Mannerism in Cinquecento Madrigal

"MANNERISM" INTHE CINQUECENTO MADRIGAL?

By DON HARRAN

MANNERISM is generally taken to denote a movement in thevisual arts covering roughly the years from 1520 to 1620. Its

influence was so potent and its diffusion so widespread that the term hascome to be associated with a sizable portion of 16th-century paintingand sculpture1 in Italy and sometimes beyond. Where art historians havefor some forty years or more rejected the term "renascence" (in the senseof a rebirth of arts and letters along classical lines) as inapplicable to theItalian Cinquecento in its entirety, historians of music are, with fewexceptions, still wont to pin a Renaissance label on anything from Dun-stable to Gesualdo. Little attempt is made, in fact, to shade this catch-all

'And, somewhat sporadically, architecture; see the chapter entitled "Renais-lance and Mannerism" in Nikolaus Pevsner's Outline of European Architecture, 6thed. (Middlesex, 1960), pp. 289-381, and, of greater specificity, Erwin Panofsky,"Zwei Fassadenentwurfe Domenico Bcccafumis und das Problem des Manierismus inder Architektur" (an appendix to his essay on "Das erste Blatt aus dem 'Libro'Giorgio Vasaris"), Stddel-Jahrbuch, VI (1930), 65-72, and Werner Hager, "ZurRaumstruktur des Manierismus in der italienischen Architektur," Festschrift fur M.Wackernagel (Cologne, 1958), pp. 112-140. The best, and by now "classic," treat-ment of 16th-century mannerism in art is Arnold Hauser's Mannerism, the Crisis ofthe Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London, 1965). Other key works on theperiod in general are Hauser's Social History of Art, Vol. I I : "Renaissance, Mannerism,Baroque" (New York, 1959) — originally, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Litera-tur (Munich, 1953), Vol. I, pp. 281-511 — and Wylie Sypher's Four Stages of Ren-aissance Style (Garden City, N. Y., 1956), pp. 100-179. The last decade has yieldeda dense crop of writings on mannerism; the subject seems to strike a responsivenote among historians of our day. Especially to be recommended are Giuliano Bri-ganti, La Maniera italiana (Rome, 1961); Craig H. Smyth, Mannerism and 'Ma-niera' (Locust Valley, N. Y., 1962); Dagobert Frey, Manierismus als europaischeStilerscheinung (Stuttgart, 1964); and John Shearman, Mannerism Middlesex,1967). The question of mannerism in literature has been dealt with by Hauser,Sypher, Gustav Hocke (see notes 19 and 58, below), and Ricciardo Scrivano, //Manierismo nella letteratura del Cinquecento (Padua, 1959). For an extensiveclassified bibliography up to 1963, see Franzsepp Wurtenberger, Mannerism (London,1963), pp. 241-46.

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designation beyond classification into early, middle, late Renaissance,English, French, Italian Renaissance, and the like.* For some reason orother, the notion of a musical mannerism, though championed in a smallbody of scholarly writings' has failed to win a following.

True, "mannerism" or "mannerist," as the case may be, can hardlybe deemed a felicitous choice of terminology; the words by themselvesare so charged with pejorative overtones as to predispose one to viewderogatorily whatever they are meant to designate. Yet equally unat-tractive, for that matter, is the term Baroque (originally, bizarre orgrotesque), which has become a commonplace, ever since Wolfflin's

1 Leo Schrade warned of this terminological hardening of the arteries as far backas 1934 (see note 3, below). He wrote that "there are scarcely two estimates andsolutions of the Renaissance-Baroque problem to be found that are truly consonantwith each other. Beyond conceptual and general contrasts [between the two periods],this [lack of agreement] comes to the fore from the moment single works are subjectto interpretation. Hence we should be occupied with freeing the music of the 16thcentury from its scientific and conceptual rigidity" {op. cit. [ut infra] p. 4).

