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.