PART 1—
PATRONS AND ACADEMIES IN THE CITY

Chapter 1—
Flexibility in the Body Social

Mid-sixteenth-century Venice was arrayed in such a way that no single mogul, family, or neighborhood was in a position to monopolize indigenous activity in arts or letters. Venice was a city of dispersal. Laced with waterways, the city took its shape from its natural architecture. The wealthy houses of the large patriciate, scattered throughout the city's many parishes, kept power bases more or less decentralized. Apart from the magnetic force of San Marco — the seat of governmental activities and associated civic ritual — no umbrella structure comparable to that of a princely court brought its people and spaces into a single easily comprehended matrix. As a commercial and maritime city, Venice offered multiplicity in lieu of centralization. It offered rich possibilities for dynamic interchange between the wide assortment of social and professional types that constantly thronged there — patricians, merchants, popolani, tourists, students, seamen, exiles, and diplomats. Local patricians contributed to this decentralization by viewing the whole of the lagoon as common territory rather than developing attachments to particular neighborhoods — a quality in which they differed from nobles of many other Italian towns. Since most extended families owned properties in various parishes and sestieri (the six large sections into which the city still divides), neighborhoods had only a circumscribed role as bases of power and operation; indeed, it was not uncommon for nuclear families to move from one parish to another.^[1]

[1] See Dennis Romano, Patricians and "Popolani": The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 120ff., esp. p. 123; Stanley Chojnacki, "In Search of the Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century," in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (London, 1973), pp. 47-90; and Edward Muir and Ronald F. E. Weissman, "Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence," in The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, ed. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (Boston, 1989), pp. 81-103, esp. pp. 85 and 87. The great exception was patrician women. Their lives outside the home were basically restricted to their immediate parishes, at least so long as their nuclear families stayed in a single dwelling (see Romano, pp. 131ff.). In this, Venetian practice reflected generalized sixteenth-century attitudes that tended to keep women's social role a domestic one. For a summary of the marriage manuals that defined such a role see Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Indianapolis, 1990), pp. 20-28.

We can easily imagine that Venetian salon life profited from the constant circulation of bodies throughout the city, as well as from the correlated factors of metropolitan dispersion and the city's relative freedom from hierarchy. Palaces and other grand dwellings constituted collectively a series of loose social nets, slack enough to comprehend a varied and changeable population. This urban makeup differed from the fixed hierarchy of the court, which pointed (structurally, at least) to a single power center, absolute and invariable, that tried to delimit opportunities for profit and promotion. There, financial entrepreneurialism and social advancement could generally be attempted only within the strict perimeters defined by the prince and the infrastructure that supported him. The lavish festivals, entertainments, and monuments funded by courtly establishments accordingly concentrated, by and large, on the affirmation of princely glory or, at the very least, tended to mirror more directly the monolithic interests of prince and court.^[2] Courtly patrons with strong interests in art and literature like Isabella d'Este of Mantua or, later, Vincenzo Gonzaga could infuse great vigor into a court's cultural life, even if the nature of cultural production still tended to be more focused and circumscribed than that of big Italian towns like Venice. With less enthusiastic patrons, like Florence's Cosimo I de' Medici beginning in 1537 (and thus coinciding with the Venetian period I focus on here), centralization and authoritarian control could straitjacket creative production according to the narrowly defined wishes of the ruling elite. In the worst of cases they could suffocate it almost completely.^[3]

Structural differences between court and city that made themselves felt in cultural production were thus enmeshed with political ones. In contrast to the courts, the Venetian oligarchy thrived on a broad-based system of rule and, by extension, patronage. Within this system individual inhabitants could achieve success by exploiting the city in the most varied ways — through business, trade, or maritime interests, banking, political offices, academic and artistic activities. Such a pliable setup depended in part on numerous legal mechanisms that, formally at least, safe-guarded equality within the patrician rank.^[4] The Venetian nobleman's loyalty was in

[2] Among standard commentaries on this are Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979), pp. 218ff., 221, 225, and on the courtly penchant for self-reflecting images, pp. 321ff.; idem, "The Gentleman in Renaissance Italy: Strains of Isolation in the Body Politic," in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason, ed. Robert S. Kinsman, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Contributions, no. 6 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), pp. 77-93; and Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (London, 1980), pp. 40-41.

[3] A single example relevant for present purposes is the patronage of madrigals by Cosimo I in Medicean Florence. Iain Fenlon and James Haar, writing on Cosimo I's effect on madrigalian developments in Florence, propose that the end of republican Florence initiated the degeneration of individual patronage dominated by the family. The Medici restoration, they recall, led to an exodus of painters, sculptors, and musicians from the city (The Italian Madrigal, pp. 85-86).

[4] On Venetian distrust of factionalism see Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, p. 38.

principle to his fellow patricians, rather than to a local prince or foreign royalty, who still commanded the service of many noble courtiers elsewhere. In order to maintain the symmetries of patrician power and an effective system of checks and balances, a large number of magistracies and councils shared the decision-making process, and the vast majority of offices turned over after very brief, often six-month, terms.

This made for a cumbersome, mazelike governmental structure that led many observers to comment wryly on the likeness of topography and statecraft in the city.^[5] Yet these same observers often marveled at Venice's success in staying the over-inflated ambitions of potential power-hungry factions or individuals. In the late fifteenth century a complex of attitudes guarding against the perils of self-interest found expression in a series of checks advanced by the ruling group to counter the self-magnifying schemes of several doges — schemes epitomized by the building of triumphal architecture like the Arco Foscari, which verged on representing the doge as divinely ordained.^[6] Venice had more than its share of calendrical rituals to militate against the claims of the individual by proclaiming overriding communal values to inhabitants and visitors alike.^[7] All of these checks and proclamations were designed to secure an ideal of changeless equilibrium and to foster the spirit of unanimitas, of a single shared will, which informed the republic's official ideology.^[8]

The patriciate ventured (if hesitantly) to extend these mechanisms to include some nonpatricians. Despite the inequities and stratification that divided nobles from the next rank of residents on the descending social ladder, the cittadini (and even more from the still lower popolani ), the Venetian aristocracy by tradition and a long-standing formula for republican success had accustomed itself to making certain efforts to appease classes excluded from governmental rule.^[9] Though without

[5] For a review of comments on the deliberate and unwieldy quality of Venetian government, see ibid., pp. 37ff.

[6] For an interpretation of this phenomenon see Debra Pincus, The Arco Foscari: The Building of a Triumphal Gateway in Fifteenth-Century Venice (New York, 1976). The success achieved by the mid-sixteenth century in checking the doges' schemes is attested by the English translator of Gasparo Contarini's De magistratibus, Lewes Lewkenor, who showed astonishment that the patriciate reacted as casually to the death of a doge as to the death of any other patrician: "There is in the Cittie of Venice no greater alteration at the death of their Duke, then at the death of any other private Gentleman" (pp. 156-57) — a translation from the work of another foreigner, Donato Giannotti, his Libro della repubblica de'vinitiani, fol. 63', as noted by Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), p. 268 n. 53.

[7] See Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, esp. pp. 74-78.

[8] On the concept of unanimitas in Venice see Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986), pp. 174ff. King's interpretation of the interaction of class, culture, and power in quattrocento Venice would argue that the political power of the ruling patrician elite extended far enough into what she calls "the realm of culture" — by which she means the culture of the "humanist group" — as to control them in a unique way (see pp. 190-91, 251). See also Romano, Patricians and "Popolani," pp. 4-11 and passim, on the emphasis Venetians placed on caritas, and Tomitano's letter cited in the Preface above, n. 3.

[9] On this issue see Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, pp. 45ff., and Romano, Patricians and "Popolani," p. 10. On institutions of charity run by citizens and nobles for popolani see the classic work of Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 (Oxford, 1971), and on confraternities generally in the period, Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989). For a study that tries to debunk emphases on Venetian traditions of charity by stressing patrician corruption and the split between civic ideals and reality see Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana and Chicago, 1986). Queller's view seems to me equally problematic in invoking an alternate "reality" as true, rather than traversing the dialectics of various realities and representations.

power of votes, for example, cittadini could participate in governmental activities through the secretarial offices of the chancelleries. They could ship cargo on state galleys. And they maintained the exclusive right to hold offices in the great lay confraternities, the scuole grandi.^[10] By sixteenth-century standards the city's embrace was thus relatively broad, and there was considerable play in its social fabric. While many cittadini, as well as plebeians and foreigners, were doomed to frustration in their search for power and position, others experienced considerable social and economic success. At the very least many had come to view their circumstances as malleable, there to be negotiated with the right manoeuvres.

The collective self-identity that promoted various attitudes of equality and magnanimity both within and without the patriciate was expressed with considerable fanfare in official postures. Gradually, the underlying ideals had come to be projected in numerous iconic variations on the city's evolving civic mythology. By the fourteenth century, for instance, Venice added to its mythological symbolism the specter of Dea Roma as Justice, seated on a throne of lions and bearing sword and scales in her two hands (Plate 4). By such a ploy the city extended its claim as the new Rome while reminding onlookers of its professed fairness, its balanced constitution, and its domestic harmony.^[11]

This conjunction of morality and might was reiterated in a series of bird's-eye maps, the most remarkable of which was Jacopo de' Barbari's famous woodcut of 1500 (Plate 5).^[12] Barbari's map surrounded the city with eight extravagant personifications of the winds inspired by Vetruvius's wind heads. Set at the extremities of its central vertical axis are powerful representations of Mercury atop a cloud and Neptune riding a spirited dolphin (Plate 6) — iconography as vital to the city's image as its serpentine slews of buildings and its urban backwaters.

Venice's geography played a real part in encouraging the city's social elasticity. The circuitous structure of the lagoon made for a constant rubbing of elbows between different classes that Venetians seemed to take as a natural part of daily affairs. When the eccentric English traveler Thomas Coryat visited the city in the

[10] See Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, pp. 45ff. On the role of the cittadini as members of the secretarial class see Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, 1470-1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage (New York, 1972), pp. 26ff.

[11] David Rosand has written on the connections between Venice and ancient Rome in visual iconography; see "Venetia figurata: The Iconography of a Myth," in Interpretazioni veneziane: studi di storia dell'arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand (Venice, 1984), pp. 177-96. See also Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1975), pp. 2-7. For a single poetic example in which Venice is linked with Justice, see Chap. 4 n. 79 (and Ex. 2) below on Domenico Venier's Gloriosa, felic' alma, Vineggia, as set to music by Baldassare Donato.

[12] See Juergen Schulz, "Jacobo de' Barbari's View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500," Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1978): 425-74, and idem, The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice (1486-1797), Saggi e memorie di storia dell'arte, no. 7 (Venice, 1970). I am grateful to Robert Karrow of the Newberry Library for his help with Venetian cartography.

4.
Bartolomeo Buon, Justice seated with sword and scales, fifteenth century, above the
Porta della Carta, Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
Photo courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm.

5.
Jacopo de' Barbari, woodcut map of Venice, 1500.
Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library.

6.
Jacopo de' Barbari, woodcut map of Venice, 1500, detail, lower middle panel.
Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library.

early seventeenth century, he observed with astonishment that "their Gentleman and greatest Senators, a man with two millions of duckats, will come into their market, and buy their flesh, fish, fruites, and such other things as are necessary for the maintenance of their family."^[13] By Coryat's time, of course, Venice's pragmatic patriciate was less able than ever to afford elitist separatism — hence the increasing number of profitable interclass marriages in the sixteenth century, which represented just one type of business arrangement between nobles and cittadini, if one of particular social resonance.

The peculiar habits Coryat observed among the Venetian aristocracy accord with its ideological rejection of showy displays of personal spending (expressly forbidden by strict sumptuary laws) — displays that were de rigueur in court towns like nearby Ferrara and Mantua. Big outlays of cash were supposed to be reserved mainly for public festivals that glorified the Venetian community as a whole. In the private sphere they could be funneled into lasting investments capable of adding to the permanent legacy of an extended family group, but not (in theory) made for more transitory or personal luxuries. Many individual cases of self-glorifying osten-

[13] Coryat's Crudities, 2 vols. (1611; repr., Glasgow, 1905), 1:396-97.

tation naturally reared their heads all the same. But part of their price was a certain dissonance with established mores, which assigned thrift an emphatic place within the official civic scheme. Coryat himself characterized the idiosyncratic shopping habits of the patriciate — and, we might note, with considerable qualms — as "a token indeed of frugality."^[14] This was a frugality located within the patriciate's formalized customs for subordinating individual needs to group concerns. It was one ritualized in any number of ways — to cite a single instance, in the conspicuous insistence on modest burials that one finds repeatedly in Counter-Reformational Venetian wills. Both patricians and nonpatricians acknowledged the custom, as evinced by Willaert's quintessentially Venetian request for a burial "con mancho pompa si possa" (with as little pomp as possible).^[15]

All of these factors — decentralization, an institutionalized egalitarianism (in policy if often not in practice), and the substantial presence of foreign exiles, travelers, businessmen, diplomats, and military men — contributed to Venice's prolific artistic and intellectual domestic life. Yet the snug sociological picture of divided authority and pluralistic harmony that we might tend to draw from them tells only part of the story. Personal impulses made strange bedfellows with public ideals, and in Venice the latter took their place as only one set of faiths among many others. Venice was above all a paradoxical city. Among the deepest instances of its divided consciousness was that Venetians of the early to mid-sixteenth century who linked themselves to high culture lived in a peculiarly ambivalent counterpose to the court culture from which their city's paradigm was supposed to depart. As a group they prized and flaunted their ideals of freedom, justice, concord, and modesty, while envying much of the apparent exclusivity, homogeneity, and even absolutism that courtly structures seemed to offer.

This tension tempered the civic, rhetorical, social, and aesthetic domains that I aim to draw together here. Let me begin to explore it by turning briefly to the Venetians' manifesto of literary style, Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua. As I show in Chapter 5, Bembo's Prose advanced a smooth, exclusive diction with the same claims to indisputable authority that tend to characterize aspects of sixteenth-century court production. It translated the harmonious heterogeneity idealized in Venice's oligarchy into the terms of literary style. The temptation to read the Prose as a conflation of courtly values with Venetian civic ones is encouraged by knowledge of Bembo's upbringing and early adulthood. Although he was inculcated with republican ideals, Bembo's youthful experiences with his father, Bernardo, had been tinged with the court. As a boy in 1478-80 he spent time at the Florentine court of Lorenzo de' Medici, which was attended by the Neoplatonic philosopher

[14] Ibid., 1:397. See also Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, pp. 17-18.

[15] The phrase appears in Willaert's will of 26 March 1558, reprinted in Vander Straeten, ed., La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:231, and in the wills of Antonio Zantani and Elena Barozza Zantani (see Appendix, C and D).

Marsilio Ficino and the poet-playwright Angelo Poliziano.^[16] His first work of widespread popularity, Gli asolani (1505), was a dialogue set in the tiny, lavish court at Asolo of Caterina Cornaro, ex-queen of Cyprus.^[17] In Gli asolani Bembo inscribed the arcane metaphysical philosophies of Ficino that he had encountered years earlier, and something of the Laurentian world that nurtured them, onto a popularized theory of love. This, and Bembo's subsequent sojourn at the court of Urbino, helped authorize him to appear as central spokesman on Neoplatonic love in the courtly manual par excellence, Castiglione's dialogue Il cortegiano, first drafted in 1513-18; by this time Bembo had already written Books 1 and 2 of the Prose, and he completed Book 3 while serving as papal secretary at still another court, that of Pope Leo X.^[18]

The intersection of Bembo's biography with Castiglione's text suggests yet another way to consider Venice's codification of courtly values. One of the tropes shared by Il cortegiano and the Prose is that of decorum, which dictates that style should always be modified to suit given occasions and subjects. If their shared commitment to decorum did not lead each author to the same linguistic and lexical norms, with Bembo advocating a formal Tuscan that diverged from the lingua cortegiana favored by Castiglione, it nonetheless points to deeper impulses that form a common substratum between them.

Such impulses are expressed in the persona Castiglione urges on the ideal courtier, a persona rooted in a gestalt that goes beyond the particular form of any momentary rhetorical stance. As Wayne A. Rebhorn has claimed, its essence lies in a perpetual desire to conform to whatever subject or situation is at hand.^[19] This driving force demands that one who wears the courtier's mask, like the idealized letterato of Bembo's Prose, invariably display propriety and measured pace. Castiglione elaborates the notion in Book 2, Chap. 7, through an interlocutor who also figures in the dialogues of the Prose, Federico Fregoso: to maintain such conduct the courtier must be circumspect and adaptable, all things to all people. At bottom he

[16] A general account of the elitism of the Laurentian court is given in Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969), pp. 265-66. For a revisionist view that calls into question the elitism and isolationism traditionally thought to typify Ficino's Florentine circle, see Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton, 1988), esp. Chaps. 1, 2, and 7. Field's argument however is mainly relevant to conditions of the Florentine context itself, for it rethinks realities of the Laurentian court, rather than the modes by which outsiders typically idealized it.

[17] On Bembo's time in Asolo and Urbino, see Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, p. 96; Carlo Dionisotti, "Bembo, Pietro," in Dizionario biografico degli italiani 8:133-51; and Giancarlo Mazzacurati, "Pietro Bembo," in Storia della cultura veneta: dal primo quattrocento al concilio di Trenta, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Vicenza, 1980), pp. 1-59.

[18] Among recent works that deal with connections between the two see esp. J. R. Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of "The Courtier" (Edinburgh, 1978), esp. pp. 80-82 and passim; Carlo Ossola, Dal "Cortegiano" al' "Uomo di mondo": storia di un libro e di un modello sociale (Turin, 1987); Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale (Naples, 1967); Thomas M. Greene, "Il Cortegiano and the Choice of a Game," in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven, 1983), esp. pp. 14-15; and Louise George Clubb, "Castiglione's Humanistic Art and Renaissance Drama," in ibid., pp. 191-93, 198-201.

[19] See Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" (Detroit, 1978), p. 92 and passim.

is a Stoic — or, in the more skeptical interpretations of Rebhorn, Lauro Martines, and others, an avoider of conflicts and harsh realities.^[20] "In everything he does our courtier must be cautious, and he must always act and speak with prudence; and he should not only strive to protect his various attributes and qualities but also make sure that the tenor of his life is such that it corresponds with those qualities. . . . in everything he does he should, as the Stoics maintain is the duty and purpose of the wise man, be inspired by and express all the virtues."^[21]

All of this stoical decorum adds up to a well-tended, varied performance, as the continuation of Federico's explanation makes clear: "Therefore the courtier must know how to avail himself of the virtues, and sometimes set one in contrast or opposition with another in order to draw more attention to it" (emphasis mine).^[22] The performative quality common to conduct, speech, and literary style, and the flexible social structures it enabled in a city like Venice, will be one of the main themes in my discussion of Venetian verse and music and the salons that nourished them. Style was varied for effect. Federico elaborates the idea in a lengthy analogy between the courtier's mixing of virtues and the painter's chiaroscuro.

This is what a good painter does when by the use of shadow he distinguishes clearly the light on his reliefs, and similarly by the use of light deepens the shadows of plane surfaces and brings different colors together in such a way that each one is brought out more sharply through the contrast; and the placing of figures in opposition to each other assists the painter in his purpose. In the same way, gentleness is most impressive in a man who is a capable and courageous warrior; and just as his boldness is magnified by his modesty, so his modesty is enhanced and more apparent on account of his boldness.^[23]

Yet such contrast must be carried off "discreetly" and without obvious "affectation": that is the key to success, since those slight inflections of display will act to entrance the beholder.

Bembo insisted on these qualities for the writer perhaps even more strenuously than Castiglione did for the general courtier. Like Castiglione, Bembo depoliticized

[20] See Rebhorn, "The Nostalgic Courtier," Chap. 3 in Courtly Performances, and (for related points) Martines, "The Gentleman in Renaissance Italy," pp. 77-93. See also numerous essays in Hanning and Rosand, eds., Castiglione, esp. the editors' introduction.

[21] Trans. George Bull, Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 114. "[È] necessario che 'l nostro cortegiano in ogni sua operazion sia cauto, e ciò che dice o fa sempre accompagni con prudenzia; e non solamente ponga cura d'aver in sé parti e condizioni eccellenti, ma il tenor della vita sua ordini con tal disposizione, che 'l tutta corrisponda a queste parti . . . di sorte che ogni suo atto risulti e sia composto di tutte le virtù, come dicono i Stoici esser officio di chi è savio" (Baldassarre Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Ettore Bonora, 2d ed. [Milan, 1976], p. III).

[22] Trans. Bull, p. 114. "[B]isogna che sappia valersene, e per lo paragone e quasi contrarietà dell'una talor far che l'altra sia più chiaramente conosciuta" (ibid.).

[23] Trans. Bull, p. 114. "[I] boni pittori, i quali con l'ombra fanno apparere e mostrano i lumi de' rilevi, e così col lume profundano l'ombre dei piani e compagnano i colori diversi insieme di modo, che per quella diversità l'uno e l'altro meglio si dimostra, e'l posar delle figure contrario l'una all'altra le aiuta a far quell'officio che è intenzion del pittore. Onde la mansuetudine è molto maravigliosa in un gentilomo il qual sia valente e sforzato nell'arme; e come quella fierezza par maggiore accompagnata dalla modestia, cosi la modestia accresce e più compar per la fierezza" (ibid.).

Ciceronian rhetorical norms in the process, replacing the dynamic involvement with current affairs that inspired Cicero's oratorical model with cerebral ideals of refined detachment.^[24] Indeed, it is this role that Castiglione assigned Bembo as interlocutor in Il cortegiano in contriving Bembo's Neoplatonic excursus in the final book, which takes wing just as the work's grounding in social and political reality is all but lost.^[25]

Courtly ways were no more excised from the elastic social fabric of Venice than from its literary norms; rather they existed in varying degrees of comfort side by side with indigenous republican ones. The model of the princely establishment even had its analogue in the internal structure of the Venetian government. The doge, although an elected official of the state, had minimal control over policy. He stood in for Venetians as a kind of princely surrogate, divested of real political power but heavily imbued with symbolic force. His principal functions were to guard civic values and to maintain an overarching awareness of public issues. Even the Venetian political historian Gasparo Contarini admitted that the doge's exterior was one of "princely honor, dignitie, and royall appearing shew."^[26] This outlook — shared by the Florentine Donato Giannotti — was often taken up and promoted in credulous terms by foreigners, unequipped with any less flattering lens through which to view the figurehead of a powerful state.^[27] But it was one created by Venetians themselves, who had vested their doge with both the image of a prince and the power of any garden-variety statesman.

The paradox of the doge remains a telling one. As Edward Muir has written, "in this image one can see the nexus at which many of the tensions in Venetian society

[24] William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), discusses the tendency in cinquecento Venice toward standardization and fixity in academic matters, relating its presence in Bembo to his lack of interest in contemporary events of historical importance (pp. 135-40). Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), similarly links the formal perfection sought by Bembo to a "refusal to respond to contemporary history" (p. 175) and to an effort to avoid the anxieties and political chaos caused by foreign invasions of Italy. Carlo Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), notes in "Chierici e laici" that Bembo's detachment from political consciousness and service represents a striking break from an earlier Venetian tradition of the scholar-public servant (p. 71). On related questions with respect to a slightly earlier period see Vittore Branca, "Ermolao Barbaro and Late Quattrocento Venetian Humanism," in Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice, pp. 218-43.

Finally, on the Venetian nobility's retreat from the urban realities of commerce, trade, banking, and shipbuilding in the sixteenth century in favor of more idealized existences linked to mainland farming and real estate see Brian Pullan, "The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Midto Late-Sixteenth Century," in ibid., pp. 379-408; and Ugo Tucci, "The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century," in ibid., pp. 346-78.

[25] See Martines, "The Gentleman in Renaissance Italy," p. 93, as well as Ossola, Dal "Cortegiano" al' "Uomo di mondo," pp. 34-37. The inherent conflict between Castiglione's monarchism and Bembo's republicanism is taken up by Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione, pp. 154-57.

[26] From De magistratibus et republica Venetorum libri quinque (Venice, 1551), p. 43 (trans. Lewes Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice [London, 1599], p. 43); quoted in Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, p. 251.

[27] On this aspect of Giannotti and other foreigners see Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 160-61.

and politics were revealed and resolved."^[28] Tensions of this kind centered on the Venetian attitudes toward sensuality and extravagance that I noted earlier. Herein lay another paradox to catch Venetians in an existential bind: despite the much-restricted ideological place assigned to luxuria, the city had more than a healthy share of it in domains outside the strictly communal. This, after all, was the same city that revealed to the artistic world sensuous new realms of color and light and boasted the most beautiful women in Europe. Like its elegant palazzi and gracious waterways, its resistance to invasion, and its invincibility at sea, sensual beauty and luxuriance formed fabled parts of Venetian lore. Many a foreigner commented on the richness and delights to be had in the city, even while remarking on its odd habits of thrift and modesty.

Perhaps most symbolic among its sensual pleasures for the English Coryat and French visitors like Clément Marot and Michel de Montaigne were the great number of courtesans in the city and the unusual abilities cultivated in the upper echelons of the courtesan's trade.^[29] "Thou wilt find the Venetian Courtezan," wrote Coryat, "a good Rhetorician and an elegant discourser."^[30] By this Coryat had in mind Venice's famed cortigiane oneste, its so-called honest courtesans, women of exceptional grace and high rhetorical polish. As well as being skilled conversationalists and writers, many of these courtesans were singers, often apparently improvising and accompanying themselves on instruments such as the lute or spinet — this in an age that sheltered women closely and kept most nonpatrician women illiterate.

The honest courtesan's success in sixteenth-century Venice thus offers a paradigm for how the city, with its pliable and equivocal social structures, could become an extraordinary resource for inhabitants not born into a full measure of its benefits.^[31] For her the city's infatuation with courtliness could be appropriated and manipulated to novel ends, to fashion a reputation that inextricably bound the sexual and the intellectual.^[32]

[28] Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, p. 252, from Chap. 7, "The Paradoxical Prince," the first section of which is headed "The Doge as Primus Inter Pares and as Princeps."

[29] For the writings of Marot, see his letter to the French duchess of Ferrara, Renée de France, Epistre envoyée de Venize à Madame la Duchesse de Ferrare par Clement Marot, in Les epistres: Edition critique, ed. C.A. Mayer (London, 1958), pp. 225-31. Montaigne's observations are recorded in his Journal de voyage en Italie, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pléiade ([Paris], 1962), pp. 1183-84. For further on this see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), whose ideas helped stimulate the interpretations I put forth in the following pages.

[30] Coryat's Crudities 1:405.

[31] On the importance of the city for enabling women's speech see esp. Ann Rosalind Jones, "City Women and Their Audiences: Louise Labé and Veronica Franco," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 299-316; and idem, The Currency of Eros, Chap. 5. For an important collection of essays emphasizing the resources offered for the fashioning of identity by the ambiguities and social complexities of early modern city life see Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman, eds., Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark, Del., 1989).

[32] In "Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women's Lyric," Jones proposes what she calls a "pre-poetics," an analysis of "conditions necessary for writing at all" in the "ideological climate of the Renaissance" that is apropos here; in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York, 1986), pp. 74-95, esp. p. 74.

A few managed to gain fame through the press, plying the arena of public discourse in order to advance their social and economic positions. The most remarkable of these women was Veronica Franco, a cittadina and daughter of a procuress who became a major poet in the 1570s and an intimate of the literary salon of Domenico Venier.^[33] In her letters and terze rime she made use of considerable literary aplomb to counter malevolent slander. In one noted instance she parried a detractor by boasting an array of linguistic arms.

  Prendete pur de l'armi omai l'eletta.                       Take your choice of weapons, then.
  ......................................                      ....................................
  La spada, che 'n man vostra rade e fora,                If you want to use the common Venetian tongue
De la lingua volgar veneziana,                             As the sword that strikes and pierces in your hand,
S'a voi piace d'usar, piace a me ancora:               That suits me equally well;
  E, se volete entrar ne la toscana,                          And if you want to try Tuscan,
Scegliete voi la seria o la burlesca,                       Choose a lofty or a lowly style,
Ché l'una e l'altra è a me facile e piana.                For one and the other are clear and easy for me.
  Io ho veduto in lingua selvaghesca                          I have seen admirable writings of yours
Certa fattura vostra molto bella,                           In rustic language,
Simile a la maniera pedantesca:                            And others in a learned vein:
  Se voi volete usar o questa o quella.                       If you want to use either one.
  .....................................                       ...............................
  Qual di lor più vi piace, e voi pigliate,                     Choose whichever suits you best,
Ché di tutte ad un modo io mi contento,               I am equally contented with them all,
Avendole perciò tutte imparate.^[34]                         Having learned them all for this purpose.^[35]

Franco's bravura served her well in the ambivalent world that cherished the honest courtesan even as it scorned her. As Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones have shown, in speaking out in areas where women had been largely silenced, vaunting her proficiencies in the verbal arts and challenging her defamer in the terms of a male duel, Franco violated a gendered system of rhetorical orthodoxies.^[36] Yet in other poems — and herein lies the point — she aligned herself emphatically, if unconventionally, with the rhetoric of the establishment by setting amatory woes alongside patriotic praises of the Serenissima.^[37]

Franco was only one of many nonpatricians who ameliorated their marginal social positions by utilizing the city's opportunities for self-promotion and social

[33] On Franco (1546-1591) see most importantly Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, as well as idem, "Veronica Franco's Terze Rime: The Venetian Courtesan's Defense," RQ 42 (1989): 227-57.

[34] Gaspara Stampa-Veronica Franco: Rime, ed. Abdelkader Salza (Bari, 1913), no. 16, vv. 109, 112-26 (p. 292).

[35] Trans. adapted from Jones, "City Women and Their Audiences," pp. 312-13.

[36] See also Sara Marie Adler, "Veronica Franco's Petrarchan Terze Rime: Subverting the Master's Plan," Italica 65 (1988): 213-33.

[37] In no. 12 she asks a lover to replace praise of her with praise of Venice (vv. 10-13): "lodar d'Adria il felice almo ricetto, / che, benché sia terreno, ha forma vera / di cielo in terra a Dio cara e diletto" (Praise the blessed and gracious home of the Adriatic, which, though earthly, has the true form of heaven on earth, cherished and precious to God); trans. Jones, "City Women and Their Audiences," p. 315, who dubs this duality a "contradictory rhetoric."

mobility. Another, outstanding for our purposes, was Willaert's student, the organist, composer, and vernacular author Girolamo Parabosco, a Piacentine who arrived in Venice around 1540.^[38] Like Franco, Parabosco manoeuvred himself quickly to the center of the Venetian literary establishment. Like her, too, he came from a bourgeois family. In the humble words he professed to Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara:

  Huomo al mondo son io di poco merto.       I'm of little merit to the world,
Lombard Cittadin, non nobile Tosco.         A Lombard citizen, not noble Tuscan,
Nudo d'haver, di gran desio coverto.         Bare of possessions, and full of wants.
  Mi chiamano le genti Parabosco,                People call me Parabosco,
E la Musica è mia professione,                  And music is my profession,
E per lei vita, e libertà conosco.                 From which I know life and liberty.
.........................................                    ....................................
  Son buon compagno, & un dolor              I'm a good chum and only one sorrow
    m'accora                                                    grieves me:
Di non poter donar non che un Ducato:      That I can't deed a single duchy,
Ma un Villagio, e una cittate ancora.           Nor even a village, or a city.^[40
]   Ho sempre un virtuoso amato,                   I've always loved a man of virtue
Fosse Spagnuol, Tedesco, ò Taliano,         Were he Spanish, German, or Italian,
Povero, ricco, o in mediocre stato.^[39]           Poor, rich, or of middling station.

Not his birth but his virtue makes a man worthy of honor, Parabosco claims, not rank but merit. He himself is no nobleman, not to say Tuscan — that is, linguistic aristocratic — but a mere citizen from modest Lombardy. Later in the same capitolo he alludes to his eminent position in the city as if only to thank those in Venice more highly placed than he.

  La festa haver mi potrete à san Marco,         During a festival you may find me at San Marco,
Che per gratia de miei Signori Illustri,          For thanks to my illustrious signori
Ho ivi di sonar l'organo il carco.^[41]                I have the duty there of playing the organ.

Parabosco's was no mean duty. In 1551 he became First Organist of San Marco, one of the most enviable posts of its kind in Europe. With this prestigious title, Parabosco held a trump card among literary colleagues in the city's populous salons,

[38] Parabosco was born in 1524 and died in Venice in 1557. For his biography see Giuseppe Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco: scrittore e organista del secolo XVI, Miscellanea di Storia Veneta, ser. 2, vol. 6 (Venice, 1899), pp. 207-486; and Francesco Bussi, Umanità e arte di Gerolamo Parabosco: madrigalista, organista e poligrafo (Piacenza, 1961). Parabosco's will is preserved in I-Vas, Notarile, Testamenti, notaio Giovanni Battista Monte, b. 706, fol. 230, dated 9 April 1557; a transcription of it appears in Bianchini, pp. 441-42. The will is an ironic reminder of cinquecento disarticulations between the real and the represented: by contrast with Parabosco's satiric projections of libertinism in the Lettere amorose, Lettere famigliari, and elsewhere (see Chap. 3 nn. 16 ff.), his will shows a marked conjugal attentiveness to his spouse, Diana. (Bianchini, not surprisingly, is credulous on this score; see, for example, pp. 225-27.)

[39] La seconda parte delle rime (Venice, 1555), fols. 50-50'.

[40] I am unsure of the precise meaning of this verse and the preceding one. Probably ducato is a pun ("ducat" as well as "duchy").

[41] La seconda parte delle rime, fol. 51.

where music was a valued commodity. His position placed him conveniently betwixt and between — between professional musicians and literati, between nobles and commoners — a situation that made good capital in Venetian society. Elsewhere Parabosco pressed the view that real nobility came from inner worth and not from birthright. His letter to Antonio Bargo of 18 November 1549 affected shock at Bargo's attempt to ingratiate him with an unworthy acquaintance, at his wanting him "to believe that it is a good thing to revere men who live dishonorably, so long as they come from honorable families." Until now he had thought Bargo a person who believed (as he did) that "only virtue may make a man noble, and not from being born in this place rather than that other one, nor from this lineage than another, nor from having much rather than little."^[42]

Parabosco answered Bargo in the spirit of familiar vernacular invective that had recently been popularized by Pietro Aretino and followers of his like Anton-francesco Doni. In meting out satiric censure in letters, capitoli, and sonetti risposti, Parabosco engaged in complicated strategies of challenge and riposte, wielding his interlocutors' rhetoric to his own ends.^[43] Like Franco, he draped himself at the same time in the cloak of Venetian patriotism. Defending his comedies against certain nameless critics in a letter to Count Alessandro Lambertino, for instance, he shot off a battery of rejoinders, the last of which protested that "some benevolence" should be shown him in the city of Venice, since with all his "study, diligence, and labor . . . [he] had always sought to show the world with what reverence and love [he] regarded, even adored . . . the gentleness, courtesy, prudence, valor, honesty, faith, and piety of these illustrious Venetian men."^[44] By presenting himself simultaneously as moral censor and pious celebrant, couching his ire in the terms of a patriot's defense, Parabosco at once created and authorized his new condition as a Venetian. Some years earlier, writing the literary theorist Bernardino Daniello along similar

[42] The complete first part of the letter reads as follows: "M. Antonio amico carissimo, io ho ricevuto la vostra de vinisette del passato, nella qual havete vanamente speso una grandissima fatica, volendomi far credere che sia ben fatto portar riverenza a gli huomini, che dishonoratamente vivono ancora che usciti di honorevole famiglia. se io non credessi che voi lo facesti, perche io cercassi l'amicitia, & benivolenza d'ogniuno: io v'havrei per altro huomo che fin qui non v'ho tenuto. perche fin hora io ho creduto, che voi siate persona che creda, che solamente la virtù faccia l'huomo nobile, & non il nascere piu in questo che quello altro loco, ne piu di questa, che di quell'altra prosapia: ne piu di molto, che di poco havere" (Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari [Venice, 1551], fol. 40). Bargo is almost surely the same as Antonio Barges, a Netherlandish maestro di cappella at the Casa Grande of Venice between at least 1550 and 1555 (when he transferred to Treviso) and a close friend of Parabosco's teacher Willaert.

[43] For a theoretical account of such strategies from an anthropological perspective see Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), pt. 1, sect. 1, "From the Mechanics of the Model to the Dialectic of Strategies," pp. 3-9, and for a compelling application of Bourdieu to Elizabethan literature see Maureen Quilligan, "Sidney and His Queen," in The Historical Renaissance, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1989), pp. 171-96.

[44] "[M]a s'io non credessi parer prosontuoso, direi bene di meritare almeno qualche benivolenza in questa città. Percioche con ogni mio studio, diligenza, & fatica, cosi in questa mia comedia, come in tutte le mie opere, io ho sempre cercato di mostrare al mondo con quanta riverenza, & con quanto amore, io ammiri; anzi adoro (se ciò mi lice fare) la gentilezza, la cortesia, la prudenza, il valore, l'honestà, la fede, & la pietade di questi Illustrissimi Signori Venetiani; ne mancarò per lo avvenire di pregar il Signor Dio che li feliciti, et renda loro prosperi ogni suo honesto, & santo desiderio: che veramente essi Signori non sono se non pensieri santi, & divini" (Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari, fol. 9'); repr. in Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco, pp. 352-53. Letter dated 5 August 1550.

lines, he had softened his claim that the elderly were unsuited to engage in amorous pursuits by pleading loyalty to the Venetian gerontocracy. Again his protestations were voiced in the language of Venetian panegyric as it was handed down in civic mythology — or a quasi-satiric inflation of it. Apart from his position on the issue of love, he insisted, he "always spoke of the aged with infinite reverence, especially in this sanctified and blessed Venice, today sole defense of Italy and true dwelling of faith, justice, and clemency, in which there are an infinite number [of old people], any one of whom with his prudence could easily govern the Empire of the whole world."^[45]

With these paradoxical rhetorical stances, writers like Franco and Parabosco could avail themselves of transgressive possibilities inherent in the diverse literary genres newly stimulated by Venetian print, yet still align themselves with the prevailing power structure. They were at once iconoclasts and panderers. In both roles they seized the chance to shape their own public images, as Franco told her adversary so unequivocally.

Doni, the plebeian Florentine son of a scissors maker, represented at its most venal the phenomenon of making capital of the social breach. After an unsatisfying start as a monk, he fled Florence for the life of a nomadic man of letters, arriving in Piacenza in 1543 and in Venice the following year.^[46] In a letter to Parabosco published in 1544 he derided the ignorance of certain monied patrons on whom the two were forced to depend. "It's true that sometimes I'm ready to knock my head against the wall when I think that the cure for maintaining ourselves has to come from the rich and the amusement in consoling ourselves from the sages; . . . [W]e have virtue and poverty and they infinite nonsense and a great deal of money. But I hearten myself with having as much patience to die as they have the stupidity to live."^[47] Doni only spelled out what Parabosco's capitolo to Anguillara had hinted at more furtively, that their wits and wiles would make up for what they lacked in clout and lucre. As if to underscore his irreverent manipulation of printed words and the contradictory strategies that the two of them crafted, Doni's letter then made out as if to return Parabosco's laudatory sonnet with a matching risposta.

Like Parabosco's, Doni's skill at social climbing played a role in Venetian madrigalian developments, if one more mercenary than musical. He possessed a rudi-

[45] "[I]n generale, io parlo sempre con riverenza d'infiniti; che si sa bene, che per tutto, & massimamente in questa santa, & benedetta Vineggia, hoggidì solo schermo d'Italia, et vero albergo di fede, di giustitia, & di clemenza, ce ne sono infiniti, che potrebbono con la lor prudenza, ogn'un di loro governare, & agevolmente l'Imperio di tutto il mondo" (I quattro libri delle lettere amorose, rev. ed. [Venice, 1607], p. 125; see also the Libro primo delle lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco [Venice, 1573], fol. 61'). The letter, undated, comes from the First Book, which was first printed in 1545 as Lettere amorose. Cf. Venier's stanza set by Donato, Chap. 4 n. 79 below.

[46] For biographical information about Doni, who lived from 1513 until 1574, see Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 1530-1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco & Ortensio Lando (Madison, 1969), pp. 49-65.

