decidedly not in any rigid, categorical, or (often) explicit way. For Zarlino perfect cadences carried the most weight. They were to be used when ending all the parts in a work or when punctuating complete sentences.^[123] Zarlino's stance on them was unequivocal, but in his detailed contrapuntal descriptions he made other (sometimes ambiguous) refinements regarding weight. Imperfect cadences, by contrast with perfect ones, were to be used for "intermediate divisions of the harmony or for places where the words have not completely reached the end of their thought." Whether ending on thirds, fifths, or sixths, imperfect cadences always had to move into their last sonority from a third and with the upper voice ascending stepwise.^[124] As with his descriptions of the soggetto and imitatione, Zarlino saw that many instances in current practice transcended his guidelines, making it impossible to illustrate every case: cadence types

[121] For what follows I am indebted to Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, Part I, Chap. 4; Siegfried Hermelink, "Über Zarlinos Kadenzbegriff," in Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan, 1973), pp. 253-73; Karol Berger, Musica ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflection in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 122-39; and Michele Fromson, "The Cadence in Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche," Chap. 1 in "Imitation and Innovation in the North Italian Motet, 1560-1605" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1988). Fromson provides a close reading of Zarlino's Part III, Chapters 53 and 54 and parts of 61, with astute analyses of his musical examples.

[122] Istitutioni harmoniche, p. 224.

[123] "[S]e le Cadenze furono ritrovate, si per la perfettione delle parti di tutto il concento; come anco, accioche per il suo mezo si havesse a finire la sentenza perfetta delle parole" (ibid., p. 225).

[124] Ibid., p. 224.

Ex. 7.
Zarlino, Le institutioni harmoniche  (Venice, 1558), p. 225.

are "almost infinite," he claimed, "for the contrapuntist . . . seeks new ones, constantly searching for new procedures."^[125]

In order to suggest some of the possible exceptions, Zarlino embedded in a passage of continuous polyphony a group of examples that he later, in the 1573 edition of the Istitutioni, dubbed "extravagant cadences." In this passage (Ex. 7), we find a welter of melodic syncopations that descend and return by step, but no orthodox cadential progressions. Six of these syncopations occur in the lower voice (mm. 1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 9-10, 11-12) and just one in the upper voice (the last one, mm. 13-14). The nonsyncopated voice in some cases makes an unconventional descent by leap to the cadential pitch (m. 3, g to c; mm. 4-5, g to c; m. 10, e to c; and m. 12, c to a); in other instances it stays put from the penultimate to the final sonority, instead of changing pitch at the point of cadence, as usually happens (e.g., the c over mm. 1-2; the c in m. 7). Furthermore, a number of the syncopations do not form dissonances with the counterpoint (as in mm. 1, 7, 10, and 13). What Zarlino seems to be drawing attention to here is the cadential impulse inherent in these syncopated melodic figures; he seems to be grappling with the Willaertian blur between such syncopated figures and the expectations of cadence that they set up in the listener.

Since the contrapuntal events in Ex. 7 lack orthodox cadences, their implied hierarchic strength will be low. In principle, they should carry less weight on our deduced scale than those described in Chapter 54 under "fuggir la cadenza," or "evading the cadence." Zarlino describes the latter as involving a "certain event in which the parts, pointing toward the desire to make a perfect ending according to one of the procedures shown above, turn elsewhere."^[126] In other words, unlike the variety of figures grouped under extravagant cadences, evaded cadences should theoretically have all the necessary conditions of true cadences, up until the final sonority.

[125] "Sarebbe cosa molta tediosa, se io volesse dare uno essempio particolare di ogni Cadenza propia, & non propia; conciosia che sono quasi infinite; onde è dibisogna, che'l Contrapuntista s'ingegni di ritrovare sempre di nuove, investigando di continuovo nuove maniere" (ibid.).

[126] "'[L]Fuggir la Cadenza sia . . . un certo atto, il qual fanno le parti, accennando di voler fare una terminatione perfetta, secondo l'uno de i modi mostrati di sopra, & si rivolgono altrove" (ibid., p. 226).

Ex. 8.
Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche,  mm. 1-19 (Venice, 1558), p. 226.

But in real use the designation "fuggir la cadenza" turns out to be a catchall for any kind of cadence that appears to start out normally and ends up going astray. This includes imperfect cadences ending on thirds, fifths, or sixths in connection with which Zarlino first introduces the term at the end of Chapter 53. Evaded cadences are useful, Zarlino tells us, "when the composer has a lovely passage on his hands which would suit a cadence perfectly, but the words have not come to an end." Then it would "not be honest" to insert one, so the composer instead evades it.^[127] To show techniques for evading the cadence, apart from the imperfect cadences already demonstrated, Zarlino again adduces a lengthy continuous passage, thirty-five breves in all (about half of which is given in Ex. 8).