3 It was first considered by Leo Schrade in "Von der 'Maniera' der Kompoiitionin der Musik des 16. Jahrhunderts," Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, XVI (1934),3-20, 98-117, 152-170. He is concerned in the main with evaluating the role playedby imitaziont dilla natura in 16th-century composition, his conclusion being that men-nerism, as rooted in such imitazioni, is "the most decisive, though not the only formof musical expression within the total span of the 16th century" (p. 170). In ^TheAesthetic Problem of the Renaissance," Revue belg* de musicologU, IX (1955), 83-102, Robert Wolf tentatively applies the expression "mannerism" to the period thatleads from the Renaissance to the Baroque; his ideas are worked out in greater detailin "Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque: Three Styles, Three Periods," Les Colloquesdt Wigimont, IV (Paris, 1963), 35-80. (The notion of a style "between" Renais-sance and Baroque was advanced at an early date by Theodor Kroyer in "ZwischenRenaissance und Barock," Jahrbuch Peters, XXXIV [1927], 45-54) Beekman Can-non, Alvin Johnson, and William Waite take up the subject in a separate chapter oftheir Art of Music (New York, I960), and Maria Maniates points up manneristtraits in the polyphonic music of the Netherlanders: "Mannerist Composition inFranco-Flemish Polyphony," The Musical Quarterly, LII (1966), 17-36. In ClaudePalisca's "A Clarification of 'Musica Reservata' in Jean Taisnier's 'Astrologiae,' 1559,"Ada musicologica, XXXI (1959). the word "mannerisim" is proposed (on p. 159) asrelevant to the peculiarities of musica rtservata. Henry Kaufman acts on Palisca'sluggestion and in his Life and Works of Nicola Vicentino (American Institute ofMusicology, Musicological Studies & Documents, No. 11; Rome, 1966) devotes anentire chapter to "Reservata — A Problem of Musical Mannerism" (pp. 175-224).The second chapter of Daniel Rowland's Mannerism—Style and Mood (New Haven,Conn., 1964) is entitled "Carlo Gesualdo: Mannerism in the Madrigal" (pp. 23-47). See also John Maclvor Perkins's article on "Arthur Berger: The Composer asMannerist," Perspectives of New Music, V (1966), 75-92. (Prof. Hellmut Federhoferrecently informed me of a study of his on "the problem of mannerism in music" to bepublished in the forthcoming Lenaerts Festschrift.)

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"Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 523

Renaissance und Barock (1888), in the style criticism of art and ofmusic.4 Not all mannerism is "mannered," though. In its own time,maniera was assigned two distinct, almost antithetical meanings. Thefirst, holding for the 15th and first half or so of the 16th centuries, con-notes the poise and refinements of courtly behavior. It was used as suchby the author Giusto dei Conti (ca. 1379-1449), who praises "la virtu,la belti, & la maniera" of the lady to whom he penned his Canzoniere*and by Lorenzo de' Medici, who in a canzone a ballo writes: "whetheryou are walking, standing, or sitting, do it always with maniera"; or asan indicator of similar qualities in works of art, as may be inferred froma letter of Raphael's 6 in which, after dealing out praise to the architectsof antiquity, the artist characterizes Gothic edifices as "totally wantingin charm and refinements" ("privi di ogni gratia, senza maniera al-cuna"). This meaning was recognized also by the'arch-mannerist Vasari,who, in addition to heaping abuse upon the "monstrous and barbarousGothic style," ' was wont on occasion to interchange "maniera" and"grazia." 8 Only in later writings, from the second half of the 16th cen-tury and from the 17th, did maniera acquire its second meaning (withwhich we are conversant today) of hollow virtuosity, of graces carriedto precious or capricious extremes. This second meaning was launched

* The term may be traced back to the Renaissance. Then it was used to desig-nate the far-fetched arguments to which the syllogistic philosophers were prone. (SeeEncyclopaedia Britannka, 1967 ed., I l l , 190.). Rousseau (and later the art criticiRuskin and Burckhardt) pinned a "baroque" label on works of art that violatedclassic canons of order and balance. The Frenchman's definition of a "baroque" mu-sic contributed no little to the aversion in which the "baroque" period was long held:"Une musique baroqut est celle dont l'harmonie eat confuse, charg£e de modulationset dissonances, le chant dur et peu naturel, l'intonation difficile et le mouvementcontraint" {Dictionnairt de musique [1768], ed. M. M. Pathay, I [Paris, 1826], 67).

8 I am indebted for this and the following examples to Georg Weise, "La doppiaorigine del concetto di manierismo," Studi Vasariani (Atti del Convegno inter-nazionale per il quarto centenario della prima edizione delle "Vite" del Vasari [1950];Florence, 1952), pp. 181ff.