[47] "Vero è che tal volta io sono per dar capo nel muro quando io considero, che il rimedio del man tenerci ha da venir da ricchi, & il trattenimento del consolar ci da i savi. . . . noi abbiamo virtù, & povertà; & essi infinita asineria, & moltitudine di dinari. Ma io rincoro d'haver cosi patientia à morire come gli hanno gagliofferia à vivere" (Lettere [Venice, 1544], fol. ciii').

mentary education in musical composition and described himself in various letters as an amateur composer.^[48] Far more important was his role during the 1540s as a chronicler of Venetian music, regularly inserting references to music and musicians into his familiar letters. In addition to Parabosco, he wrote the organist Iaches de Buus, the Piacentine composer Claudio Veggio, one Paolo Ugone, and a singer called Luigi Paoli.^[49] Doni asked the last of these to bring his compagnia to his place with their case of viols, a large harpsichord, lutes, flutes, crumhorns, and part books for singing, since they were going to be performing a comedy on the following Thursday.^[50] In a letter to Francesco Coccio he jestingly listed musicians who were destined for Paradise — Buus, Willaert, Arcadelt, Francesco da Milano, Costanzo Porta, Giachetto Berchem, and Parabosco.^[51] Yet all his attention to music relegated it to the interstices of a project founded in the larger world of Venetian letters.

Doni's eclecticism depended on the city's flexible structures. It leaned away from the elitist, totalizing aesthetic of Bembo toward the grittier, more syncretistic one that the city paradoxically made possible. This is evident in his most famous joining of musical and literary worlds, the Dialogo della musica, published in 1544 by Girolamo Scotto shortly after Doni's arrival in Venice, in which he playfully recreated the casual evenings of an academic assembly.^[52] However fanciful (and decidedly popularizing in tone), his Dialogo nonetheless tried to represent the mechanics of exchange in a musical salon that included letterati. As noted by Alfred Einstein and James Haar, the first of the Dialogo' s two parts is unmistakably set in provincial Piacenza, where a circle that formed around the poet Lodovico Domenichi took on the title Accademia Ortolana.^[53] The participants in Part I are Michele, possibly a composer and here an alto; a soprano named Oste; the Piacentine poet Bartolomeo Gottifredi called "Bargo," who also sings tenor; and Grullone, a professional musician and bass.^[54] Within its fictitious dialogue the interlocutors lightly debate current

[48] For a summary of these see James Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica of Antonfrancesco Doni," Music & Letters 47 (1966): 198-224, to which we may add the following claim — albeit suspect — from Doni's letter generically addressed "A Poeti, & Musici," in Tre libri di lettere del Doni e i termini della lingua toscana (Venice, 1552): "so favellare anche de la Musica" (p. 121); and "io ci ho messo certi Canti ladri, assassinati, stropiati, per farvi dir qualche cosa, & per far conoscere i begli da brutti, & la buona musica dalla cattiva," etc. (pp. 122-23).

[49] Those letters appear as follows: to Buus (undated), Tre libri de lettere, pp. 183-84; to Veggio, dated to April 1544 from Venice, Lettere, pp. cx'-cxi; to Ugone, 9 March 1544 from Venice, Lettere, pp. cv'-cvi; to Paoli, dated 1552 from Noale, Tre libri de lettere, p. 351.

[50] "Voi havete à venire Domenica sera da noi con tutta la vostra compagnia, & portate la Cassa con le Viole, le Stromento grande di penna, i Liuti, Flauti, Storte, & libri per cantare, perche Giovedì si fa la nostra Comedia."

[51] Tre libri di lettere, p. 209. Only Arcadelt and da Milano had no strong known connection with Venice.

[52] Mod. eds. G. Francesco Malipiero and Virginio Fagotto (Vienna, 1964); and Anna Maria Monterosso Vacchelli, L'opera musicale di Antonfrancesco Doni, Istituta e monumenta, ser. 2, vol. 1 (Cremona, 1969). Doni was always fascinated by this sort of academic life. He gives an account of current academies in the last pages of his Seconda libraria (Venice, 1551).

[53] See Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica," pp. 202-5; Einstein, "The Dialogo della Musica of Messer Antonfrancesco Doni," Music & Letters 15 (1934): 244-53; and idem, The Italian Madrigal 1:193-201.

[54] For further on the identities of the interlocutors in Part I see Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica," pp. 203-4, and Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:196.

literary issues and chatter about other literati and musicians. In between they freely interpolate sight-readings of music — mainly madrigals.

At the outset the interlocutors decide on the style of their encounters with characteristic self-consciousness. "So that we don't seem as if we just want to rip off or mimic Boccaccio . . . let's sing and tell stories both at once," says Oste, "because where others just say 'Let's sing it again,' 'That's beautiful,' and make similar chitchat, we'll dwell a little more on discussing poetry, making jokes, telling stories [novelle ] and other sweet fantasies [fantasiette ] . . .; and feeding the body that way with a sweet sleep, we'll nourish it with a soft sweetness, or a divine food."^[55] Shortly after this they embark on a madrigal of Claudio Veggio's and continue to converse and sing four-part madrigals throughout Part 1.

Once Doni enters the expanded world of Venice in Part 2, new personalities double his resources. Now eight interlocutors are present: Bargo and Michele from Part 1, a woman called Selvaggia, the composers Parabosco and Perissone, Domenichi and Ottavio Landi from Piacenza, and the composer Claudio Veggio, who seems to have been connected with both cities. Pieces handed out from Michele's pouch [carnaiolo ] now accommodate up to all eight of those present. Once again the speakers begin with reflections on their relations to one another and remarks on their use of conventions, all the while laughing at their own bows and curtsies.

SELVAGGIA: Inasmuch as I am among the number of honored women and this music is made out of love for me, I thank you and I am most obliged to Parabosco and everyone.

PARABOSCO: Your Ladyship injures me; for I am your servant.

PERISSONE: Conventional words; are such torrents of theories necessary?

PARABOSCO: Well said. Too much talk in rhetoric.

PERISSONE: I'm just kidding, since you began with servants and such things, which aren't really used by musicians, painters, sculptors, soldiers, and poets.

SELVAGGIA: So that we don't just keep multiplying words, how did you others end yesterday?^[56]

[55] "[P]er non parere che vogliamo rubbare o imitare il Boccaccio, se vi governarete a modo mio canteremo e novelleremo a un tempo: perché dove altri si passa cantando asciuttamente col dire solo 'Diciamolo un'altra volta', 'Quest'è bello', e simili chiachiere, noi ci diffonderemo un poco più nel parlare ragionando di poesia, di burle, di novelle e d'altre dolci fantasiette, come più a sesto ci verrà e a proposito; e così cibando il corpo d'un dolce riposo, pasceremo l'animo ancora d'una soave dolcezza, anzi d'un cibo divino" (Dialogo della musica, p. 8).

[56]    S.   Tanto ch'io son nel numero delle donne onorate e che per mio amore si fa questa musica, io vi ringrazio e v'ho tropp'obbligo e con Parabosco e con tutti.

G.   Vostra Signoria mi fa ingiuria; ch'io le son servitore.

P.   Parole generali: che bisogna tante scorrentie di teoriche?

G.   Dì bene: tanto discorrere su le rettoriche.

P.   Dico appunto baie, come tu hai cominciato di servidore e di certe cose, che fra noi non s'usano alla reale da' musici, da' pittori, scultori, da' soldati e da' poeti.

S.   Per non moltiplicare in parole, che si terminò ieri da voi altri?
Dialogo della musica, p. 98

At this they move on. Doni continues to aim for the informal realism of a private academy, moving the speakers in and out of their commitment to the discourse and sustaining their self-conscious scrutinies. After the initial gallantries Parabosco announces that their company has been ordered to speak about a beautiful woman by Grullone and Oste. Since neither Grullone nor Oste is there, they sing instead a madrigal about a donna bella set by the obscure Noleth. This prompts a trifling speech by Domenichi on what makes a woman beautiful, in the course of which Doni quotes his own epistolary eulogy of the Piacentine beauty Isabetta Guasca — probably the real-life name of the Dialogo 's Selvaggia.^[57] Domenichi will not let up his lengthy disquisitions and as he prepares yet another, Veggio begins restlessly to hum and finally implores the group to sing Parabosco's setting of Petrarch's Nessun visse giamai before letting Domenichi carry on.^[58]

In this way Doni presents the salon not only as a dynamic space for arbitrating different styles and tempers but as a vehicle for self-display and self-fashioning. The salon thus functioned like the occasional and intertextual verse of Franco and Parabosco.^[59] In a city set up to permit social mobility and obsessed with styling itself according to its wishes, it was natural that by midcentury the growing numbers of private salons should become one of the main marketplaces for the exchange of ideas and artworks. Salons encouraged the sort of juggling for position and exposure common to places of barter. The nobility who formed the salons' main patrons were more receptive to ambitious commoners than they had been before. And by the mid-sixteenth century the means for winning intellectual and artistic recognition within the bustling city had become more diversified and more ample than ever.

Not surprisingly, ambitions proved only more fierce as a result. The ascendency of the private salon following on the heels of Venetian print culture brought quick changes of players, fast renown, rapid dissemination of ideas and artifacts, and above all pressures to excel and adapt quickly to new fashions. The idea of the marketplace, then, is not just metaphorical, for marketplace economies held a material relevance in the city's salons. The salon was not only the concrete locus of patronage, with all that winning patronage entailed; even more crucially, the busy commercial aspect of the city — with its large mercantile patriciate, its steady influx of well-heeled and cultivated visitors, and its thriving presses — increasingly animated

[57] Dialogo della musica, p. 106. On Guasca see Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica, " p. 215, including remarks on Doni's authorship of the piece that follows. Another Piacentine and favorite poet of early madrigalists, Luigi Cassola, addressed her in his Madrigali (Venice, 1544), verso of penultimate folio. For the extensive popular literature containing similar encomia of women see Chap. 3 nn. 39, 41-45 below.

[58] Dialogo della musica, p. 122.

[59] For a standard recent argument on early modern Europe's self-fashioning see the so-called New Historicist position delineated in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), pp. 1-10 and passim. Prior to Greenblatt's formulation related ideas were developed in text-critical terms by Thomas Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature," in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven, 1968), pp. 241-64.

toward midcentury the activity taking place in the living rooms of prosperous Venetians.

The heterogeneity and lack of fixity that typified these salons were interwoven threads in a single social fabric. The very immunity of private groups to concrete description, so confounding to the modern historian, lies at the core of their identity. One of their defining characteristics, this loose organization and openness to change was essential to forming competitive groups. Private gatherings in salons, though often described in contemporary literature as accademie (a term I use here), were in fact only distant predecessors of more formalized academies that proliferated later in the century.^[60] Unlike the latter, they made no by-laws or statutes; neither did they invent titles or keep the sorts of membership lists, minutes, and systematic records that were to become commonplace by the end of the century. Instead, they protected their cultural cachet in the safe seclusion of domestic spaces, where discussion, debate, and performance were private. Rather than demanding fixity from either their activities or adherents, they thrived on the easy accommodation and continual intermingling of new ideas and faces.^[61] Through most of the sixteenth century, Venetian academies that stressed vernacular arts were almost exclusively of this type. This is true both of academies that concentrated on literary enterprises in the vernacular — poetry, letters, plays, editions, and treatises on popular theories of love and language^[62] — and of those musical academies linked to the circle of Willaert. The gatherings of Venetian noblemen like Marcantonio Trivisano and Antonio Zantani or of transplanted Florentines like Neri Capponi and Ruberto Strozzi are all known only from scattered accounts and allusions.^[63]

[60] At midcentury such groups mostly went nameless, so that the term accademia, like others they used, was not at first part of a proper name. By reducing them all for convenience to the single epithet academy, I mean to stress their historical relationship to the later groups, but not to confuse their structures with the formalized ones of those later academies. The generic names applied to academic salons during this time were as changeable as their makeups — accademia, ridotto, adunanza, or cenacolo. For further explanation of different meanings of the term accademia see Gino Benzoni, "Aspetti della cultura urbana nella società veneta del'5-'600: le accademie," Archivio veneto 108 (1977): 87-159.

[61] From the growing literature on the academies of Venice and the Veneto, especially notable are Benzoni, "Aspetti della cultura urbana nella società veneta"; idem, "Le accademie," in Storia della cultura veneta: il seicento, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 4, pt. 1 (Vicenza, 1983), pp. 131-62; idem, "L'accademia: appunti e spunti per un profilo," Ateneo veneto 26 (1988): 37-58. Still informative (if partly outdated), particularly because they incorporate less-fixed academic groups, are the older studies of Michele Battagia, Delle accademie veneziane: dissertazione storica (Venice, 1826), and Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna, 1926-30). See also Achille Olivieri, "L'intellettuale e le accademie fra '500 e '600: Verona e Venezia," Archivio veneto, 5th ser., vol. 130 (1988): 31-56, who explains how academies of the later sixteenth century and beyond came to structure themselves after imaginary collectives in ways that became normative at the time.

[62] For general discussions of informal literary academies in sixteenth-century Venice see Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, pp. 71ff., and, on the fifteenth century, King, Venetian Humanism, pp. 12-18. Outside this pattern are a very few public-minded and philologically oriented academies that grew up earlier in the century; in the early cinquecento this includes the Neacademia of Aldus Manutius, devoted to Greek scholarship, and at midcentury the Accademia Veneziana, also known as the Accademia della Fama, devoted to an encyclopedic agenda of learning and publication. For the Neacademia see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, 1979), pp. 195ff., and on the Accademia Veneziana, Chap. 4 nn. 91ff. below.

In the remainder of Part 1, I try to depict the textures of vernacular patronage in Venice by focusing on the private worlds of figures such as these. Chapter 2 begins with the pair of Florentine exiles Capponi and Strozzi, apparently the main private benefactors of Willaert and Rore, respectively, from about the late 1530s until the mid-1540s. As rich aristocrats and singers of domestic music, they represent a kind of private patronage that shunned the popularizing commodifications made by the likes of Parabosco. They stand in sharp opposition to another foreign patron, Gottardo Occagna, who sponsored prints of vernacular music and letters in Venice from about 1545 to 1561. Fictitious printed letters to Occagna from Parabosco that feigned public displays of private diversions suggest he colluded with vernacular artists in mounting the Venetian social ladder. Central to my assessments of both Occagna and the other protagonist of Chapter 3, the patrician Zantani, are the ways in which social images were fashioned through the rhetoric of Petrarchan love lyrics. The juxtaposition of Occagna's and Zantani's cases shows that while those outside the Venetian patriarchy might invert this rhetoric to mobilize their positions, the local aristocracy sought out ennobling texts and images to reinforce their status claims. Zantani probably promoted some of the many encomia of his wife that were made in the rhetoric of Petrarchan praise, and he engineered several printed volumes that could bring him renown, not least an anthology with four of the madrigals from Willaert's (then) still unpublished Musica nova corpus.

All of these figures are maddeningly elusive to our backward gaze. It is only in Chapter 4, with the salon of another native patrician, Domenico Venier — a friend of vernacular music whose palace was the literary hub of midcentury Venice — that we come to see the full richness of exchange, the gala of personalities, the competitive forces they set in motion, and the fruitful intersection of art and ideas that the flexible social formation of Venice allowed.

[63] Distinctly removed from this mold are several academies on the mainland, most notably the highly organized Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, established at the self-educative initiative of Veronese noblemen — a group that for all its enterprise and interest in fashions on the lagoon lacks the urban nonchalance and elasticity of the Venetians. On academies in the Veneto see Benzoni, "Aspetti della cultura urbana nella società veneta," and Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, pp. 72ff.

Chapter 2—
Florentines in Venice and the Madrigal at Home

Throughout much of the 1530s and beyond Venice sheltered a colony of exiled Florentines, the fuorusciti. As a group, the fuorusciti were highly aristocratic and educated, well versed in music and letters, and eminently equipped to indulge expensive cultural habits.^[1] One of them, Neri Capponi, arrived in Venice in 1538 from Lyons. Before long he had established what became the most sophisticated musical academy in Venice, headed by Willaert and graced by the acclaimed soprano Polissena Pecorina. Like other private patrons, Capponi seems to have gathered his academists under his own roof, where they flourished in the early 1540s and almost surely premiered much of Willaert's Musica nova. Another Florentine, Ruberto Strozzi, lodged intermittently in the city during the thirties and forties in the course of far-ranging business and political errands that accelerated after his family was banished from Florence in 1534.^[2] In the same years Strozzi seems continually to have sought out new madrigals.^[3] The Strozzi kept a palace by Venice's Campo San

[1] The Florentine community had maintained a chapel at the Venetian Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari since 1436. The portion of the Frari's archive at I-Vas designated "Scuola dei fiorentini" lacks items for the years 1504 to 1658.

For an informative essay emphasizing the literary aspect of Florentine exiles in Venice see Valerio Vianello, "Tra Firenze e Venezia: il fenomeno del fuoruscitismo," in Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro: contributi sulla cultura veneta del cinquecento, Biblioteca Veneta, no. 6 (Padua, 1988), pp. 17-46.

[2] Capponi lived from 1504 to 1594 and Strozzi from ca. 1512 to 1566. See further on Capponi's genealogy in n. 11 below.

[3] For knowledge about patronage of the madrigal by Florentine exiles in this era, see the crucial findings of Richard J. Agee: "Ruberto Strozzi and the Early Madrigal," JAMS 36 (1983): 1-17, and idem, "Filippo Strozzi and the Early Madrigal," ibid., 38 (1985): 227-37. Agee was cautious about concluding definitively that the Neri Capponi of musical fame is the same as the one appearing in many Strozzi letters, but cross-references in the letters combined with Passerini's genealogy cited in n. 11 below confirms that they are one person.

Canciano along the lovely Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli (Plate 7).^[4] Even though their presence in Venice was sporadic, various members of the family including Ruberto made stays long enough to establish a base for domestic music making there. In the early to mid-forties, as he tore about Italy and France, Ruberto is known to have bought up madrigals and motets by Cipriano de Rore.^[5]

The coincidence of the Florentine presence in Venice with the flourishing of Venetian madrigals was fateful. Florentines made their way into Venice following a long history of political strife in their own city, whose republican edifice by then had collapsed. During the years spent in Florence, these exiles had sustained a long tradition vigorously promoting Italian vocal music. It was only natural that they should have continued it once abroad.

The patronage of both Capponi and Strozzi was aggressively acquisitive, seeking sole ownership of important new settings. But their interest was not mere collection. Each was groomed in gentlemen's musical skills and moved in patrician circles that practiced part singing.^[6] Each also studied viol in Venice with the pedagogue Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego, as Ganassi revealed in dedicating to them in 1542 and 1543 the respective halves of his treatise on viol playing.^[7] In both roles — as patrons and as amateur musicians — they met with extravagance the expectations of class and pedigree that they shared with a large network of affluent Florentines abroad, whose cultural heritage placed arts and letters at its center.

In both political and artistic realms the vicissitudes and imaginative powers of Ruberto's father had played a dominant role — a role that is critical for our understanding of the next generation's construction of this heritage and its relationship to Venetian music. Ruberto was the son of Filippo di Filippo Strozzi, the most prominent Florentine banker of the first third of the century and, by many reckonings, for most of his life the richest man in Italy.^[8] It was for the Strozzi bank in Lyons that Capponi had served as company manager from 1532 until 1538, when he fled to Venice

[4] The information comes from a letter from Lione Strozzi, prior of Capua, to Cavalier Covoni, minister of the Strozzi tariffs, addressed to "campo di San Canziano, in ca' Strozzi." The letter appears with documents published in G.-B. Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, tragedia (Florence, 1847), p. 312; see also Agostino Sagredo, "Statuti della Fraternità e Compagnia dei Fiorentini in Venezia dell'anno MDLVI dati in luce per cura e preceduti da un discorso," Archivio storico italiano, App. 9 (1853): 447. Sagredo believed that the Strozzi house was "quella ora del Weber dove altre volte era la famosa Biblioteca Svajer" (p.447), that is, Davide Weber, the famous early-nineteenth-century art collector, and Amedeo Svajer, the bibliophile. This house stands at the Ponte di San Canciano by the so-called Traghetto di Murano and is now numbered 4503 in the sestiere of Cannaregio. The ancient Greek reliefs on the exterior, apparently added by Weber, are described by Abbé Moschini, Itinéraire de la ville de Venise et des îles circonvoisines (Venice, 1819), pp. 189-91. See further in Giuseppe Tassini, Alcuni palazzi ed antichi edifichi di Venezia storicamente illustrati con annotazioni (Venice, 1879), pp. 171-72, which traces the house back to the Morosini family, and idem, Curiosità veneziane, ovvero origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia, rev. ed. Lino Moretti (Venice, 1988), p. 119.

[5] See Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi."

[6] See nn. 24-27 below.

[7] See his Regola rubertina (Venice, 1542), dedicated to Strozzi, and Lettione seconda pur della prattica di sonare il violone d'arco da tasti (Venice, 1543), to Capponi. For an English text see the trans. of Hildemarie Peter made from the German ed. of Daphne Silvester and Stephen Silvester (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1972).

[8] Filippo was born in 1488 and died in 1538. For a contemporary view of his wealth see the cinquecento historian Bernardo Segni, Istorie fiorentine dall'anno MDXXVII al MDLV, ed. G. Gargani (Florence, 1857), who claimed that "nella ricchezza fu solo, e senza comparazione di qualsivoglia uomo d'Italia" (p.371).

7.
Strozzi palace in Venice along the Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli by the so-called
Traghetto di Murano, Ponte di San Canciano. Parish of San Canciano, Cannaregio
4503. Photo courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm.

in early spring in the face of French demands to release certain of Filippo's funds.^[9] Capponi's involvement in Strozzian financial affairs formed part of a protracted union between the two families, which involved a web of marriages around the turn of the century and included the marriage of Ruberto's sister to Luigi Capponi.^[10] Neri's father, Gino di Neri, had been wedded to Filippo's sister Caterina. Ruberto and Neri were thus first cousins, and Filippo Strozzi, Neri's uncle.^[11] The two families had formed within Florentine society a considerable power base, which had its center in the person of Filippo. By the mid-thirties, however, owing to Strozzi clashes with the new duke, Alessandro de' Medici, Filippo's family and its immediate associates had been cast into a restless and embittered exile. In the course of this, Filippo's banking interests were managed from abroad, mostly by employees from the ranks of the fuorusciti. Venice was just one of several cities that received substantial Strozzi business, along with Rome, Naples, Lyons, and Seville.^[12]

To clarify the precarious social and political situation in which Filippo, his family, and their Florentine allies found themselves in the 1530s, it is necessary to look briefly back over the long-standing Strozzi relationship with the Medici. In 1508, during Florence's next-to-last republic, the headstrong Filippo became engaged to Clarice de' Medici. At that time her family was banished from the city. The engagement was a brash move on Filippo's part that drew horror and fury from his half-brother Alfonso and members of the extended Strozzi clan, who held at the time at least tentative favor with the Ottimati government.^[13] Yet it soon showed his shrewd foresight. With the Medici restoration of 1512 Filippo found himself ideally placed to exploit the financial interests and favor of Clarice's uncle Giovanni, who assumed the papacy as Leo X the following year. In the decades up to 1534 Filippo bankrolled two Medici popes in his role as papal financier, culminating in 1533 with his dowering of a Medici bride for the future king of France, Henry of Orleans, at the staggering sum of 130,000 scudi.^[14] In exchange for such favors he received an almost

[9] See Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 306-7.

[10] See Melissa Meriam Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favour and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3-4. (Note, however, Agee's cautions concerning some apparent genealogical confusion in her discussion of these marriages, "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 7 n. 27.)

[11] This fact, previously unmentioned, helps explain Filippo's willingness to rely on Neri to care for his family finances, particularly by making him executor of his will. The family tree, first noted by James Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica of Antonfrancesco Doni," Music & Letters 47 (1966): 207 n. 38, is included in the multifascicle work Le famiglie celebri italiane, gen. ed. Pompeo Litta (Milan, 1819-1902), which is variously ordered and bound in the different copies that survive. The copy in I-Vas includes 14 vols., with "Capponi di Firenze," ed. Luigi Passerini (1871), in vol. 3, tavola XX. Neri's grandfather is described there as a very rich banker who opened a banking house at Lyons. His mother is given as Caterina Strozzi, who married Gino di Neri Capponi. Our Neri, born 6 March 1504, appears as the oldest of ten children.

[12] Filippo speaks of his bank in Venice in various letters and wills; see Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 315ff., and Sagredo, "Statuti della Fraternità e Compagnia dei Fiorentini," p. 447.

[13] On the marriage contract and its aftermath see Bullard, "Marriage Intrigues," Chap. 3 in Filippo Strozzi and the Medici, and idem, "Marriage Politics and the Family in Renaissance Florence: The Strozzi-Medici Alliance in 1508," American Historical Review 74 (1979): 51-71. For a general account of the hazard perceived by the Ottimati government in Strozzi ambitions see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago and London, 1973), esp. p. 7.

[14] See Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici, pp. 158-62, on the history of this affair.

endless series of venal offices. On a single occasion in 1524, at the institution of the College of the Knights of St. Peter, Giulio de' Medici, then Pope Clement VII, awarded him eleven titles of the office of knight in return for credits totaling 9,130 ducats; he divided them among four of his sons, giving three to Ruberto.^[15]

Until Clement VII's death in September 1534 Filippo's political position experienced only one real setback when he abandoned Rome for Florence shortly before the sack in 1527 to take the helm of popular republican leadership. Having failed in that role, he was temporarily forced to pursue interests abroad. But by 1530 he had reforged Medici bonds in Florence and Rome and resumed principal residence in the latter city.

It was only after several years of renewed papal collaboration that Filippo's seemingly unbreakable financial edifice began to crack with the death of the pope — Filippo's primary debtor and Medici supporter. Filippo still boasted a sprawling empire and had much to protect in the continued prestige of the Strozzi family. But any goodwill toward them that remained among Medici at home was dwindling fast. Filippo's wealth and leverage among princes posed an immediate threat to the collateral line of the Medici headed by the dissolute Duke Alessandro, now in firm — and monarchical — command of the patria with imperial support. Alessandro grew increasingly suspicious of Filippo and his sons. At last, in December 1534, shortly after Clement's death and after various skirmishes that took the family again out of Florence, Alessandro declared them rebels.^[16]

Filippo's story merges at this juncture with that of members of the younger generation who are my main concern here. In August 1536, after a two-year stay in his palazzo at Rome, Filippo finally retired to Venice.^[17] His time there was soon cut short, however, by what Benedetto Varchi later described as Lorenzo de' Medici's breathless arrival at San Canciano on 8 January 1537 with news that he had murdered Alessandro.^[18] Filippo quickly married off his sons Piero and Ruberto to Lorenzo's sisters. Goaded on by Piero, he also began to organize troops for an assault against the Medici, only to be captured in his first major attempt in the Tuscan hills of Montemurlo on 31 July. The Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi recounted that Filippo's sons retreated the next day toward Venice, tired and defeated and with no alternative but to take stock of their situation and await a better opportunity to strike.^[19] By December 1538 Filippo had died in prison, reputedly

[15] Ibid., p. 152.

[16] Lorenzo Strozzi, Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi, ed. Pietro Stromboli (Florence, 1892), pp. 173-74.

[17] I base this chronology on the first of Neri Capponi's many letters to Filippo written from Lyons. Originally they were addressed to Rome, but beginning on 19 August 1536 they were sent to Venice (I-Fas, CS, Ser. III [95], fol. 23). This initiated a continuous series of letters to Venice until 25 March 1537, when Capponi began writing Filippo at Ferrara (CS, Ser. V [95], fol. 129'). (See Table 1 below.)

[18] Storia fiorentina, 2 vols. (Florence, 1963), 2:555 (Book 15, Chap. 4). Varchi's account largely agrees with those of Strozzi, Vite, pp. 174-75, and Segni, Istorie fiorentine, p. 345. Both of the last two include the story that Filippo, once he made up his mind to believe Lorenzo, proclaimed him the Florentine Brutus — just one detail whose repetition suggests a strong narrative filiation among the various versions.

[19] Istorie della città di Firenze, ed. Agenore Gelli, 2 vols. (Florence, 1858), 2:306.

by his own hand, but most probably at the hands of the Medici.^[20] In the years afterward, Ruberto and other anti-Mediceans abroad continued to pursue schemes to retrieve Florence from the Medici until their defeat in the War of Siena in 1552-55 dashed their last real hopes.

I have synthesized events highlighted in Florentine letters and histories in order to emphasize the intrigues and narrowly factional politics that brought elite Florentine patrons into Venice. Far from epitomizing the republicanism idealized in Venice and attached to Filippo in various romanticized representations that appeared after the events of 1537-38, he and his kin differed little in kind from the Medici themselves. In a very real sense, an entrepreneurial merchant-banker on the rare order of Filippo Strozzi — not unlike Jacob Fugger, imperial banker to Charles V — was at once invention and inventor of the princely sponsors who required him to stage their grand schemes. His identity depended on an exchange of mutually productive powers. Born into such a dynasty in the world of early modern power politics, a young man like Ruberto cannot have thought himself much less a prince's son than if his father had been a duke or an emperor, a difference he might have attributed to the winds of fate or to a slight disparity in style or ambitions.

For the Strozzi, empire and culture formed an indivisible alliance. As Pier Paolo Vergerio had put it, not only was "the ability to speak and write with elegance" — and, we might add, to sing — "no slight advantage."^[21] Learning and cultural refinement both expressed and bolstered the imperial claims of those born into entitled possession of them. Filippo's passions for high finance and Florentine politics extended almost by necessity to arts and literature, in which he developed considerable abilities. His brother Lorenzo wrote that on all those days that Filippo was free to plan as he liked, his time was divided equally between "the study of letters, private business, and private pleasures and delights."^[22] He hired as an intellectual companion and for help with correcting the natural history of Pliny the philologist and composer Bernardo da Pisano.^[23] He also composed lyrics of some distinction that were set to music by the likes of Arcadelt, Layolle, and Willaert, and wrote poems for other aristocrats in his circle.^[24] Both brothers, according to Lorenzo, were

[20] Controversy arose immediately as to how Filippo had really died; see Segni's Istorie fiorentine, pp. 370-71. See also Gelli's commentary in Nardi, Istorie 2:324 n. 1, and 1:325 n. 1.

[21] Quoted in Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979), p. 194; see also his view of humanistic education and the arts in connection with the ruling classes, passim, esp. Chaps. 11 and 13.

[22] "Tutti i giorni della sua vita, che gli fu lecito dispensar per elezione, costumò in tre parti dividere: una alli studi delle lettere, l'altra alle sue private faccende, l'ultima alli suoi privati piaceri e diletti" (Strozzi, Vite, p. 200).

[23] See Varchi, Storia fiorentina 2:274. Filippo was the dedicatee of Pisano's edition of Apuleis, on which see Frank A. D'Accone, "Bernardo Pisano: An Introduction to His Life and Works," Musica disciplina 17 (1963): 125-26. D'Accone hesitated to link too securely the identity of this Pisano with that of the musician, but his doubts are certainly cleared up by Varchi's reference to Pisano as an "eccellente musico in que' tempi, che grande e giudizioso letterato" (as noted by Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 229 n. 11).

[24] On Layolle's setting of Gite, sospir dolenti see Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, pp. 150, 279, 282. The madrigal was included in the first layer of B-Bc, MS 27.731, which they date to ca. 1535-40. Only a few settings of Filippo's poetry are known today, but given the exclusive patterns of patronage that obtained with Florentine patrons it seems likely that others (ones for which he commissioned settings, for example) simply are not extant. The findings of Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," suggest that literary patrons wrote many more verses for commissioned settings than now survive; see also Thomas W. Bridges, "The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982), p. 29. (Apropos, it might be of interest that while in Lyons Capponi wrote Filippo, then in Venice, to send thanks for a capitolo Filippo had composed for him — for singing to music?; 1 December 1536, CS, Ser. III [95], fols. 71'-72'.)

accustomed to singing part music, not only madrigals but carnival songs and Lamentations, which they performed on feast days publicly and "without shame."^[25] Their houses were rich repositories of books and musical instruments, and both Lorenzo and Filippo have been associated with manuscripts central to French and Italian polyphonic repertories of the time.^[26] Recent archival unearthings, finally, show Filippo as patron to Bartolomeo degli Organi, a singer named "La Fiore," an instrumentalist called "urbano sonatore," the Roman madrigalist Constanzo Festa, and possibly the Ferrarese composer Maistre Jhan.^[27]

The pains Filippo took to reinforce his cultural hegemony naturally included his immediate family. He attended to the humanistic education of his sons by hiring noted tutors and (later) sending his sons to the Studio in Padua. Girolamo Parabosco's description of Ruberto as having "rare judgment in all sciences" may therefore reveal more than the usual hyperbole,^[28] for Ruberto's education not only included the Paduan stint but tutoring in Greek letters and law with Varchi.^[29]

Ruberto and his brothers sang part music like their father and uncle, as shown by a letter of 19 November 1534 (first noted by Agee) that Ruberto's Lyons-based relative Lionardo Strozzi wrote him in Rome.^[30] Lionardo alludes to Ruberto's request

[25] "Dilettavasi oltre modo della musica, cantando con modo e ragione; nè si vergognò insieme con Lorenzo suo fratello e altri suoi simili, cantare ne' giorni santi pubblicamente nelle Compagnie di notte, le Lamentationi. Similmente fece per carnevale in maschera per le case le canzoni. Dilettossi anche di comporre nella nostra lingua in prosa e in versi, come per più sue traduzioni e madrigali, che oggi in musica si cantano, puossi conoscere" (Strozzi, Vite, p. 202).

[26] On Filippo's books and instruments see Frank A. D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms and Settings in an Early 16th-Century Florentine Manuscript," in Words and Music — The Scholar's View: A Medley of Problems and Solutions Compiled in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt by Sundry Hands, ed. Laurence Berman (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 29-58, and Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 227 n. 2. On Filippo as recipient of the chansonnier in I-Fc, MS Basevi 2442, see Howard Mayer Brown, "Chansons for the Pleasure of a Florentine Patrician: Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442," in Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering in Honor of Gustave Reese, ed. Jan LaRue et al. (New York, 1966; repr. New York, 1978), pp. 56-66, and idem, "The Music of the Strozzi Chansonnier (Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442)," Acta musicologica 40 (1968): 115-29, as well as Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 230 n. 12. On Lorenzo Strozzi's extensive connections with the proto-madrigalian manuscript I-Fc, MS Basevi 2440, esp. as poet, see D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms," pp. 33-35, and idem, "Bernardo Pisano."

[27] Filippo created a mascherata together with Bartolomeo in 1507 and bought music from him in 1510, as discovered by Frank A. D'Accone, "Alessandro Coppini and Bartolomeo degli Organi: Two Florentine Composers of the Renaissance," Analecta musicologica 4 (1967): 52-53. On Filippo's connections with "La Fiore," dating from 1517, see Richard Sherr, "Verdelot in Florence, Coppini in Rome, and the Singer 'La Fiore,'" JAMS 37 (1984): 406-8, 410-11. For Filippo's patronage of Festa and "Urbano sonatore" see Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," pp. 229-30 and passim, and for that of a "maestro Janni musico" in 1521 see D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms," p. 33 n. 16.

[28] See Parabosco's dedication of his Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1546), quoted in full in n. 65 below.

[29] As recounted in the anonymous biography of Varchi, "Vita di Benedetto Varchi," in Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 3 vols. (Florence, 1857), 1:25.

[30] Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 9-11. For a different translation see Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, pp. 66-67.

for new music, revealing at the same time that the Lyonnaise circle — of which Ruberto periodically formed a part — sang music at home, "either at your house [i.e., the Strozzi's], or at Niccolò Mannelli's." The current group includes Lionardo himself, Ruberto's brother Vincenzo, the Florentine composer Layolle, as well as Neri Capponi (whom Lionardo familiarly calls "vostro nery Capponi").^[31]

Among the most striking aspects of Florentine epistolary exchange are the elitist postures adopted time and again in patrimonial ploys and in the Florentines' observations of outsiders. Florentines pursue what is rare and new, unknown, and decidedly private. In the first and best known of their letters, from Ruberto, in Venice, to Varchi of 27 March 1534, Ruberto described his attempt to have an epigram of Varchi's set by Willaert and asked Varchi in return to compose a madrigal in honor of "Madonna Pulissena" (undoubtedly Pecorina). Ruberto's assumption that he would wield influence with the chapelmaster is remarkable in itself. But even more so is the clandestine, cocky way he went about the whole venture. Ruberto presents himself as something of a roué, asking his teacher for a text "with that same boldness that I would use to ask one of my lovers to screw her."^[32] He folds his swaggering bravado in love matters into a self-assured cultural elitism. Linking sexual and cultural conquest in a single identity that placed stealth at the strategic node of a sacred bond, Ruberto expressed his hopes through the conjuncture of culture and combat: "I don't want to tell you not to speak to a soul on earth about this [madrigal], because I would do you an injury, as if I lacked faith in you; yet I have more faith in you than the Hungarians have in their swords."^[33]

Lionardo's letter of 19 November 1534 evinces the same Florentine attitude toward sharing music. Ruberto's request was specifically meant to procure new and unknown music from the Lyonnaise contingent. Lionardo hopes that a canzone that arrived from Florence some eight days earlier will serve; if it's already known in Rome, he'll get some other new pieces for them — not hard for him to do since, as he boasts, a friend in Florence always sends along Arcadelt's latest things. The entire letter turns on this issue of having the latest pieces on hand — and only for restrictive, private use.^[34]

[31] For general background on music making in sixteenth-century Lyons see Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992); pp. 254-56 treat Strozzi patronage.

[32] A published repr. of the letter may be found in Raccolta di prose fiorentine: tomo quinto contenente lettere (Venice, 1735), parte terza, 1:69. For a version based on a copy in I-Fas see Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 1-2. I quote from Agee's transcription, which reconciles the printed version with that of a manuscript copy: "Non havendo a chi ricorrere, m'è forza venire a Voi, et certo lo fo con quella baldezza [the printed version has caldezza ], che se avessi a richiedere una mia innamorata [here, di chiavarla is crossed out in the manuscript — the printed version avoids the expression by replacing it with dots]" ("Ruberto Strozzi," p. 2 n. 4).

[33] "Non voglio dirvi non ne parliate con homo del mondo, perche io vi ingiurerei, parendovi avessi poca fede in Voi, il che certo non saria, perche ho piu fede in Voi, che li Ungheri nelle spade" (ibid.). Strozzi's outrageousness doesn't stop there; witness the salutation that he juxtaposes immediately afterward: "Fate, lo abbia quanto prima meglio; e senza altro dirvi, raccomandomi a voi per infinita saecula saeculorum Amen. "

[34] Some years later, on 26 April 1539, a Strozzi employee in Venice may have been emulating the Florentine fervor for novelty by pleading with one Palla Strozzi in Lyons to have a text of his set by Layolle, "a 4, but if you would have him do it a 5, so much the better" — this just at the time when five-voice pieces were gaining favor over four-voice ones. See Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," pp. 236-37 nn. 37-38.

This was the same tight vise that gripped the new Venetian-styled madrigals of Willaert and Rore. In 1542 Ruberto's employee Pallazzo da Fano angled to have Strozzi send him a new madrigal of Rore's written for Capponi, should he be able to get hold of it.^[35] Failing that (his letter reveals), he hopes for "some other lovely thing, but not one that many people have — that is, one that might be for a man like messer Nerio. . . . And truly not a man will have your madrigal that you sent me, for I know the one to whom I sent it to be of messer Nerio's kind" (emphasis mine).^[36] Whoever got the madrigal from da Fano was probably not a Venetian; for the secrecy and exclusivity that marks these transactions are little known in the dealings Venetian patricians had with composers.^[37] On the contrary, Venetians largely welcomed printed venues, except at times for their own literary production.

Capponi's tightfistedness was the very quality that so astonished the low-born Antonfrancesco Doni. When his exiled compatriot Francesco Corboli took him to Capponi's salon, Doni was already beginning to fashion a career out of the new livelihood to be earned from the Venetian printing industry and was squirreling away musical works for his forthcoming Dialogo della musica. He claimed to be agog on his first encounter with Venetian music making there — not only at the dazzling musical scene but at the total inaccessibility of the music.

There is a gentlewoman, POLISENA Pecorina (consort of a cittadino from my native town), so talented and refined that I cannot find words high enough to praise her. One evening I heard a concert of violoni and voices in which she played and sang together with other excellent spirits. The perfect master of that music was Adrian Willaert, whose studious style, never before practiced by musicians, is so tightly knit, so sweet, so right, so miraculously suited to the words that I confess to never having known what harmony was in all my days, save that evening. The devotee of this music and lover of such divine composition is a gentleman, a most excellent spirit, Florentine as well, called Messer Neri Caponi, to whom I was introduced by Messer Francesco Corboli [another Florentine] and thanks to whom I listened, saw, and heard such divine things. This Messer Neri spends hundreds of ducats every year on such talent, and keeps it to himself; not even if it were his own father would he let go one song.^[38]

[35] The final digit of the letter's date is illegible; for Agee's views of its date see "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 12 n. 39, where he first assigned the date 1541, and idem, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 236 n. 35, where he amended his reading to 1542 based on a subsequent finding. My investigations of Strozzi's whereabouts (as summarized in Table 1 below) indicate that the date must be 1542.