The passage begins with a canon at the fifth, spaced at the semibreve. The guide in m. 2 sets up a typical syncopated cadential figure but fails to return by ascent to the pitch of preparation. Owing to the close spacing of the canon, the consequent initiates an identical syncopated figure in the middle of m. 2, so that the two end up overlapping in mm. 2-3. Had the upper voice returned to the f at the beginning of m. 3, the cadence would still have been unorthodox, since the lower voice would

[127] "[Q]uando si vorrà fare alcuna distintione mezana dell'harmonia, & delle parole insieme, le quali non habbiano finita perfettamente la loro sentenza; potremo usar quelle Cadenze, che finiscono per Terza, per Quinta, per Sesta, o per altre simili consonanze: perche il finire a cotesto modo, non è fine di Cadenza perfetta: ma si chiama fuggir la Cadenza; si come hora la chiamano i Musici. Et fu buono il ritrovare, che le Cadenze finissero anco in tal maniera; conciosia che alle volte accasca al Compositore, che venendoli alle mani un bel passaggio, nel quale si accommodarebbe ottimamente la Cadenza, & non havendo fatto fine al Periodo nelle parole; non essendo honesto, che habbiano a finire in essa; cerca di fuggirla, non solamente al modo mostrato: ma nella maniera ch'io mostrerò nel seguente capitolo" (ibid., p. 225).

then have anticipated its own cadential pitch. By moving instead to d, it forms a suspended 2-3 dissonance with the consequent. Zarlino fails to sustain the d long enough for it to sound against the lower voice's resolution to b, leaping instead to g in m. 3 on the second part of the implied cadence's second sonority. The lowervoice consequent then undergoes the same lack of resolution as had the guide, b moving to a in m. 3. To double the injury done to the expected cadence at the third beat of that measure, the upper voice leaps again, now down to f and finally (in m. 4) to c.

More obvious deflections away from cadences affect the syncopated voice later in the passage. In m. 6, it leaps up from e to g. In m. 11 what had seemed to be a perfectly prepared Phrygian cadence to aa/a finds the diminished voice dropping suddenly a fifth to c to form an evaded cadence on a minor third. And in m. 19, the Phrygian cadence set up so conventionally is undercut by the sudden disappearance of the upper voice at the moment of final cadence.

To summarize, although Zarlino's discussion does not fix hierarchical relationships of cadence and text in an absolute or exhaustive way, certain hierarchical relationships emerge implicitly from his remarks. Perfect cadences, which mark off complete sentences or thoughts, rank highest.^[128] They sit above imperfect cadences, which mark off incomplete sections of text. Evaded cadences seem to carry syntactic weight in proportion to the extent to which they set up cadential expectations. Thus if all the conditions of cadence are present but one (such as the actual cadential pitch in one of the voices), then the evaded cadence may rank fairly high. Those that go astray in more ways, and hence imply cadences less strongly, are weaker syntactically. The so-called extravagant cadences, having little resemblance to conventional cadences apart from the syncopated melodic figure, would seem to be weakest of all.^[129]

Taken together, Zarlino's remarks on cadences, rests, textual repetition, and text underlay constitute a novel effort to conceptualize the new relation between text and music in the highly irregular and variegated polyphony of Willaert's circle. Zarlino fused his broad learning and acculturation in literary circles with his exceptional musical perspicacity and practical experience to codify Willaert's vocal polyphony within the terms of current rhetorical issues. These combined gave him a unique place in mediating between the new preoccupations of Venetian literary culture and the long-standing technical traditions of polyphonists bred in the church.

[128] It might seem to us that perfect cadences would be strongest when their lowest voice leaps up a fourth or down a fifth, yet Zarlino asks that such leaps be confined mainly to the bass in multivoice polyphony. This is because he views cadences essentially as two-voice contrapuntal progressions.

[129] We might have hoped Zarlino's ranking of appropriate cadential degrees would complement the foregoing, but he was not very effective in this respect. His chapters on individual modes (Part IV, 18-29) subsume each under a rationalistic arithmetic system that unrealistically favors root, third, and fifth. This directly contradicts contemporary practice (as pointed out by Palisca, On the Modes, pp. xiii-xvi; Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, pp. 105-7; and Carl Dahlhaus, Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität [Kassel, 1968], p. 198). Aaron gives a better idea of how modal counterpoint was actually being written (Trattato, Chaps. 9-12), even though his discussion is largely based on chant.