6 To Leo X, 1519. See Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur (Vienna, 1924),pp. 175 and 177f. about the sources and authenticity of this letter.

7 He climaxes his famous philippic against Gothic style (Introduction to Vol. Iof his Vite, chap. I l l ) with the words "May God preserve every country fromsuch notions and modes of building! They appear so ill-proportioned when com-pared with the beauty of our structures that they are not deserving of any furtherdiscourse from us." Le Vite de' eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1550),ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878-1885), I, 138.

8Cf. John Shearman, "Man\era as an Aesthetic Ideal," The Renaissance andMannerism (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art;Princeton, 1963), II, 205.

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by a person who himself acknowledged the first, namely, Vasari." (Hisequivocal stand more or less typfies the mannerist artist with his va-garies and his swaying between ideological antipodes — a point to be dis-cussed further on.) The difference between the two sets of connotationslies, to wit, between maniera as something positively construed and akind of "mannered" maniera, one might call it, a negative epithetbandied about by artists and theorists bent on reform.

Perhaps one may draw a parallel here between developments in thepictorial arts and the way Italian music towards the end of the 16thcentury turned against the past. In art as in music there was a conscious-ness of divergent styles, which correspond, in a way, to what WalterFriedlander calls "mannerism" and "anti-mannerism"10 or to whatMonteverdi classified as a prima and seconda prattica; n a repudiationof the immediate past (how much vituperative abuse was leveled at thispast by Vincenzo Galilei!); u a longing for simplicity and a renewedcontact with reality; and a formulation, in theoretical terms, of the tenetsof reform (Bellori and Malvasia in painting; Galilei, Girolamo Mei,Monteverdi, and others in,music).

The madrigal as maniera? The idea is enticing; yet in arts so diver-gent in their constitution as music and painting or sculpture, a dangeralways lurks of reading relationships a posteriori into the past — in thiscase a relationship between a matikre sonore and the visual arts of theCinquecento — which may not have existed in fact. Since the issue athand is unbacked by documentary evidence — what musical theoristsspeak about maniera in the madrigal? 13 — the watchword is obviously

8 It was taken up by Lodovico Dolce in hi* Dialogo delta pittura intitolatoI'Aretino (Venice, 1557) — see note 26, below — and then ran its course on downto G. P. Bellori's Le Vite de' pittori, scultori et architttti moderni (Rome, 1672) andC. C. Malvasia's Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678).

10 See Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York, 1958).This is a reprint (in translation) of two separate essays that originally appeared in1925 and 1929.

11 Foreword to his Quinto libro de' madrigali (1605). Facs. reprint in Tutte leopere di Claudio Monteverdi, ed. G. F. Malipiero, X, 69-72.

13 Dialogo delta musica antica e delta moderna (Venice, 1581; facs. ed. withpreface by Fabio Fano, Rome, 1934). Partly translated in Oliver Strunk, SourceReadings in Music History (New York, 1950), pp. 302-322.

11 During the 16th century maniera as employed by the theorists was roughlyequated with style. Thus Zarlino speaks of Willaert displaying "a reasonable dispo-sition in composing all songs in an elegant maniera whose clearest proof is offered inhis compositions" ("& ha mostrato un'ordine ragionevole di componere con elegantemaniera ogni musical cantilena, & nelle sue compositioni egli ne hi data chiaroiimoessempio") Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), facs. ed. (New York, 1965),

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caution. The notion of mannerism in the Italian madrigal is suggested,then, as an hypothesis. As such, it depends for its workability on a num-ber of general affinities between music and arts in the 16th century.Some of these, as the writer sees them, may be summed up under theheadings of artificiality, eclecticism, overpreoccupation with detail,change as a constant of style and structure, and the generating influenceof Northern art. Each will be discussed in turn.