[36] Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 13, letter IIa.

[37] Accordingly, composers in Venice, with rare exceptions, were inclined to hand works to the press accompanied by toadying endearments to wealthy dedicatees from whom they hoped for subvention, rather than selling them off piecemeal. On this issue see Jane A. Bernstein, "Financial Arrangements and the Role of Printer and Composer in Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Printing," Acta musicologica 62 (1990): 39-56.

[38] "Ecci una gentil donna POLISENA Pecorina (consorte d'un cittadino della mia patria) tanto virtuosa & gentile, che non trovo lode sì alte, che la commendino. Io ho udito una sera un concerto di violoni & di voci, dove ella sonava, e cantava in compagnia di altri spiriti eccellenti. il maestro perfetto della qual musica era Adriano Villaert di quella sua diligente invenzione non più usata dai musici, sì unita, sì dolce, sì giusta, sì mirabilmente acconcie le parole, ch'io confessai non avere saputo che cosa sia stata armonia ne' miei giorni, salvo in quella sera. L'infervorato di questa musica, e l'innamorato di tanta divina composizione è un gentil'uomo, uno spirito eccellentissimo pur fiorentino, detto M. Neri Caponi: al quale per mezzo di M. Francesco Corboli uomo Reale fui fatto amico e mercé sua sentii, vidi, et udii tanta divinità. Questo M. Neri dispensa l'anno le centinaia de ducati in tal virtù e la conserva appresso di sé né se fosse suo padre darebbe fuori un canto." The letter, dated 7 April, was appended to the tenor part book of Doni's Dialogo della musica of 1544, ed. G. Francesco Malipiero and Virginio Fagotto, Collana di musiche veneziane inedite e rare, no. 7 (Vienna, 1964), p. 5.

Many have assumed, with good reason, that the music Doni heard at Capponi's house included works printed only fifteen years later in the Musica nova.^[39] The links between the two repertories are strong. Francesco dalla Viola's dedication of the printed volume maintained that the pieces in the Musica nova had been "hidden and buried" so that no one could use them and that consequently "the world came to be deprived" of its contents.^[40] The very person who later possessed the collection — presumably after Capponi and before its owner at the time of publication, Prince Alfonso d'Este — was the woman Doni so praised, Polissena Pecorina; it was from her that Alfonso later bought the collection.^[41] Doni's claim that Willaert's "diligente inventione" heard at Capponi's had never before been practiced by musicians may even help explain the print's belated designation as "musica nova."^[42] Even more than all of this, Doni's letter describes with uncanny closeness the Musica nova's studied, introspective character, its meticulous setting of text, its lofty musical rhetoric ("questa divina compositione," Doni calls the music), and its ability above all to inspire awe — qualities that became touchstones of later descriptions of Willaert's Musica nova compositions.^[43]

This repertorial link gives a very good idea about one aspect of the musical fare at ca' Capponi — or, more precisely, about its compositional substance. Doni offers his Piacentine dedicatee little in the way of concrete information about the

[39] For early views to this effect see, for example, Armen Carapetyan, "The Musica Nova of Adriano Willaert: With a Special Reference to the Humanistic Society of 16th-Century Venice" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1945), pp. 91 and passim, and Edward E. Lowinsky, "A Treatise on Text Underlay by a German Disciple of Francisco de Salinas," in Festscrift Heinrich Besseler zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1961), pp. 231-51; repr. in his Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1989), 2:868-83.

[40] In dalla Viola's words, it had been "nascosta & sepolta di modo, che alcuno non se ne potea valere, & il mondo venea à restar privo di cosi bella compositione." The dedication is reprinted in facsimile in Willaert, Opera omnia, ed. Walter Gerstenberg and Hermann Zenck, vol. 5 (1957), p. x.

[41] On Alfonso's purchasing of the collection from Pecorina in December 1554 see Anthony Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova: New Evidence, New Speculations," JAMS 26 (1973): 132-45. The documents surrounding this exchange are now reprinted together with numerous new ones in Richard J. Agee and Jessie Ann Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova di Willaert," Rivista italiana di musicologia 24 (1989): 219-305. See also David S. Butchart, " 'La Pecorina' at Mantua, Musica Nova at Florence," Early Music 13 (1985): 358-66.

Doni fashioned for his Dialogo a sonnet of his own in homage to Pecorina, A la bella concordia unica e rara (p. 318); perhaps he hoped for access to Willaert's much-guarded compositions through her.

[42] Einstein's error in translating Doni's "non più usata da i musici" as "no longer followed by musicians" (The Italian Madrigal 1:199), still often repeated, would have Capponi spending a fortune on music that was already out of date, rather than on "musica nova." The Italian idiom frequently appears in music prints as an advertising ploy (as in Perissone Cambio's Madrigali a cinque voci of 1545, whose title page includes the phrase "non più veduti ne istampati").

[43] See, for example, Zarlino's descriptions cited in Chap. 6 below and those of theorists like Vicentino and Stoquerus assembled in Don Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 40 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 177-79, 230-32, and passim. In a passage in Chapter 19 of his Germani de musica verbali (ca. 1570) Gaspar Stocker claimed that Willaert's music stood at the summit of the new approach to text setting, which all good composers were then following; on this treatise see Lowinsky, "A Treatise on Text Underlay."

performances themselves, except that the concerts included both voices and viols.^[44] And Ganassi's dedication in the Lettione of the previous year adds nothing else of substance to Doni's description. Together, however, Doni and Ganassi corroborate at least two aspects of the academy's structural makeup: first, that Willaert's role was that of a kind of Promethean maestro, "principio" of what Ganassi called Capponi's "divino e sacro collegio"; and second, that the academy presented itself through the double claims of novelty and exclusivity.

Doni's account also confirms various contemporaneous representations of Pecornia that identify her as a central interpreter of Willaert's music.^[45] She may have assumed this role already by the early 1530s. As we saw, Ruberto Strozzi in 1534 requested his teacher Varchi to compose a madrigal text in her honor (most likely Quando col dolce suono, later set by Arcadelt, as Agee believes).^[46] In the same letter Strozzi remarked that Pecorina sang very well not only to the lute but also from part books.^[47] This information virtually clinches the idea that much of the Musica nova was composed with her soprano in mind. Indeed Pecorina was so directly identified with the collection that it came to be nicknamed after her.^[48] All of this, finally, reinforces the Musica nova's striking position between the dual poles of sacred church and secular home.

Willaert himself set another madrigal lauding Pecorina, the still-anonymous text Qual dolcezza giamai.

Qual dolcezza giamai                                 As much as the sweetness
Di canto di Sirena                                   Of the Siren's song ever
Involò i sensi e l'alm'a chi l'udiro,             Rapt the senses and the soul of the listener,
Che di quella non sia minor assai             No less than that does the beautiful Pecorina
Che con la voce angelica e divina            Stir the heart with her                                            5
Desta nei cor la bella Pecorina.               Angelic and divine voice.
A la dolce armonia si fa serena                   At the sweet harmony the air becomes
L'aria, s'acqueta il mar, taccion'i venti,     Serene, the sea calms, the wind turns quiet,
E si rallegra il ciel di gir'in giro.^[49]              And the heavens rejoice from sphere to sphere.

[44] Doni does not say whether Capponi's academists played and sang simultaneously. In treble-dominated pieces we would expect that viols often accompanied voices, but Doni leaves us maddeningly uninformed as to whether instruments played some parts alone, without doubling voices — a signal point in madrigals so textually conceived as those in the Musica nova.

[45] A famous reference is that of Girolamo Fenaruolo, whose capitolo urging Willaert not to forsake Venice for Flanders (as he did for a time in 1556) referred to "the good times of Pecorina" (buoni tempi de la Pecorina); printed in Francesco Sansovino, Sette libri di satire . . . Con un discorso in materia de satira (Venice, 1573), fol. 193'; repr. in Vander Straeten, ed., La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:219.

[46] See Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 11-12.

[47] "Canta sul leuto benissimo, ed in su' libri." Compare this with Ortensio Landi's listing of her among the notable modern musicians in his Sette libri de cathaloghi a' varie cose appartenenti (Venice, 1552), p. 512.

[48] As Lowinsky pointed out, Stocker cited by way of example a work "referred to by the Italians as Le pecorine" ("A Treatise on Text Underlay"). Among other things, the article includes Lowinsky's discovery of a sixteenth-century handwritten notation, "La Pecorina di Ms. Adrian," in a set of part books of the Musica nova in Treviso; see ibid., 1:881. See also Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova," pp. 140-41.

[49] Verses 7-9 gloss Petrarch's Hor che 'l ciel, no. 164, in turn an adaptation of a nightscape in Virgil's Aeneid; on both see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), pp. 116-17.

I santi angeli intenti                                   The holy angels, intent,                                 10
Chinand'in questa part'il vago viso,            Bow their lovely faces earthward,
S'oblian'ogni piacer del paradiso.              Forgetting every pleasure of Paradise.
Et ella in tant'honore                                 And she, so honored,
Dice con lieto suon "qui regn'Amore."       Says with a happy sound, "Here reigns Love."

Like Doni's A la bella concordia and Varchi's Quando co 'l dolce suono,^[50] this poem captured Pecorina's renowned vocal élan for an audience probably composed in the main of admirers well-acquainted with her. It glossed Petrarch's praise of Laura from the fourth stanza of the canzone Chiare freshe et dolci acque, where flowers falling about her seem to say "qui regna amore" (no. 126, v. 52). Neither this nor any of the celebratory texts or surviving accounts of her support the assumption routinely made by earlier writers that Pecorina was a courtesan.^[51] The poem makes no attempt of the sort common in encomia of cortigiane oneste to link her vocal charms (or, in other cases, literary aplomb) with physical allurements. In its emphasis on how moving her singing is, lauding her power to transform the natural bodies of earth, sea, and sky, it fashions her image instead as that of a divine enchantress, attracting the beneficent notice of heaven by calling the harmonies of heavenly love to earth. She was thus almost undoubtedly a gentildonna, as Doni called her, styled after the musically skilled donne di palazzo Castiglione described in Book 3 of Il cortegiano.

[50] The former was included in Doni's Dialogo della musica (mod. ed., p. 318). There is also a setting by Vincenzo Ruffo to a Polissena, Era lieta Junon — whether to Pecorina it is less certain.

[51] For a typical representation of Pecorina as a courtesan see Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:175, who assumed that virtually all women active as performers were courtesans. (See also Donna G. Cardamone, ed., Adrian Willaert and His Circle: Canzone Villanesche alla Napolitana and Villotte [Madison, 1978], p. ix.) Anthony Newcomb argues a contrary view regarding Pecorina in "Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy," in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), pp. 105-6. The notion that music making by women was universally regarded in the sixteenth century as leading to licentiousness is put to rest by H. Colin Slim, "An Iconographical Echo of the Unwritten Tradition," Studi musicali 17 (1988): 48-49. His central topic, a portrait in the Spada Gallery of Rome by an unidentified north Italian painter, depicts a gentildonna with lira and the cantus part of a strambotto setting. Similar iconography can be seen in other representations of the time, for example in Habiti d'huomeni e donne venetiane (Venice, 1570), an engraving from which is reproduced in Gaspara Stampa, Rime, ed. Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello, 2d ed. (Milan, 1976), p. [71].

The difficulty of reading evidence to determine whether or not sixteenth-century women were courtesans must be understood to originate in contemporaneous tensions over the appropriation of styles. It was the intended strategy of elevated cortigiane oneste to take on the courtly graces of cultivated women — hence the notion of gracious service that underlies the cortigiano/cortigiana pairing — and the phenomenon generated a nervous ambiguity that lasted throughout the century. The idea that women who made music were prostitutes was promoted in satiric literature such as Pietro Aretino's Ragionamenti (Venice, [1538] 1539); see also Fenaruolo's capitolo to Willaert cited in n. 45 above: "Ne si trovano donna cosi strana / Ne tanta casta, che s'egli cantava / Tosto non divenisse una puttana," vv. 122-24 (repr. in Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:221). Much confusion about how to regard cinquecento women making music seems to stem nowadays from the famous admonition Bembo made in a letter of 1541 to his sixteen-year-old daughter Helena not to play a musical instrument, since doing so is a thing for vain and frivolous women ("il sonare è cosa strana e leggera"); see Opere in volgare, ed. Mario Marti (Florence, 1961), pp. 877-78. But Bembo's letter, probably anticipating an eventual public readership, must be interpreted in the context of his concerns about Helena's illegitimacy and his (ultimately successful) efforts to establish her within patrician society: two years after the letter was written he married her off to the Venetian nobleman Pietro Gradenigo (see Chap. 4 n. 20, below).

The configuration of Capponi's academy as I have described it raises questions about the changing place of madrigals in private aristocratic homes. With Willaert installed as director, Pecorina as prima donna, and other top musicians as the corps of singers and instrumentalists (those "altri spiriti eccellenti" who played and sang), all producing what Doni called "concerti," did Capponi, the accomplished part singer and student of Ganassi, still participate in music making as he had in Lyons? Could he have set up his academy to include him as singer or violist?

Probably not, or at least not with as much regularity. The metrical instabilities and contrapuntal independence of Willaert's madrigals would have made them more difficult for amateur singers than the madrigals and chansons of Arcadelt and Layolle sung at Lyons. Most likely secular settings of slightly older vintage complemented the new fare by Willaert and his circle, as happens in Doni's Dialogo della musica. There may well have been simple ricercars and instrumental arrangements of vocal music playable by nonprofessionals like Capponi, similar to those Ganassi used to illustrate his manuals. But based on the descriptions of Capponi's academy by Doni and Ganassi and the imitations of Willaert's madrigals made by members of his cappella who were both singers and composers, it seems inconceivable that professionals did not play the largest role in performing the music heard at Capponi's house (at least on important evenings attended by outsiders like Doni).^[52] In this analysis, the same situation that placed Capponi and his kind at the center of musical patronage pushed them to the margins of music making.

In short, Venice must have worked a sea change on the musical scene in noblemen's homes since Capponi's Lyonnaise days, transshaping their role in the private soirée. Unlike the symmetries described in accounts of earlier meetings, where nobles appear to stand on fairly equal ground, Capponi's new accademie observed a definite structural hierarchy (however shadowy and inaccessible they may have been). Meetings now pointed hierarchically to two patriarchal figures, the master of ceremonies and the musical director.

I have belabored this shift and the state of Florentine expatriate patronage generally not because Florentines offered the exclusive or even the primary venues for Venetian madrigals at midcentury (though I believe theirs were crucial ones), but because the conditions of Florentine patronage helped inaugurate a direction of great stylistic and social importance for madrigals generally. Secular music making in the early sixteenth century, as described by Castiglione, was a central occupation of courtly noblemen, one of their masks and avocations. From the time of Filippo's and Lorenzo's involvement in carnival, their singing of Lamentations, polyphonic canzoni, and probably chansons, to their promotion of the new genre of Florentine and Roman madrigals by Festa, Layolle, and Arcadelt, noble patrons shared domestic

[52] Perissone Cambio would be a central example, an outstanding singer of high parts and an ambitious young composer who first came on the scene about 1544. His Madrigali a cinque voci, published in 1545, was the first book to imitate Willaert's settings printed much later in the Musica nova; see Chap. 9 below, pp. 341-56.

music as one of their elegant pastimes. It was the patrons themselves who performed, if with the occasional addition of more expert practitioners like Layolle and (we may imagine) Pisano. Whatever went on in Capponi's salon, the newer madrigals were probably no longer the principal province of Capponi and his peers, except in the noblemen's roles as owners, overseers, and auditors. The courtly amateur was gradually becoming the ceremonial host, a position that would become commonplace later in the sixteenth century.

Neri Capponi evidently resided in Venice from at least 1538 until 1544.^[53] After that he disappears from view, nowhere to be found in the exiled Strozzi correspondence of the 1540s after June 1543 — a correspondence in which he had previously been a central figure.^[54] The explanation for this may lie in Capponi's political orientation. Like most other Florentine exiles, Capponi lacked the intense interest in republican revolution that fueled the Strozzi sons. Despite his close financial ties to Filippo Strozzi, who had not only made him manager of the Lyons bank in 1532 but an executor of his will in 1535,^[55] nothing in contemporary histories connects him with efforts at Medicean overthrow. Once Filippo had passed away and Cosimo's rule had been securely consolidated, Capponi probably shared the doubts then growing within the exile community about the efficacy of the Strozzi's continued anti-Medicean schemes. Like so many other fuorusciti, chances are he slipped back into the shadows of his native city, disappearing from prominence as soon as it was safe enough to do so quietly.^[56]

Ruberto Strozzi, on the other hand, continued training his thoughts on revolutionary schemes to play French supporters of the republic against the imperial backers of Cosimo's monarchy. Ruberto's political burden was heavy. By 1537 he was apparently the only one of Filippo's male heirs who had reached his majority still in his father's good graces.^[57] Less experienced in arms than his eldest brother, the ruffian Piero,^[58] but better suited to diplomacy, Ruberto took on much of the work of forging diplomatic bonds with the French and arranging purchases of arms.

Because of his quixotic, itinerant existence after the family was banished from Florence in 1534, tracking Ruberto's movements is not easy. I offer a provisional attempt for the decade from 1536 to 1546 in Table 1, based primarily on the evidence of locations to which selected letters were addressed. Ruberto's correspondents

[53] Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 306-7.

[54] Capponi wrote what seems to be his last extant letter to Ruberto from Venice and mailed it to Ferrara; it dates from 23 June 1543 (I-Fas, CS, ser. V, 1210.10.204).

[55] The will, dated 31 December 1537, is reprinted in Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 323-31; see esp. pp. 327 and 330.

[56] Compare the cases of Benedetto Varchi and Vincenzo Martelli mentioned in Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, pp. 41-42.

[57] See Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 327-28, where Piero and Vincenzo are cut out (see also p. 307).

[58] Ibid., p. cii.

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were at times as unsure of his whereabouts as we,^[59] but in general we can surmise from their letters that Ruberto spent the bulk of his time in Venice from about August or, at latest, October 1538 through at least part of the summer of 1542, where he and his kin were apparently living and being treated "like kings."^[60] Titian's famous portrait from 1542 of the little girl feeding a biscuit to her dog, identified as Clarice Strozzi, shows none other than Ruberto's daughter (Plate 8).^[61] It is just one token of the family's high style of living there, since portraits of children were rare in the sixteenth century, most of them having been made of royalty.

In these years the Strozzi probably kept a lively household in Venice. Ruberto's teacher Ganassi, in dedicating to him the Regola rubertina (glossing his student's name), hinted that the Strozzi salon was one of the most active in the city: "since there is a harmony . . . in giving everyone his due, when thinking to whom I should address this little work, I remembered you, to whom one ought to give more than others since you are more adorned with harmony of the soul, harmony of the body, and vocal and instrumental harmony within your magnificent house, and delight in it more than do others."^[62] One of Ruberto's republican compatriots, the historian Donato Giannotti, wrote a letter on 9 December 1544 to Ruberto's brother-in-law Lorenzo Ridolfi that may complement Ganassi's remark.^[63] Giannotti explains that Ruberto, in Venice for the previous month, is about to depart for Rome, and then takes up Ridolfi's inquiries about a certain "cantafavola" that Giannotti (then in Vicenza) had composed some time previously Irked to hear that Ridolfi had got hold of this work, Giannotti

[59] Most of the letters I cite are preserved in originals or manuscript copies in the Carte Strozziane at I-Fas. In addition I draw from Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, and Donato Giannotti, Lettere italiane (1526-1571) , ed. Furio Diaz, vol. 2, (Milan, 1974), for letters that concern Ruberto. Some of my information derives from internal remarks in letters, as noted.

[60] Segni, Istorie fiorentine, pp. 380-81.

[61] Aretino praised the portrait in a letter of 6 July 1542 along with the child's father, that "grave e ottimo gentilhuomo"; Lettere di M. Pietro Aretino, 6 vols. (Paris, 1609), 2:288'; mod. ed. Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, commentary by Fidenzio Pertile, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 3 vols. in 4 (Milan, 1957-60), 3/1:217-18, with the portrait given as Plate 30. Patricia H. Labalme thought Aretino might have seen the portrait at Strozzi's house in Venice; see "Personality and Politics in Venice: Pietro Aretino," in Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 126. On the portrait itself see Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition, 2 vols. (New York, 1971), vol. 2, The Portraits, p. 142, and Plates 106-8 and 110. Titian's painted inscription ANNOR II MDXLII is visible in the upper left-hand corner of the painting. See also Georg Gronau, "Zwei Tizianische Bildnisse der Berliner Galerie: I, Das Bildnis des Ranuccio Farnese; II, Das Bildnis der Tochter des Roberto Strozzi," Jahrbuch der königlich preuszischen Kunstsammlungen 27 (1906): 3-12. Wethey, following Gronau, placed Ruberto and his wife in Venice from 1536 until 1542, but this is misleading (cf. Table I).

[62] "[P]erche è armonia . . . il dare ad ogniuno quello, che si conviene, pensando io a chi questa mia operetta si dovesse indrizzare, mè sovvenuta. V.S. allaquale si deve piu che ad altri: quanto essa è piu d'altri ornata de l'armonia de l'anima, de l'armonia del corpo, & de l'armonia vocal & istrumental, con tutta la sua magnifica casa, & piu d'altri se ne diletta" (Regola rubertina [Venice, 1542]; facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 18a [Bologna, 1976]).

[63] Lettere italiane 2:115-17. Giannotti's correspondence is a rich source of news about the exiled community. See Randolph Starn's edition of some of Giannotti's letters, Donato Giannotti and His "Epistolae": Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Rome, M. 107, Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, no. 97 (Geneva, 1968), with a good biography and summary of the exiles' machinations in the late thirties and early forties on pp. 45ff. and passim and discussion of Giannotti's patronage by Lorenzino de' Medici on p. 143 n. 7.

8.
Titian, Portrait of Clarice Strozzi  (daughter of Ruberto Strozzi), 1542. Photo courtesy 
of the Gemä ldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

protests in typically Florentine fashion that he wanted it to remain "hidden" (occulta ) and not be recited by friends in Rome where Ridolfi was staying. He wonders if the work was procured from the Strozzi house in Venice. Since Giannotti calls it both a "cantafavola" and "commedia," the work was probably a light one — a pastoral, fable, or fairy tale — and quite possibly to be done with singing.^[64]

[64] Paolo Fabbri informs me that here the term probably means simply "trifling work," as in Aretino's Lo ipocrito (5.24) of 1542, where cantafavola appears to be virtually synonymous with "commedia": "LISEO: Signori, poi che colui che ha fatto la comedia, è stato sempre de la fantasia ch'io voglio esser tuttavia, so che gli faccio una grazia rilevata a dirvi che, se la cantafavola vi è piaciuta, l'han caro, e se non vi è piaciuta, carissimo" (private communication). The Nuovo dizionario della lingua italiana defines cantafavola as a "frivolous fiction."

By the time Parabosco dedicated his Madrigali a cinque voci to Ruberto in 1546, Ruberto's ties to Venice had become far more tenuous. Parabosco's is the only surviving musical dedication to Strozzi aside from Ganassi's, yet it shows only a passing acquaintance with him — tellingly, considering Parabosco's usual inclination to flaunt as much familiarity as he could get away with. Here Parabosco instead fashioned a paradoxical opposition of his humble gift with Strozzi's grand station to frame a conceit congratulating his own presumption in risking the dedication.

To the illustrious and generous Signor Ruberto Strozzi

My Lord, knowing music to be as pleasing to you as it is made pleasing to the whole world by your infinite virtues and kindnesses, I did not want to fail to make you a present of these little notes of mine, such as they may be. This, which others would perhaps have desisted from making, has (like everything else) spurred me on and entreated me. . . . Many, my Lord, being ashamed of the humbleness of their gift, or fearing your judgment, would not have done this, but I make you a gift of these little efforts of mine most boldly. I will not be ashamed to present them to you because they are poor, nor will I be afraid because they are not revised. For I am certain that in the greatness of your merits and your judgment, they will be what every large present is. For into the great sea the big rivers disperse just like the little rivulets, and it thus receives one just like the other, benignly and courteously. I do not rest without kissing your hand, infinitely joining my affection to you. Your most devoted servant Girolamo Parabosco.^[65]

But the dedication evidently failed to further the ambitions of either party. There is no evidence of Ruberto's involvement with music after this time. Parabosco's book was never reprinted, and after it he all but quit musical composition, never replacing the high-brow Venetian madrigal with anything that could have brought him a wider musical audience.

In sum, the state of affairs concerning Strozzi in the early forties is arresting in two respects: first, his pet object of patronage was the gifted but at first little-known

[65] "Allo illustre et generoso Signor Roberto Strozzi Signor mio, sapend'io la Musica esser si grata a V.S. come quella é grata a tutto il Mondo per le infinite sue virtu, & cortesie: non ho voluto manchare di non farle presente di queste mie poche note: quale elleno si siano. & quello, che a cio fare havrebbe forse altrui ritenuto: me quanto ogni altra cosa a spinto, & inviato: che é la grandezza de i meriti di V.S. & il pellegrino giuditio, che ella hâ in tutte le scienze. Molti signor mio vergognandosi per la poverta del presente, o temendo il giuditio di V.S. non havrebbono fatto quello, che facc'io che per questo quanto per darle segno della servitu ch'io le porto, le faccio baldanzosissimamente dono di queste mie poche fatiche. ne mi vergognaro di presentarglile per che elle siano povere, ne temero per che non siano senza emenda: chio mi rendo sicuro, che nella grandezza de i meriti & del giuditio di V.S. esse saranno quello, che saria ogni altro gran presente. che nel grandissimo Mare cosi si disperdono i grandi fiumi, come i picciol rivi, & cosi egli benigno, & cortese riceve l'uno come l'altro. altro non mi resta se non basciar la Mano di V.S. raccordandole la affettion mia verso di lei essere infinita. Devotissimo servo Girolamo Parabosco" (Madrigali a cinque voci di Girolamo Parabosco discipulo di M. Adriano novamente da lui composti et posti in luce [Venice, 1546]).

Rore, for whom he remains the main Italian patron known to us before Rore's employment by the dukes of Ferrara (the other being Capponi);^[66] and second, Strozzi resided during that period in the same city with which Rore's early madrigal style is identified — even though Rore's own biography remains cryptic. When Pallazzo da Fano's letter was written, surely in November 1542, Rore had apparently been composing in Brescia, where he seems to have been based, and in Venice, where da Fano says the composer traveled and delivered madrigals to Neri Capponi. Wherever Rore's madrigals for Strozzi were composed, therefore, Venice formed a point of convergence for both composer and patron in the early forties, entangled in the larger web of circumstances and interrelations there.

Despite this Venetian nexus we cannot infer with any confidence the actual compositions Rore wrote for Strozzi (by contrast with those Willaert wrote for Capponi). Presumably they consisted mostly of madrigals and perhaps secondarily motets, similar in style to the ones Rore published in 1542 and 1544: the Strozzi correspondence mentions Rore's secular works only with the generic "madrigali." A letter from Capponi in Venice to Strozzi in Ferrara of 18 October 1542 sends Ruberto a sonnet "fecj fare a Cipriano" (done by Cipriano), which accords with the sort of sonnet-filled repertory of Rore's First Book from that same year.^[67] And Pallazzo da Fano's letter of the early forties shows interest in a motet that Rore had "gotten into good shape" since returning from Venice, as well as a "madricale . . . che fece a M, nerio" (a madrigal he made for messer Nerio). It hardly seems possible that these were the same works included in Rore's first and second books of madrigals, for why would he have published them?

Ruberto's move from Venice to Ferrara — a court in sympathy with the anti-Medicean French king from whom he hoped for support — took place no later than October 1542. When da Fano's letter was written, in other words, Ruberto had just left Venice. It seems revealing that Rore should have landed in Ferrara just a few years after Strozzi's dealings with the Ferrarese were intensifying, and it is certainly possible that Strozzi could have been influential in securing Rore's foothold there. The impression Rore's musical portfolio made in Ferrara may well mark the beginning of intense Ferrarese interest in Venetian repertory, an interest that was to culminate in Alfonso's acquisition in 1554 and publication in 1559 of the coveted Musica nova (see Chap. 3 below). To that extent Ruberto's influence at court concerning Willaert and Rore also marks a stage in the dissemination of Venetian style throughout northern Italy.

There is no reason to think that the Strozzi ever provided a stable presence in Venice's musical life after 1542.^[68] Parabosco's hapless dedication inadvertently

[66] See Capponi's letter of 18 October 1542, cited in Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 236 n. 35.

[67] Ibid.

[68] A letter of Giannotti's, probably from April 1546, reveals that Ruberto's wife may have moved back to Venice for a time that year. Giannotti tells Ridolfi that Piero's and Ruberto's wives are going to Venice soon, that Piero has resolved to move his wife back to Venice, and that Ruberto may do the same (Lettere italiane 2:133).

underscores the waning impact of Florentines on Venetian music. One could hardly have expected that exiles like Filippo, Ruberto, and Capponi, landed in the city's peaceful lap, would have found in it the ultimate resting place — the "Noah's Ark," "Holy City and terrestrial paradise" — that the self-made Aretino did when he drifted into the city in 1527 (never again to leave).^[69] The physiognomy of Florentine patronage abroad was essentially one of restless exile. These men were bitterly frustrated, at pains to protect their wealth and patrimony and to assert to the world their continued dominance in culture and politics — the more so since they were by history and inculcation masters of their destinies, princes of the establishment from which they now found themselves disenfranchised with dwindling hope for reversal. The processes of acquiring new music, performing it, admitting one's select audience and coparticipants, trading new works and even information about them all became acts of stealth that defined power and position. The acquisitions themselves were marks of privilege, earned through the same cloak-and-dagger tactics used for trades in arms.^[70] To these Florentines, Venice may have been a friendly sanctuary from exile and impossible tensions at home, but also a slightly common place — overly inclusive by comparison with the elect circles in which they were accustomed to move.

[69] The characterizations come from additions Aretino made to the revised version of his comedy La cortigiana (1st ed. 1525; rev. ed. Venice, 1534) after arriving in Venice; for the panegyric on Venice see La cortigiana, act 3, sc. 7, in Pietro Aretino, Tutte le commedie, ed. G.B. De Sanctis (Milan, 1968), pp. 168-76.

[70] Indeed, the letters to and from Ruberto of 18 October and 3 November 1542 that reveal clandestine procurements of music are dominated by secret plans to procure arms.

Chapter 3—
Petrarchizing the Patron—
Vernacular Dialogics and Print Technology

Although the manoeuvres of Florentine patronage remain largely hidden, we have seen that the patrons' personalities and social identities do not. By comparison, the identities of non-Florentine patrons of music in Venice, even noble ones, are obscure at best. These figures had nothing of the ultra-high society and finance or international politics to compare with the likes of Strozzi and Capponi. Official historians and heads of state were generally unconcerned with their business and their movements; nor as a rule did hired secretaries or agents keep track of their more sedentary and prosaic lives. By contrast with literary patrons like Domenico Venier, whose constant verbalizing yields a portrait rich in tone if not always in specifics, the doyens of musical patronage kept relatively quiet. Figures interested in music often fell outside the regular patterns of verbal exchange that would have chronicled their lives for future generations. In musical realms it is largely composers themselves and their professional ghost writers, surrogates, or publishers who shed light on musical benefactors, mostly in the conventional form of dedications, sometimes in the less direct and often less intelligible form of dedicatory settings. Only the unprecedented fusion of Venetian literary and musical activities during the 1540s helps expose Venice's non-Florentine musical patrons to our distanced view. In the dialogical bustle that Venetian Petrarchism produced, musical patrons increasingly placed themselves — or were placed by acquaintances — squarely amid the verbal transactions that were the more common preserve of literati. It is this phenomenon that unlocks otherwise sealed doors. To open them I begin with some connections between the business of printing and the business of writing.

In sixteenth-century Venice texts became a major commodity. The local presses that had specialized in meticulous limited editions early in the century were gradually supplanted for the most part by firms that produced a huge number of volumes at great speed. As presses cranked up production, words came to be marketed in a

range of forms and sheer quantity that were new to the modern world. Print commerce boomed, moreover, as part of a clamorous urge to engage others in dialogue. A remarkable number of texts issued in the mid-sixteenth century utilized some mode of direct address or concrete reference, or concocted a world of imaginary interlocutors.

By the middle of the century these dual phenomena — the urge to dialogue and the quest for diversity — had brought more authors, more vernaculars, and more literary forms into the hurried arena of published exchange than had ever been there before. Composers and patrons numbered among the many groups who were drawn into increasingly public relationships as a result. For them (as for people of letters), the new public nature of verbal interchange could prove by turns threatening and expedient. On the one hand, it exposed private affairs — or fictitious imitations of them — to social inspection and thus caused tensions over the commodification of what was individual and supposedly personal. On the other hand, it allowed its ablest practitioners to manipulate their social situations, reshape their identities, and, in the most inventive cases, mobilize their own professional rise.

All of this occurred not simply because the quantity of publications had increased but because new mechanisms of literary exchange were encouraged by the vernacular press. These mechanisms took the form of what I will call "dialogic genres." I coin this term principally to interrelate the great variety of writings that fashioned transactions in the form of letters, poetic addresses, and counteraddresses, that fictionalized the interchanges of salons, academies, and schoolrooms, or constructed discourses of address in dedications, dedicatory prefaces, letters, and occasional or encomiastic poems. All of these modes involved speaking to and among others — to patrons, lovers, enemies, and comrades; among teachers and students, scholars and mentors, authors and patrons, courtesans and clients.

In this sense my appeal to the concept of a literary dialogics, however difficult to define, is historically grounded in sixteenth-century Venice, and particularly in the multiplicity of new literary forms linked to an active print commerce. But I also mean for it to resonate with something of the same multivocal plurality with which the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin characterized the nineteenth-century novel.^[1] Language, for Bakhtin, was continually stratified into social "dialects" by the centrifugal forces of social use. Dispersive and fragmenting, those forces prevented languages from maintaining the sort of uniform character that official doctrines might try to prescribe and perpetuate for them. As part of living acts, language is instead seen to thrive in the face of potential contestations that always reside

[1] Bakhtin's theories were worked out in a great many texts, most importantly "Discourse in the Novel," written in 1934-35; see The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, 1981), pp. 259-422. Useful introductions to Bakhtin's notion of dialogism and his specialized vocabulary may be found in the Introduction and Glossary of that volume and in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, 1984).

somewhere between immediate uses and other possible uses. Language always asserts itself against the alien terrain of a listener — or in one of Bakhtin's most famous phrases, it "lies between oneself and another."

For Bakhtin this aspect of language was basic to its status as communication, written or verbal. Yet he argued that not all genres foreground this pervasive condition of language at their stylistic surface. As Bakhtin saw it, while novels were explicitly dialogical, poetry — by claiming to spring from a single authorial voice — pretended to a monological status, albeit one he believed was always ultimately fictitious. We could extend Bakhtin's dichotomy so as to place early modern dialogues, letters, encomia, and dedications on the dialogic side and genres like treatises and theses on the fictively monologic. What I call "dialogic genres" mark out an early modern instance of the general linguistic condition Bakhtin called "dialogism." Indeed, it could be argued that the notion of a pervasive literary dialogics first became relevant at precisely the historical moment when technology — in this case, print technology — acted to multiply and explode the social relations of expression and representation. It is this technologically induced explosion, driving vernacular circulation, that energized in Venice the sort of cultural heteroglossia — that undergrowth of tangled meanings — that Bakhtin described. In early modern Venice, as in the novels Bakhtin discusses, there was a correlated factor at work too: namely, a socially embedded process of imitation that cannot be conceived apart from the multivocal character of Venetian literary production. Imitation functioned as a primary mechanism of vernacular circulation. Through the processes of imitation, tropes and gestures were appropriated and revised, reproduced and perpetuated.^[2]

Many of the materials that proliferated through imitation were drawn from Petrarch's rime, which came to be treated as a form of fetishized booty.^[3] In Chapter 5 I show how Venetian spokesmen for language canonized Petrarch's lyrics as the proposed basis of an official "monological" rhetoric. Yet the city simultaneously remade these lyrics into what W. Theodor Elwert dubbed some time ago a "Petrarchismo vissuto,"^[4] a lived Petrarchism that propelled Petrarch's tropes through various cultural reproductions as a virtual form of mimetic capital. Thus at the same time as Petrarch's language affirmed images of Venetian civic identity through its august façade of subjective restraint, his lyrics furnished a cruder source of cultural capital for the city's appropriative strategies of imitation. In these

[2] This accords with the "expansive and associative" tendencies of the mid-sixteenth-century lyric described by Carlo Dionisotti, as discussed by Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici, e libri d'amore nel rinascimento (Rome, 1990), p. 46. Fedi's thesis regarding the linguistic and generic diffusion caused by the form of the raccolta, the lyric anthology, is also relevant (see esp. pp. 43-45).

[3] For a stimulating consideration of how print technology bears on the production of Petrarchan commentaries see William J. Kennedy, "Petrarchan Audiences and Print Technology," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984): 1-20. Related issues are taken up in Fedi, La memoria della poesia, and Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), Introduction.

[4] See Elwert's "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. 125-76.

imitative processes dialogic modes figured strongly, even in lyrics: by turning Petrarch's internal, self-reflexive poetics inside out, replacing the absorbed introspection of an inward gaze with the reciprocal modes of observation, address, and realistic description, sixteenth-century lyrics often externalized Petrarch's poetics in interactive plays on real-life personalities.

This three-pronged phenomenon — mechanical reproduction, imitation, circulation — is distilled in Stephen Greenblatt's expression "mimetic machinery," as recently employed in Marvelous Possessions to situate exploration narratives within "social relations of production."^[5] Like the voyagers and readers he depicts there, my patrons and composers interacted dialectically in "accumulating and banking" figures and images to "stockpile" them in "cultural storehouses." Musical figures meticulously collected and ordered their tropes in books, archives, galleries, and libraries, whose form and content hold the clues to the mimetic practices they employed. For this reason my immediate concerns with both Petrarchizing and printing do not turn in this chapter on the ideas and tropes Petrarchized per se. Rather, like Natalie Zemon Davis (to whom Greenblatt codedicates his book) and like numerous others following her lead, I look at how such storehouses served, in Davis's phrase, as "carriers of relationships."^[6]

It may seem curious to probe these relationships through an ostensibly literary phenomenon, when music is at issue. Yet two cases that I will juxtapose below show how composers as well as their patrons exploited "dialogic" writing (broadly conceived) in mutually advantageous ways, profiting if passively at times from verbal interactions that were the typical province of men and women of letters. Not only

[5] See Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), pp. 6 and passim. The notion of circulation builds on Greenblatt's earlier Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988).

[6] See "Printing and the People," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), p. 192. The groundwork for an understanding of printing as a facet of social geography in the early modern period was laid in large part by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958 with L'apparition du livre; in English The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London, 1976), esp. Chap. 8, "The Book as a Force for Change." Thereafter came Marshall MacLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962), and the monumental study of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), abridged as idem, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983). MacLuhan's and Eisenstein's studies have been charged with overemphasizing print's break with past oral and manuscript cultures, in part because of their concentration on intellectual developments in elite, nonephemeral, and relatively mainstream forms of print, by contrast with Febvre and Martin's more sociological approach. Davis's essay represents an early attempt to assess early modern printing in its social relation to nonelite cultures. Her microhistorical approach has been widely favored in recent works dealing with a great variety of printed objects, readers, and modes of circulation. The most vigorous voice in current discussions of print culture in the early modern period is Roger Chartier's; see esp. his explanations of the concept of "print culture" in the introduction to The Culture of Print: Power and Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, ed. Roger Chartier (Princeton, 1989), pp. 1-10; and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987). Others have followed Chartier's lead in stressing the anxieties generated by print possibilities and the awkward coexistence of print culture with manuscript culture (a theme I take up briefly in Chaps. 4 and 6); see the various essays in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark, Del., 1986); and Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, Circa 1450-1520, ed. Sandra L. Hindman (Ithaca, 1991).

were musicians and musical patrons often part of these dialogic encounters, but the circulation of dialogic varieties of imitation was frequently animated by the unorthodox forms in which they took shape.

In the pages that follow I construct a complementary pair of case studies around two patrons who were long-term residents in Venice. One involves the aspiring immigrant patron Gottardo Occagna. Between 1545 and 1561 Occagna was made dedicatee of at least three books of madrigals and recipient of various letters and literary dedications by Girolamo Parabosco. He died in Venice in 1567, but nothing is known of the last six years of his life. The other involves the Venetian nobleman Antonio Zantani, who died the same year. Zantani sponsored the main musical circle in mid-cinquecento Venice and amassed significant collections in various fields of graphic arts. He was also husband to a beauty exalted in the dialogic and musical literature of the time. By considering the complicities and agendas encoded in writings that accumulated around them, I will try to describe the sensibilities, ideological investments, and social connections with which their patronage of Venetian repertories was aligned.

Gottardo Occagna

Let me begin by sketching what I can of Occagna's biography, heretofore unknown. Occagna drew up a will in Venice on 19 February 1548 (see Appendix, A).^[7] There he reveals, true to his name, that he is a Spaniard from the little town of Ocaña near Toledo, who has been living for an unspecified length of time in Venice. He calls himself "Gottardo di Ochagna at present resident here in the city of Venice." He names Alfonso de Benites as his father and Suor Maria di San Bernardo, "a nun in the monastery of Seville called Santa Maria di Gratia," to whom he leaves one hundred ducats, as his mother. His brother, to whom he leaves the same sum, he describes as a Dominican monk in the order of the "observanti." Others whom Occagna mentions were also apparently Spanish: an Alberto Restagno de la Niella; his wife, Paula; and a couple named Anzola and Hieronimo Barcharolla.

Occagna's will attests to a certain worldliness and wealth. He refers to the unnamed parts of his estate as being "both here in Venice and in Spain and in every other place." Outside his family his closest connections seem to have been Genoese: his "executor, commissary, and sole heir" Zuanagostino de Marini, in whose house he was staying in the parish of San Moisè; and a "Lorenzo Sansone genovese da Savona fiol de misier Raymondo mio carissimo." As a maritime, colonializing, and commercial city, Genoa

[7] Since Occagna's notary used the Venetian calendar, beginning on March 1, the date 19 February 1547 (as it is given) means 1548 in modern usage. So far as I can determine, this is the only document Francesco Bianco notarized for Occagna, nor have my searches of other notaries in the city thus far turned up other documents connected with him (despite the fact that Occagna "cancels and annuls all other testaments previously spoken, written, or ordered" by him).

in some ways resembled Venice. It excelled at navigation and cartography, shipbuilding and various industrial techniques, as well as banking. Once the Genoese shifted in 1528 from serving France to the imperial Charles V of Spain, they also began to manage huge sums and trading ventures for the Spanish crown. Occagna's dual Spanish and Genoese connections thus probably point to mercantile (or possibly diplomatic) activities along a Spanish-Genoese-Venetian axis.

Nothing tells us what the mix of commercial and cultural attractions was that kept Occagna in Venice. Yet it's clear that he integrated himself into aspects of Venetian cultural life in ways other foreign businessmen and diplomats might have envied. One of the recurring concerns of his will, for instance, were the various institutions of charity central to the consciousness of counter-reformational Venetians. Like so many of the city's residents, Occagna had joined a large lay confraternity, the Scuola di Santa Maria della Carità, to which he left twenty ducats so as to have the brothers accompany his body to its burial. He left ten ducats each to the hospitals of the Incurabili and Santissimi Giovanni e Paolo.

Beyond these standard gestures Occagna described himself as fiscal sponsor of a young girl ("putina") Valleria, to whom he had apparently been lending continuous financial assistance ("facto arlevare") for some time through her caretaker, Anzola Barcharolla.^[8] For the girl's future marriage or (more likely, as he concedes) her entrance into a convent, he set aside twenty ducats. Such a practice is common enough in wills of the time,^[9] but why Occagna should have provided for the child's long-term maintenance is a mystery that suggests a deeper connection — parenthood, either his own or that of a good friend or servant.

While Occagna's will reveals him as well assimilated into Venetian cultural institutions and practices — particularly those involving charity but surely also the larger panoply of rituals connected with church and scuola — nothing in it suggests how he was drawn so far into the world of music and letters. Yet we should bear in mind that charitable, religious, and mercantile activities gave ample opportunities for expanding cultural connections from a position outside the establishment — from a position, that is, outside the local patrician class.^[10]

[8] Apparently the Barcarollas, who lived at San Barnaba, were servants to the French ambassador, though at what rank Occagna does not say.

[9] Among personalities discussed in the present study, we encounter it in the wills of Adrian Willaert (see Chap. I above, n. 15), Elena Barozza Zantani (as discussed in the present chapter), and Veronica Franco; for the last see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), Chap. 2, pp. 65-66, 74-84.

[10] Occagna's involvement in the scuole grandi, which hired top singer-composers to freelance on special occasions, represents one instance of his cultural networking. (On the hiring of singers at the scuole grandi see Jonathan Glixon, "A Musicians' Union in Sixteenth-Century Venice," JAMS 36 [1983]: 392-421.) For a fine exegesis of the role assumed in sixteenth-century Venice by local and foreign merchants, including the ways they moralized their positions through codes of honor and virtue and tried to improve their cultural status through the acquisition of musical skills and instruments, see Ugo Tucci, "The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century," in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (London, 1973), pp. 346-78, esp. pp. 364-69; see also idem, "Il patrizio veneziano mercante e umanista," in Venezia centro di mediazione tra oriente e occidente (secoli XV-XVI): aspetti e problemi, 2 vols., ed. Hans-Georg Beck et al., Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Florence, 1977), 1:335-58.

9.
Perissone Cambio,  Madrigali a cinque voci  (Venice, 1545), title page, quintus part book.
Photo courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, from 2.15.14-18 Musica (4).

Occagna's earliest public link to vernacular arts comes from a composer who is known to have freelanced at the Carità in later years, Perissone Cambio.^[11] Perissone dedicated his first print, the Madrigali a cinque voci, to Occagna in 1545 (Plates 9 and 10). The print was mutually expedient in aiding the aspirations of both dedicator and dedicatee. In 1545 Perissone had only recently arrived in Venice and was still jobless.^[12] Although he had managed to attract some attention as a first-rate singer and promising madrigalist (as attested by Doni's Dialogo della musica and other anthologies from 1544), no position within the San Marco establishment could be secured for him until 1548. In order to issue the Madrigali a cinque voci, he took his career into his own hands by submitting an application to the Senate for a printing privilege in his name (a practice that was usually carried out by printers). The privilege was granted not for any ordinary settings of madrigals or ballatas but for "madrigali sopra li soneti del Petrarcha."^[13] Shortly thereafter the Madrigali were issued without a printer's mark as a sort of vanity print.^[14]

[11] On Perissone's connection with the Carità from 1558, see Glixon, "A Musicians' Union," pp. 401 and 408.

[12] See further on Perissone's biography in Chap. 9 nn. 27-30, 38. The best source of biographical information on Perissone is Giulio Maria Ongaro, "The Chapel of St. Mark's at the Time of Adrian Willaert (1527-1562): A Documentary Study" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986).

[13] See Chap. 9 n. 38.

[14] In the dedication Perissone says that he is having some of his madrigals for five voices printed ("facend'io stampare, alcuni miei Madrigali, à cinque voci").

10.
Perissone Cambio,  Madrigali a cinque voci  (Venice, 1545), dedication to Gottardo Occagna. 
Photo courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, from 2.15.14-18 Musica (4).

Perissone had clearly found a collaborator in the venture in Occagna. Both on the title page and in the dedication Perissone stressed the fact that encouragement from friends who wanted the music for their own use had been his incentive to print it. As his title page put it, these madrigals had not only been "composed for the pleasure of various friends of his" but were only being "brought to light at their request" (emphasis mine). The music Occagna and his friends presumably wanted (and may already have been singing) included the newest and trendiest sort — mostly Petrarch's sonnets set in a motetlike style, though leavened with a few lighter texts done in a more arioso Florentine manner. Only one collection of music had previously been printed in Venice that was at all comparable to this one, namely Rore's First Book from 1542. Perissone's was the first serious attempt to appropriate the style of Willaert and Rore, even quoting from Willaert's unpublished settings of Petrarch. Despite its unassuming origins, then, Perissone's book bore public witness to the new position Occagna had acquired via Petrarchan fashions among the city's cultural elite.

Only a larger dialogic context helps us read the alliances through which Occagna acquired this and other coveted accoutrements of patrimony and patriarchy, a context chiefly provided by various Petrarchizing addresses made to Occagna by Parabosco. Occagna surfaced as literary patron to Parabosco in the same year as Perissone printed his Petrarchan madrigals. Parabosco dedicated to him the first in his series of epistolary handbooks called Lettere amorose, zany anthologies of formulaic letters for different amorous situations. These letters extended the familiar letter genre, resurrected for the vernacular by Pietro Aretino only in 1537, into the domain of popular love theory that had been made so fashionable early in the century with Pietro Bembo's Gli asolani of 1505.^[15] Accordingly, the Lettere amorose

[15] On Aretino's resuscitation of the familiar letter genre see Amedeo Quondam, Le "carte messaggiere": retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare, per un indice dei libri di lettere del cinquecento (Rome, 1981), and Anne Jacobson Schutte, "The Lettere Volgari and the Crisis of Evangelism in Italy," RQ 28 (1975): 639-88.

mixed in a smattering of letters, purportedly to various acquaintances, along with avowedly fictitious and generic ones.

Parabosco specially contrived a dedication that would enfold Occagna in the letters' intimate world. He declined to adopt the obsequious rhetoric conventional in high-styled dedications, advancing in its place the more impertinent tone of eclectic satirists whom Aretino epitomized. Parabosco names three reasons for making this gift: first, knowing Occagna's delight in reading "opere volgari" (he was an afficionado of vernacular letters); second, as a sign of love; and third, because Occagna, who once thought Parabosco an adventurer in love, now knows how far from the truth he had been, as proven by those letters written to assuage his grief. With no further hint, he adds, Occagna will know which were dictated by real passion and which composed fictitiously for the pleasure of friends.^[16]

The familiarity Parabosco risked in the 1545 dedication was only a preamble to what was to come in the expanded second edition issued the following year. There he attached an Aggiunta in the form of three letters, one to Occagna and two addressed anonymously, plus an extra pseudoletter to Occagna that formed in reality a dedication to the Aggiunta.^[17] (The typography of this last letter, as printed in the 1549 edition, helps make the letter's dedicatory function clear; see Plate II).

In the first of the letters Parabosco upped the ante of familiarity in a way that exposes Occagna's complicity in being honored by jocular informality rather than groveling decorum.^[18] Parabosco begins by answering Occagna's purported request to explain the workings of the "three [types of] love" (the "tre amori"). In the slow unraveling of allusions that follows, the reader is positioned as privileged onlooker to a private male exchange. Within it, Parabosco tropes the basic Petrarchan tension of an eternally frustrated male infatuated with a chaste, unattainable woman. Yet he quickly and radically alters Petrarchan voice and address. One of the "tre amori" depicts love as a sportman's quest to attain the unattainable, while another celebrates the sweetness of requited love. Unlike Petrarch's poet, who always addresses (ultimately) himself, Parabosco's letters reverse this self-referential strategy to address another lovelorn male. Thus while Parabosco weaves his strands from the private conceits and postures of Petrarch's rime, he assumes an ironic — but typically

[16] Here is the bulk of the dedication to the Lettere amorose: "Al Nobile, et Generoso Sig. Gottardo Occagna. Tre sono le cagioni . . . che mi spingono à farvi dono di queste mie lettere amorose, l'una per conoscer io V.S. dilettarsi & haver sommo piacer di legger l'opere volgari; l'altra per dar segno a quella dell'amore, & della servitù, ch'io le porto, havendomi à ciò astretto le sue infinite virtù la terza perche conosciate homai, quanto sete lontano del vero, ogni volta che crediate, ch'io sia aventurato nell'amorose imprese, come dite, & di questo ve ne daranno non picciol segno quelle lettere lequali sono scritte, come vederete, piu tosto per disacerbere il dolore, che per speranza di muover pietà ne di altrui cuore. Quelle di tal soggetto la maggior parte della propria passione dettate sono, le altre poi à piacer di diversi miei amici composi. V.S. che è saggio, conoscerà molto bene dall'effetto quelle da queste, però io non le ne darò altro segno." Signed 12 June 1545.

[17] I am grateful to Kenneth A. Lohf of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library for checking the edition of 1546 and to Jill Rosenshield of Special Collections at Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin for checking editions printed in 1549 and 1561.

[18] For a full transcription of the letter see Appendix, B, Paraboso, I quattro libri.

11.
Girolamo Parabosco, Lettere amorose  (Venice, 1546), "Aggiunta al
valoroso Signor Gottardo Occagna," fol. 79'.
Photo courtesy of Van Pelt Library, Special Collections, the
University of Pennsylvania.

Venetian — position of doubleness, a doubleness in which the subjects' public words annul the implication of intimacy even as they allege it.

Parabosco's letter also inverts parodistically the male-female relation of Petrarch's poetry, as made clear in the second type of love, consisting of a male tactic designed to conquer a particular sort of woman who is won over by the spectacle of a man wallowing in his amorous obsession for her. From their male perspective this is a "sweet love, since loving one of this sort, one . . . doesn't have to suffer through [all] the usual effort." The end is not only attained, but the route to it is eased and quickened. Parabosco claims a man may reach his desired goal by the very act of obsessing over it (or, as he says, through the act of "ruminating"), since his coy behavior softens the sympathetic woman. ("How many have there been," he asks, "who have found remedies in cases like this at a point when the wittiest men in the world would not have imagined one in a thousand years?") The amorous huntsman can therefore chalk his catch up to the wits of his own female quarry, who actually exploits his exaggerated grief to justify her tacit but eager complicity in the lovers' game.^[19] Parabosco claims to rejoice when friends pull off stunts like these. "[M]y Lord, it doesn't displease me but makes me happy whenever I see a friend of mine giving himself as prey for the loving of such a subject — of which I will say nothing else because I know that you know much better than I the sweetness that one draws from that" (emphasis mine).^[20] The master at this wily love game, Parabosco would then claim, is Occagna himself, the one who arguably backed both print and reprint.^[21] This implies a collusion between them not in matters of love but rather in elaborating iconoclastically Petrarch's outer theme of innamoramento, of falling in love, to mutually accommodating ends: the double position Parabosco seems to assume in doing so — standing at once between private and public, between inward and outward, and between sober and comic — must be understood as equally Occagna's.

Such subversive inversion is, of course, defined and bound by the thing it subverts, Parabosco's anti-Petrarchism by definition Petrarchan. Several passages from the Aggiunta affirm this duality: one of them glosses side by side two of Petrarch's

[19] A passage taken from fols. 104-104' translates: "Oh the great happiness of a lover who is able to see his ultimate goal being fastened, almost in spite of fortune, on his desire through the sublime intellect of his lady. Who could imagine the sweetness that that fortunate man then feels who is at once assured of the love of his beloved and of loving a thing of tremendous value, since the intelligence of the one he loves is no less proven to him than her affection. Beyond that, the man of this second ardor, being of a warm character, can always have more hope of attaining his intended goal than can any other [sort of man]; and no less because of the excuses that such ladies make for his pity than because of their sympathy, each of which they use in similar ways. Those ladies don't have any need to show all that harshness that they are accustomed to enjoy in loving well, because they are so eminent in it or at least much pledged to it. For which reason they are almost always disposed to receive a loving fire."

[20] Fol. 104'.

[21] Note that the final dedicatory letter to Occagna, included in the Aggiunte in the editions of 1546, 1549, and 1558, strongly suggests that Occagna was an actual financial backer (see Plate 10). Although the letter was deleted from Gabriel Giolito's edition of 1561, along with the dedications to Occagna of Books 1 and 3, that of Domenico Farri (another Venetian publisher) dedicated each of its four separately printed books to Occagna in the same year, according to Giuseppe Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco: scrittore e organista del secolo XVI, Miscellanea di Storia Veneta, ser. 2, vol. 6 (Venice, 1899), p. 482.

sonnets — indeed two out of the sixty or so sonnets that were set by Parabosco's teachers and colleagues;^[22] while two other passages avow in the most ubiquitous of Petrarch's oxymorons, that of the icy fire, an ardor that destroys and melts the coldest ice.^[23]

Parabosco's letters thus suggest several things about the position an upwardly mobile patron like Occagna might assume toward those he patronized: first, that as dedicatee, he was a willing interlocutor in an exchange that made the private public — or pretended to; second, that his tacit participation in literary exchanges formed part of a larger world of vernacular discourse, which embraced music along with various sorts of letters; and third, that a primary discursive mode for all these — and a yardstick from our vantage point — was the collection of tropes provided by Petrarch's lyric sequence. Parabosco (to trope myself) inverts Petrarch's lyric stance in order to stand in it: the unattainable woman becomes attainable, chaste womanhood becomes unchaste, the silent woman (by implication) becomes vocal, and the writer who speaks to himself now speaks out to others. As the internal spiritual struggle of Petrarch's lyrics is externalized in the implicit dialogue of the familiar letter, the most defining aspect of Petrarch's stance is turned inside out. Literary voice and content thus collaborate to lower Petrarch's canonized style to the level of a vulgar popularization.

The very different transformations of Petrarchism that I have noted in Perissone and Parabosco — Perissone's sacred-style Petrarch settings and Parabosco's irreverent verbal plays on Petrarchan poetics — play (broadly speaking) with Venice's tendency at this time to separate styles into high and low. Through its dialogic modes, authors could often slip freely between styles that were otherwise strictly separated. Occagna received two further dedications in the 1540s that exemplify more straight-forwardly Venice's tendency at midcentury to stratify styles along such Ciceronian lines. Both match verbal subjects, already matched to linguistic registers, to particular musical idioms.

The first of these came again from Parabosco, but the music was not his. Instead Parabosco dedicated to Occagna a book of mascherate by an apparently obscure composer named Lodovico Novello.^[24] According to the dedication, Occagna

[22] See his discussion of the third type of love in the letter given in Appendix, B, I quattro libri, which conflates Petrarch's sonnet no. 253, v. 1, with sonnet no. 159, v. 14: "O dolci sguardi, o dolci risi, o dolci parole, che dolci sono ben veramente più che l'ambrosia delli Dei" (fols. 104'-5).

[23] These occur at the end of the first letter: "laqual cosa è troppo a far felice un'huomo, ilquale sarebbe degno d'infinita pena, se havendo cotal commodità non rompesse un diamante, o non infiammasse un ghiaccio" (fol. 105); and in this passage from the third: "rompa homai la mia fedeltà la vostra durezza; il mio ardor distrugga, & consumi il freddissimo ghiaccio, & la crudeltà, di che havete cosi cinto il core: accio ch'io canti ad un tempo & la bellezza, & la cortesia di chi a suo piacer mi puo donar morte, & vita" (fol.108').

[24] Title: Mascherate di Lodovico Novello di piu sorte et varii soggetti appropriati al carnevale novamente da lui composte et con diligentia stampate et corrette libro primo a quatro voci. The dedication reads: "Al Nobile et gentil Signor Gottardo Occagna/Girolamo Parabosco. Carissimo signor mio, quando io mi ritrovassi privo di quello che da v.s. mi fosse richiesto io me ingegnaria di farmi ladro per contentarvi ne fatica ne timore alcuno o di vergogna o di danno che avenir me ne potesse mi farebbe rimener giamai di cercare ogni via per che fosse adempiuto il desiderio vostro & mio. Essend'io adunque a questi giorni stato richiesto da V.S., di alcune imascherate, & havendo per mille negotii importantissimi come tosto vi sara manifesto l'animo in piu di mille parti diviso io non poteva veramente in modo alcuno servire la S.V. del mio, & mentre mi pensavo ond'io potessi o rubarle o d'haverle in duono fuor d'ogni mio pensiero & senza alcuna mia diligenza quasi per miracolo mi sono venute alle mani queste composte per lo eccelente M. Lodovico Novello per lequali V.S. potra essere apieno sodisfatta d'ogni suo desiderio per che ce ne sono in ogni soggetto ma tutte ugualmente dette con bella & acuta maniera & facile senza molta gravita come si conviene, & cosi il canto come le parole accio che da tutti siano intese & gustate. lo le dedito a V.S. con licenza di chi ha carico de farle stampare. Di queste come V.S. potra vedere tutte le stanze che seguiranno la prima si cantano sopra le noti di essa prima ne qui alcuno potra pigliare errore per che altro canto non ci e che de una sola stanza per ciaschaduna imascherata salvo che di tre, quali sono questi: i gioiellieri, gli fabri, & i Ballarini. di queste tre l'ultima stanza di ogniuna ha un Canto per se & tutte le altre si cantano come la prima, come si comprendera chiarissimamente V.S. le accetta con lieto animo & mi comandi." I add punctuation to a transcription taken from Mary S. Lewis, Antonio Gardane, Venetian Music Printer, 1538-1569: A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study, vol. I, 1538-49 (New York, 1988), pp. 527-28, which also includes a list of the print's contents.

It does not seem implausible that "Lodovico Novello" was a pseudonym for Parabosco.

wanted newly fashioned songs as entertainment for the carnival season and hoped Parabosco could author them. The composer pleaded himself overcommitted, which can hardly have been far from the truth, insisting that he would have stolen them and suffered any shame, damnation, or exertion to procure them had he not chanced miraculously on the four-voice mascherate by Novello. Somehow Parabosco was acting as intermediary between Novello and the printer Antonio Gardane, with whom he must have had a working alliance, for he claimed to make the dedication with the "license of one who has the task of having them printed" (emphasis mine). These mascherate cover "every topic, but all with equal beauty, wit, and ease, and without much gravity, as is fitting," so that "both the melody and words can be understood and enjoyed by everybody." By "every topic" Parabosco means every mask, every get-up — of which there are a great variety: mascherate "Da hebree," "Da mori," "Da nimphe," "Da rufiane," "Da scultori," "Da calzolari," "Da vendi saorine," "Da orefici," "Da maestri di ballar," "Da porta littere," "Da fabri," and so on (masks of Jewesses, Moors, nymphs, procuresses, sculptors, shoemakers, mustered vendors, goldsmiths, dance masters, postmen, locksmiths). Occagna's circle must have planned to sing them themselves (just as they sang Perissone's madrigals), for Parabosco closes with advice on how they should go about matching the stanzas to the melodies.

The texts allowed plenty of ribald humor and artisanal double entendre: doctors who nimbly probe the love sores of willing patients; locksmiths who "screw in keys" free of charge.^[25] Woven between their lines is a sophisticated tapestry of intertextual references to other lyrics, frottole, dance songs, napolitane, epic verse, comedies, and madrigals. Thus the songs could amuse the cognoscenti and invert the official rhetoric they knew all too well, without perplexing the uninitiated.^[26]

[25] The unpublished transcriptions of texts and scores on which I base my discussion of Novello's print are those of Donna Cardamone Jackson. I am very grateful to her for loaning them to me.

[26] On the question of how carnival rites served as a "foil" to official rhetoric see Linda L. Carroll, "Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice," The Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 487-502. Relevant too is the now widely read study by Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984).

Many of the masks work Petrarchan figures into their repertory of inside jokes. The mask of the mailmen, for instance, beseeches the "lovely ladies" it addresses to post their love letters with them. But if a killing love death should demand discretion, it offers to send their messages by word of mouth ("a bocca dire") — carnal messages that tell, for instance, "How love makes you die and the spirit and food of a hot impetuous passion, which consumes your afflicated heart, join flesh to flesh and skin to skin."^[27] Figures like the "cor afflitto che abbruccia" (afflicted heart that burns) and "amor che fa morire" (love that makes you die) circulated rampantly as common versions of Petrarchan tropes. Thus whoever wrote the texts had no lack of models close at hand. The precise phrase "Amor mi fa morire" was, in fact, well known to Venetian afficionados of vernacular music like Occagna and company, for it troped the incipit of a well-known ballata-madrigal set by Willaert and widely circulated in the 1530s.^[28] All the funnier therefore that it should appear here in a raucous, strophic part song. The modest bits of contrapuntal imitation that Novello incorporated into his mascherata did nothing to elevate the songs' generally low idiom, their gawky tunes, and sudden metric shifts. On the whole the masks were better suited to outdoor revelries than to genteel drawing rooms, where quiet, ceaseless polyphony was the norm.

This, then, is low style pure and simple, and its proper place is carnival: in short, low style for carnivalesque subjects. At this lower rung of mascherate also sat spoken comedy. In 1547, for the third year in a row, Parabosco dedicated a vernacular work to Occagna, this time his comedy Il viluppo, citing Occagna's pleasure in reading "simil Poemi."^[29] Reading the play aloud — reciting it in a group, that is — may be what Parabosco had in mind, a practice that was widespread among the literate.^[30] Here again we find Occagna in the thick of the newly ascendant vernacular arts, engaging in the play of Petrarchism made part of daily life and relishing the diverse styles and levels that the new Ciceronian conceptions of words prescribed.

The high-styled antithesis to masks and comedies came with a work dedicated to Occagna in 1548, attached to an early edition of Rore's Third Book of madrigals printed by Girolamo Scotto (RISM 1548⁹ ).^[31] This dedication assigned Occagna the

[27] The passage comes from stanza 3 of the mascharata "Da porta lettere": "Se voleti a bocca dire/Qualche cosa et non inscrito/Come amor vi fa morire/Et ch'il spirto vostro e vitto/D'un focoso e gran desire/Che v'abbruggia il cor afflitto/Di congionger dritto adritto/Carne a carne e pelle a pelle."

[28] See Chap. 7 above, nn. 18-19.

[29] "[E]ssendomi venuto in proposto di stampare questa mia nova Comedia, quale ella si sia, a Vostra Signoria la dono: & perche io so il piacere ch'ella ha di legger simil Poemi." Parabosco used the same address, "Al nobile, & generoso signore Gottardo Occagna."

[30] Cf. Donato Giannotti's letter to Lorenzo Ridolfi discussed in Chap. 2 nn. 63-64.

[31] The book was printed about the same time as or slightly earlier than an equivalent one by Gardane (RISM 1549¹⁰). The account books of the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona show that it purchased one of the 1548 eds. (presumably Gardane's) on 19 April 1548; see Giuseppe Turrini, L'Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico, Atti e memorie della Accademia di Agricoltura, Scienze e Lettere di Verona, no. 18 (Verona, 1941), p. 37. For bibliographical issues surrounding the print see Alvin H. Johnson, "The 1548 Editions of Cipriano de Rore's Third Book of Madrigals," in Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. John Walter Hill (Kassel, 1980), pp. 110-24, and Mary S. Lewis, "Rore's Setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella: A History of Its Composition and Early Transmission," Journal of Musicology 4 (1985-86): 365-409. Johnson argues that differences in the title pages of the two editions (there are actually two distinct ones in different part books for Gardane's) leave no doubt that Scotto's was published first; the title pages and dedications are reproduced in Johnson, pp. 111, 114-15, and 121. For the argument that both editions were published by April 1548 see Lewis, p. 381. Gardane's edition bore no dedication until the supplement was issued the following year (see below) and appended to the altus part book, which was dedicated by Perissone Cambio to the poet-cleric Giovanni della Casa.

slight place he has previously held in historical memory, for the print included Rore's setting of the first six stanzas of Petrarch's final canzone, Vergine bella. The brief dedication was signed not by the composer, however, but by the Paduan flutist Paolo Vergelli:

To the noble and valorous Signor Gottardo Occagna, my most eminent friend and Lord.

My most honored Lord and friend, I know the diligence and effort that you have used recently in order to have those Vergine, already composed many months ago by the most excellent musician Mr. Cipriano Rore, your and our most dear friend. Those works having come into my hands, it seemed to me [fitting], both because of the love I bear to you and to satisfy your desire, to have them printed with some other lovely madrigals by the same composer, and some by the divine Adrian Willaert and other disciples of his, so that you might not only be satisfied in your wish, but with it might even bring some praise and merit to the world, which thanks to you will be made rich by this present, truly worthy of being seen and enjoyed by everyone. I kiss your hands. Paolo Vergelli, Paduan musician.^[32]

Contrary to Vergelli's claims, Scotto's edition of the Vergine cycle suggests that there was no such mutually beneficial collaboration between Occagna and Rore of the kind Occagna had had with Perissone (or Willaert and Rore with the Florentines). If anything, it hints that Occagna's aspirations broke down at such formidable levels. In fact, both bibliographical and musical evidence surrounding the edition make me think the enterprise was surreptitious.^[33] First of all, the dedication was not authored by Rore — by then in Ferrara — but by Vergelli, probably as one of Scotto's freelancers. Vergelli noted that Occagna had been trying hard to get hold of the Vergine stanzas for some months. He also claimed that both he and Occagna were good friends of Rore's (whom he called "vostro e nostro carissimo amico"). Why then did they let the cycle

[32] "Al nobile & valoroso Signor Gottardo Occagna compadre & Signor mio osservandissimo. Signor compare honorandissimo. Sapendo io la diligenza, & la fatica che havete usata questi giorni passati per haver quelle vergine, gia molti mesi sono, composte da lo eccellentissimo musico messer Cipriano Rore, vostro et nostro carissimo amico, mi e parso, essendomi le predette compositioni venute alle mani, per lo amor che vi porto, & per satisfare al desiderio vostro, farle stampare con alcuni altri bellissimi madrigali del medemo compositore, & con alcuni del Divinissimo Adriano Villaerth, e de altri suoi discepoli, accio che vostra signoria non solamente sia satisfatta del desiderio suo, ma ne consegua ancora qualche laude & merito appresso il mondo, il quale merce di vostra signoria sara fatto riccho di questo presente, veramente degno di esser veduto, & goduto da ognuno. Et a V.S. baccio le mani. Paolo Vergelli musico padovano." The title page reads: Di Cipriano Rore et di altri eccellentissimi musici il terzo libro di madrigali a cinque voci novamente da lui composti et non piu messi in luce. Con diligentia stampati. Musica nova & rara come a quelli che la canteranno & udiranno sara palese. Venetiis. Appresso Hieronimo Scotto. MDXLVIII.

[33] Lewis reaches a similar conclusion in "Rore's Setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella," pp. 394-405.

be printed in a form so glaringly incomplete as both poetic and musical structure — especially given that Rore had been instrumental in introducing literary standards to Italian part music that aimed to set poems intact?^[34] The six stanzas fell five short of the total eleven, leaving the canzone hanging in midair. Further, in such fragmentary form the music lacked the tonal unity supplied by the last five stanzas once Rore's settings of them were issued in a supplement the following year.^[35] Even the supplement was probably only Rore's way of making the best of a bad situation: three years later, a new edition by Gardane included substantial revisions that Rore had made to the whole cycle. If Occagna hoped his identification with the Vergine settings would give him the kind of cachet that exiled Florentines got from Willaert's settings, he can only have half succeeded. The upwardly mobile might have envied him, while the real cognoscenti must have sneered at the clumsiness of the effort. Perhaps no one in 1548 could have reaped the benefits of a linkage to Rore's Vergine in a legitimate, public arena, but surely not Occagna.

With this evidence in hand we can begin to situate Occagna's position within the kind of ethnography of books I hinted at earlier, one that moves between bibliographical evidence and larger dialogic contexts. It is this hermeneutic move that allows us to consider the extent to which Occagna's link with the Vergine cycle put him in cultural company with the city's most select patrons.

What in fact could have been the mechanism that brought about this link, if in fact Occagna had no responsibility for the genesis of the music? Quite simply, he must have offered a subvention to Scotto's printing house. Vergelli probably procured the subvention as part of his moonlighting for Scotto, after having gotten hold of the unfinished music. Occagna for his part cannot have attended much to the niceties of its public debut when presumably he helped finance it. His connection with Rore's Vergine thus jibes with ones he made earlier with Parabosco and Perissone. Rather than maintaining his position privately, as nobles tended to do, these addresses and exchanges all helped advance publicly his fledgling reputation in Venetian society.

Occagna's involvements would have been intolerably reckless for the likes of most Venetian aristocrats. In addressing nobles, middle-class authors like Parabosco almost never employed the familiar versions of Petrarchan tropes that Occagna condoned. Even the more dignified tropes of praise that helped define noblemen's patriarchy — and that their patriarchy perpetuated — usually reached them only indirectly. I turn now to Antonio Zantani.^[36]

[34] Although the trend for complete settings had previously been mainly toward sonnets, it was extended as early as 1544 to longer multistanza poems with cyclic settings of Petrarch's sestine Alla dolce ombra (no. 142) by Jachet Berchem, published in Doni's Dialogo della musica in 1544, and later to Giovene donna (no. 30) by Giovanni Nasco, issued in his Primo libro a 5 in 1548, the same year that Rore's Vergine appeared.

[35] The remaining five stanzas can be found as additions to a number of extant copies of the Terzo libro, as discussed by Lewis, "Rore's Setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella." For further discussion of the music, including the question of tonal unity, see Chap. 10, esp. n. 5.

[36] Primary sources give several variant versions of the name, including Zantani, Centani, Centana, and Zentani.

Antonio Zantani

Zantani gained notoriety in Venetian music history by attempting to print four madrigals from the Musica nova in the late 1550s. But his links to Venetian music date from at least 1548 and involve the same Scotto edition in which Rore's Vergine cycle was printed. Besides the settings by Rore, this edition included works by Willaert, Perissone, Donato, and others that enhanced its Venetian character.^[37] Most of Willaert's contributions were occasional, forming part of the dialogic networks I have attempted to describe here. Among them was a dedicatory setting of Lelio Capilupi's ballata Ne l'amar e fredd'onde si bagna^[38] a tribute to a renowned Venetian noblewoman whom Capilupi named with the epithet "la bella Barozza" — Antonio's wife.^[39] Its praise of her sets the Petrarchan paradox of the icy fire in a verbal landscape shaped by Venetian geography: her flame, born in the cold Venetian seas, burns so sweetly that the fire from which the poet melts seems frigid beside it.

  Ne l'amar e fredd'onde si bagna                       In the bitterness and cold in which
L'alta Vinegia, nacque il dolce foco              The great Venice bathes itself was born the sweet fire
Ch'Italia alluma et arde a poco a poco.        That inflames and illumines Italy bit by bit.
  Ceda nata nel mar Venere, e Amore                Venus, born of the sea, may yield, and Cupid
Spegna le faci homai, spezzi li strali               May put out the torches and break his arrows;
Chè la bella Barozz'a li mortali                      For the lovely Barozza stabs the mortals
Trafigge et arde coi begl'occhi 'l core.           And consumes their hearts with her beautiful eyes.
  E di sua fiamma è sì dolce l'ardore,                 And there is such a sweet ardor from her flame
Che quell'ond'io per lei mi struggo e coco     That that which makes me melt and burn for her
Parmi ch'al gran desir sia freddo e poco.      Seems frigid and small beside the great desire.

Barozza's full name was Helena Barozza Zantani. In 1548 she already had a reputation as one of Venice's great beauties. She had been painted by Titian and Vasari, venerated by Lorenzino de' Medici, and widely celebrated in verse.^[40] These tributes

[37] A number of these pieces reappear in the manuscript of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Guelf 293. See Lewis, "Rore's Setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella," pp. 407-8, for a list of its contents and concordances.

[38] The setting is among those in Wolfenbüttel 293. The poem appears in Rime del S. Lelio, e fratelli de Capilupi (Mantua, 1585), p. 31. For my identification of the poet I am indebted to Lorenzo Bianconi and Antonio Vassalli's handwritten catalogue of poetic incipits, which gave me the initial lead on this and a number of other poems.

[39] Many sources confirm that Helena was Antonio's wife, including Dragoncino's designation of his stanza "Consorte di M. Antonio" (see n. 42 below); Aretino's paired letters to "Antonio Zentani" and "Elena Barozza" from April and May 1548, respectively (Lettere di M. Pietro Aretino, 6 vols. [Paris, 1609], 4:207' and 208'; Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, commentary by Fidenzio Pertile, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 3 vols. in 4 [Milan, 1957-60] 2:215-17); and the wills of Antonio and Helena, as given in Appendix, C and D.

[40] Both portraits are described by Pietro Aretino and both are now apparently lost. Vasari's was painted before he left Venice in 1542 (cf. n. 86 below); see Aretino, Lettere, 2:304' (no. 420, to Vasari, 29 July 1542, with a sonnet in praise of Barozza) and 4:208' (no. 478, to Helena, May 1548, with reference to both portraits), and Lettere sull'arte 1:224 and 2:216-17.

On Lorenzino's unrequited feelings for Helena Barozza, and for the most thorough gathering of information on her, see L[uigi] A[lberto] Ferrai, Lorenzino de' Medici e la società cortigiana del cinquecento (Milan, 1891), pp. 343-52, esp. p. 347 n. 2.

placed Helena in the cult of beautiful gentildonne, which assigned Petrarch's metaphorical praises to living ladies and generated yet more goods for Venetian printers.^[41] Of all these praises, those in lyric forms were most apt to adopt something close to the lightly erotic tone of Capilupi: Giovambattista Dragoncino da Fano's Lode delle nobildonne vinitiane del secolo moderno of 1547, for instance, devoted one of its stanzas to the "sweet war" Helena launched in lovers' hearts, ending in praise of her "blonde tresses."^[42]

Other encomia conflated her beauty with her moral worth. Confirming the occult resemblance thought to exist between physical and spiritual virtue, they deflected the transgressive possibilities to allure and mislead the unsuspecting to which beauty was also commonly linked. A letter of Aretino's to Giorgio Vasari of 1542 honored Vasari's portrait of Helena for the "grace of the eyes, majesty of the countenance, and highness of the brow," which made its subject seem "more celestial than worldly," such that "no one could gaze at such an image with a lascivious desire."^[43] Aretino troped his own letter in an accompanying sonnet, declaring her loveliness of such an honesty and purity as to turn chaste the most desirous thoughts (see n. 43 below). Lodovico Domenichi's La nobiltà delle donne similarly joined beauty with virtue by comparing Helena's looks with the Greek Helen of Troy and her honesty with the Roman Lucrezia ("Mad. Helena Barozzi Zantani, laquale in bellezza pareggia la Greca, & nell'honestà la Romana Lucretia . . .").^[44] Even the female poet-singer Gaspara Stampa added to her Rime varie a sonnet for Barozza, that "woman lovely, honest, and wise" (donna bella, onesta, e saggia).^[45]

Like most of the women exalted by this cult, the virtuous Helena was safely sheltered by marriage. This ideally suited her to the Petrarchan role of the remote and unattainable lady, as it was now employed for numerous idolatries of living women.

[41] For documentation of the literary activity generated by these cults see Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco, pp. 278-98, and on Helena, pp. 294-96.

[42] Fol. [4].

[43] Verses 9-11: "Intanto il guardo suo santo e beato/ In noi, che umilemente il contempliamo,/Casto rende il pensiero innamorato (Lettere 2:304' and Lettere sull'arte 1:224).

[44] Fol. 261 in the revised version printed by Giolito in 1551. Domenichi was an interlocutor in Doni's Dialogo della musica and a Piacentine comrade of Parabosco's. The theme of Troy echoed again at the end of Parabosco's I diporti, as a group of Venice's most prominent literati enthuse over various Venetian women in the popular mode of galant facezie, in between recitations of novelle and madrigali. The Viterban poet Fortunio Spira exclaims, "Che dirò di te . . . madonna Elena Barozzi così bella, così gentile! oh! se al tempo della Grecia tu fossi stata in essere, in questa parte il troiano pastore senza dubbio sarebbe stato inviato dalla Dea Venere, come in luogo dove ella meglio gli havesse potuto la messa attenere!" See Giuseppe Gigli and Fausto Nicolini, eds., Novellieri minori del cinquecento: G. Parabosco — S. Erizzo (Bari, 1912), p. 192. (I diporti were first published in Venice ca. 1550; see Chap. 4 n. 30 below.) Also directed to Helena may be a letter and three sonnets in Parabosco's Primo libro delle lettere famigliari (Venice, 1551) addressed "Alla bellissima, et gentilissima Madonna Helena" and dated 30 April 1550 (fols. 49-50). Parabosco makes intriguing mention there of "il nostro M.A. ilquale compone libri delle bellezze, & delle gratie vostre: con certezza che gli possa mancar piu tosto tempo, che suggetto. io vi faccio riverenza per parte sua, & mia" (our Messer A., who composes books of your beauties and graces, with the certainty that he may be lacking time, rather than a subject. I revere you for his part and mine); fol. 49.

[45] Rime (Venice, 1554), no. 278; mod. ed. Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello, 2d ed. (Milan, 1976), p. 264. On the tributes of Stampa and others to Helena Barozza see Abdelkader Salza, "Madonna Gasparina Stampa, secondo nuove indagini," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 62 (1913): 31.