Court life in the 16th century exhibits the traits of a cultural in-breeding. The retreat of the lord and his retinue into a twilight exist-ence of their own making was, perhaps, a compensation for the disorderof the world outside. In proportion as wars and religious disturbancesthreatened to topple established social structures, the courtiers withdrewinto the shell of an artificial code of ethics and deportment. Their activ-ities were played out against a make-believe setting of secular pomp andceremonial. The good manners and graces that Castiglione urged uponthe noble as the indispensable appurtenances of his station became intime the very status symbols that set him apart from the plebs. Goodmanners presuppose a taste for ritual, and ritual with its fixed behavioralpatterns leads to an estrangement from reality.14

Whether mythological, allegorical, or bucolic in content, the enter-tainments of the courts were calculated to indulge this same predilectionfor the fanciful. Clearly the prominent role allotted therein to music —which, by the very nature of its materials (viz., sounds), is the most un-realistic, hence alienated of the arts — was bound to have repercussions onits development. In fact it was in the seclusion and secularism of the courtsthat the madrigal was stamped with its most characteristic imprint. Here its

from the preface to part I, p. 2. In writings of the 17th and 18th centuries, though,the term was assigned various meanings ranging from a "manner" of performance(e.g., Caccini's "nobile maniera di cantare") or a performance practice (Praetoriusrefers to singing "uff jetzige Italienische Manier" in connection with Bovicelli andCaccini) to the addition of embellishments to instrumental music (F. W. Marpurgdistinguishes between Setzmanitren and Spielmanieren, the first denoting written-out"figures and passages," the second improvised ornaments). About these later usages,see Hugo Riemann, Musiklexikon, 12th ed., Il l (1967), 543.

14 As a striking parallel to estrangement of this sort, one need only mention thetopography of the aristocratic household. In the Middle Ages the feudal lord builthis fortress in such a way as to encompass his tenant landowners. The Renaissancenoble chose for his palace a site in the midst of urban throngs. The new taste has itthat the dwelling be situated outside the city walls, away from humanity, in a ruralor silvan setting (Palazzo del Te, Pratolino, Villa d'Este). Nor was this enough; thedwelling was further isolated by elaborately planned gardens which, in themselves,stressed the contrast between the artificial order created by man and the natural dis-order of his environment. Cf. Hauser, Mannerism, I, 283-84.

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poets whetted their taste for the amorous and the pastoral; here theyevolved their subtleties of thought and expression. A few decades back,the Florentine court and the urban populace had been entertained tosounds of the sprightly frottola (or more accurately its Florentine count-erpart, the canto carnascialesco); the same ditties sung within the wallsof the palazzo were repeated even more lustily on the streets. It is a signof the intervening class stratification that the madrigal became an exclu-sive diversion of the courts, while the masses were forced to seek theiramusements elsewhere — in the popular song, the villota, the canzonevillanesca.

The madrigal picked up its refinements via its poetry, a poetry astasteful and graceful as the highbred society for whom it was created. Itbuilds on a number of artifices which, in their way, presage the marin-ism and gongorism of the 17th century: verbal tautology ("O Sole,ov'e quel sole / Che gia solo solea . . . " ) ; solmization syllables that readas vocables ("II dolce vostro sguardo ./ Sol mi fa l'aspra pena . . . " ) , aremnant from the time of the frottola; the quotation of a well-knownverse as a kind of punch line (an example being Petrarch's "Fiorfrond'herb'aria antr'ond'arm'arch'ombr'aura," forced into service as theclosing line of the anonymous ottava rima, / vaghi fiori); alliteration("La sua pieta se pcrde. / Perch'e via piu'l mio mal che sua possanza");and a delight in the dramatic qualities of speech ("Tant'e l'assentio e'lfelch'io rod'esuggo").15

In an era given over to incongruities of every form and coloring, it isnot surprising to read about love as the cause, at one and the same time,of misery and of happiness: about lovers who die once deprived of

15 The examples of tautology, solmization syllables, and quotation are taken frompoems set, respectively, by Ruffo, Vincenzo Ferra, and Arcadelt in Libro terzo ded[iverst] autori eocellentissimi li madrigali a quatro voci a notte negre . . . (Venice:G. Scotto, 1549), pp. 5, 23, 22. The Petrarch line is the fifth verse of his sonnetAmor che meco al buon tempo (Canzioniere: CCCIII). The example of alliterationis verses 9-10 from the madrigal Bench.} la donna mia, set by Ubert Naich in //primo libro d'i madrigali dt diuersi eccellentissimi autori a misura de breve. . . . (Ven-ice: A. Gardane, 1542), p. 14. The last example is from a sonnet set by Jacques duPonte in // secondo libro de li madrigali de diversi eccellentissimi autori a misura dibreve... (Venice: A. Gardane, 1543), p. 32.