But it also suggests that the music, writings, and paintings in her honor participated in loose networks of reference and praise that helped situate familial identities within larger civic structures. Indeed, it raises the possibility that some were spousal commissions meant (like Willaert's madrigal) to embellish the domestic household and redound to the family name: Helena's husband, Antonio, could after all count himself among the most avid of aristocratic devotees to secular music at midcentury and a keen patron of the visual arts.

Zantani's vita will set the stage for reexamining relationships between civic identity and patronage at closer range.^[46] Antonio was born on 18 September 1509 to Marco Zantani and Tommasina di Fabio Tommasini.^[47] His father descended from a line of Venetian nobles, his mother from a family originally from Lucca and admitted to the official ranks of Venetian cittadini only in the fourteenth century.^[48] In 1532 Antonio gained an early admission to the Great Council,^[49] and on 16 April 1537 he and Helena were wed in the church of San Moisè.^[50] Their respective wills of 1559 and 1580 identify their residence as being in the congenial neighborhood parish of Santa Margarita (see Appendix, C and D).^[51] Inasmuch as Antonio's family clan was very small, they may also have lived at times, or at least gathered, at the beautiful Zantani palace nearby at San Tomà (Plate 12) — quarters that would have suited well the salon over which Zantani presided at midcentury.^[52] Most famous of the earlier Zantani was Antonio's

[46] For a biography of Zantani see Emmanuele A. Cicogna, Delle inscrizioni veneziane, 6 vols. (Venice, 1827), 2:14-17. A briefer and more readily available biography, mainly derived from Cicogna, appears in Lettere sull'arte 3/2:528-30. Where not otherwise noted my biographical information comes from Cicogna.

The main contemporaneous biography is that given in the form of a dedication to Zantani by Orazio Toscanella in I nomi antichi e moderni delle provincie, regioni, città . . . (Venice, 1567), fols. [2] — [3']. It is reproduced in Appendix, E.

[47] I-Vas, Avogaria di Comun, Nascite, Libro d'oro, Nas. I.285. Marco and Tommasina were married in 1503 (I-Vas, Avogaria di Comun, Matrimoni con notizie dei figli).

[48] This information comes from Giuseppe Tassini's manuscript genealogy "Cittadini veneziani," I-Vmc, 33.D.76, 5:37-38, which, however, puts her marriage to Marco in 1505 (cf. n. 47 above). Tommasina drew up her will on 9 August 1566 (I-Vas, Archivio Notarile, Testamenti, notaio Marcantonio Cavanis, b. 196, no. 976), calling herself a resident of the parish of Santa Margherita.

[49] See Cicogna, Inscrizioni veneziane 2:14. (The date of 1552 given in Lettere sull'arte 3/2:528 is wrong.) On the practice of admitting young noblemen to the Great Council before their twenty-fifth birthdays see Stanley Chojnacki, "Kinship Ties and Young Patricians in Fifteenth-Century Venice," RQ 38 (1985): 240-70.

[50] I-Vas, Avogaria di Comun, Matrimoni con notizie dei figli. A marriage contract survives in the Avogaria di Comun, Matrimoni, Contratti L.4, fol. 381' (reg. 143/4), but is not currently accessible to the public.

[51] Helena's will was kindly shared with me by Rebecca E. Edwards. Cicogna refers to a will of 10 October 1567 that Zantani made just before his death, which is preserved in the Testamenti Gradenigo (Inscrizioni veneziane 2:16n.). Presumably it is included in the extensive Gradenigo family papers at I-Vas, which are as yet insufficiently indexed. (I am grateful to Anne MacNeil for inquiring about this.) Michelangelo Muraro cites an ostensible copy of the will at I-Vmc, MS P.D. 2192 V, int. 12, but the document in question is presently missing; Il "libro secondo" di Francesco e Jacopo dal Ponte (Bassano and Florence, 1992), p. 382. Cicogna quotes enough of this will, however, to show that Zantani took pains to have his name day celebrated every year thereafter: "Egli fu l'ultimo della casa patrizi Zantani, e col suo testamento ordinò che delle sue entrate fosser ogn'anno de' trentasei nobili dassero in elezione nel Maggior Consiglio."

[52] Zantani's clan died out with his death. Nonetheless, Pompeo Molmenti's statement that Antonio lived in the present Casa Goldoni is oversimple; see La storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle origini alla caduta della repubblica, 7th ed., 3 vols. (Bergamo, 1928), 3:360-61. For the information, noted by Dennis Romano, that Venetian patrician families often had residences in several different parishes see Chap. 1 above, n. 1.

12.
Main staircase, Casa Goldoni, formerly Palazzo Centani (Zantani), parish of San Tomà.
Photo courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm.

grandfather of the same name, who had reputedly battled the Turks and been brutally killed and dismembered for public display while a governor in Modone.^[53] According to one account, it was owing to "the glorious death of his grandfather" that Antonio gained his title of Conte e Cavaliere, bestowed with the accompaniment of an immense privilege by Pope Julius III, who occupied the papacy between 1550 and 1555.^[54] Later in life Antonio served as governor of the Ospedale degli Incurabili. One of his memorable acts, as Deputy of Building, was to order in 1566 the erection of a new church modeled on designs of Sansovino.^[55] He died before he could see it, in mid-October 1567, and was buried at the church of Corpus Domini.^[56]

Music historians remember only two major aspects of Zantani's biography. The first is that he was foiled in trying to publish a collection of four-voice madrigals that included four Petrarch settings from the Musica nova, then owned exclusively by the prince of Ferrara. The second is that he patronized musical gatherings at his home — gatherings that involved Perissone, Parabosco, and others in Willaert's circle, as recounted in Orazio Toscanella's dedication to him of his little handbook on world geography, I nomi antichi, e moderni (given in full in Appendix, E).

It is well noted that you delight in music, since for so long you paid the company of the Fabretti and the company of the Fruttaruoli, most excellent singers and players, who made the most fine music in your house, and you kept in your pay likewise the incomparable lutenist Giulio dal Pistrino. In the same place convened Girolamo Parabosco, Annibale [Padovano], organist of San Marco, Claudio [Merulo] da Correggio, [also] organist of San Marco, Baldassare Donato, Perissone [Cambio], Francesco Londarit, called "the Greek," and other musicians of immortal fame. One knows very well that you had precious musical works composed and had madrigals printed entitled Corona di diversi.^[57]

Among the recipients of Zantani's patronage, then, were guilds of instrumentalists and singers, solo lutenists, organists, chapel and chamber singers, and polyphonic composers (primarily of madrigals and canzoni villanesche ), several of them doubling in various of these roles. Both the Fabretti and the Fruttaruoli were long-established groups. The Fabretti were the official instrumentalists of the doge, performing for many of the outdoor civic festivals, and the Fruttaruoli a confraternity

[53] For modern biographies of Antonio's grandfather and father, see Cicogna, Inscrizioni veneziane 2:13-14.

[54] See Toscanella's dedication to Zantani, I nomi antichi, e moderni, fol. [3], with further on Zantani's family, heraldry, etc. The origins of Zantani's knighthood with Julius III would seem to be confirmed by a manuscript book on arms written by Zantani and titled "Antonio Zantani conte e cavaliere del papa Iulio Terzo da Monte," as reported by Cicogna, Inscrizioni veneziane 2:16. If Toscanella was right about the immense size of the privilege, this may account for Zantani's apparent increase in patronage in the early to mid-1550s.

[55] See Bernard Aikema and Dulcia Meijers, Nel regno dei poveri: arte e storia dei grandi ospedali veneziani in età moderna, 1474-1797 (Venice, 1989), p. 132, and Muraro, Il "libro secondo," p. 382.

[56] The church was secularized in 1810 and later destroyed; see Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità veneziane, ovvero origini della denominazioni stradali di Venezia, 4th ed. (Venice, 1887), pp. 208-10. On Zantani's death date see Cicogna, Inscrizioni veneziane 2:16.

[57] See Appendix, E, fol. [2']. The passage was first quoted and trans. in Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:446-47.

that likewise performed outdoor processions.^[58] Apparently Zantani paid members of both the Fabretti and Fruttaruoli over a considerable time and, as Toscanella's wording implies, also kept the lutenist dal Pistrino on regular wages, perhaps as part of his domestic staff. Toscanella did not mean to suggest that these musicians all convened ("concorrevano") at once, but he was calling up the idea of collective gatherings in the sense of private musical academies.^[59]

Zantani's foiled efforts in music printing might be seen as part of a larger attempt to increase his familial patrimony. In approximately 1556-57 he assembled with the aid of another gentleman, Zuan Iacomo Zorzi, the musical anthology that eventually led to his confrontation with agents protecting the interests of the prince of Ferrara. The anthology was to be published with an ornate title page and with the title La eletta di tutta la musica intitolata corona di diversi novamente stampata: libro primo (Plate 13).^[60] Zorzi contributed a dedication addressed to none other than Zantani himself (Plate 14) — this despite the fact that Zantani was not only the print's backer but in reality its chief owner and producer. Zorzi's dedication praised

[58] The latter were named for their renowned promenade on the so-called Feast of the Melons, which reenacted an occasion when they had been feted with melons by Doge Steno — an honor that they repeated ritually in every first year of a doge's reign by bearing melons in great flowered chests and small silver basins on a certain day in August and processing with trumpets, drums, and mace bearers from the campo of Santa Maria Formosa through the Merceria and piazza San Marco to the Ducal Palace. For further information see Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità veneziane, ovvero origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia, rev. ed. Lino Moretti (Venice, 1988), pp. 266-67: "[L]a confraternita dei Fruttajuoli, eretta fino dal 1423, aveva qui un ospizio composto di 19 camere, ed un oratorio sacro a S. Giosafatte. Quest'arte, unita a quella degli Erbajuoli, aveva un altro oratorio dedicato alla medesimo santo presso la chiesa di S. Maria Formosa. I Fruttajuoli col Erbajuoli erano gli eroi della cosi detta festa dei Meloni. Dovendo essi presentare al doge nel mese d'agosto del primo anno del di lui principato un regalo di meloni (poponi), solevano nel giorno determinato raccorsi in Campo di S. Maria Formosa, e per la Merceria, e per la Piazza di S. Marco, preceduti dallo stendardo di S. Nicolò e da trombe, tamburri e mazzieri [mace-bearers], recarsi in corpo a palazzo, portando i poponi in grande ceste infiorate, e sopra argentei bacini. Introdotti nella Sala del Banchetto, complivano il doge per mezo del loro avvocato, poscia gli facevano offrire da due putti un sonetto ed un mazzolino di fiori, e finalmente fra mezzo le grida di Viva il Serenissimo! consegnavano i poponi allo scalco ducale."

[59] We can deduce what stretch of time Toscanella's description covered by considering the musicians' biographies. Of the madrigalists mentioned, Parabosco came to Venice around 1540, Perissone at least by 1544, and Donato by 1545, whereas the minor composer and contralto Londariti was hired into the chapel at San Marco only in 1549 (see Chap. 9 below, n. 4 and passim). By 1557 Parabosco had died. Londariti left the chapel around the same time (see Ongaro, "The Chapel of St. Mark's," pp. 187-88, who dates his departure between 6 April 1556 and 10 December 1558), and Perissone had most likely passed away by 1562 (ibid., p. 165 n. 194 and Document 272).

Giulio dal Pistrino is almost undoubtedly the same as Giulio Abondante, who published five books of lute music (three extant) between 1546 and 1587. See Henry Sybrandy, "Abondante, Giulio," in The New Grove 1:20, and Luigi F. Tagliavini, "Abondante, Giulio," Dizionario biografico degli italiani 1:55-56.

The organists Padovano and Merulo did not enter San Marco until 1552 and 1557, respectively, Merulo having taken Parabosco's place on the latter's death; but Padovano, true to his name, was a Paduan who had long been in the area, and Merulo has been placed in Venice at least as early as 1555. The latest information on these organists has been amassed by Rebecca A. Edwards, "Claudio Merulo: Servant of the State and Musical Entrepreneur in Later Sixteenth-Century Venice" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1990), to whom I am grateful for sharing various information before her dissertation was filed. On Padovano and his family, see Edwards, p. 94 n. 27. Edwards speculates that since Merulo witnessed a document for Zantani in Venice on 27 November 1555 (p. 214 n. 2) he may have been studying in Venice for some time before 1555, possibly under Parabosco (pp. 269-70). Merulo's close ties with Parabosco can be deduced from the dedication of the latter's Quattro libri delle lettere amorose (Venice, 1607) by the editor Thomaso Porcacchi, who called Merulo "ora molto intrinseco del Parabosco che glie l'haveva lasciate [i.e., le lettere ] in mano avanti la sua morte"; see Edwards, p. I n. I. Edwards also establishes that the printer and bookseller Bolognino Zaltieri, whom Toscanella names as having engaged him to assemble I nomi antichi, e moderni ("diede carico à me in particolare di raccorre . . . i Nomi antichi, & moderni," fol. [2]), was one of Merulo's partners; see Chap. 3 and Chap. 4, pp. 217-18.

[60] The "corona" was probably a reference to the Zantani family heraldry. See Appendix, E, fol. [3].

13.
La eletta di tutta la musica intitolata corona di diversi novamente stampata:
libro primo  (Venice, 1569), title page.
Photo courtesy of Musikabteilung der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

14.
La eletta di tutta la musica intitolata corona di diversi novamente
stampata: libro primo  (Venice, 1569), dedication from Zuan Iacomo
Zorzi to Antonio Zantani. Photo courtesy of Musikabteilung der 
Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

Zantani as the "'padre' of musicians, literati, sculptors, architects, painters, antiquarians . . . [and] all sorts of honored men."

The anthology (or most of it) was apparently printed by about 1558 but not issued until 1569, ten years after the Ferrarese had brought out the Musica nova. It is worth recounting a bit of the well-known story behind the print and its relation to

Willaert's Musica nova,^[61] because it tells us a lot about Zantani's character and about the new function Petrarchan tropes and styles assumed in helping to define identity in a thickly populated urban world. Zorzi had secured the original privilege for La eletta in 1556, but Zantani immediately had it transferred to his own name. Apparently he wanted to avoid the vulgar process of procuring the privilege himself, which it was the usual business of printers to do.^[62] On 19 January 1557 Zorzi was granted the privilege for the print along with approval to essay a new printing technique. And both were transferred to Zantani on 29 March 1557.^[63]

The anthology was obviously hot property from the start. In addition to Willaert's previously unpublished Petrarch settings, it included new works by Willaert's prominent disciples Donato and Perissone.^[64] Unlike the Musica nova, La eletta was planned from the outset as an appealing four-voice potpourri. The reader for La eletta's Venetian license summarized its literary contents as "diverse types of poems" such as "canzoni, sonetti, madrigali, sestine, ballate, and so forth . . . treating youthful topics and amorous emotions."^[65]

Ironically, this project brought the Cavaliere more lasting notoriety than any of his other ventures. When Zantani planned the publication he undoubtedly intended the settings from the Musica nova to crown it. He probably got hold of them through his connection with Willaert's three protégés, Parabosco, Perissone, and Donato: it was they who, between 1545 and 1553, had published parallel settings imitating those that later became part of Willaert's Musica nova collection and who therefore must have had closest access to them.^[66] As it turned out, however, Polissena Pecorina had already sold the whole corpus (or something close to the printed version of it) with sole rights to Prince Alfonso d'Este, who meant to have it published by Gardane in an exclusive complete edition. The news that Zantani's

[61] For a retelling of the story with illuminating new details and copious documentation see Richard J. Agee and Jessie Ann Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova di Willaert," Rivista italiana di musicologia 24 (1989): 219-305. The authors were kind enough to share the article with me in typescript before its publication. Since Agee and Owens publish all of the relevant documents thus far known, I cite their article for documents, including ones first unearthed by others.

[62] Agee and Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova," Document 7, pp. 246-47. The documents directly concerning printing privileges were nearly all first transcribed in Richard J. Agee, "The Privilege and Venetian Music Printing in the Sixteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1982).

[63] Ibid., Documents 9 and 10, pp. 248-49 (originally located by Martin Morell), which mention the use of new characters and staves.

[64] The settings by Rore, Ferrabosco, Francesco dalla Viola, Heinrich Schaffen, and Ivo had all been published before 1556. The three settings by Donato were not brought out elsewhere until Donato's Secondo libro a 4 was issued in 1568. Three of Perissone's four were still unique in 1569 (a fourth had come out in Gardane's print De diversi autori il quarto libro de madrigali a quattro voci a note bianche novamente dato in luce (Venice, 1554); Vogel/Einstein 1554¹; RISM 1554²⁸). This left only the following settings (in addition to Perissone's) as apparently unique to La eletta when it was finally issued: single madrigals by Giachet Berchem and Sperindio and a group of eight settings by Giovan Contino, all clustered toward the end of the volume. In all, its cultural capital had radically dropped.

[65] See the reader's report for the license cited in Agee and Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova, " Document 4, dated 28 November 1556: "ho letto, et ben esaminato alcune rime diverse, poste in canto, et altre volte stampate, come sono Canzoni, Sonetti, Madrigali, Sestine, Ballate, etcetera né in quelle ho ritrovato cosa contra nostra Santa fede né contra l'honore et fama di alcun principe, Et con tutto che trattino materie giovanili, et affetti amorosi, non sono però tali, che non si possino stampare senza pericolo che corrompino gli buoni costumi" (p. 245).

[66] See Chap. 9 below.

print was to be issued imminently with Willaert's four-voice madrigals came to the prince's attention only in late 1558, setting off a volley of hostile exchanges between a whole cast of characters, Venetian and Ferrarese: Zantani; the unhappy Ferrarese ambassador in Venice, Girolamo Faleti; Alfonso's secretary at home, Giovanni Battista Pigna; and Alfonso's father, Duke Ercole.^[67]

Clearly Zantani had pinned great expectations on his intended Corona, in which he had already invested considerable labor and funds by Christmas 1558, when notice of it reached the sponsors of Musica nova in Ferrara.^[68] In the battle that ensued, Zantani turned hot with anger and humiliation. A famous letter to Faleti from late 1558 sputtered indignantly at the idea that those two "mecanici" Gardane and Zarlino should be allowed to hamper the well-laid plans of a nobleman like himself.

I would never have thought that you would ever create such displeasure about something by which I am made unhappy or that you would give such trouble as you have to the petition of certain tradesmen like Gardane and Father Gioseffe Zarlino and, without giving me to understand anything, order me now to dispense with the four madrigals taken out of the book of Mr. Adrian . . . (and not even taken out in such numbers as they are [found] in that book); and they have removed your authority ["mezo"] and that of your excellent Duke. To you I am just a servant of yours and moreover to Francesco dalla Viola and those other mercenary people. But you know very well that my father was a consigliere and always very favored in his dealings even by the doge and now I on the contrary must accept this offense. I can never believe that the Duke should want to create such vexation not only for me but all my relatives. I tell you now that my privilege is also [at issue] here and in my petition it says that I was making "a selection from all the madrigals both printed and not printed" and this was in 1556. But I turn to you and say that I will be grieved by you interminably that for four madrigals you should use me thus.^[69]

[67] Pecorina's role and many details of these exchanges were first brought to light by Anthony Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova: New Evidence, New Speculations," JAMS 26 (1973): 132-45. Other studies have followed up on this and various other aspects of the Musica nova 's printing history, namely David S. Butchart, "'La Pecorina' at Mantua, Musica Nova at Florence," Early Music 13 (1985): 358-66, and most recently Agee and Owens, "La Stampa della Musica Nova. "

[68] Agee and Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova, " Document 48, pp. 276-77 (see also n. 71 below).

[69] Ibid., Document 45, p. 274: "Io non harei mai pensato che V.S. mi fese mai dispiacer né cosa che per lei mi dolese e dese fastidio che a peticion de certi mecanici come è il Gardana, Pre Isepo Zerlin, senza averme mai fato intender cosa alcuna, farmi far hora comandamento ch'io dispena quatro madrigali tolti fuora del libro di m. Adriano et non più in tanto numero che sono in quel libro et hano tolto il vostro mezo e della eccellentia del signior duca. Io li son ancora mi suo servitor et piu di Francesco Dalla Viola et st'altri mercenarii et sa ben V.S. che sempre che mio padre esta consegier ancio[?] dose si è stato sempre favorevole in le cose sue et che hora mo alincontro per ben io deeba [sic] ricever mal io non posso mai creder che'l signior duca mi voglia usarmi dispiacer non solum a me, ma eciam a tutto il mio parentado. Io ve dicho che'l mio privilegio si è ancian a questo et in la mia suplica dice ch'io ho fato una selta de tutti i madrigali cusì in stampa come non in stampa et questo fo del 1556 ma vi torno adir che [    ] mi dolarò di voi in sempiterno che per quatro madrigali usarme tal termine." The letter is undated, but Agee and Owens note that it was written no later than 6 December 1558. Facs. in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 14, cols. 671-72. My translation does not attempt to eliminate the awkwardness of the original.

On the positions held by Antonio's father, who became a consigliere to doge Lorenzo Priuli in 1557, see G. B. di Crollalanza, Dizionario storico-blasonico delle famiglie nobili e notabili italiane estinte e fiorenti, 3 vols. (Pisa, 1886-90; repr. Bologna, 1965) 3:119.

To Zantani's mind the Ferrarese were launching a direct assault on his kin and his venerable social status. In the wake of the feud Zantani was even contemplating a lawsuit. Owing to the machinations of Pigna he did not follow through on this. Pigna enlisted the efforts of the weary Faleti to urge Zantani away from jeopardizing Prince Alfonso's good graces simply in order to thwart a lowly composer like Francesco dalla Viola, who was only engineering the publication on the prince's behalf.^[70] On Christmas Day 1558, after securing Zantani's reluctant cooperation, Faleti wrote a beleaguered report to Duke Ercole, updating him on the current state of affairs. Here we see Zantani's ire in a profoundly Venetian light.^[71] The Ferrarese should not imagine that it is in Faleti's power to make the Cavaliere stop sounding his case and stop trying to retain his privilege in order not to lose a "great deal of money that he has spent in printing his work." For "it is the custom of this Republic to let everyone be heard, not to say one of their most principal nobles, for whom so many have by now exerted themselves."^[72]

Nonetheless, after all rank had been pulled, it was Ercole and Alfonso who came off victors — courtly princes over city nobles. Zantani apparently agreed reluctantly to delay publication of La eletta for a ten-year period. When it was finally issued, with Zorzi's dedication to Zantani, the Cavaliere had been dead for two years.

These musical activities formed part of a dense thicket of patronage activities discernible through both dialogic writings and art-historical chronicles. All told, they reveal Zantani as an avid collectionist, who added music as part of the vernacular arts to other artifacts favored by Venetian antiquarian types, especially medals, antiques, and portraits. All of these were common fare among local patricians, who heaped honor on their families' names by their systematic additions to domestic patrimony. Antonio stands apart from most other patrons in actually performing the labors of some of the artisanal crafts he patronized. In addition to the music-printing technique he invented, he produced his own prints of engraved coins.^[73] He practiced the art of engraving himself, as well as painting and, even more surprisingly, the gentler work of embroidery.^[74]

Zantani's dual roles as amateur artisan and collector were brought together most intensely in his work with medals. In time he assembled one of the most noted medal collections of his day and by 1548 collaborated with the famous engraver

[70] Agee and Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova, " Document 47, pp. 275-76.

[71] Ibid., Document 48, pp. 276-77.

[72] "[S]e questi pensano che sia di mio potere il fare che predetto Cavaliere non produca le sue ragioni a diffesa sua et a mantenimento del suo privileggio per non perdere una grossa spesa che ha fatto nel stampar l'opera sua, s'ingannano, essendo costume di questa Republica il dar modo a tutti che siano uditi nelle loro ragioni, ne che a uno de principalissimi suoi gentil'huomeni a favore del quale homai tanti si sono messi" (ibid.).

[73] On the former see ibid., Documents 9 and 10, pp. 248-49.

[74] See Toscanella, I nomi antichi, e moderni, fol. [2']: "Non è nascoso ancora, che S. S. C. dipinge, ricama & intaglia sopra ogni credenza bene."

Enea Vico in producing Le imagini con tutti i riversi trovati et le vite de gli imperatori tratte dalle medaglie et dalle historie de gli antichi. Libro primo, a book of medals depicting the first twelve Roman emperors together with a large variety of reverses portraying their lives.^[75]

Zantani may well have printed Le imagini himself, or at least been centrally involved in doing so. Embedded in the elegant title page was the Zantani coat of arms and at the base of the left-hand column Zantani's crest showing a leopard and a scimitar in memory of his grandfather's bravery (Plate 15). On the final recto is Zantani's printer's mark, a device of a leashed dog (Plate 16), decorated with two mottoes that locate the crafts of printing and engraving within standard themes of civic virtue: "Solus honor" and "Malo mori quam transgredi" ("Only honor" and "I would rather die than transgress"). The dog, as it turns out, occupied a special place in Zantani's symbolic system. The only painting Zantani is undisputably known to have commissioned was one done by Jacopo dal Ponte around 1550 of Zantani's two hounds (Plate 17).^[76] Moreover, elements of canine iconography found in Le imagini reappeared on the title page of La eletta (Plate 13), where a leashed dog was positioned at the base of the cartouche with Zantani's mottoes draped around the dog's tree and on the crown at the top. Within this symbolic network the dog represented honor and fidelity. As the first substantial artifact that Zantani bequeathed to posterity, Le imagini thus designates an ethical and intellectual space with intriguing symbolic links to the views of patrimonial objects he later expressed concerning La eletta. While speaking outwardly to collecting, Le imagini's prefaces and plates moralize ancient history as the vaunted prototype for sixteenth-century forms of patriarchy.

Zantani clearly did not do any of the actual engraving for the volume; rather, he allotted to himself the tasks of writing two prefaces and collecting and organizing the medals' reverses, with representations of the emperors' careers.^[77] At the outset of the prefaces Zantani insists that his main labor, that of comprehending the totality of the emperors' lives and deeds in visual portrayals, has been a historical one. The reader's task, he claims, should (like his) be to consider the ancients' actions with the intellect

[75] Aretino's praise of this work in a letter dated April 1548 suggests it had been already printed by that month (Lettere 4:207'; repr. in Letter sull'arte 2:215-16). The projected second book was never published, and in some copies (like that at Harvard) the words "Libro primo" have been scraped away. On Le imagini see also Marino Zorzi, ed., Collezioni di antichità a Venezia nei secoli della repubblica (dai libri e documenti della Biblioteca Marciana) (Rome, 1988), pp. 70-71.

[76] I am grateful to David Rosand for this information (private communication) and for sending me proofs from Muraro, Il "libro secondo," which documents that the commission was made in 1548 and paid for in 1550 (pp. 70-71). The painting was acquired by the Louvre while this book was in press.

[77] This is the division of labor suggested by Vico in his Discorsi . . . sopra le medaglie de gli antichi divisi in due libri (Venice, 1558), where he refers to the "medaglie di rame di Augusto, nel libro de' riversi de' primi XII. Cesari da me fatto e gia in luce (di cui è stato autore l'honorato cavalliere m. Anton Zantani)" (p. 84). It is not absolutely certain who published the book, but Zantani is the most likely candidate since his family arms appear on the title page; see Crollalanza, Dizionario storico-blasonico 3:119/2, and Eugenio Morando di Custoza, Libro d'arme di Venezia (Verona, 1979), tavola CCCLXXX, no. 3413. The Latin translation of the work issued in 1553 as Omnium caesarum verissime imagines ex antiquis numismatis desumptae replaced Zantani's arms with the lion of Venice and made various other alterations; the entry in the National Union Catalogue attributes the printing of this later volume to Paolo Manuzio, as does Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts: Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts, pt. 2, Italian Sixteenth-Century Books, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), p. 778.

15.
Le imagini con tutti i riversi trovati et le vite de gli imperatori tratte dalle
medaglie et dalle historie de gli antichi: libro primo  (Venice, 1548), title page.
Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago, Special Collections.

16.
Le imagini con tutti i riversi trovati et le vite de gli imperatori tratte dalle 
medaglie et dalle historie de gli antichi: libro primo  (Venice, 1548), printer's mark.
Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago, Special Collections.

as much as to gaze at their portraits with the eyes.^[78] This admonishment precipitates an awkward moral lesson. From looking and reading "one sees and appreciates the value of virtue, to what unhappiness wrongdoing leads, of what profit is honest conversation, how easily men's thoughts change, how a virtuous man is really free and an evil one a servant, and finally how no one can escape the providence of God in receiving either penalties or rewards."^[79] As the embodiment of the virtues Zantani aimed to depict, the emperors' lives were necessarily idealized to mirror the mythologized self-imagery that made Venice out as a new Rome.^[80] This preoccupation with moral ques-

[78] "[I]o intendo di dare in luce le imagini de gli imperatori tratte dalle antiche medaglie con tutte quelle maniere di riversi che alle mani pervenute mi sono, come che non picciol fatica in ciò habbi havuta, & aggiugnervi la somma delle vite, & operationi fatte da quegli. . . . Prendete adunque ò lettori questa dimostratione di buona volontate verso voi, & quanto con l'occhio del corpo riguarderete le effigie de gli antichi, tanto con il lume dello intelletto considerate le loro attioni, prendendo que'begli essempi del vivere, che si convengono" (Le imagini, p. [4]).

[79] "Poca è la fatica di guardare, & di leggere, ma la utilitate, & il frutto è copioso, & grande, perche si vede, & istima quanto può la virtute, à che infelicitade si volga l'errore, di quale giovamento sia l'homente libero, & uno scelerato servo. & finalmente come niuno fugge la providentia di Dio nel ricevere le pene, ò i premi, ch'egli s'habbia meritato" (ibid., pp. [4]-[5]).

[80] Only occasionally did he counterbalance the representations with moral criticism (some of Nero's reverses depict courtesans, plunder, and the like).

17.
Jacopo dal Ponte,  Portait of Two Hounds  (Due bracchi ), ca. 1550. Commissioned by
Antonio Zantani in 1548, paid for 1550. Private collection.

tions was to return in a little literary composition of his, the "Dubbi morali del cavaliere Centani" — a brief contribution to a popularizing ethics organized into a pedantic series of questions and responses on temperance, abstinence, and honesty.^[81]

In the last analysis Zantani begged any exegetical questions that might emerge from these exercises. While he could have "interpreted and made declarations about the reverses," Zantani wrote, he believed such an effort in many ways to be "difficult and vain" and so left this to the judgment of each individual.^[82] Even this he turns to moral account, for true judgment is seen as an act of divination, the revelation of a stable reality whose truth is unassailable. After all, "it can easily happen that the contin-

[81] Zantani's "Dubbi morali" is found in Book II of the Quattro libri de dubbi con le solutioni a ciascun dubbio accommodate, published by Giolito (whose name does not appear on the title page) and ed. by Ortensio Landi (Venice, 1552), pp. 174-76. The volume is discussed by Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari, 2 vols. (Rome, 1890-97; repr. Rome, n.d., 1:368-70. On Zantani's composition of "dubbi amorosi" for another volume edited by Landi see Muraro, Il "libro secondo," p. 382 (I have not seen the latter "dubbi").

[82] "Io poteva . . . forzarmi nella presente opera de interpretare, & dichiarire i riversci delle medaglie, ma riputando io tale fatica in molte parti essere & difficile, & vana, ho voluto lasciare al giudicio di ciescaduno questa cura, & pensiero" (Le imagini, p. [6]).

ual diligence of some students . . . may reveal fitting and true interpretations, [while] many others [are] sooner apt to guess than to judge the truth."^[83] "The risk of error is very great," he cautions, "and the fruits dubious and few."^[84] His preference was the wordless language of pictures and his pleasure the tasks of taxonomy: organizing the reverses into a visual chronicle, separating copper ones from gold and silver, and the like. Less verbal than many of his fellow patricians, Zantani nonetheless longed for the same moralized polity represented by good olden times and timeless old goods.

The moralizing tone Zantani adopted in Le imagini and in the "Dubbi" recalls many writers' emphases on Helena's virtue — a virtue that was mutually produced through encomiastic representations of her and through her own forms of social action. Like many Venetian noblewomen Helena seems not only to have stood for ideals of virtue but to have lived out her personal life in pious acts of charity. Toward the end of her life, on 22 June 1580, she organized such acts in a lengthy and detailed will inscribed by her own hand (Appendix, D). Following Venetian tradition she requested a burial "senza alcun pompa" in the same arch of the church of Corpus Domini where her father-in-law and husband were buried. For the rest she mostly specified distributions of alms: ten-ducat sums to various churches, institutions of charity, and to the prisoners of the Fortezza, altogether totaling one hundred ducats; ten-ducat dowries for three needy girls; all of her woolen and leather fabrics among "our poor relatives"; and the release of all her debtors.^[85]

By comparison, Antonio's enactments of virtue took more public and symbolic forms. At the crux of his collecting activities was a family museum that bound civic virtue together with patrimonial fame. In keeping with this, the legacy of Zantani's work with medals not only presents him in the guise of moralist but shows him in the archetypal mold prevalent from the fifteenth century of the Venetian antiquarian engrossed by the ancient world and intent on preserving the past. In some forms, this sort of preservation could take merely fetishistic and sterile forms of

[83] "[M]olto bene possa avvenire, che la continova diligenza d'alcuni studiosi, accompagnata dal giudicio, & bello intendimento di varie cose, possa ritrovare acconcie, & vere interpretationi, & molti altri essere atti piu presto ad indovinare, che giudicare la verità" (ibid.).

[84] "[I]l rischio di errare è grandissimo, il frutto dubbio, & poco, & molto habbia dello impossibile per l'oscurità delle cose avolte nella longhezza, & nella ingiuria del tempo: percioche le cose dalla memoria nostra lontane sogliono seco recare ignoranza, & l'antichita guasta, & corrompe i segni di quelle" (ibid.).

[85] Helena's will resembles those of other patrician women in Venice, whose bequests emphasized private relations with neighbors, servants, and friends, charitable institutions, and bilateral and natal kinship relations over and above the patriline. Among studies that have dealt with this question, see Stanley Chojnacki, "Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975): 571-600; Donald E. Queller and Thomas Madden, "Father of the Bride: Fathers, Daughters, and Dowries in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Venice," RQ 46 (1993): 685-711, esp. p. 707; and (most importantly for the sixteenth century) Dennis Romano, "Aspects of Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice," RQ 46 (1993): 712-33, esp. pp. 721-23 on female testators. Romano distinguishes between a "primary system" of patronage, with objects as the product (as generated by commissions) and a "secondary system" of patronage with objects as the sign (as effected through donations and bequests). Wills, for Romano, formed central instruments for the enactment of secondary forms of patronage, not least because they were relatively public in nature. In Helena's case, they represent a prime documentary source for our knowledge of how such patronage ensured the female patrician's virtue and the salvation of her soul through the care of less fortunate social ranks and thus pulled her acts into a complex circulation of culturally encoded goods and favors between high and low.

collectionism. Yet most Venetian antiquarians did not simply accumulate items piecemeal but made systematic acquisitions of vases, numismata, engraved jewels, and other antique artifacts, organizing them as a means of honoring the ancestral home. This is the end that is consolidated through production of Le imagini, as affirmed by the prominent Zantani iconography that decorates its title page.

In the sixteenth century antiquarians increasingly complemented their domestic patrimony with portraiture. Titian's painting of Helena, now apparently lost, could well have been Antonio's commission, forming part of larger patterns of acquisition no longer visible to us.^[86] Venetians often purchased Flemish paintings, thus paralleling the acquisitions of Venetian musical patrons.^[87] Here we can begin to piece together the cult of Helena, the cultivation of northern polyphony (and painting), and the antique collectionism that in combination marked Antonio's world. All three constituted precious components in the patrimonial order. Objects distant in both time and place formed monuments to the breadth and power of his family estate, in which Helena was central as both image and property. It seems almost inconceivable that an interested party like Zantani, much accustomed to shaping the creative forces around him, did not have a hand in constructing the cult formed around his wife. How different would such constructions have been from a monument to his medal collection like Le imagini or a testimonial to his salon like La eletta? The allusive networks within which such encomia and commemorations existed — and into which dialogic modes drew their practitioners more generally — were animated by the complex exchanges of goods, favor, speech, and song that created value and fame.^[88]

[86] Titian's portrait is not dealt with among the lost portraits taken up in the comprehensive catalogue of Titian's works by Harold E. Wethey, who apparently missed Aretino's reference to it; see The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition, 2 vols. (New York, 1971), vol. 2, The Portraits. Vasari's portrait did have its genesis in a familial commission, but from Helena's brother Antonio Barozzi. Vasari's notebook records the portrait as follows: "Ricordo come adi 10 di marzo 1542 Messer Andrea Boldu Gentiluomo Venetiano mj allogò dua ritrattj dal mezzo la figura insu[;] uno era Madonna Elena Barozzi et [l'altro era] Messer Angelo suo fratello de qualj ne facemo mercato che fra tuttj dua dovessi avere scudi venti doro cioè scudi 21" (Il libro delle ricordanze di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Alessandro del Vita [Rome, 1938], p. 39).

On sixteenth-century collections that mixed antiques and portraits see, for instance, Logan's description, which matches Toscanella's representation of Zantani: "Two possible ancestors of the Renaissance art collection are the collection of family relics and memorials and the antiquarian collection. The first Venetian family museums in the fifteenth century were . . . of the former kind — collections of arms and banners and other family relics — and doubtless in such shrines to the family lares and penates many sixteenth-century portraits found a natural place. The evidence suggests, however, that the systematic collection of works of art tended to be more closely associated with the collection of antique objects"; see Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, 1470-1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage (New York, 1972), p. 153.

[87] On antiquarianism in Venice and the Veneto see Lanfranco Franzoni, "Antiquari e collezionisti nel cinquecento," in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3, Dal primo quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, pt. 3, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza, 1981), pp. 207-66. For a good general discussion of the phenomenon, with analysis of certain Venetian collections described in Marcantonio Michiel's Anonimo Morelliano, see Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, pp. 152-59. Logan reports that three-quarters of Venetian antiquarians also owned foreign paintings, with Flemish ones predominating. He adds that in general "the number of Flemish works tended to be in proportion to the size of the antique collection" (p. 158), and suggests that some of this may be accounted for by the trade lines through which both were acquired.

[88] For a fine anthropological treatment of the politics and forms of commodity exchange in social life see Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 3-63.

Here we might return to our starting point: the anxieties over the fashioning and winning of fame revealed in the dialogics of print culture by which we mainly come to know the Zantani. These anxieties had been adumbrated two centuries earlier in Petrarch's own verse, which called attention to the poet through his amorous obsession and his paradoxical complaints over the appropriation of his lyrics by the common fold. Central to the Venetians' construction of fame, apropos, was Petrarch's devotion in the Canzoniere to the cult of a single woman, a woman now often transformed into real flesh and blood, given voice, and sometimes satirized as sexually available. In all such forms, conventional and inverted, Petrarch's lyrics still provided the Renaissance master trope for figures of praise. As many critics have been quick to point out, moreover, Petrarch's praise of Laura is at root a monument to his own literary creation and the creation of his own self, as symbolized by the poet's laurel (the wreath of poetic achievement) and embodied in the verbal kinship Laura and laurel are given in his lyrics. This idea subtends the now classic semiotic analysis of Petrarch's poetic strategy proposed by John Freccero.^[89] In Freccero's words, Petrarch's laurel is "the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him as poet laureate."^[90] Restated in the balder terms of my analysis, what Petrarch demonstrated to later generations was not only how to praise others but how to make praise of others serve as praise of oneself. This idea is wedded to more recent notions of Petrarch's special role in early modern culture in establishing selfhood not just as an ideological site of subjectivity and autonomy but as a socially embedded site of agency and self-invention — "self-fashioning," as it has come to be called in the coinage of Stephen Greenblatt.^[91]

Critics since Freccero have elaborated the importance Petrarch's covert strategies of self-exaltation and self-fashioning assumed for the lyric in subsequent centuries. One of the most provocative commentaries comes from Nancy J. Vickers in her essay "Vital Signs: Petrarch and Popular Culture."^[92] Vickers's interest lies in the continuities between Petrarch's tropes and the tropes prevalent in present-day popular lyrics, a continuity she sees made possible by our technological capacity for wide-

[89] "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5 (1975): 34-40.

[90] Ibid., p. 37.

[91] I refer to Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980) but also to more exclusively literary statements on the matter, notably Thomas Greene, "The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature," in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven, 1968), pp. 241-64, as well as the general notions of individuality as a salient feature of Renaissance culture, as defined by Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century. On Petrarch's specific role in this process see Arnaud Tripet, Pétrarque, ou la connaissance de soi (Geneva, 1967), Giuseppe Mazzotta, "The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self," Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 271-96, and most recently (and importantly), Albert Russell Ascoli, "Petrarch's Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the 'Ascent of Mount Ventoux,'" Stanford Italian Review 10 (1992): 5-43.

[92] Romanic Review 79 (1988): 184-95. For Petrarch's ambivalence about his appropriation by the common people see Vickers's analysis on p. 195 of a passage from his Familiari. Other studies locating Petrarchism in specific historical time and place that have influenced my recent thinking include those cited in n. 3 above.

spread reproduction of words and sounds. For Vickers, continuities within high lyric verse cannot alone account for the vast temporal and cultural dispersion of Petrarchan texts as material identities. They cannot account for what she calls "the multidirectional exchanges between high, middle, and popular cultures so radically enabled by the reconstitutions of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction."^[93] Here Vickers speaks of the culture of late-twentieth-century rock music. Yet her observations on how radically dispersed themes are inherited and traded between different social strata resonate with my own. For like her I am interested in how repetitions of Petrarchan tropes served to make famous the objects idolized, as well to create their authors' fame. More specifically, I am interested in how Petrarchan tropes were recast in dialogic forms to fashion fame in a dynamic urban environment. This means an environment receptive to the mobility of a kind of "middle class," of which most professional musicians formed a part, and receptive to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, in which Venice's many less-established immigrant patrons, as well as musicians, played a role. In the network of compacts formed between patrons and composers we see the dialectic mechanical reproduction formed with Petrarchan music and Petrarchizing words.

Appendix: Marco Trivisano

One case that deviates from the norm of the elusive patron as I have characterized it here may be that of Marco Trivisano, to whom Gardane dedicated Willaert's first book of motets for six voices in 1542. According to Gardane's dedication, this Trivisano housed a "most honored ridotto " in which "every sort of musical instrument" was kept, where "the most excellent things . . . [were] continuously sung and played" and the most noble persons who delighted in singing and playing habitually retired.^[94] More than that, Gardane states that Trivisano himself not only delighted in hearing music but was accomplished in both the theory and practice of it, singing and playing.^[95]

The usual presumption holds that this is the same man as the Marcantonio Trevisano (ca. 1475-1554) who served as one of the city's three procurators from 1549 and as doge from 1553 until his death less than a year later. If this is correct, and we may never know for sure, then, owing to his high-ranking position, there are many more writings about him than exist for other musical patrons. Already about sixty-seven years old in 1542, the Trevisano of political fame was remembered for a legendary moral integrity and a personal diffidence that verged on caricaturing the kind of temperament idealized in the official

[93] "Vital Signs," p. 185.

[95] "[V]oi siete parimente & nobile & virtuoso, & . . . nella Musica non pure sopramodo vi dilettate: ma di lei ne siete buonissimo professore, ne solamente nella pratica, ma nella Theorica altresi. E si nel Canto, come nel Suono: Impercio che non è stromento Musicale, che con meravigliosa harmonia, & con dolcissima attentione di cui vi ode, non sia da voi ottimamente suonato." Ibid.

state rhetoric I have connected with Willaert's musical style. In his oration for Trevisano's election to the dogado, Bernardino Tomitano praised him for serenity, goodness, integrity of mind, innocence of habit, and singular affection for the patria.^[96] Similarly, an oration composed after his death by Bartolomeo Spathafora devoted four pages to elaborating his qualities of humility, temperance, fortitude, and modesty.^[97] And according to Sansovino, Trevisano's mildness and tranquillity of spirit were so great that he would have declined the dogeship but for the duty he felt toward state and kin.^[98] One wonders whether Sansovino was trying to rationalize Trevisano's peculiar dogeship, for a controversy arose even during the electoral process over whether Trevisano was too innocent for the task. His subsequent brief rule was distinguished almost entirely by mild Counter-Reformational escalations in civic expressions of piety.^[99]

[96] Oratione di M. Bernardino Tomitano, recitata per nome de lo studio de le arti padovano, ne la creatione del serenissimo principe di Vinetia M. Marcantonio Trivisano (Venice, 1554), fol. 2.

[97] Quattro orationi di M. Bartolomeo Spathafora di Moncata, gentil'huomo venetiano l'una in morte del serenissimo Marc'Antonio Trivisano . . . (Venice, 1554), pp. 13-33, esp. pp. 23-26. On p. 19 Spathafora wrote, "Egli fu di vita irreprensibile, di prudentia incomparabile, nè solamente giusto, & pietoso, ma liberale, & magnifico in verso la patria."

[98] See Venetia citta nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIII. libri da M. Francesco Sansovino . . . (Venice, 1581): "Senatore di cosi innocente vita, & singolare per Santità, che si hebbe fatica a fargli accettare il Principato. Percioche lo huomo ottimo, avezzo a i costumi del tutto lontani dalla mondana grandezza, non sapeva cio che fosse ambitione. Alla fine astretto da i suoi parenti, acconsentì alla volontà loro, contanta humiltà & con tanta modestia, che nulla piu; di maniera che temuto & reverito dall'universale, tenne le cose della giustitia nel suo saldo & inconcusso vigore" (Book 13, fol. 271').

[99] For further biographical details see Andrea da Mosto, I dogi di Venezia nella vita pubblica e privata (repr., Florence, 1977), pp. 254-59 and 570-71, and Gino Benzoni, ed., I dogi (Milan, 1982), pp. 121-22, 145, 188. Trevisano's career up to 1533 may be traced in Marin Sanuto, I diarii, ed. Rinaldo Fulin et al., 58 vols. (Venice, 1879-1903).

Chapter 4—
Ritual Language, New Music Encounters in the Academy of Domenico Venier

The previous two chapters have struggled to construct narratives from records of musical patronage that are sketchy at best. My approach has necessarily been bifocal, reading above for concrete particulars and below for deeper cultural meanings, while looking to the dialogics of vernacular exchange to mediate between them. Here I confront a different set of problems in the situation of literary patronage — a patronage at once of and by literati. These figures recorded their ideas and projects in the very media of poems, letters, and dialogues through which I tried to decipher hidden subtexts relevant to musical patronage. They devised the representations of themselves in the same texts in which they pretended to lay themselves bare, manipulating the claims avowed at the outer face of the text. Like the literary critic, the historian must therefore read surface for subsurface, always keeping in view the pressures, pleasures, and performative impulses in which such claims were implicated.

This chapter explores the most prominent literary patron at midcentury, a Venetian patrician named Domenico Venier. Venier lived from 1517 until 1582 and presided for virtually all of his adult life over the most renowned vernacular literary academy in Venice.^[1] Consolidated around the mid-forties, the academy became the

[1] The secondary literature on Venier and his circle is scant. The chief work is Pierantonio Serassi, ed., Rime di Domenico Veniero senatore viniziano raccolte ora per la prima volta ed illustrate (Bergamo, 1751), which includes the unique edition of his poetic works as well as a biography. A new edition by Tiziana Agostini Nordio of the Centro Interuniversitario di Studi Veneti, under the general direction of Giorgio Padoan, is currently in preparation. The brief entry on Venier's academy in Michele Maylender, Storia delle accademie d'Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna, 1926-30), 5:446, is based on Serassi's work. A few poems are anthologized in Daniele Ponchiroli, ed., Lirici del cinquecento (Turin, 1958), pp. 105-12, and Carlo Muscetta and Daniele Ponchiroli, eds., Poesia del quattrocento e del cinquecento (Turin, 1959), pp. 1373-77. For a critique of how cinquecento Petrarchists, including Venier, have been anthologized, see Amedeo Quondam, Petrarchismo mediato: per una critica della forma antologia (Rome, 1974). On the academy's effects in the second half of the century see some of the literature on Veronica Franco, whom Venier patronized in the 1570s: Riccardo Scrivano, "La poetessa Veronica Franco," in Cultura e letteratura nel cinquecento (Rome, 1966), pp. 195-228; Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), pp. 89-94, 154-55, 179-80, and passim; and Alvise Zorzi, Cortigiana veneziana: Veronica Franco e i suoi poeti (Milan, 1986), pp. 59-90. Discussions of Venier's own poetry are taken up in Dámaso Alonso and Carlos Bousoño, Seis calas en la expresión literaria española (prosa, poesía, teatro), 4th ed. (Madrid, 1970), pp. 51 and 92-94; Edoardo Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario e i lirici veneziani del tardo cinquecento (Rome, 1974), pp. 39-70; and Francesco Erspamer, "Petrarchismo e manierismo nella lirica del secondo cinquecento," in Storia della cultura veneta: il seicento, vol. 4, pt. 1, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza, 1983), pp. 192-97.

city's crossroads for local and foreign writers and remained so until Venier's death. Nowadays Venier's reputation has dramatically faded, only barely revived by renewed interest in the phenomena of lyric production, dispersion, and collection.^[2] Yet in his own day his life was marked by constant accolades that came to assume near-mythic proportions.^[3] His fame as an organizer of literary culture continued posthumously — long enough to have been included in the 1640s as interlocutor with Apollo, Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Seneca, Guicciardini, and others by an anonymous Florentine satirist lampooning the conversations of the Accademia degli Unisoni.^[4]

Let me begin to sketch some formative details of Venier and his circle of patrician friends as they developed in the second quarter of the century. Venier's coterie had been largely schooled together in the 1520s. By the 1530s they had already begun to fashion themselves as virtual heirs apparent to Venice's literary scene. Meanwhile most of them held civic offices and pursued various business interests. In 1546 a worsening case of gout seems to have prevented Venier from continuing to hold offices (as noblemen normally would), and at the same time his academic activities moved into high gear.^[5] His palazzo at Santa Maria Formosa quickly became the

[2] See, for example, Roberto Fedi, La memoria della poesia: canzonieri, lirici, e libri d'amore nel rinascimento (Rome, 1990), esp. pp. 43-46.

[3] The large number of sixteenth-century references mentioned below represents merely a fraction of what exists. Despite this, Venier's academic activities have not been well documented elsewhere — hence the rather heavy documentation that follows.

[4] This comes from a manuscript of satires entitled "Sentimenti giocosi havuti in Parnaso per L'Academia degli Unisoni," I-Vmc, Misc. P.D. 308C/IX. Other manuscript copies of these satires are listed by Ellen Rosand, "Barbara Strozzi, virtuosissima cantatrice: The Composer's Voice," JAMS 31 (1978): 250 n. 31.

[5] According to the electoral records of the Great Council, Venier was voted in as a senator on 26 October 1544 for a sixteen-month term that ended on 15 March 1546, after which he apparently did not serve for many years; I-Vas, Segretario alle voci, Elezioni del Maggior Consiglio, registro 2 (1541-52), fols. 40'-41. Zorzi summarizes the various offices held by Venier in Cortigiana veneziana, pp. 83-84 (without citing documents that provide the information but giving an overview of pertinent archives). The results of my archival searches have thus far agreed with Zorzi's information. On senatorial ranks see Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (London, 1980), pp. 59-81, and the glossary, p. xvi, and Oliver Logan, Society and Culture in Venice, 1470-1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage (New York, 1972), p. 25.

The secondary literature alluding to Venier's academy shows some discrepancy concerning the academy's date of origin. Serassi's claim of 1549 is based on the far-fetched reasoning that Michele Tramezzino's dedication to Venier of 1548 (see n. 29 below) omits to mention the illness that ostensibly prompted Venier to drop out of political life and focus full time on cultural activities. Serassi's date is repeated in Pompeo Molmenti, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle origini alla caduta della repubblica, 7th ed., 3 vols. (Bergamo, 1928), 2:374. Already in May 1548, however, Pietro Aretino referred to "l'Accademia del buon Domenico Veniero, che in dispetto della sorte, che il persegue con gli accidenti delle infermità, ha fatto della ornata sua stanza un tempio, non che un ginnasio" (the Academy of the good Domenico Venier, who in spite of fate, which persecutes him with the misfortune of illness, has made of his ornate salon a temple, not a mere schoolroom); letter to Domenico Cappello, Lettere, 6 vols. (Paris, 1609), 4:274, quoted in Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 7, pt. 3 (Milan, 1824), p. 1684. And as early as 1544, Bembo referred to Venier's "dilicata complessione" (see n. 19 below).

meeting place for writers of every stripe: patrician diplomats and civil servants, cultivated merchants, editors, poets, classicists, theorists, and playwrights.^[6] Some of them were professional, others amateur, and (most strikingly) many had no clearly defined social-professional position of any sort.

Many references in the prolific occasional literature of the time make note of the various personalities involved. Among the closest to Venier were the patrician poet Girolamo Molino, whose posthumous biographer counted Venier's salon the most influential in Molino's experience,^[7] and the letterato Federigo Badoer — an exact contemporary, though intermittently much occupied with diplomatic missions prior to his founding of the Accademia Veneziana in 1558.^[8] Others included the Paduan scholar Sperone Speroni; a host of vernacular poets like Fortunio Spira, Anton Giacomo Corso, Giovanni Battista Amalteo, and Giacomo Zane, and others whose lyrics appeared in the copious poetic anthologies of midcentury; and polygraphs like Girolamo Parabosco and Lodovico Dolce.^[9] Parabosco named many of these in a much-cited capitolo to Count Alessandro Lambertino, along with the satirist Aretino, who had at least a tangential relationship to the group.^[10]

[6] Francesco Flamini, Storia letteraria d'Italia: il cinquecento (Milan, 1901), identified the location of Venier's palazzo as the Venier house at Santa Maria Formosa (p. 180) — i.e., that of Sebastiano Venier who was made famous by his victories against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 — an assertion echoed elsewhere in secondary literature. Venier's tax report, I-Vas, Dieci savi alle Decime (166-67), b. 130, fol. 653 (located by David Butchart and graciously shared with me), confirms the general location, but the genealogies give no reason to think that the house was the same.

[7] In naming Molino's many friends and colleagues in Venice, Giovan Mario Verdizzotti wrote that "of all these honored conversations he frequented none more often than that of Domenico Venier . . . whose house is a continuous salon of talented people, both noblemen of the city and all sorts of other men in the literary profession and others rare and excellent" (di tutte queste honorate conversationi niuna egli più frequentava, che quella del M. Domenico Veniero . . . la casa del quale è un continuo ridutto di persone virtuose così di nobili della città, come di qual si voglia altra sorte d'huomini per professione di lettere, & d'altro rari, & eccellenti); Molino, Rime (Venice, 1573), p. [7]. Sansovino listed him among the other great Venetian writers of the time ("M. Gieronimo Molino è noto a ciascuno, però non ve ne parlo"), as he did Venier — both through the droll mouth of "Venetiano"; Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia. Libri due, ne quali ampiamente, e con ogni verità si contengono (Venice, 1565), fol. 33'. Molino lived from 1500 until 1569.

[8] Badoer (1518-1593) was precisely contemporary with Venier. A satiric capitolo, in praise of Badoer by Girolamo Fenaruolo to Venier, recounts how Fenaruolo, while walking through the Merceria, hears the news that Badoer has been made Avogadore; Francesco Sansovino, Sette libri di satire . . . Con un discorso in materia de satira (Venice, 1573), fols. 196-200'.

[9] Most of the writers listed by "Venetiano" as being in Venice can be linked to Venier: in addition to "Bargarigo" [sic, i.e., Niccolò Barbarigo] and Molino it includes Gian Donato da le Renghe, Pietro Giustiano (historian), Paolo Ramusio, Paolo Manutio, Giorgio e Piero Gradenighi (Gradenigo), Luca Ieronimo Contarini, Di Monsi, Daniel Barbaro, Agostino da Canale (philosopher), Bernardo Navaiero (Navagero), "prestantissimo Senatore," Iacomo Thiepolo, Agostin Valiero, Lodovico Dolce, Sebastiano Erizzo" (fols. 33'-34). "Et se voi volete Huomeni forestieri," he continues, "ci habbiamo M. Fortunio Spira, gran conoscitor de tutte le lingue, M. Carlo Sigonio che legge in luogo d'Egnatio che fu raro a suoi dì Bernardo Tasso; Hieronimo Faleto orator di Ferrara, Sperone Speroni habita la maggior parte del tempo in quest' segue. Il vescovo di Chioggia non se ne sa partire. Girolamo, Ruscelli, dopo molto girar per Italia, finalmente s'è fermato in questa arca" (Delle cose notabili, fol. 34). We will encounter many of these figures below.

[10] Aretino's acquaintance with Domenico and other members of the Venier family goes back to the 1530s; see Aretino's letters to Lorenzo Venier of 24 September 1537 (Aretino, Lettere 1:163), to Gianiacopo Lionardi of 6 December 1537 (Lettere 1:233'-34), and to Domenico of 18 November 1537 encouraging his literary talents (Lettere 1:190-190').

Andarò spesso spesso a ca' Venieri,               I'll go ever so often to the Veniers' house
Ove io non vado mai ch'io non impari                Where I've never gone for four whole years
Di mille cose per quatr' anni intieri;                    Without learning about a thousand things.
Per ch'ivi sempre son spiriti chiari,                   For eminent spirits are always there
Et ivi fassi un ragionar divino                              And folk reason divinely there
Fra quella compagnia d'huomini rari.                  Among that company of rare men.
Chi è il Badoar sapete, e chi il Molino,           Who Badoer is you know, and who Molino is,
Chi il padron della stanza, e l'Amaltèo,              Who the father of the stanza, and Amalteo,
Il Corso, lo Sperone, e l'Aretino.                      Corso, Sperone, and Aretino.
Ciascun nelle scienze è un Campanèo,            Each one in the sciences is a Capaneus,
Grande vo' dire, et son fra lor sì uguali,             Great, I mean, and so equal are they
Che s'Anfion è l'un, l'altro è un                          That if one is an Amphion, the other is an
Orfeo.^[11]                                                               Orpheus.

Parabosco composed the capitolo as a bit of salesmanship, hoping to induce Lambertino to visit the city, and he bills the salon as one of the town's featured spots.^[12] Some of the writers he mentions are practitioners of high lyric style, like Molino and Amalteo; others, like Aretino, dealt in satire and invective; and still others — Speroni for one — in philosophy. The mix seems representative, since everything points to a scene that was generously eclectic.

Some measure of this eclecticism clearly extended to include music. Although the academy's agenda was essentially literary, Parabosco's presence in its regular ranks is telling. He was one of several stars from the San Marco musical establishment who had connections with Venier's group, which also included various solo singers — probably of less professional cast — who declaimed poetry to their own accompaniments. Not surprisingly, some of the literary members had strong musical interests too — interests that can be documented through sources outside Venier's immediate group.

As the major center for informal literary exchange in mid-cinquecento Venice and one that embraced musicians, Venier's academy articulates concerns relevant to the

[11] La seconda parte delle rime (Venice, 1555), fols. 61-61'.

[12] Parabosco was involved with Venier from at least 1549 when Aretino mentioned to Parabosco in a letter from October of that year that it was Venier who had introduced them ("avermi insegnato a conoscervi"); Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, commentary by Fidenzio Pertile, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 3 vols. in 4 (Milan, 1957-60), 2:308. In July 1550 Parabosco wrote Venier a letter of praise and affection from Padua, which suggests by its wording that the two had had a more extensive correspondence: "ho ricevuto una di V.S. a li ventisette del passato" (I received one of your [letters] on the 27th of the past [month]); Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari (Venice, 1551), fols. 4-4'. In 1551, finally, Parabosco published a letter to one Pandolpho da Salerno characterizing the group around Venier as a definite body: "Io sto qui in Vinegia continuando la prattica del Magnifico M. Domenico Veniero, & del Magnifico Molino, & del resto della Accademia: i quali sono tutti quei spiriti pelegrini, & elevati che voi sapete" (I remain here in Venice continuing the activities of the magnificent Messer Domenico Venier, and the magnificent Molino, and the rest of the Academy, all of whom are those rare and lofty spirits whom you know); (Lettere famigliari, fol. 14'). The letter could well have been written earlier than 1551. It is undated, but most other letters in the collection bear dates between the years 1548 and 1550. Parabosco's reference to the "spiriti pelegrini" is ambiguous. For evidence surrounding this mysterious appellation, associated with an academy of Doni's, see Maylender, Storia delle accademie 4:244-48. Maylender voices doubts about whether it ever existed (4:248), as does James Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica of Antonfrancesco Doni," Music & Letters 47 (1966): 202.

intensely literary orientation of Venetian music. Yet the academy has found its way into surprisingly few musical studies of the cinquecento, and then only in passing.^[13] The elusive state of evidence about the group's musical activities no doubt accounts for some of this neglect, for nothing of a direct nature survives. Nonetheless, the history of Venier's circle is rich, and an attempt to reconstruct its values and practices yields valuable insight into the processes by which literary ideas were absorbed by makers of music.

The Legacy of Pietro Bembo, Ratified and Recast

Venier and his peers grew up under the spell of Pietro Bembo. Until receiving his cardinalate in 1539 Bembo lived in semiretirement at his villa in Padua, so that only a few privileged literati, including some members of Venier's circle, could have managed much contact with him before he departed for Rome. Venier was only twenty when Aretino named him in a fanciful, irreverent account of a dream about a Bembist Parnassus. As Aretino nears the garden he finds Domenico and his brother Lorenzo among a group of callow youth seated at Bembo's feet. In the idyllic excerpt below Bembo is reading aloud his Istorie veneziane to a rapt and adoring audience.

I take myself to the main garden and as I draw near it I see several youths: Lorenzo Venier and Domenico, Girolamo Lioni, Francesco Badoer and Federigo, who signal me with fingers to their lips to come quietly. Among them was the courteous Francesco Querino. As they do so the breath of lilies, hyacinths, and roses fills my nostrils; then, approaching my friends, I see on a throne of myrtle the divine Bembo. His face was shining with a light such as never before seen; sitting on high with a diadem of glory upon his head, he had about him a crown of sacred spirits. There was Giovio, Trifone, Molza, Nicolò Tiepolo, Girolamo Querino, Alemanno, Tasso, Sperone, Fortunio, Guidiccione, Varchi, Vittore Fausto, Pier Francesco Contarini, Trissino, Capello, Molino, Fracastoro, Bevazzano, Bernardo Navaier, Dolce, Fausto da Longiano, and Maffio.^[14]

[13] Such references begin in the mid-nineteenth century with Francesco Caffi, Storia della musica sacra nella già cappella ducale di San Marco dal 1318 al 1797, 2 vols. (Venice, 1854), 1:112-13, 121, and 2:49-50, 129. His suggestions were pursued by Armen Carapetyan, "The Musica Nova of Adriano willaert: With a Reference to the Humanistic Society of 16th-Century Venice" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1945), pp. 74-75, and Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:446, and were taken up by (for example) Francesco Bussi, Umanità e arte di Gerolamo Parabosco: madrigalista, organista, e poligrafo (Piacenza, 1961), pp. 36-37, and Dean T. Mace, "Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal," The Musical Quarterly 55 (1969): 73. None of these contains more than a few sentences.

It should be mentioned that Serassi assumed more musical activity and patronage in connection with Venier's salon than evidence collected thus far will support — namely, that "nè capitava in Venezia Musico o Cantatrice di conto, che il Veniero non li volesse udir più d'una volta; e se accadeva ch'essi fossero veramente eccellenti, non solo li premiava secondo il merito loro, ma li celebrava ancora co' suoi bellissimi versi" (Rime di Domenico Veniero, pp. xiv-xv). Serassi's view surely contributed to the assumption prevalent in music histories that Venier's was equally a literary and a musical academy.

[14] "Mi lascio menare a l'uscio del giardin principale, e ne lo appressarmici, veggo alcuni giovani: Lorenzo Veniero e Domenico, Girolamo Lioni, Francesco Badovaro e Federico, che col dito in bocca mi fêr cenno ch'io venga piano: fra i quali era il gentil Francesco Querino. Intanto il fiato dei gigli, de' iacinti e de le rose mi empieno il naso di conforto; onde io, acostandomi agli amici, veggo sopra un trono di mirti il divin Bembo. Splendeva la faccia sua con luce non più veduta; egli sedendo in cima col diadema de la gloria in capo, aveva intorno una corona di spirti sacri. V'era il Iovio, il Trifone, il Molza, Nicolò Tiepolo, Girolamo Querino, l'Alemanno, il Tasso, lo Sperone, il Fortunio, il Guidiccione, il Varchi, Vittor Fausto, il Contarin Pier Francesco, il Trissino, il Capello, il Molino, il Fracastoro, il Bevazzano, il Navaier Bernardo, il Dolce, il Fausto da Longiano, il Maffio" (quoted from Lettere sull'arte 1:97-98). The letter is dated from Venice, 6 December 1537. The figures not fully identified are Paolo Giovio, Triphon Gabriele, Francesco Maria Molza, Luigi Alemanno, Bernardo Tasso, Sperone Speroni, Giovanni Francesco Fortunio, Giovanni Guidiccione, Benedetto Varchi, Giangiorgio Trissino, Bernardo Capello, Girolamo Molino, Girolamo Fracastoro, Marco Bevazzano, Bernardo Navagero, Lodovico Dolce, and Maffio Venier.

Aretino's spoof played on the kind of doting admiration he must have observed in Venice. At midcentury Bembo's beliefs in linguistic purity and the imitation of models and his rhetorical principles for writing prose and poetry still formed the near-exclusive stylistic guides for mainstream vernacular writers, especially in the Venetian literary establishment that Venier came to represent. In Chapter 5, I show how volumes of writings on vernacular style produced by Venetian literary theorists of the generation that succeeded Bembo reproduced and gradually transformed his views. For the moment I wish only to point up some contexts in which Bembo's theories were propounded within the academy and the range of mechanisms by which they were transmitted.

Lodovico Dolce, possibly the most dogged Bembist at midcentury and one of Venier's closest adherents, provides a link between Bembist ideology and Venier's literary practice. Dolce was an indigent polymath who earned a meager livelihood off the Venetian presses. In 1550, three years after Bembo's death, he published his Osservationi della volgar lingua as a kind of zealous reaffirmation of official vernacular ideology. Many of its catchiest passages obediently echo the judgments and jargon of Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua. Dolce reinforces his "Venetocentric" view by naming as the best lyric stylists five comrades, including Domenico Venier and at least three other Venetian poets tied to his circle — Molino, Bernardo Cappello, and Pietro Gradenigo.^[15] Other writings, seen in juxtaposition with Dolce's, imply that after Bembo left the Veneto, Venier filled the patriarchal void he left behind.^[16] The cosmopolitan Girolamo Muzio cast Venier as a kind of literary padron in his verse treatise Arte poetica. Dedicated to Venier in 1551, it exploited the folk rhetoric of didactic capitoli.

Ricorrerò ai maestri de la lingua,                   I'll apply myself to the masters of language,
Al buon Trifon Gabriello, al sacro                 To the good Triphon Gabriele, to the sacred
Bembo.                                                           Bembo.
Andrò in Toscana al Varchi, al Tolomei,       I'll go to Tuscany to Varchi, to Tolomei,
E correrò a Vinegia al buon Veniero.^[17]         And I'll race to Venice to the good Venier.

[15] Dolce argues that to write the best Tuscan one need not be Tuscan, as proved by Bembo and others in Venice, "who, writing often in this language, produce fruits worthy of immortality, such as [Bernardo] Capello, Domenico Venier, M. Bernardo Zane, Girolamo Molino, Pietro Gradenigo, and many others" (che in essa lingua, spesso scrivendo, producono frutti degni d'immortalità si come il Capello, M. Domenico Veniero, M. Bernardo Zane, M. Girolamo Molino, M. Piero Gradenigo Gentilhuomini Vinitiani, e molti altri); Osservationi nella volgar lingua (Venice, 1550), fol. 9. Compare the protestations of Girolamo Muzio, Chap. 5, n. 32 below.

[16] The view appears repeatedly in sixteenth-century accounts, as well as in modern ones; see, for instance, Flamini, Storia letteraria, p. 180, who calls Venier "l'erede e successore del Bembo."

[17] Arte poetica, fol. 94.

The political prominence of Venier's noble family and his early education at San Marco with the renowned teacher of humanities, Giovanni Battista Egnazio, made him well suited to the role he came to assume.^[18] In their correspondence of 1544, Bembo praised the young Venier for "a lovely, pure, and well-woven style" (un bello, casto, e ben tessuto stile), the same qualities championed in the Prose.^[19] Indeed, the strands of their relationship were not only literary but included the larger familial web of Venetian patrician society: the manuscript letters of Pietro Gradenigo, Bembo's son-in-law and Venier's literary cohort, reveal that in the mid-forties Venier actually became godfather to two of Bembo's grandsons.^[20]

Venier's most explicit advocacy of Bembist canons came in the commemorative sonnets he composed after Bembo's death in 1547 and published in 1550 in the third volume of the famed series of anthologies known as the Rime diverse, or Rime di diversi.^[21] Venier adapted the norms of Bembist style to the purposes of a fervid encomium. By stressing in Bembo the traditional virtues of Venice, he fixed his predecessor's fame in the lasting domain of Venetian civic mythology. An especially typical embodiment of this comes in the sonnet Pianse non ha gran tempo il Bembo,^[22] a double tribute to Bembo and another patriarchal contemporary (and close colleague of Bembo's), the Venetian poet-scholar Triphon Gabriele, who died in 1549.^[23]

Pianse non ha gran tempo il Bembo, ch'era,    Not just as much as the sun circles the Adriatic shore,
Scevra l'alma dal corpo al ciel salito,               But as much as it turns from morning to evening,
D'Adria non pur, quanto circonda il lito,         [Had Venice] wept not long ago for Bembo, who had risen
Ma quanto gira il Sol da mane a sera.             To Heaven, his soul severed from his body.                           4

[18] See the reference to Venier's schooling by Lodovico Dolce cited in Rime di Domenico Veniero, p. iv. On Egnazio see James Bruce Ross, "Venetian Schools and Teachers, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century: A Survey and a Study of Giovanni Battista Egnazio," RQ 29 (1976): 521-60.

[19] "Ho tuttavia con grande piacer mio in essa vostra lettera veduto un bello & casto & ben tessuto stile: ilquale m'ha in dubbio recato, quali più lode meritino, o le rime vostre o le prose" (Delle lettere di M. Pietro Bembo . . . di nuovo riveduto et corretto da Francesco Sansovino, 2 vols. [Venice, 1560], 2: libro 10, fol. 131). The letter is dated 31 July 1544, from Rome.

[20] Their father, Pietro Gradenigo, one of the poets singled out for mention by Dolce (see n. 15 above), was a nobleman and husband to Bembo's illegitimate daughter Helena. The information comes from a series of letters in manuscript, "Lettere inedite di Pietro Gradenigo Patrizio Veneto Scritte a diversi," I-Vnm, MSS It. Cl. X, 23 (6526), fols. 9 and 13. A letter on fol. 9 of 15 April (no year but probably from 1544 based on the surrounding letters) speaks of the birth of their son Alvise: "ho elletto per compari Domenico Veniero, e Federigo Badoero miei antichi, et cari amici, et compagni, et Signori devotissi mi di Vostra Signora Reverendissi ma oltre ad alcuni altri gentilhuomini" (I have chosen as godfathers Domenico Venier and Federigo Badoer, my old and dear friends and comrades, and most loyal sirs of your Republic, in addition to some other gentlemen). Elsewhere Pietro writes to his father-in-law: "Marti prossimo passato battezzammo il mio bambino, et li ponenimo nome Paolo. . . . I compari che l'hanno tenuta al battesimo sono stati questi, lo eccellen te ms. Giacomo Bonfio . . ., Monsigno r Franco, il Sign or Girardo Rambaldo, ms. Federigo Badoer, ms. Domenico Veniero, ms. Antoni o Moresini, et ms. Marc' Antonio Contarini. Gentilhuomini tutti di gran valore, et miei cari amici et compagni" (Last Tuesday we baptized my baby boy, and named him Paolo. . . . The godfathers who held him at the baptism were the excellent Messer Giacomo Bonfio . . ., Monsignor Franco, Signor Girardo Rambaldo, Messer Federigo Badoer, Messer Domenico Venier, Messer Antonio Moresini, and Messer Marc' Antonio Contarini, all gentlemen of great worth and my dear friends and comrades); fol. 13.

[21] Libro terzo delle rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori nuovamente raccolte (Venice, 1550).

[22] Folio 197'.

[23] Gabriele was a principal interlocutor of Daniello's La poetica, on which see Chap. 5 below. In 1512 Bembo sent to him the first two books of his Prose della volgar lingua in manuscript; see Mario Marti's preface to his edition Opere in volgare (Florence, 1961), pp. 265-68, and for a reprint of the letter Bembo wrote accompanying the manuscript, pp. 713-15. A manuscript in I-Vmc entitled "Accademie in Venezia" (MS Gradenigo 181) lists Gabriele's circle in Padua under "Adunanze virtuose" (fol. 148'). A few remarks on Gabriele's circle may be found in Paul Lawrence Rose, "The Accademia Venetiana: Science and Culture in Renaissance Venice," Studi veneziani 11 (1969): 200.

Piange te parimente, hor ch'a la vera               Now that to the true Fatherland, dying,
Patria morendo e tu TRIFON se gito,            You too have gone, Triphon, all of Venice
Venezia tutta, e quanto abbraccia il sito          Weeps for you equally, as much as it yet embraces
Qua giuso ancor della mondana sfera.             The site of the worldly sphere here below.^[24]               8

D'egual senno ambo duo, d'egual bontate        Of equal wisdom both, of equal goodness
Foste, a communi studi ambo duo volti,          Were you, both turned to common studies
D'una patria, d'un sangue, e d'una etate;          From one homeland, one blood, and one age.           11

Nodo par d'amistade insieme avolti                 An equal knot of friendship wound round both
Tenne sempre i cor vostri alme ben nate,         Always held your hearts, well-born souls;
Ed hor ancho v'ha 'l cielo ambo raccolti.          And now even Heaven has gathered you both.          14

Here Venier placed the memory of his two mentors in the discourse of Venetian myth by stressing in them qualities attached to traditional conceptions of the state — goodness and wisdom — as well as their derivation from a common race. Though Venier distinguishes between Heaven, the "vera patria," and Venice, the "mondana sfera," his affections seem to lie chiefly with the latter. From the opening image of the sun circling the Adriatic shore (the "lito") he links in a linguistically rich evocation both Venetian geography and the notion of the homeland to the patriotic rhetoric of the Serenissima.^[25] The poem's emphasis on the moral content of Venetian mythology ("d'egual bontade") demonstrates that Venier's depiction of Bembo and Gabriele as model figures was not meant to be just literary and scholarly but ethical as well, charged with a moral imperative.

In other poems on Bembo's death Venier made clear the nature of this imperative, as seen in a sonnet that asks Dolce too to mourn Bembo.

DOLCE, possente a raddolcir il pianto,            Dolce, powerful enough to sweeten the mourning
Ch'èper alta cagion pur troppo amaro,             That from a great cause is all too bitter,
Piangendo il Bembo à tutto 'l mondo caro,       Weeping for Bembo, dear to the whole world,
Poi che sua morte ha tutto 'l mondo pianto,      Now that the whole world has wept for his death:      4

Perche seco habbia il duol di gioia alquanto,     Since grief contains some joy,
Anzi vada il gioir col duolo a paro,                   Or rather joy goes paired with grief,
Segui 'l tuo stile, e non ti sia dischiaro               Follow your style, and let it not displease you
Di lagrimarlo in sì soave canto.                         To lament him in such a sweet song.                          8

[24] For vv. 1-2 Nino Pirrotta kindly offers the alternative "Not just what is surrounded by the Adriatic shore [i.e., Venice], but all the land circled by the sun from morning to evening" as clarification of the distinction Venier later draws between Venice and the "worldly sphere" (private communication).

[25] Bembo used a related lexicon and imagery in his own sonnet, "Questo del nostro lito antica sponda, / Che te, Venezia, copre e difende" (Opere in volgare, ed. Marti, no. 93, pp. 300-301).

Questo farà, che 'l suon de tuoi lamenti           This will make the people hear ever more
Gioia non men che duolo altrui recando           Eagerly the sound of your laments,
Sempre piu disiose udran le genti.                   Bearing joy to others no less than grief:               11

Tal che ferendo in un I'alme e sanando,          So that at once wounding and healing the souls,
Fama eterna il tuo stil ne l'altrui menti,            Your style, like Achilles' lance,
Come l'hosta d'Achille, andrà lasciando.^[26]      Will leave eternal fame in people's minds.             14

Throughout the poem Venier pursued the Petrarchan opposition of gioir and duolo to develop the poem's thematic strategy, while punning his recipient's name: to make his sadness felt most keenly Dolce should lament Bembo's death in sweet tones. His conceit tempers the sense of both terms, joy and grief, with distinctly Petrarchan reserve, each straining to uphold and assert its meaning in the face of its antonym.

At its surface, then, the injunction for Petrarchan paradox is simply a thematic one. But its stylistic basis finds an explanation in Ciceronian codifications of vernacular style that prevent words from registering too firmly on a single semantic or stylistic plane. By reducing the expression of sorrow through its opposite and exhorting Dolce to a sweet style even for the dark subject of death, Venier thus also claimed for his contemporaries the same canon of moderation earlier urged by Bembo. The road he treads is dutifully narrowed by Bembist precepts. And his insistence in the sestet that a lament is best heard mixed with contrasting sentiments invokes Bembo's advocation of Ciceronian variation and restraining decorum as the vehicles of rhetorical persuasion.

Such reserved expression also recalls the Venetian patriciate's artfully orchestrated self-image and its tendency to insist on well-monitored emotions in the civic sphere. Decorum, in this sense of reserve, formed the literary counterpart of virtù, purity, wisdom, and good judgment. As we have seen, these qualities, basic to Venetian communal identity, were epitomized for Venetians by Petrarch's lyric style. The academic and self-conscious brand of Petrarchism that proliferated in Venier's milieu, in catering to the needs of a highly disciplined state, thus served to reinforce the self-identity that was so emphatically articulated in the political and social rhetoric of the republic.

Yet, paradoxically, the ideological force that suppressed the poet's voice joined blithely with a candid quest for individual public acclaim. And so, ironically, Venier sugars the end of his sonnet with assurances that "Fama eterna il tuo stil ne l'altrui menti . . . andrà lasciando." The Bembist path to literary perfection might be unyieldingly self-effacing, but the promised compensation for taking it was poetic immortality.

[26] Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, fol. 211, in the Newberry Library copy [recte: fol. 195].

Venier was well accustomed to the position of civic literary advisor he assumed in these sonnets. Although he wielded as much power as any vernacular author in Venice, he seems to have eschewed print by and large, publishing little and participating mainly in a manuscript culture that circulated verse by hand, post, perhaps even word of mouth.^[27] Publicly he served primarily as a mentor to the many fledglings of the bourgeoisie, aristocratic dropouts, and patrician dilettantes who flocked to his door. Despite the power and esteem he accumulated, Venier resembled other noble literati in producing no canzoniere or other literary opus while he lived. His role instead was that of arbiter of Venetian poetic tastes. Like the printed anthologies to which he sometimes added his prestigious name, his salon and his acquaintance were stepping stones to public status for numerous literary aspirants of backgrounds less privileged than his, striving for acknowledgment or remuneration and a firm place within the active literary discourse of the day.^[28] In this capacity Venier appeared as dedicatee of a number of volumes issued from the prolific Venetian presses, and much of the poetry that he and his comrades produced responded indirectly to the new public nature of words.^[29] Generated out of the larger fabric of Venetian society, this poetry often transformed the contemplative, soloistic poetics of Petrarchan-Bembist lyric models into the more externalized and explicitly dialogic forms that I identified in Chapter 3 — sonnet exchanges, dedica-

[27] On this phenomenon see Armando Balduino, "Petrarchismo veneto e tradizione manoscritta," in Petrarca, Venezia e il Veneto, ed. Giorgio Padoan, Civiltà veneziana, Saggi 21 (Florence, 1976), pp. 243-70.

[28] Venier's sporadic contributions to the printed literature may be compared with those of several other Venetian poets, highly placed in the social and literary worlds, whose writings circulated in manuscript. Molino, also of noble birth, must have been known primarily in manuscript, since his Rime were printed only posthumously. The same is true of Giacomo Zane, who died in 1560 and whose Rime were issued in 1562; see Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario, p. 101 n. 1. I am inclined to think that there was a tendency among the uppermost crust to emulate aristocratic Florentine manuscript culture (in addition to the Tuscan language) by avoiding a wholesale participation in the culture of printed words as being beneath their station. Poets, including Molino, Celio Magno, Giuliano Goselini, and others, frequently entered into the world of print via musical sources, and only later poetic ones; see Lorenzo Bianconi and Antonio Vassalli, "Circolazione letteraria e circolazione musicale del madrigale: il caso G.B. Strozzi," in Il madrigale tra cinque e seicento, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Bologna, 1988), pp. 125-26.