For a discussion of the new attitude to words as sounds — an attitude formed,it would seem, from the poets' familiarity with Bembo's Prose delta volgar lingua —cf. Dean T. Mace, "Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal,"The Musical Quarterly, LV (1969), 65-86. As Mace sees it, the music of the madri-gal developed out of the new way of writing and reading Italian verse. "The madri-gal as music," he writes, "is a deployment of sound and rhythm in a manner exactlyanalogous to that urged by Bembo for poetry" (p. 74).

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Madonna's presence, yet live from the hope of seeing her again; aboutmen who seek out the pleasures of love because they delight in wallowingin its torments; about undaunted suitors who willingly suffer martyrdomfor her who only too willingly ordains their martyrdom; about theirmore easily despairing confreres who, however much they try to escapefrom love, become all the more entangled in its stratagems; about stem-faced ladies who persist in their cruelty while deep down they cravemuch the same thing as the objects of their cruelty.16 The conceits of themadrigal work by way of antitheses. They unite "concepts" that aremutually exclusive; they force a rationale on ideas which, when held upto scrutiny, are irrational in their conjunction. Most characteristic of theconcetto, as the literary theorists would have it, is its sudden turn to theunexpected, a turnabout in content that takes one by surprise. The pro-cedure is technically known as peripety, from the Greek word for a"reversal" or "sudden change," and it recalls similar "surprise" proced-ures in mannerist painting (e.g., Parmigianino's Self-Portrait from aConvex Mirror; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).41 It springs froma kind of "e'pater le bourgeois" mentality which, in Arnold Hauser'swords, would have "the commonplace.seem rare and exquisite and thesimple and readily intelligible complicated and sophisticated." 18 Symp-tomatically, the theorist Gracian, author of a treatise on wit and conceitentitled Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1649) refers to peripety as "crisis" "— a word which, in the context of this study, carries no little historicalweight.

The striving for cleverness d tout prix shows especially in the meta-phor, a device to which poets clung with a vengeance. Metaphor is as itwere a concetto reduced to the level of words or groups of words. Theforms it takes (simile, allegory, personification, oxymoron, etc.) are somany means at the poet's disposal for circumventing the obvious or theprosaic. Metaphor stages its flight from reality by the pairing of notionswhose separate meanings admit of no logical basis for their apposition.

18 These five situations are set forth, respectively, in the four following poems in// secondo libro (see note 15, above) — the ballata Dolor che la mia vita, p. 33;Machiavelli's ballata Amor io unto I'alma, set by Gero (among-others), p. 29; themadrigal Quando fia mai, set by Lamberto, p. 16; the sonnet Tant'e I'assentio, setby Jacques du Ponte, p. 32 -— and in the madrigal Perchi piii acerba, set by Verde-lot in II primo libro (see note 15, above), p. 24.

17 See Hauser, Mannerism, I, 298.11 Ibid., I, 297." Cf. Gustav Hocke, Der Manierismus in der Literatur (Rowohlts deutsche

Enzyklopddie, Vol. 82/83; Hamburg, 1959), p. 151.

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It appeals to the imagination of the reader or listener, to his ability todiscern hidden similarities between apparent divergencies. Metaphoricalexpression flourishes in times of "crisis"; it acts as a linguistic safeguardagainst a reality whose presence must be disguised and transformed if itis to be endurable. Like the "allegories" of Titian w or the "metaphor-ical" portraits of the Milanese painter Arcimboldo, who discloses anoccult world of flora and fauna behind the countenance of his sitters,31

so the Italian madrigal, with its weighty metaphorical dress, suggests tothe consciousness an unexplored terrain of extra-meanings and analogieslying screened behind the word and the idea it is supposed to communi-cate. It is not given to ordinary souls to catch these meanings and an-alogies; M rather are they the intellectual property of an elite, a "secretlanguage marking off its users from the common herd." M This languagewas finished for that courtly society whose modus vivendi was itself anexample of metaphorical evasion or "a flight from things into words," touse Karl Vossler's expression.24