[29] Among volumes dedicated to Venier are the Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini, et eccellentissimi ingegni scritte in diverse materie (Venice, 1542), with a dedication by the publisher and editor Paolo Manutio; an edition of Ficino's Tre vite entitled Marsilio Ficino florentino filosofo eccellentissimo de le tre vite (Venice, 1548), translated into the vernacular by Giovanni Tarcagnota (pseudonymously called Lucio Fauno in a preface to the readers) and dedicated by the publisher Michele Tramezzino; the Rime diverse del Mutio Iustino Politano (Girolamo Muzio), including the Arte Poetica (Venice, 1551), dedicated by the author; and the Rime di Mons. Girolamo Fenaruolo (Venice, 1574), dedicated by Fenaruolo's posthumous biographer Marc'Antonio Silvio. Venier also figured among the inflated number of dedicatees (loosely so-called) scattered throughout Antonfrancesco Doni's Libraria (Venice, 1550), fol. 16'; on the various editions of the work, two of which date from 1550, see C. Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, Anton Francesco Doni, scrittore e stampatore (Florence, 1960), nos. 21, 22, and 70. In addition, many of the poems in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi stem from the Venier circle and include a great many encomiastic praises of both Bembo and Venier — for example, Dolce's Venier, che dal mortal terreno chiostro, fol. 184, Giorgio Gradenico's (Gradenigo) Venier, che l'alma a le crudel percosse, fol. 98', and Pietro Aretino's VENIERO gratia di quel certo ingegno, fol. 183'. The Libro terzo was the first of the Rime di diversi series to represent large numbers of poets connected with Venier, including Dolce, Giovanni Battista Susio, Giovanni Battista Amalteo, Parabosco, Giorgio Gradenigo, Fortunio Spira, Bernardo Tasso, Giacomo Zane, Bernardo Cappello, Anton Giacomo Corso, and Venier himself (although a number had already been included in the Rime di diversi nobili huomini et eccellenti poeti nella lingua thoscana. Libro secondo [Venice, 1547] — Corso, Cappello, Susio, Parabosco, and Dolce).

tory poems, stanzas in praise of women, patriotic encomia, and so forth. It thus became fundamentally a poetics of correspondence and exchange, but also of competition, which often took the form of ingenious and ultrarefined verbal games.

One of the works that best reveals the evolving direction of Venier's academy at midcentury is Parabosco's I diporti. First printed (without date) by 1550, I diporti is a colorful, Boccaccesque series of novellas in the form of conversations between various men of letters.^[30] The interlocutors are mostly linked with Venier's group: Parabosco himself, Molino, Venier, Badoer, Speroni, Aretino, the scholar Daniele Barbaro, Benedetto Corner (Venier's interlocutor in a dialect canzoniere discussed below), the editor and poet Ercole Bentivoglio, Count Alessandro Lambertino (recipient of Parabosco's capitolo cited earlier), the philosopher and classicist Lorenzo Contarini, and the poets Giambattista Susio, Fortunio Spira, and Anton Giacomo Corso, among others.^[31]

During a lengthy digression toward the end of the stories the participants enumerate the requisite qualities of different lyric genres — madrigal, strambotto, capitolo, sestina, pastoral canzone, and sonnet.^[32] Madrigals must be "sharp with a well-seasoned, charming invention" (acuti e d'invenzione salsa e leggiadra) and must derive their grace from a lively spirit.^[33] They must be beautifully woven, adorned with graceful verses and words and, like the strambotto, have a lovely wit (arguzia) and inventiveness. To exemplify these qualities Sperone recites one of Parabosco's madrigals, applauding its manipulation of a pretty life-death conceit. Corso then recites a witty capitolo (again Parabosco's), full of anaphora, prompting Badoer to effuse on its "begli effetti amorosi."^[34] The sestina, Contarini insists, allows the exposition of beautiful things and is a very lovely poem (poema molto vago).^[35]

[30] I cite from the mod. ed. in Novellieri minori del cinquecento: G. Parabosco — S. Erizzo, ed. Giuseppe Gigli and Fausto Nicolini (Bari, 1912), pp. 1-199, hereafter I diporti. On the date of the first edition see Bussi, Umanità e arte, p. 77 n. 1. As Giuseppe Bianchini reported, Parabosco mentioned the existence of I diporti in a letter (also undated), which in turn probably stems from 1550; Girolamo Parabosco: scrittore e organista del secolo XVI, Miscellanea di Storia Veneta, ser. 2, vol. 6 (Venice, 1899), p. 394. On this basis Bianchini suggested 1550 as the date of the first edition. Ad[olphe] van Bever and Ed[mond] Sansot-Orland, Oeuvres galantes des conteurs italiens, 2d ser., 4th ed. (Paris, 1907), pushed the compositional date to a slightly earlier time (pp. 219-20), but without real evidence. The hope Doni expressed in the Libraria (Venice, 1550) that Parabosco would soon issue "un volume di novelle" (p. 23) would seem to secure the date of 1550, since Doni's book was published in that year.

[31] The mix of Venetians and non-Venetians overlaps a good deal with other descriptions of Venier's circle, like the one in Parabosco's capitolo cited in n. 11 above. Characteristically, a number of figures (as Parabosco states in the ragionamento to the Prima giornata) are non-Venetians but all spent time in Venice: Bentivoglio and Lambertino from Bologna, Susio from Mirandola, Spira from Viterbo, Corso from Ancona, and Speroni from Padua (I diporti, p. 10). Speroni was also a main interlocutor in Bernardino Tomitano's Ragionamenti della lingua toscana (see Chap. 5, pp. 129-30 below). The towering Aretino, quite fascinatingly, though counted by Parabosco among the non-Venetians, is the only one given no native origin. For further identifications of these and other interlocutors in I diporti see Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco, pp. 395-98. On Baldassare Donato's encomiastic setting of a sonnet on Contarini's death see Chap. 9 n. 76.

In the decade after I diporti M. Valerio Marcellino published a series of conversations called Il diamerone that were explicitly set among the Venier circle (Venice, 1564); see Chap. 5 below, n. 139.

[32] I diporti, pp. 177-91.

[33] Ibid., p. 177.

[34] Ibid., pp. 179-80.

[35] Ibid., pp. 182-83.

In each genre, then, grace and beauty are paramount. But no less important in their estimation are invention, wit, and technical virtuosity. When they come to the labyrinthine sestina, this stance takes the form of a little apologia, as Corso and Contarini argue that the genre is no less suited than the canzone to expressions of beauty and no more difficult to compose.^[36] After more madrigals of Parabosco are recited — and amply praised by as harsh a judge as Aretino — the whole company assembles to assess the formidable sonnet.

Toward the end of their exchange they cite several sonnets of Venier, whose virtuosic verbal artifice won him widespread fame in the sixteenth century. Whereas the madrigals described earlier aimed at a tightly knit and clever rhetorical formulation, these sonnets employ technical artifice in a somewhat different role. To construct the following, for example, Venier systematically reworked corresponding triads of words — no fewer than four of them in the first quatrain alone.

Non punse, arse o legò, stral, fiamma, o laccio    The arrow, flame, or snare of Love never
D'Amor lasso piu saldo, e freddo, e sciolto         Stung, burned, or bound, alas, a heart more
Cor, mai del mio ferito, acceso,                          Steady, cold, and loosed than mine, wounded, kindled,
  e 'nvolto,                                                             and tied
Gia tanti dì ne l'amoroso impaccio.                     Already so many days in an amorous tangle.                  4

Perc'haver me 'l sentia di marmo e ghiaccio,       Because I felt marble and ice within me,
Libero in tutto i' non temeva stolto                     Free in everything, I foolishly did not fear
Piaga, incendio, o ritegno, e pur m'ha colto        Wound, fire, or restraint, and yet
L'arco, il foco, e la rete, in ch'io                         The bow, the fire, and the net in which I lie have
  mi giaccio.                                                          caught me.                                                                  8

E trafitto, infiammato, avinto in modo                 And pierced, and inflamed, and captured in such a way
Son, ch'altro cor non apre, avampa, o cinge       Am I that no dart, torch, or chain opens, blazes, or clasps
Dardo, face, o catena hoggi più forte.                Any other heart today more strongly.                             11

Ne fia credo chi 'l colpo, il caldo,                       Nor, I believe, may it be that the blow, and the heat, and
  e 'l nodo,                                                             the knot
Che 'l cor mi passa, mi consuma, e stringe,        That enter, break, and squeeze my heart
Sani, spenga, o disciolga altri, che                     Could be healed, extinguished, or unloosed by any other
  morte.^[37]                                                               but death.                                                                 14

Parabosco's interlocutors submit a panegyric on Venier after the mention of this puzzlelike poem and its sister sonnet, Qual più saldo, gelato e sciolto core. Both poems were well enough known to the interlocutors to forego reading them aloud. Non

[36] Ibid., p. 182.

[37] In addition to its mention in I diporti, p. 190, and its inclusion in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, fol. 198, the sonnet appeared in numerous subsequent printed anthologies and a large number of manuscripts. For a partial listing of these see Balduino, "Petrarchismo veneto e tradizione manoscritta," pp. 258-59. I give an early version of the sonnet as it appeared in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi, to which I have added some modern diacritics.

punse, arse o legò, Spira avows, is one of the "rarissimi e bellissimi fra i sonetti maravigliosi di Venier."

Non punse, arse o legò initiated a subtle shift in the stylistic premises that Venier's circle had maintained for years. Its formal type, dubbed by the modern critics Dámaso Alonso and Carlos Bousoño the "correlative sonnet,"^[38] seems to have been Venier's invention, created by extending to their utmost Petrarchan tendencies toward wit and ingegno that appear in earlier cinquecento poetry in far less extreme guises. The essential strategy of the correlative sonnet lies in its initial presentation of several disparate elements ("punse" / "arse" / "legò") that are continually linked in subsequent verses with corresponding noun, verb, or adjective groups ("stral" / "fiamma" / "laccio"; "saldo" / "freddo" / "sciolto," and so forth). Although the high-level syntactic structure is highly syntagmatic, the immediate syntax of the poetic line tends to lack coordination and subordination of elements except that of a crisscrossed, paratactic sort.

Very possibly Non punse, arse o legò and Qual più saldo had even been written some time before 1550, as Spira seems to imply in describing them as the models imitated by another sonnet and the source of Venier's wide renown as a "raro e nobile spirto."^[39] They thus represent an early and radical extension of the Petrarchan penchant for witty wordplay, one that was carried out in less systematized forms in Petrarch's own sonnets and imitated in less extreme ways by others in the sixteenth century — Luigi Tansillo, Annibale Caro, Benedetto Varchi, and Gaspara Stampa.^[40]

[38] For their analysis of this sonnet see Alonso and Bousoño, Seis calas, p. 56. See also Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario, pp. 57-58, and Erspamer, "Petrarchismo e manierismo," pp. 190-91, who names the basic rhetorical figure with the Latin rapportatio. The sixteenth-century Daniello characterized the phenomenon as "corrispondenze e contraposizioni" in his discussion of Petrarch's sonnet no. 133, Amor m'ha posto come segno al strale; La poetica (Venice, 1536), p. 79 (see n. 40 below and Chap. 5 below on Daniello). For an analysis of the sonnet's correlations see Dámaso Alonso, "La poesia del Petrarca e il petrarchismo (mondo estetico della pluralità)," Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1961): 100-4.

[39] I diporti, p. 190. The two sonnets appear on the same page in the Libro terzo delle rime di diversi. One candidate for the imitations Spira refers to is Parabosco's sonnet Sì dolce è la cagion d'ogni mio amaro; its first tercet reads: "Non fia però ch'io non ringratia ogn'hora / La fiamma, il dardo, la cathena, e Amore / Che si m'arde per voi, stringe, & impiaga" (Parabosco, Il primo libro delle lettere famigliari, fol. 50).

[40] Consider, for example, the more leisurely correlations in Petrarch's sonnet no. 133, "Amor, m'ha posto come segno al strale, / Come al sol neve, come cera al foco, / Et come nebbia al vento," in which two and a half lines (vv. 1-3) are needed to correlate four pairs of elements a single time. The second quatrain brings back their substantive forms ("colpo," "sole," "foco," "vento") just once, and the first tercet correlates only the first three pairs of elements ("saette," "sole," "foco" / "mi punge," "m'abbaglia," "mi distrugge"). The last tercet concludes the whole by turning its final rhetorical point around a reorientation of the last element: the "dolce spirto" of the beloved that becomes the breeze ("l'aura") before which the poet's life flees. Petrarch's four-pronged correlations thus number a total of four for the whole sonnet, as compared with twelve for Venier's three-pronged correlations in Non punse, arse o legò.

For an example in Bembo, see sonnet no. 85, Amor, mia voglia e 'l vostro altero sguardo (Opere in volgare, ed. Marti, p. 497), which structurally resembles Petrarch's Amor, Fortuna e la mia mente (no. 124). Alonso and Bousoño, Seis calas, pp. 85-106, discuss two-, three-, and four-pronged correlations in sonnets by Petrarch, Ariosto, Luigi Tansillo, Vincenzo Martelli, Benedetto Varchi, Gaspara Stampa, Camillo Besalio, Pietro Gradenigo, Annibale Caro, Maffio Venier, Luigi Groto, and Giambattista Marino. A good example, though not as rigorously organized as this one, exists in Stampa's no. 26, which may be significant in view of her association with Venier; see Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston, 1982), pp. 9-12, 18, 37-38, and nn. 66-75 below. The first quatrain of the poem reads: "Arsi, piansi, cantai; piango, ardo, canto; / Piangerò, arderò, canterò sempre / Fin che Morte o Fortuna o tempo stempre / A l'ingegno, occhi e cor, stil, foco o pianto" (Rime, ed. Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello, 2d ed. [Milan, 1976], p. 97). Like Petrarch, Stampa reorders the triad in its different reincarnations.

Though the correlative sonnet represents only one subgenre in the poetry of Venier, it nonetheless presents a vivid example of the growing tendency in the Venetian lyric to invest the sanctioned Ciceronian properties of grace and moderation with greater technical complexity.^[41]

Polyphony and Poetry, High and Low

The infatuation with ingegno that inspired Venier's correlative sonnets must have found congenial exemplars in the madrigalian practice recently ascendent in Venice. Both correlative sonnets and polyphonic madrigals depended on an audience immediately at hand, ready to be engaged and impressed and to reflect on its currency in the world of vernacular arts. And both were rooted in a kind of intellectual luxuria that was necessary to champion what might otherwise have seemed intolerably arcane creations.

The reshaping of Venetian madrigals in knotty church polyphony parallels the academic, self-conscious impulse toward intellectual sophistication that lay beneath Bembo's thinking about vernacular style and that reached extremes in correlative verse. Such impulses were the very sort encouraged by the competitive lather of Venetian academic life and the commercialization of art with which it intersected. Yet they contradict the prevailing norms of decorum that control both Venetian sonnets and sonnet settings to produce a basic tension in Venice's high vernacular arts: like Venier's most intricate poems, the madrigals produced by Willaert and his circle seem to want to emerge unruffled from the competitive fray as both the most urbane and the gravest emblems of aristocratic culture — to win eminence in the domain of virtuosity without jeopardizing the aristocratic values to which they are beholden.

Ultimately the extremes of complexity in both Willaertian madrigals and Venier-styled verse threatened to upset the Bembist balance between calculated artifice and natural grace. Both labor in a ponderous rhetoric whose guiding hand is an over-riding consciousness of noble gravitas, without embracing the elegance — the sprezzatura — that was de rigueur in Florentine music and letters or in those of courts like

[41] Other famous examples of Venier's correlative verse include M'arde, impiaga, ritien, squarcia, urta, e preme (Rime di diversi . . . Libro quinto [Venice, 1552], p. 299) and Maladetto sia 'l dardo, il foco, e 'l laccio (ibid., p. 300).

The source tradition may indicate that Venier revised such sonnets with a view to perfecting technical aspects of them. In the radically revised version of Non punse, arse o legò that was issued in vol. 5 of the Rime di diversi, p. 297, for example, he changed vv. 5 and 6 from: "Perc'haver me 'l sentia di marmo, e ghiaccio / Libero in tutto i non temeva stolto" to: "Saldo et gelato più, che marmo, et ghiaccio, / Libero & franco i non temevo stolto," adding an extra two sets of correlations and allowing every verse in the sonnet to participate in the correlative pattern. Multiple variant readings from various manuscripts are given in Balduino, "Petrarchismo veneto" (p. 259), who also lists sixteenth-century prints that include this sonnet (p. 258 n. 26). Balduino cites other sorts of revisions that show Venier's increasing concern for technical perfection, for example the two versions of the sonnet Mentre de le sue chiome in giro sparse (pp. 254-58). Venier apparently rewrote the initial quatrain in a later version, changing the first verse, from "in giro sparse" to "a l'aura sparse" and thus introducing a pun and play of sounds between the ends of vv. 1 and 4 ("Vedea sotto il bel cerchio aurato starse") — that is, "a l'aura sparse" / "aurato starse."

Mantua and Ferrara. On the contrary, the new Venetian products were strangely mannered by comparison with those produced elsewhere in northern Italy and in ways perhaps unimaginable without Venice's combative pressure to adapt afresh new techniques and styles. Beneath its virtuosic displays Venice managed to maintain as a Procrustean bed ideals of the ordene antiquo that were deeply rooted in Venetian consciousness.

Although no direct reports tell of Venetian madrigals performed in the Venier household (or in most others, for that matter), fictive re-creations like Doni's make it clear that madrigals found their main abode in drawing rooms. Clearly the primary occupation of the Venier house was vernacular literature, with musical performances playing a decidedly secondary role. Yet much evidence suggests that music nonetheless occupied a regular niche in the academy's agenda. Several central figures linked with Venier's household sustained strong connections with the culture of written polyphony: in addition to Parabosco the literati Girolamo Fenaruolo and Girolamo Molino, to whom I will turn shortly. Two other star pupils of Willaert's were known to its members: Perissone Cambio and Baldassare Donato. Perissone formed the subject of a double sonnet exchange between Venier and Fenaruolo following his death, probably in the early 1560s.^[42] And the promising Donato was given the task no later than 1550 of setting three of Venier's stanzas for large civic celebrations — this at a time when Venier's academy was still in its youthful stage and Donato himself no more than about twenty.^[43] Even Willaert appears in what may be suggestive proximity to Venier, namely the postscript to Parabosco's capitolo characterizing Venier's salon to Lambertino of 1555.^[44] Perhaps Willaert — aging, heavily burdened, and slowed by ill health — would not have spent much time there late in life, but there is no doubt that he kept in touch with many of its intimates.

Serious polyphonic madrigals stand at the forefront of developments in Venetian secular music. But like Venier's correlative sonnets for Venetian literati and vernac-

[42] See Chap. 9 nn. 65-66 below, and for the sonnets the Appendix to Chap. 9.

[43] See Giulio Maria Ongaro, "The Chapel of St. Mark's at the Time of Adrian Willaert (1527-1562): A Documentary Study" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 125.

Yet another polyphonist, Gasparo Fiorino of Rossano, was directly acquainted with Venier, although probably in a later decade. Fiorino flourished from about 1571-74 in Ferrara and apparently had social connections with Rome as well (see Iain Fenlon, "Fiorino, Gasparo," in The New Grove 6:601-2). Fiorino was recipient of a dedicatory sonnet by Venier, which was attached to his Libro secondo canzonelle a tre e a quatro voci, fol. [2], a collection "in lode et gloria d'alcune signore et gentildonne genovesi," published in 1574. Fenlon speculated that Fiorino had been a singer at St. Mark's in the middle of the century. Although the documentary work of Ongaro, "The Chapel of St. Mark's," now makes this very doubtful, the sonnet addressed to him by Venier does confirm that he was a singer (Rime di Domenico Venier, no. 98).

[44] Parabosco, La seconda parte delle rime, fol. 63'-64. Earlier scholars treated the juxtaposition of their names as evidence that Willaert frequented Venier's house, even though the poem makes no such explicit claim; see Gaetano Cesari, "Le origini del madrigale cinquecentesco," Rivista musicale italiana 19 (1912): 395-96, and Carapetyan, "The Musica Nova of Adriano Willaert," p. 74.

ular poetry more broadly, they represented only one of several genres available to musicians. Bembo's call for discrete stylistic levels echoed as profoundly in vernacular music as it did in literature. And while Venetian composers now generally reserved their most serious secular efforts for madrigal books, the same composers also began, in 1544, to publish in separate volumes stylized genres of light music — canzoni villanesche alla napolitana and villotte.^[45] Many of the dialect songs were obscene and invariably had something comic, rustic, or earthy about them. The canzoni villanesche that emanated from Venice reworked Neapolitan polyphonists' three-voice settings of popular Neapolitan songs by expanding the models from three voices to four and shifting the original popular tune from its prominent place in the soprano to a more hidden location in the tenor. They often Tuscanized the poems' dialect and reduced the number of stanzas. These transformations made the whole genre into something less soloistic and more madrigalistic — that is, more a matter of shared choral singing according to the elevated northern ideal of equal-voiced polyphony. They also invested the settings with self-conscious artifice — lowly tunes uplifted by northern wit, as it were — in ways that could appeal to Venetian intellects. Many prints of Venetian canzoni villanesche met with immense success — numerous reprints and many arrangements for solo lute.

Dialect songs likely formed part of the academy's fare, just as madrigals did. One collection of villotte was produced in 1550 by Willaert's close Netherlandish friend Antonio Barges and dedicated by Barges to Venier's cohort Fenaruolo.^[46]

To the Magnificent and Reverend Monsignor Mr. Girolamo Fenaruolo, my lord:

Being the custom of almost everyone who wants to print some little thing of his to erect a defense against a certain sort of person who, either out of a bad nature or not to appear ignorant, censures the efforts of everyone, good and bad alike, I too on that account would have to address these flowers of mine (rather than fruits) to someone who by his profession had toiled and acquired more in music than in any other science. But all the same I will not do so. For in this case it's enough for me that I've forced myself as much as I could not to deviate from the teaching of the only inventor of true and good music, the most excellent Adrian, who was not only my most diligent teacher but the very best father to me. I therefore dedicate these little efforts of mine to you — you who are a friend and who, besides belles lettres and

[45] The primary work on lighter genres is that of Donna G. Cardamone, The "Canzone villanesca alla napolitana" and Related Forms, 1537-1570, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1981), esp. Chaps. 5 and 6. On pp. 164ff. Cardamone discusses misgivings of northerners about the moral influence of part-songs in dialect, but their Counter-Reformational statements seem to have appeared only after the mid-fifties. Willaert first published a collection of napolitane (as they were sometimes called) with the printer Girolamo Scotto in 1544, but only a single gathering of the tenor part book survives (see Cardamone 2:35-36). In 1545 Antonio Gardane brought out a version of the same book, Canzone villanesche alla napolitana di M. Adriano Wigliaret a quatro voci . . . novamente stampate (RISM 1545²⁰), and one by Perissone, Canzone villanesche alla napolitana a quatro voci di Perissone novamente poste in luce.  . . . Donato published a book of napolitane in 1550 (cited in n. 78 below).

[46] Full title: Di Antonino Barges maestro di cappella alla Casa grande di Venetia il primo libro de villotte a quatro voci con un'altra canzon della galina novamente composte & date in luce (Venice, 1550). Barges was maestro at the Casa Grande until 1563. He witnessed Willaert's will of 8 December 1562 shortly before the latter's death; see Vander Straeten, La Musique aux Pays-Bas 6:246.

gracious habits, are so adorned with that sweet virtue, and who gladly hear my works. Not that they were made with the goal that they might be printed, but rather composed at various times at the wishes of my different friends (although now perforce being sent out, so as to appear a grateful friend with little praise rather than an ungrateful musician with much). I also send you a few sweet compositions by the Magnificent Cavalier S. Andrea Patricio da Cherso, which I believe you'll like a lot. This, my sir, is how much I now give you evidence of the love I bear to you, and I do so ardently, being certain that you know clearly (and much better than many others) how true that thought is; for he who does what he can do does therefore what he ought. Not that anyone should therefore blame me for not sending them to the very worthy and gentle M. Stefano Taberio, since in sending them to you not only do I make a richer gift to M. Stefano, who loves you so much, but also to the gentle M. Marco Silvio, both of whom, living in you as you live in them, love and honor the one who loves and honors. I kiss your hand, my lord, and I wish for that dignity that your good qualities merit, begging you to be kind enough to sing these little canzonette of mine now and then with your Silvio and with those gentlemen, among the pleasantries and delights of the most merry Conegliano; and love me since I love and honor you. Antonino Barges.^[47]

Barges's villotte — some of which are really villanesche alla napolitana, others Venetian dialect arrangements — were among the more northern, complex examples of light music. They justify his claim to be following closely his "ottimo patre," Willaert, and his linking of villotte with the seemingly high literary circle of Fenaruolo.

Barges pointedly avoided praising Fenaruolo's own musical skills, emphasizing instead his devotion to musicians and citing the genesis of the print's villotte among amateur appreciators like Fenaruolo and friends. Clearly he did expect that they could render their own performances of the songs, for he asked Fenaruolo to sing them "now and then" together with his other literary cohorts. Barges's expectation

[47] "Al Magnifico & Reverendo Monsignore M. Girolamo Fenarolo Signor suo. Essendo costume quasi d'ogn'uno che voglia mandare alcuna sua fatica in luce, proccaciarsi diffesa contra una certa sorte di persone, che o per lor trista natura, o per mostrar di non esser ignoranti biasimano cosi le buone come le triste fatiche d'ogn'uno. anch'io percio doverei indrizzar questi miei piu tosto fiori che frutti, ad alcuno che per sua professione piu havesse sudato & aquistato nella musica che in altra scientia. ma non lo farò altrimenti, perche in questo mi basta ch'io mi son forzato per quanto ho potuto, di non deviare dalla dissiplina de l'unico inventore della vera & buona musica l'Eccellentissimo Adriano il quale non solamente m'é stato diligente maestro, ma ottimo patre, Io dunque â voi che oltre le bellissime litere, & i gratiosi costumi, sete ancho ornato di questa dolcissima virtu mi sete amico, & udite voluntieri le mie compositioni dedico queste mie picciole fatiche, non gia fatte a fine ch'andassero alle stampe, ma in diverse volte a voglia de diversi amici miei composte quatunque adesso, (piu tosto per parer grato amico con poca lode, che ingrato musico con molta) sia forzato mandarle fuori. Mandovi ancora alcune poche ma soavi compositioni del Magnifico Cavalliero il S. Andrea Patricio da Cherso, le quali credo che molto vi piaceranno. Questo é signor mio quanto hora vi posso dare in testimonio dell'amore ch'io vi porto, & lo faccio arditamente essendo certo che voi (& assai meglio di molt'altri) conoscete chiaramente quanto sia vera quella sententia, che quello che fa quanto puote, conseguentemente fa quanto deve. Ne sia percio alcuno che mi biasimi, non le mandando al molto meritevole & molto gentile M. Stefano Taberio, percio che mandandole a V.S. non solamente ne faccio piu ricco dono a M. Stefano che tanto v'ama, ma insieme al gentilissimo M. Marco silvio, i quali vivendo in voi, si come voi in loro vivete, amano, & honorano, chi v'ama, & honora. Vi bascio la mano signor mio, & vi desidero quella dignita che meritano tante vostre buone qualita, pregandovi che mi siate tal'hor cortese di cantar queste mie canzonette con il vostro silvio, & con quei gentil'huomini, tra le amenita & le delitie del giocondissimo Conegliano: & amatemi per ch'io v'amo & honoro. Antonino Barges."

that his recipient would sing the pieces recalls those of Perissone and Parabosco in dedicating prints to Gottardo Occagna (see Chap. 3, pp. 53-60). Like Perissone, Barges claims not to have composed these works for print but for the pleasure of literary friends — Silvio, Stefano Taberio, and Fenaruolo. In any case, they were not so hard to negotiate as Perissone's five-voice madrigals, which required a firmer grasp of singing written counterpoint from part books.

Fenaruolo knew other musicians too, including Willaert, to whom he addressed a satiric capitolo in 1556, and Perissone, whose death he mourned with Venier, the dedicatee of Fenaruolo's posthumous canzoniere.^[48] Venier's academy seems a likely setting for the sort of light music dedicated to Fenaruolo, since it was one of his main venues. Napolitane may even have been heard there in equal measure with serious madrigals, as was true at the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona from the time of its founding in 1543.^[49]

With their earthy tones and often obscene Neapolitan or Venetian texts, these songs correspond musically to bawdy dialect verse composed by Venier himself and others in his circle, verse that formed the subject of a letter from Aretino to Venier in November 1549.

Just as the coarseness of rustic food often incites the appetite to gluttony, Signor Domenico — more than the great delicacy of high-class dishes ever moved to the pleasure of eating in such a way — so too at times the trivial aspects of subjects in the end sharpen the intellect with a certain eager readiness, which as fate would have it never showed itself with any epic material. So that in composing in the Venetian language, style, and manner in order to divert the intellect, I especially praise the sonnets, capitoli, and strambotti that I have seen, read, and understood by you, by others, and by me.^[50]

[48] Remo Giazotto has published eight sonnets concerning numerous members of Willaert's circle and assigned their authorship to Fenaruolo; see Harmonici concenti in aere veneto (Rome, 1954). Inexplicably, no other reference to the book said to have contained the sonnets can be found, including by the staff at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome (private communication). I have searched over forty libraries in Italy and many others elsewhere in Europe and in North America.

[49] See Giuseppe Turrini, L'Accademia Filarmonica di Verona dalla fondazione (maggio 1543) al 1600 e il suo patrimonio musicale antico, Atti e memorie della Accademia di Agricoltura, Scienze e Lettere di Verona, no. 18 (Verona, 1941), p. 184, Appendix A, passim; and the newer publication, idem, Catalogo delle opere musicali: città di Verona, Biblioteca della Società Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, BMB, ser. I, no. 18 (Bologna, 1983). See also Cardamone, The "Canzone villanesca alla napolitana" 1:175-78.

[50] "Sì come bene ispesso; la grossezza de i villani cibi, ò Magnifico S. Domenico; incitano l'appetito a una avidità di gola, che altra delicatura di signorili vivande, non mai la mossero al piacere del mangiare in tal' modo; così alle volte il triviale de i suggetti infimi aguzzano lo ingegno, con certa ansia di prontitudine, che in sorte d'alcuna Heroiche materia non dimostròssi mai tale. Sì che nel comporre per recrear' lo intelletto in lingua, in stile, & in foggia Venetiana, laudo sommamente, i Sonetti, i Capitoli, & gli Strambotti, che ho visti, letti & intesi da voi; da altri, & da me" (Lettere 5:218'). (Aretino's trio of triads in the last sentence — lingua / stile / foggia; sonetti / capitoli / strambotti; visto / letti / intesi — undoubtedly plays on Venier's correlative technique.) Girolamo Ruscelli also mentioned Venier's capitoli satirizing pedantry (now apparently lost), in Del modo de comporre in versi, nella lingua italiana (Venice, 1559): "Molto vagamente pur' in quest' anni stessi hanno il mio Signor Domenico Veniero, et altri nobilissimi ingegni introdotto di scrivere in versi Sciolti, & di Terze rime, alcuni soggetti piacevolissimi, & principalmente volendo contrafar la pedanteria. . . . & non so se questa, nè altra lingua habbia sorte di componimento così piacevole. De' quali io ò in questo stesso volume, ò (se pur questo venisse soverchiamente grande) in qualche altro spero di farne dar fuori alcuni, che sieno per pienamente dilettare ogni bello spirito" (Even in these very years my Signor Domenico Venier and other most noble talents have very charmingly introduced writing in blank verse and terze rime on some very light subjects, principally wanting to make a burlesque on pedantry . . . and I don't know if this, or any other language may have a sort of composition so pleasing. Some of these I, either in this same volume, or [should it yet become excessively long] in some other one, hope to issue, so that they may delight utterly every beautiful spirit); p. lxxviii.

Until recently nothing else has been known of this aspect of Domenico's literary activity (unlike that of his brother Lorenzo and nephew Maffio, both famous dialect poets). But a codex at the British Library, MS Add. 12.197, preserves a full-length autobiographical canzoniere in dialect composed as an exchange between Domenico Venier and another nobleman named Benedetto Corner.^[51] The collection turns on the two men's relations with a woman named Helena Artusi, whom both claim to have "chiavà" (screwed). The opening sonnet "del Venier a i Lettori" describes the authors of the poems: "One has the name Domenico, the other Benedetto; one comes from ca' Corner, the other from ca' Venier, and is sick in bed" (Un ha nome Domenego, e Benetto / L'altro; questo si se da ca Corner; / L'altro è da ca Venier, ch'è gramo in letto; vv. 9-11).^[52]

The collection is organized as a risqué canzoniere, a low dialect countertype to Petrarch's Rime sparse. Some of the poetic forms stand outside, in some cases beneath, the Petrarchan canzoniere, including capitoli, sonnets "con ritornelli," madregali, madrigaletti, and barzellette; others — canzoni and sonnets "senza ritornelli" — are standard Petrarchan types.^[53] Many are in dialogue, mainly with Helena, and a few mention various contemporaries — a "Cabriel Moresini" and the mid-sixteenth-century poet "Domenego Michiel," for example.^[54] In order to expand the conceit into a larger social-literary exchange, they also pin Helena's name as alleged author to fictitious rejoinders to their own defamatory verse.

It may seem paradoxical that Venier, like the madrigalists, should have simultaneously practiced two such opposed stylistic levels with equal zeal. But it was not so

[51] Perhaps this Corner is the one Aretino called "il Cornaro patron mio" in the same letter excerpted in n. 50 above.

[52] The manuscript, which I chanced upon at the British Library, had never been discussed in any secondary sources until I shared it with Tiziana Agostini Nordio. She examined my film of the manuscript, corroborated my suspicion of its authenticity, and pointed me to the Aretino excerpt cited above. She has since published a descriptive account of the manuscript, "Poesie dialettali di Domenico Venier," Quaderni veneti 14 (1991): 33-56, listing the identifications of Briquet numbers that I made based on my watermark tracings and supplying some information on Helena Artusi (pp. 37-38). I might modify the last of these with the information that Artusi's death was lamented in a sonnet set by Giovanni Nasco and printed in his Second Book for five voices in 1557, "Hor che la frale e mortal gonna è chiusa" (see Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:460), providing a probable terminus post quem of 1556/57 for the codex. Some of the poems ascribed to Maffio Venier (Domenico's nephew) in I-Vnm, MSS It. cl. IX, 173 (6282), probably belong to Domenico, as indicated by their references to his physical condition; see Antonio Pilot, "Un peccataccio di Domenico Venier," Fanfulla della domenica 30 (1906; repr. Rome, 1906). (Though evidently unaware of the British Library MS, Pilot points out, pp. 6-8, that the Marciana codex exchanges dialect verse with a Corner, refers to a Helena, and to Venier's illness.)

For a discussion of dialect verse generally among the Veniers see Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, pp. 17-19, 37-38, 51-57, 186-89, and passim; and Bodo L.O. Richter, "Petrarchism and Anti-Petrarchism among the Veniers," Forum italicum 3 (1969): 20-42.

[53] All of these are detailed in the prefatory sonetto caudato on fols. 1'-2.

[54] Michiel is surely not the Domenico Micheli of Bolognese musical fame, but a poet anthologized at midcentury. The latter has sixteen poems published under the name "Domenico Michele" in the Libro terzo and Libro quarto (1550 and 1551) of the Rime di diversi series — in all fifteen sonnets and one capitolo. One of the sonnets in the Libro terzo is dedicated to Venier.

in the world of Renaissance styles and conventions, epitomized by the Venetians' pragmatic acceptance of such contradictory modes and their arduous attempts to explain and order them by appeal to Cicero. As early as 1541 a composer called Varoter — apparently a Venetian nobleman fallen on hard times — dedicated his four-voice villotte to no less a patron than Duke Ercole of Ferrara with the apologia that "just as a man whose ears are filled with grave and delicate harmonies, satiated as at a royal banquet, feels a desire for coarse and simple fare, so I have prepared some in the form of rustic flowers and fruits."^[55]

It is hardly surprising that a prominent patrician and former senator would have kept such activities close to the vest. Venier was a figurehead in a different sense from Willaert. The civic ideals that the chapelmaster was expected to reflect in his official capacity were ones that Venier was obliged to embody as their very font. While Venier and his noble friends might act in paradoxes among one another, these were not for everyone to see. Unlike professional, salaried musicians, they sent works to the press not as the servants of consumer audiences but as representatives of their class. And what they did not send the press — whether high or low — was as much a register of class differences as what they did. The pervasive presence of a variety of stylistic registers through all social classes should therefore not be taken as erasures of class differences at the base of social structure. On the contrary, the modes in which styles, and the tropes and dialects attached to them, circulated on the whole maintained, rather than surrendered, the claims of class.

Improvised Song

In addition to vernacular polyphony, high and low, the academy's music included unwritten song, the sung (and probably at least partly improvisatory) recitations of poetry that formed a continuous part of the indigenous Italian culture so eloquently described by Nino Pirrotta.^[56] Castiglione's Cortegiano provides evidence that both solo song and written part-song were favored by aristocratic amateurs, and Willaert's transcriptions of Verdelot's madrigals for lute and voice could well have been done by Polissena Pecorina or less virtuosic counterparts.^[57] Accordingly,

[55] Varoter continues: "I have made so bold to sing Your Excellency's virtues in new melodies and to send them with other canzoni of mine to Your Excellency" (si come quella, che havendo il petto e le sue orecchie piene di gravi e delicate armonie, satia con altrimenti che di regie vivande, voglia descender a grossi e naturali cibi: Liquali io di fiori e frutti rusticani gli ho preparati . . . ho havuto ardimento cantar per modi novi le vostre virtuti, e quelle insieme con altre mie Canzoni mandare alla E.V.). The author's real name was Alvise Castellino. The passage is quoted and translated in Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:379.

[56] See various essays in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), especially "The Oral and Written Traditions of Music," pp. 72-79, and "Ricercare and Variations on O rosa bella," pp. 145-58. See also James Haar's essay "Improvvisatori and Their Relationship to Sixteenth-Century Music," in Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350-1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), pp. 76-99, and William F. Prizer's "The Frottola and the Unwritten Tradition," Studi musicali 15 (1986): 3-37.

[57] On types of music making in Castiglione's milieu see Baldassarre Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Ettore Bonora, 2d ed. (Milan, 1976), Book 2, Chap. 13, and James Haar "The Courtier as Musician: Castiglione's View of the Science and Art of Music," in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (New Haven, 1983), pp. 171-76. Willaert's transcriptions of Verdelot appeared in Intavolatura de li madrigali di Verdelotto de cantare et sonare nel lauto, 1536, Renaissance Music Prints, vol. 3, ed. Bernard Thomas (London, 1980), facs. ed. Archivum Musicum, Collana di testi rari, no. 36 (Florence, 1980). See Haar's comments on the latter in "Notes on the Dialogo della musica," p. 206, and evidence in Doni, Dialogo della musica, p. 315.

references to solo singing recur often in the Venier literature — always in conjunction with women, who, until later in the century, had no other apparent place within the academy's ranks.^[58]

Several female singers who come to us through encomiastic literature had connections with Venier. In later years a series of letters by the renowned courtesanpoet Veronica Franco, printed in her Lettere familiari of 1580, establish Venier as her mentor, and two of them contain suggestive references to music making at home. The ninth one, addressed anonymously like nearly all her letters, invites friends to visit for an occasion in which she will make music at home (an "occasione in ch'io faccio la musica"). She asks to borrow a "stromento da penna," either a kind of harpsichord — probably the more portable spinet — or possibly a lute or guitar.^[59] Another (no. 45) tells a friend that on the following day there will be "musica per tempo" at her house and that before the start of this "suono musicale" she hopes to take delight in his "dolcissima armonia de' soavi ragionamenti."^[60] Since music was not at the top of Franco's accomplishments, these letters may have provided little more than formulas for epistolary exchange that could be adapted for use by others. Yet her allusions nonetheless point to situations in which music served as social adornment. At issue is not whether Franco herself could really sing and play, or do so well enough for Venier's salon, but rather how her claims match the more generalized expectations of courtly ladies and well-graced cortigiane oneste.^[61]

Other women praised by Venier were accomplished singers who provided their own accompaniments. To one of them he wrote:

  Con varie voci or questa, or quella corda        With various words, now this, now that string
Tocca da bella man sul cavo legno                  Does the lovely hand touch on the hollow wood,
Mirabilmente il canto si al suon accorda.         Miraculously tuning her song to its sound.
                                                                                                                (no. 68, vv. 9-11)

[58] Apropos, a passage from Parabosco's Lettere amorose to a woman turns on the conceit that his love and hers issue from a concordant harmony: each of them might play and sing in separate rooms in perfect harmony, their thought in perfect agreement, so perfectly are they tuned to the same (Neoplatonic) music. The air they play is none other than the treble-bass formula called "Ruggiero" after the tradition of reciting stanzas from Ariosto's Orlando furioso in solo song; she is compared to Bradamante, he to Ruggiero (I quattro libri delle lettere amorose, ed. Thomaso Porcacchi [Venice, 1561], fols. 107-8).

[59] The term "stromento da [or'di'] penna" generally means simply plucked keyboard instrument, as, for example, in the description of the Florentine intermedi of 1518, in Lorenzo Strozzi, Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi, ed. Pietro Stromboli (Florence, 1892), p. xiii; reported in Howard Mayer Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: The Music for the Florentine Intermedi, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 30 ([Rome], 1973), p. 87. Nino Pirrotta kindly informs me that since penna refers to a plectrum it may also be used synonymously for any instrument played with one — hence guitars and lutes, as well as plucked keyboards (private communication).

[60] I thank Margaret F. Rosenthal for bringing these letters to my attention. See Veronica Franco, Lettere dall'unica edizione del MDLXXX, ed. Benedetto Croce (Naples, 1949), pp. 19-20.

[61] On such questions see Rita Casagrande di Villaviera, Le cortigiane veneziane del cinquecento (Milan, 1968); Georgina Masson, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (New York, 1975); and Anthony Newcomb, "Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy," in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), pp. 90-115.

The singer vaunted here is Franceschina Bellamano, as confirmed by the sonnet's contemporary editor Dionigi Atanagi.^[62] As early as 1545 the music theorist Pietro Aaron's Lucidario in musica listed Bellamano among Italy's renowned "Donne a liuto et a libro."^[63] In Ortensio Landi's Sette libri de cathaloghi of 1552 she ranked with Polissena Pecorina and the elusive Polissena Frigera as one of three most noted female musicians of the modern era.^[64] Like Venier's sonnet, the Sette libri emphasized her instrumental skill by punning her name as "bella mano."

Several other solo singers appear in encomiastic literature linked to Venier. In one sonnet Venier joined the chorus of praises sung posthumously to the precocious singer-lutenist Irene di Spilimbergo, mythologized after her untimely death by members of his circle (Molino, Fenaruolo, Dolce, Amalteo, Muzio, Pietro Gradenigo, and Bernardo Tasso). In another he praised the singer and gambist Virginia Vagnoli, wife of Alessandro Striggio.^[65] But the most lauded solo singer usually associated with the first decade of Venier's academy was the famed poet Gaspara Stampa. Although she was probably not a regular at their meetings, her close ties with intimates of the academy — especially Parabosco and Molino — and the sonnet she addressed to Venier make her presence there very likely.^[66] Stampa's

[62] See Rime di Domenico Veniero, p. xv; the sonnet, Ne 'l bianco augel, che 'n grembo a Leda giacque, is no. 68 in Serassi's edition, p. 37. It appears in the anthology De le rime di diversi nobili poeti toscani, raccolte da M. Dionigi Atanagi, libro secondo, con una nuova tavola del medesimo . . . (Venice, 1565), fol. 11, where Atanagi's annotated tavola reads, "Ad una virtuosa donna, che cantava, & sonava eccellentemente di liuto, detta Franceschina Bellamano: al qual cognome allude nel primo Terzetto" (fol. K/2 4). See also Bussi, Umanità e arte, p. 36.

[63] Fol. 32. See also the references to Bellamano in Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:447 and 2:843. Einstein considered her — without evidence — to have been a courtesan, as he did virtually all female musicians; see Chap. 2 n. 51 above for a reassessment of the problematics involved.

[64] The full title of the former is Sette libri de cathaloghi a' varie cose appartenenti, non solo antiche, ma anche moderne: opera utile molto alla historia, et da cui prender si po materia di favellare d'ogni proposto che si occorra (Venice, 1552); she is listed as "Franceschina bella mano" on p. 512. I am indebted to Howard Mayer Brown for the reference and for the use of his copy of the book. Parabosco addressed a letter to Polissena Frigera (Frizzera) in his second book of Lettere amorose; see Libro secondo delle lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco (Venice, 1573), fol. 11'.

[65] For the verses to Spilimbergo see Rime di diversi nobilissimi, et eccellentissimi autori, in morte della Signora Irene delle Signore di Spilimbergo. Alle quali si sono aggiunti versi Latini di diversi egregij Poeti, in morte della medesima Signora, ed. Dionigi Atanagi (Venice, 1561), with Venier's poem on p. 33. Like Venier's sonnet to Franceschina Bellamano, this one plays with the words bella man. This might seem to suggest that the former could also have been intended for Irene or another female singer-lutenist other than Franceschina Bellamano, but Atanagi's authority as editor of both volumes (cf. n. 62 above) makes this unlikely. On the volume dedicated to Irene see Marcellino, Il diamerone, p. 5; Elvira Favretti, "Una raccolta di rime del cinquecento," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 158 (1981): 543-72; and Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Irene di Spilimbergo: The Image of a Creative Woman in Late Renaissance Italy," RQ 44 (1991): 42-61. For a reprint of the table of contents see idem, "Commemorators of Irene di Spilimbergo," RQ 45 (1992): 524-36.

The information about Vagnoli was kindly related to me by David Butchart. It appears in a sonnet of Venier's (not included in Serassi's ed.) cited by Alfredo Saviotti, "Un'artista del cinquecento: Virginia Vagnoli," Bulletino senese di storia patria 26 (1919): 116-18.

[66] The sonnet to Venier is no. 252 in her Rime varie; mod. ed., Rime, ed. Bellonci and Ceriello, p. 247. On the question of Stampa's involvement in ca'Venier see Abdelkader Salza, "Madonna Gasparina Stampa, secondo nuove indagini," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 62 (1913): 1-101, who delivers a negative opinion while adducing much evidence that can be interpreted to the contrary (pp. 22-23).

singing was continually exalted with the topos of weeping stones; Parabosco's letter in his Lettere amorose of 1545 is only one of many such references: "What shall I say of that angelic voice, which sometimes strikes the air with its divine accents, making such a sweet harmony that it not only seems to everyone who is worthy of hearing it as if a Siren's . . . but infuses spirit and life into the coldest stones and makes them weep with sweetness?"^[67]

We know little of how these soloists' unpreserved music sounded. I imagine Stampa singing fairly stock melodic formulas for poetic recitation not unlike the ones printed in Petrucci's Fourth Book of Frottolas of 1505 as "modi" or "aeri," which matched different melodies to different poetic forms — sonnets, capitoli, and so forth.^[68] Such melodies were entirely apt for the poet-reciter, for whom display of original verse was the main point. They could be invented or borrowed, and reapplied stanza after stanza with creative variations and ornamentation, the patterns reshaped according to the poem's thematic development and the performer's inspiration.

The process is simple enough to try by applying Petrucci's melodies to Stampa's own verse. What emerges from such an exercise is how very singable her lyrics are — not only in the musicality of their scansion and sound groups, but in their thematizing of the very process of reciting in song.^[69] Frequently Stampa's verse begins by summoning a friend, lover, or muse with a vocative rhetorical device in a way that might invite some kind of musical intonation. In the opening of Stampa's capitolo no. 256 we hear an apostrophic call to a muse that suggests this kind of intonation, replete with allusions to singing, melodic qualities, and the emotions they engender.^[70]

   Musa mia, che sì pronta e sì cortese         My muse, you who were so quick and so kind
A pianger fosti meco ed a cantare            To weep with me and to sing
Le mie gioie d'amor tutte, e l'offese          Of all my joys of love, and the hurts

   In tempre oltra l'usato aspre ed                 In modes beyond the usual harsh and bitter
      amare                                                      ones,^[71]

Movi meco dolente e sbigottita                You move with me dolefully and dismayed,
Con le sorelle a pianger e a gridare . . .    With your sisters weeping and crying out . . .

[67] "Che dirò io di quella angelica voce, che qualhora percuota l'aria de' suoi divini accenti, fa tale sì dolce harmonia, che non pura a guisa di Sirena fa d'ognuno, che degno d'ascoltarla . . . ma infonde spirto e vita nelle più fredde pietre, facendole per soverchia dolcezza lacrimare?" (Libro primo delle lettere amorose di M. Girolamo Parabosco [Venice, 1573], fol. 21'). Molino also referred to Stampa as a siren ("Nova Sirena"); see Salza, "Madonna Gasparina Stampa," p. 26, and for Ortensio Landi's praise of her musical prowess, pp. 17-18.

[68] This book (RISM 1505⁵) contains untexted melodic formulas for a "Modo de cantar sonetti" (fol. 14) and an "Aer de versi latini" (fol. 36), as well as a texted "Aer de capituli," Un solicito amor (fol. 55'), for which different texts in capitolo form can be supplied. It is reprinted in Ottaviano Petrucci, Frottole, Buch I und IV: Nach dem Erstlingsdrucken von 1504 und 1505 (?), ed. Rudolf Schwartz, Publikationen älterer Musik, vol. 8 (Leipzig, 1935; repr. Hildesheim, 1967).

[69] The latter forms the subject of a study by Janet L. Smarr, "Gaspara Stampa's Poetry for Performance," Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 12 (1991): 61-84.

[70] See also sonnet 173, Cantate meco, Progne e Filomena, and Ann Rosalind Jones's analysis of it as "an exchange of sympathy and song," The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Indianapolis, 1990), pp. 138-39.

[71] I should emphasize that my use of "modes" for tempre here does not mean to imply the full panoply of technical traits linked with sixteenth-century modal theory. I intend instead the more general sense of melodies or melodic gestures using characteristic intervallic relationships, especially as they might have been conceived within a broad cultural consciousness as evoking affects.

In recitation for terze rime such as these the three poetic lines of the capitolo's stanzas would each be matched with a single musical phrase and the overall poetic prosody of each strophe thus shaped by a larger tripartite architectural scheme. Tunes for reciting such stanzas typically have a simple progressive shape that defines the keynote at the start, migrates above it, and then sinks to a clear return. The anonymous setting of Jacopo Sannazaro's capitolo Se mai per maraveglia alzando 'l viso, as arranged by Franciscus Bossinensis for lute and voice and printed by Petrucci in Tenori e contrabassi intabulati col soprano in canto figurato . . . Libro secundo in 1511, suits Stampa's capitolo especially well (see Ex. 1, where the music is given with Sannazaro's text replaced by Stampa's).^[72] The arrangement offers up a preludial series of freely iterated, improvisatory chordal arpeggios that preface the recitative-like opening of the tune. This in turn leads into a more melodious excursion at the tune's center.^[73] In Ex. 1 I have underlaid the first stanza of Stampa's capitolo to which she could have applied grace notes, cadential decorations, rhythmic alterations, and other forms of improvisation here and in subsequent stanzas.

Of course, Stampa could also have used newer formulas, or made them up herself. A remarkable discovery by Lynn Hooker concerning Stampa's only two canzoni, nos. 68 and 299, lends supports to the latter alternative.^[74] Hooker points out that the two share precisely the same versification scheme and, moreover, that the first of them, Chiaro e famoso mare, bases its content, narrative, and verse structure on Petrarch's Chiare fresche et dolci acque. We know that canzoni were among the least fixed of repetitive forms and therefore the least susceptible to repetitive melodic formulas; they could use stock melodic archetypes traditionally linked with settenari and endecasillabi, respectively, but the method of pairing, separating, concatenating, and varying the melodies has to have been keyed (at minimum) to the particular formal scheme of each individual canzone. The unusual formal identity of the canzoni in this trio (including Stampa's two and Petrarch's Chiare fresche) might alone be grounds to suspect that Stampa performed all three with the same melodic

[72] Knud Jeppesen, La Frottola, 3 vols. (Copenhagen, 1968), 1:118, lists the piece as "Laude?" My attribution of the poem to Sannazaro is based on Iacobo Sannazaro, Opere volgari, ed. Alfredo Mauro (Bari, 1961), pp. 210-11, where it is given with the rubric "Lamentazione sopra il corpo del Redentor del mondo a'mortali."

[73] This example seems to me to suit Stampa's poem for use as a capitolo formula better than the generic "aer de capituli" published by Petrucci in RISM 1505⁵, since the latter is more lyrical than recitational and rather foursquare in its metric-melodic contours. (See fol. v' of Petrucci's Book Four, ed. Kroyer, p. 99.) Kevin Mason shows how unusual the idiomatic, improvisatory style of Bossinensis's ed. of Se mai per maraviglia is among early- to midcentury lute books; see "Per cantare e sonare: Lute Song Arrangements of Italian Vocal Polyphony at the End of the Renaissance," in Playing Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela: Historical Practice and Modern Interpretation, ed. Victor Coelho (Cambridge, forthcoming). See also Howard Mayer Brown, "Bossinensis, Willaert and Verdelot: Pitch and the Conventions of Transcribing Music for Lute and Voice in the Early Sixteenth Century," Revue de musicologie 75 (1989): 25-46, who argues that Bossinensis initiates a tradition for publishing lute books that largely demonstrate how to arrange "apparently vocal polyphony" for solo performance (rather than how to play lute accompaniments in the idiomatic, improvisatory style).

[74] Hooker's study was produced in my seminar on Petrarchism at the University of Chicago. In its current form it bears the title "Gaspara Stampa: Venetian, Petrarchist, and Virtuosa" (seminar paper, Winter 1992).

Ex. 1.
Anon. capitolo  setting,  Se mai per maraveglia alzando 'l viso,  with a capitolo  text
by Gaspara Stampa substituted for Sannazaro's  capitolo;  in Tenori e contrabassi
intabulati col sopran in canto figurato per cantar e sonar col lauto: libro secundo. 
Francisci Bossinensis  (Venice, 1511), fols. v^v -vi.

formulas and that the formulas were either her own or adapted by her to suit the special requirements of the three canzoni's shared formal structures. Hooker virtually clinches the argument that this was so by relating the nexus of canzoni to Orazio Brunetti's letter to Stampa in which he begs re-entry into her salon with the plea that he has missed her marvelous singing and especially her rendition of Petrarch's Chiare fresche.

Whether the melodies were Stampa's inventions or adaptations from preexistent formulas, her practice would almost certainly have matched melodic phrases to poetic lines, rather than to syntactic structures (which in any case do not always correspond to line lengths). This approach is far from high-styled Venetian madrigalian practice. It comes closer to madrigalian styles linked in their text-music relationships, harmonic patterns, and free treble-dominated declamatory rhythms to the world of improvvisatori, the most striking manifestations of which are the madrigali ariosi.^[75] The music's role in both solo singing and polyphonic imitations thereof — but especially in singing by the poet her- or himself — was to provide the verse with a musical dress. This did not mean that the goal of moving the listener through the efficacious joining of words and voice was any less strong for song than polyphony; indeed the reverse could have been true. It means instead that song did not aim for a sovereign aesthetic equal to the poetry in the same way elaborate polyphonic settings did.

In 1547 the madrigalist Perissone Cambio dedicated to Stampa his Primo libro di madrigali a quatro voci, praising her musical talent, her "sweet harmonies," and recalling her epithet of "divine siren."^[76] Perissone's dedication confirms the connection we might infer from Parabosco's letter to her cited earlier — a connection, that is, between Stampa, the cantatrice, and Venetian polyphonists. Yet the volume's contents show even more importantly that their distinct performing traditions — written polyphony and recited song — at times merged. Perissone's four-voice madrigals set two distinct kinds of verse: weighty Petrarchan sonnets and lighter ottave, madrigals, and ballatas, most of which were short. Frequently homophonic, these four-voice settings traded in great melodic charm. They strike a course midway between the tradition of melodious song practiced by Stampa and the thick, motetlike style found in the new five- and six-voice Venetian madrigals. Perissone, in other words, brought to many of his four-voice madrigals that

[75] Madrigali ariosi were issued by the Roman publisher Antonio Barrè in three different editions, first printed in 1555, 1558, and 1562, respectively. See James Haar, "The Madrigale Arioso: A Mid-Century Development in the Cinquecento Madrigal," Studi musicali 12 (1983): 203-19, and (with particular attention to the relations of harmony, melodic phrasing, and verse lines) Howard Mayer Brown, "Verso una definizione dell'armonia nel sedicesimo secolo: sui madrigali ariosi di Antonio Barrè," Rivista italiana di musicologia 25 (1990): 18-60.

[76] The dedication and translation are given in Chap. 9, p. 373. A facsimile of the dedication also appears in my edition of the book, Sixteenth-Century Madrigal, vol. 3 (New York, 1989), p. xvi.

indefinable, memorable, and tuneful quality that Pirrotta linked to the Italians' notion of "aria"^[77] — a quality particularly striking in them since they were published after Perissone issued his first book of five-voice madrigals in a style close to the Musica nova.

The more tuneful approach of Perissone's Madrigali a quatro voci resembles Donato's four-voice settings of Venier's three patriotic stanzas for the dual celebration of Ascension Day and the Marriage of Venice to the Sea.^[78] I offer the text of one of them below.

Gloriosa, felic'alma, Vineggia,                    Glorious, happy soul, Venice,
Di giustitia, d'amor, di pace albergo,           Shelter of justice, of love, of peace,
Che quant'altre cità più al mondo pregia     You who, first in honor, leave behind
Come prima d'honor ti lassi a tergo.           All other cities praised in the world:                 4
Ben puoi tu sola dir cità d'egregia;              Well may you alone be called city of renown;
Stando nell'acqu'in fin al ciel io mergo,         I immerse myself up to Heaven in water,
Poichè mi serb'anchor l'eterna cura,            Since the eternal cure still serves me,
Vergine, già mill'anni intatt'e pura.^[79]             Virgin, a thousand years intact and pure.          8

Donato's setting (Ex. 2) avoids the blurred outlines of the new Willaertian madrigal — a style in which the young composer was by then already proficient.^[80] Instead it celebrates the poem's association of the Virgin with the Marian virtues of Venice by means of lucid textures and well-defined successions of textual units. The simple F-mollis tonality concentrates its cadences exclusively on F and C and continually emphasizes the unassuming modal degrees of F, C, and A to create pleasing melodic outlines. Its graceful arioso melodies are enhanced by a fairly harmonic bass line, both treble and bass thus recalling characteristics of songlike genres. In this way the words project clearly to suit what was probably an outdoor performance on the occasion for which it was written, with instruments doubling vocal parts. But it may also have been heard with reduced forces in chamber performances at salons like Venier's. In such a venue

[77] See Pirrotta's "Willaert and the Canzone villanesca," in Music and Culture in Italy, p. 195, and Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 247ff.

[78] They appeared in Baldissara Donato musico e cantor in santo Marco, le napolitane, et alcuni madrigali a quatro voci da lui novamente composte, corrette, & misse in luce (Venice, 1550). See Ellen Rosand, "Music in the Myth of Venice," RQ 30 (1977): 527-30, with particular attention to the modernized reinterpretations of Venetian civic mythology in Venier's poems.

[79] Rime di Domenico Veniero, p. 40. (Here and elsewhere, I give the orthographical variants as they appear in the musical source.) Parabosco seemingly glossed the first line of the poem as the last line of his own Stanze in lode de l'inclita città di Vinegia, first published in his Rime (Venice, 1547), fols. 19-21': "di virtù tante Iddio t'adorna, et fregia, / felice gloriosa alma Vinegia" (15.7-8). Perhaps Venier's stanzas already existed by that time. For a modern edition of Parabosco's Stanze see Bianchini, Gerolamo Parabosco, pp. 461-64.

[80] When only about eighteen years old Donato had already published a highly proficient madrigal in the Willaertian style, a setting of Petrarch's sonnet S'una fed'amorosa, s'un cor non finto (see Chap. 9 n. 70 below). It was included in Cipriano de Rore's Terzo libro di madrigali a cinque voci of 1548 (RISM 1548⁹); for a mod. ed. see my "Venice and the Madrigal in the Mid-Sixteenth Century," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1987), 2:656-67.

Ex. 2.
Donato, Gloriosa, felic'alma, Vineggia  (Domenico Venier), incl.;  Le napolitane,
et alcuni madrigali a 4  (Venice, 1550), p. 20.

(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page)

Ex. 2
(continued)

(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page)

Ex. 2

its text could articulate the academy's alliance with the same civic values that sound less directly in the copious Bembist lyrics its members produced.

Since musical activity in Venier's salon functioned as a pastime rather than a central activity, and since the academy kept no formal records of its meetings, concrete evidence of links between musicians and men of letters is scarce. Parabosco, as a key figure in both the musical establishment at San Marco and the literary circle of Venier, forms the primary liaison between musicians and writers. Among literati the most intriguing link may be found in the figure of Molino, Venier's aristocratic poet friend and acquaintance of Parabosco (who sent him two books of his Lettere amorose ).^[81] Molino's stature in Venetian society was considerable, despite family battles that cost him an extended period of poverty and travails (on which more in Chap. 6).^[82] A bust sculpted by Alessandro Vittoria for the tiny Cappella Molin in Santa Maria del Giglio — where a great number of reliquaries owned by the family are still preserved — portrays Molino as the embodiment of gerontocratic wisdom (Plate 18).

In 1573 his posthumous biographer, Giovan Mario Verdizzotti, wrote that of all the arts Molino had delighted in understanding music most of all.^[83] The remark is supported by earlier evidence. Several composers based in Venice and the Veneto — Jean Gero, Francesco Portinaro, and Antonio Molino (no relation) — set Molino's seemingly little-accessible verse to music before its publication in 1573, four years after the poet's death.^[84] As early as 2 April 1535 Molino seems to have tried to obtain a frottola, Se la mia morte brami, by one of the genre's greatest exponents, Bartolomeo Tromboncino. The work had been requested of Tromboncino (then in Vicenza) by the Venetian theorist Giovanni del Lago, who apparently was in such a hurry to procure it that Tromboncino had no time to rewrite the original lute-accompanied version in a more madrigalesque vocal arrangement with the addition of an alto part, as had apparently been asked of him.

You ask me for the draft of Se la mia morte brami, and I send it to you most happily, advising you that I have written it only for singing to the lute, that is, without alto. For this reason, for whoever should want to sing it [a cappella], the [missing] alto would produce a serious wrong. Had you not had so little time, I would have

[81] Cited in Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco, pp. 420-21 n. 2.

[82] See Chap. 6 nn. 11-14 below. The most extensive modern work on Molino is that of Elisa Greggio, "Girolamo da Molino," 2 pts., Ateneo veneto, ser. 18, vol. 2 (Venice, 1894), pp. 188-202 and 255-323.

[83] "[D]i Musica . . . egli sommamente intendendosene dilettava" (Molino, Rime, p. [6]).

[84] The settings are Amore, quanta dolcezza in Gero's Book 2 a 3, 2d ed. (Venice, 1556), of which the first ed. is lost; and Come vago augellin ch'a poco a poco in Portinaro's Book 1 a 4 (1563), the latter also set in Antonio Molino's I dilettevoli madrigali a quatro voci (1568). The publication of Molino's posthumous canzoniere in 1573 led to many further settings, including three by Andrea Gabrieli, one by Luca Marenzio, five by Massaino, three by Pordenon, and twenty-four by Philippe de Monte, none of them listed in Il nuovo Vogel.

18.
Alessandro Vittorino,  Bust of Girolamo Molino,  Cappella Molìn,
Chiesa di Santa Maria del Giglio, Venice.
Photo courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm.

arranged it for singing in four parts, with no one part obstructing any of the others, and on my return to Venice, which will be at the beginning of May, if such an occasion arises, I shall fashion one of the sort mentioned above in order to make you understand that I have been and always shall be at your service. But please do me this favor: remember me to the magnificent and kindly Messer Girolamo Molino, that lover of artists ["virtuosi"], whom God by his grace should grant hundreds and hundreds of years of life.^[85]

[85] "V.S. mi richiede la minuta de: Se la mia morte brami: et così molto volun tier ve la man do, ad verten dovi ch'io non la feci se non da can tar nel lauto cioè senza con tr'alto. Per che chi can tar la volesse il con tr'alto da lei seria offeso. Ma se presta [sic ] non haveste havuto, gli n'harei fatta una che se can ta ria a 4 senza im pedir lun laltro et alla ritornata mia a Venetia che sera a prin cipio de maggio se accadera gli nefaro una al modo supra dicto facen dovi in terder [sic ] ch'io fui et sempre sero minor vost ro facendomi pero questo piacere racoman darmi al magnifi co et gentilissimo gentilhomo amator de i virtuosi ms Hyeronimo molino che Dio cent'e cent'anni in sua gratia lo conservi." In musical contexts the term virtuosi generally referred to musicians, so here Molino is probably being called specifically a "lover of musicians." Quoted from I-Rvat, MS Vat. lat. 5318, fol. 188; Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:48, gives a translation along with a somewhat different version of the text, as does Jeppesen, La frottola 1:150-1. The entire manuscript of Vat. lat. 5318 has been transcribed and published along with glosses of each letter in English by Bonnie J. Blackburn, Edward E. Lowinsky, and Clement A. Miller, eds., A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford, 1991), with Tromboncino's letter on p. 869. I am indebted to Bonnie Blackburn for reminding me of the latter and sharing substantial portions of the Correspondence with me prior to its publication.

Tromboncino's allusion to the rushed nature of the request that prevented him from producing the four-voice version and his warm regards to Molino suggest that the work was wanted for a specific occasion and probably by Molino, rather than del Lago. The work is lost, but we may assume that it was either a traditional frottola or rather akin to one. As a genre, of course, the frottola was related to the tradition of solo singing practiced by Molino's good friend Gaspara Stampa.

Molino himself may have performed solo song, as Stampa seems to hint in a sonnet dedicated to him with the words "Qui convien sol la tua cetra, e 'l tuo canto, / Chiaro Signor" (Here only your lyre is fitting, and your song, / eminent sir).^[86] In Petrarchan poetry the idea of singing, and singing to the lyre, is of course a metaphorical adaptation of classical convention to mean simply poetizing, without intent to evoke real singing and playing. But Stampa's poems make unusual and pointed separations between the acts of "scrivere" and "cantare" that suggest she meant real singing here.^[87]

Other contemporaries specifically point up Molino's knowledge of theoretical and practical aspects of music. Six years after Tromboncino's letter was written, in 1541, Giovanni del Lago dedicated his extensive collection of musical correspondence to Molino, whom he declared held "the first degree in the art of music" (nell arte di Musica tiene il primo grado). Further, he claimed, "Your Lordship . . . merits . . . the dedication of the present epistles, in which are contained various questions about music. . . . And certainly one sees that few today are found (like you) learned . . . in such a science, but yet adorned with kindness and good morals."^[88] Del Lago's correspondence, as will be seen in Chapter 6, was theoretically oriented in church polyphony. One of its most striking aspects is its recognition of connections between music and language that parallel those embodied in the new Venetian madrigal style. Del Lago insisted that vernacular poetry be complemented with suitable musical effects and verbal syntax with musical phrasing. In

[86] No. 261, vv. 12-13, from her Rime varie.

[87] Franco, who may also have done solo singing, does so too; see, for example, capitolo no. 2, v. 169, in Gaspara Stampa — Veronica Franco: Rime, ed. Abdelkader Salza (Bari, 1913), p. 241. I suspect that this is a feature of poetry conceived for an immediate audience — a distinctive aspect of a musician's verse, as both Stampa's and (to a lesser extent) Franco's was. This is a point made by Smarr, "Gaspara Stampa's Poetry for Performance." One should also note Venier's sonnet to Molino (Rime di Domenico Venier, no. 48, p. 26), which refers to the "suon delle tue note" (v. 6) — again, possibly with literal intent.

[88] "Vostra segnoria . . . merita . . . la dedicatione delle presenti epistole, nellequali si contengono diversi dubbij di Musica. . . . Et certo si vede che pochi al di d'hoggi si trovano (come voi) dottata . . . di tale scienza, ma ancora di gentilezza, et costumi ornata." This is the same collection of correspondence that contains Tromboncino's letter cited in n. 85 above — MS Vat. lat. 5318 (fol. [Í]).

discussing these relationships he developed musically the Ciceronian ideals of propriety and varietas.^[89] His dedication to Molino therefore presents a fascinating bridge between patronage in Venier's circle and developments in Venetian music. Yet taken in sum these sources show Molino's musical patronage embracing two different traditions, each quite distinct: one, the arioso tradition of improvisors and frottolists; the other, the learned tradition of church polyphonists. Molino's connection with both practices reinforces the impression that Venetian literati prized each of them.

Indeed, informal salons like Venier's, with their easy mixing of diverse personal and artistic styles, were ideally constituted to accommodate different traditions. They were well equipped to nurture the kind of interaction of musical and literary cultures necessary to achieve a profitable exchange and, at times, a fusion of disparate traditions. As we have seen, this was accomplished in a variety of ways: in the appropriation of literary ideals by composers, so evident in the new Venetian madrigal; in the bifurcation of secular genres according to Italian and dialect, high and low; and in the continued commingling of the ideals of song with those of imitative counterpoint, seen both in Perissone's four-voice book of polyphonic madrigals and in Donato's settings of Venier's stanzas.

Afterword

By the late 1550s, certain urban groups began crystallizing into more definite structures. Titled, formalized academies such as were to become the norm late in the century now made their first appearance.^[90] The most celebrated of these was the brain-child of Venier's lifelong friend Federigo Badoer, who in 1557 began forming a highly public academy called the Accademia Veneziana, or Accademia della Fama.^[91] This extravagant organization was a large, ambitious, and fatally costly undertaking designed formally along the lines of the Aldine Neacademia to serve the public needs of scholarship in science, arts, and letters.^[92] Its parallel in Florence was the Medici-supported Accademia Fiorentina. The Accademia Veneziana ultimately consisted of an administrative staff with four notaries and a secretariat, headed by a

[89] I summarize these points in "The Composer as Exegete: Interpretations of Petrarchan Syntax in the Venetian Madrigal," Studi musicali 18 (1989): 203-38, esp. pp. 219-23.

[90] The only real formal ancestor to this phenomenon in Venice was the Aldine Neacademia, which thrived from 1496 to ca. 1515 and had its official constitution in Greek. See Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, 1979), pp. 195ff.

[91] The most important modern studies of the Accademia Veneziana are those of Rose, "The Accademia Venetiana," pp. 191-242; Pietro Pagan, "Sulla Accademia 'Venetiana' o della 'Fama,'" Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 132 (1973-74): 359-92 (with corrections to some of the documents transcribed in Rose); and Lina Bolzoni, "L'Accademia Veneziana: splendore e decadenza di una utopia enciclopedica," in Università, accademie e società scientifiche in Italia e in Germania dal cinquecento al settecento, ed. Laetitia Boehm and Ezio Raimondi, Annali dell'Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico, no. 9 (Bologna, 1981), pp. 117-67. A brief entry appears in Maylender, Storia delle accademie 5:436-43.

[92] Another notable precursor, though much more modest in scope, is the Accademia degli Uniti founded in 1551, which did have official capitoli; see Antonio Pilot, "Gli ordini dell'Accademia Veneziana degli Uniti 1551," Ateneo veneto 35 (1912): 193-207.

chancellor, Bernardo Tasso, to whom it paid a handsome salary equivalent to Willaert's as chapelmaster of San Marco — two hundred ducats. Its separate departments, the Consiglio Iconomico, Consiglio Politico, Consiglio delle Scientie, and Oratorio, were intended collectively to embrace the whole of the Renaissance encyclopedia and thereby ensure the moral and scientific education of the state. As announced in a series of three published constitutions, various suppliche, and letters, it aimed to cover the full range of disciplines, since all pertained "to the public and private interests."^[93] Official members were eventually enrolled in scores of categories — even Zarlino was listed under the rubric of "musico."^[94]

The academy was defunct after less than four years. The phenomenon of its abrupt rise and fall marks an anxiety deeply embedded within the opposed alternatives of private and public, which forms a major theme in midcentury Venice. Particularly revealing are the intersections between Badoer's ambitiously titled Accademia Veneziana and the decidedly nameless accademie at ca' Venier.

Both Venier and Molino helped out with the planning and execution of the Accademia Veneziana in its formative phase. In September 1557 Venier joined the signers of a letter to Camillo Vezzato inviting him to participate in Badoer's academy — "a company" they claimed already to have "bound together," though in actual fact it was still in its founding stages.^[95] Molino, for his part, wrote to Bernardo Tasso on behalf of the Accademia Veneziana on 22 January 1558 singing its praises.^[96]

In recent days a noble company of learned and flourishing talents has joined together under the title Accademia Veneziana, having the intention of profiting literati and the world by putting into their hands books of philosophy and other disciplines. And not only in order to purge these of infinite errors and mistakes, which in truth they do contain, much to the grief of scholars, but to compile them with many useful annotations, discourses, and scholarly notes and, translated from various languages, bring them to light with the most beautiful printing and paper ever seen. Beyond this they intend to send forth new works, both by them and by others, never before printed; and indeed (from what I have understood) they have a great number of them prepared. This undertaking appears vast and very difficult; however, knowing the excellence and energy of those who have taken it upon themselves makes me believe that it will undoubtedly go forward fortuitously. Indeed they have rented the most elegant shop with the most lovely view in our whole Merceria, which they soon intend to open.^[97]

[93] The words are Badoer's, from a supplica of 12 July 1560 to the Procuratori asking to shift the academy from his house to the rooms of the Biblioteca Sansovino at San Marco, newly finished by Titian; see Rose, "The Accademia Venetiana," p. 229. See also the letter of Badoer's from 1559 quoted in Rose, p. 193.

[94] Maylender, Storia delle accademie 5:442.

[95] Pagan, "Sulla Accademia 'Venetiana,'" p. 361 n. 7.

[96] Delle lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso, 3 vols. in 2 (Padua, 1733-51), 2:358-61.

[97] "[A'] giorni passati s'è congregata insieme una nobile compagnia, sotto titolo di Accademia Veneziana, di alcuni dotti, e fioriti ingegni, avendo intenzione di giovare a letterati, e al mondo, col metter le mani così nei libri di Filosofia, come di altre facultà: e non solo purgar quelli degli infiniti errori, e incorrezioni che nel vero portano seco attorno, con molto danno degli studiosi, ma farli insieme con molte utili annotazioni, e discorsi e scolj, e tradotti appresso in diverse lingue, uscire in luce nella più bella stampa, e carta che si sia ancor veduta. Oltra di ciò intendono dar fuori Opre nuove, e non più stampate, sì per loro, come per altre composte; e già (per quel ch'io ho inteso) essi ne hanno gran numero apparecchiato. La qual' impresa, ancor che paja grande, e difficile molto; tuttavia il conoscere il valore di quei che l'hanno sopra di se tolta, e il buon polso loro, mi fa credere che ella anderà innanzi con felice corso senza dubbio. E già hanno tolta ad affitto la più bella bottega, e nella più bella vista che sia in tutta la nostra Merceria, intendono tosto aprila" (ibid., 2:359-60).

All of this was simply a prelude to a request that Tasso place his newly written Amadigi in their hands. Molino adds that most of these "Signori Accademici" are his friends; it is they who entreated him to make this request, together with "various of their protectors, among whom are Federigo Badoaro and Domenico Veniero."^[98]

While Molino knows something about the various plans he mentions, he hardly seems to count himself as one of the official academists. Much of what he relates sounds secondhand, as if he had been prepped by them to try to acquire the prestigious work for publication and went through with the task only as a favor.^[99] Venier's role, the letter suggests, might have been parallel to Badoer's at this early stage. But other documents lead me to believe that it could not have extended much beyond that of an initial financial backer.

Indeed Molino's distanced tone seems to presage the future relationship between Venier's private circle and the grand scheme conceived by Badoer. Neither Venier nor Molino can be found in documents emanating from the academy after these initial ones. The original business charter of 14 November 1557 did not include them, and neither of them signed the by-laws of the Accademia Veneziana in 1559.^[100] Contrary to what is stated in virtually all of the literature on Venier's circle, moreover, nothing suggests that Venier's group merged with the Accademia Veneziana only to return to its separate, private, and informal state after the Accademia Veneziana's demise.^[101]

The small — and finally nonexistent — place Venier and Molino occupy in the documents can be no accident; on the contrary their absence is remarkable. To read the documents otherwise misconstrues the spirit that informed Venier's enterprise, for although Badoer started from a combination of civic and literary ideals that were partially epitomized by Venier's academy at that time, he institutionalized them in

[98] "[T]anto più volentieri vi do questo ricordo, quanto questi Signori Accademici; che sono per lo più miei amici . . . me ne hanno fatto instanza" (ibid., 2:360); and later, "io ne sono stato pregato da questi Signori miei amici, e da diversi loro protettori, tra' quali è'l Clarissimo M. Federigo Badoaro, e M. Domenico Veniero; in nome de' quali io la prego insieme di questo favore" (ibid., 2:361).

[99] For further on the letter's references to Amadigi see Bolzoni, "L'Accademia Veneziana," pp. 124 and 128-29.

[100] See Documents 1 and 2 given in Rose, "The Accademia Venetiana," pp. 216-24, and other Documents given in his Appendix.

[101] The idea is implied by Serassi, Rime di Domenico Venier, p. xvii. Zorzi's recent Cortigiana veneziana states outright that the gatherings at ca' Venier transferred directly to the house of Badoer (p. 81), as if to suggest that Venier's salon simply emptied out during this time. Both Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana 7/1:253 and 7/3:1684, and Bolzoni, "L'Accademia Veneziana," pp. 119-20, tie the birth of the Accademia Veneziana closely to Venier's inner circle, albeit without claiming such a direct causal relationship. As far as I can determine, the freshest reading of Venier's relationship to the Accademia Veneziana based on known documents is that of Pagan, "Sulla Accademia 'Venetiana,'" esp. pp. 359-66.

ways antithetical to the mood of casual artistic exchange at ca' Venier.^[102] The ambitious agenda formulated in the Accademia Veneziana included a new philological emphasis that had had little place in the informal salon. Translations into the vernacular proposed in the summa of the Accademia Veneziana included an expanded corpus of authors in line with the academy's encyclopedic leanings.^[103]

This is not to say that Badoer's venture bore no fruit after financial corruption brought on its ruin. When the Accademia Veneziana foundered in 1561 Venier's salon seems to have absorbed some of its stranded letterati along with something of their more Aristotelian and eclectic literary perspectives.^[104] Venier's gradual turn in the sixties and seventies to philological inquiry into Provençal and Latin forms, metrical experiments with non-Bembist verse forms like the capitolo and the poetic genres of satire, pastoral, and elegy were undoubtedly related to the new directions they explored.^[105] And its philological focus seems to have led in time to acceptance of a wider range of literary models than strict Bembist views had allowed.^[106] But Venier's academic tastes were better accommodated in the atmosphere of the informal accademia, thriving in the slippery space between private elitism and public fame that drawing rooms could provide.

[102] Cf. Iain Fenlon and James Haar's characterization of the way the Accademia Fiorentina evolved under Medici support around 1540 as a means of systematizing and centralizing Florentine intellectual life in ways that were pedantic and countercreative; The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century: Sources and Interpretation (Cambridge, 1988), p. 85.

[103] See further in Bolzoni, "L'Accademia Veneziana," pp. 128-38, who characterizes Badoer's academy as a "syncretistic plurality" (p. 133).

[104] New adherents set adrift by Badoer's failed academy include Girolamo Fenaruolo, Marc'Antonio Silvio, and Celio Magno.

[105] On this later period see Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, pp. 177-78. Taddeo, Il manierismo letterario, also hints at this development but without much in the way of a chronological perspective (p. 56). In later years Venier pursued his interest in archaic metrics and linguistics through correspondence with Ludovico Castelvetro and Giovanni Maria Barbieri and prepared an edition, never completed or published, of the verse of the troubadour poets Peire d'Alvergne and Peire Rogier; see Santorre Debenedetti, Gli studi provenzali in Italia nel cinquecento (Turin, 1911), pp. 67-68, 159-60, and 228. He also made a translation of the Odes of Horace.

[106] Badoer's academists, notably Bernardo Tasso in his Ragionamento della poesia, exalted Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua for generating the rebirth of a poetic Italian language but did not embrace his mandate that Petrarch and Boccaccio be its sole models.