Eclecticism in art is generally to be associated with periods of stressand tension. It feeds on the vacillation of the artist, on his inability toconceive a uniform point of view in the face of a diversity of styles ortraditions bidding for precedence. Its characteristics are the substitution ofthe many for the one, the well-worn for the untried. One is reminded ofGiorgio Vasari's definition of "bella maniera," a style so beautiful in itsevery part as to recommend it as the worthiest goal of painting: a "bella

20The so-called Education of Cupid (Rome, Galleria Borghese), Sacred andProfane Love (ibid.), Allegory of the Marquis d'Avalos (Paris, Louvre), Feast ofVenus (Madrid, Prado), Bacchanal of the Andrians (ibid.), Apotheosis of Ariadne(London, National Gallery), and many others.

51 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1517-1595) is something of a rara avis in manneristpainting. He entered the service of Emperor Ferdinand I in 1562 and stayed inPrague twenty-six years, during which time he enjoyed the favor of Maximilian IIand, after 1576, his son, the great patron of icientific and artistic endeavors, RudolphII. Arcimboldo appears as the most representative of the painters of "portrait meta-morphosis" (heads formed, trompe I'oeil, as flowers, vegetables, fish, quadrupeds, anddiverse utensils), the idea being to portray a theme through the use of "metaphorical" attributes. As typical a work as any is Summer (fruit, vegetables, wheat, andgreenery congealing into a human shape) in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

a Describing the features of the impresa — a kind of metaphor in its own right(tee note 45, below) — Paolo Giovio (d. 1552), one of the great Latinists of histime, writes in the following class-conscious manner: "The device should not be soobscure as to require a libyl to interpret it, nor so obvious that any common person[plebeius] could understand it," Dialogo dells imprese militari e amorose (Rome,1555), quoted in Vol. IV of Encyclopedia of World Art (New York, 1961), col. 729.

a See Hauser, Mannerism, I, 293." Quoted, ibid., I, 290.

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maniera" may be achieved by copying "the most beautiful things, com-bining them from what was most beautiful (whether hands, heads,bodies or legs) to make the most attractive figure possible, to be appliedin every work for all figures." M For Lodovico Dolce, this "maniera" isso "bella" that it becomes "mala," "cattiva," or, in short, a bore. Com-mending Raphael for his painting, he writes that "there is not a shadowin it of what the painters of today disdainfully call maniera, namely, badpractice where forms and faces almost always look alike." M The samesort of creeping eclecticism that overtook the artists and was sanctionedby Vasari and his kind turns up, in a musical sphere, in the writings ofthe theorists of music who set up this or that composer as an exemplar.Thus Zarlino celebrates the achievements of Willaert, "truly one of therarest minds that ever practiced music" ("veramente uno de piu rariintelletti, che habbia la Musica prattica giamai essercitato"), and Gla-rean singles out Josquin as that representative of a "perfect art to whichnothing may be added" ("perfecta ars, cui ut nihil addi potest"): mu-sical practice, like that of the visual arts, is thereby conventionalized,with the styles of a few men being hailed as worthy of imitation.27 Andwhere the men were wanting for this imitation, then the theorists pressedfor an "imitazione della natura" which, as Leo Schrade noted, refers notonly to naturalistic depiction but to an evocation of nature in generalterms as well "One could reveal the 'verita del soggetto' [the truth of themeaning of words] with crassly realistic means or one could idealize'nature': the ground one stands on is, in the one and the other, thesame. The 'imitazione della natura' conditions the conceptual formationof the mannerist style"; ". . . imitation is the supreme law obeyed by the'maniera' of the artistic construction." M (Indeed, for Schrade the urgeto reproduce moods and meanings constitutes the crux of the mannerist

M ". . . le cose piu belle, e da quel piu bello o mani o teste o corpi o gambeaggiungnerle injieme, e fare una figura di tutte quelle bellezze che piu si poteva, emetterla in uso in ogni opera per tutte le figure" (Le Vite [see note 7, above], IV, 8).That artists were prevailed upon to hew to ideal standards of beauty is implicit aswell in the title and contents of Vincenzo Danti's "treatise on the perfect propor-tions of all things which may be imitated or portrayed through the art of drawing"(// primo libro del Trattato delle perfette proporzioni di tutte le cose, che imitate oritrarre si possono con I'arte del disegno [Florence, 1567]).

M " . . . in cid non appare ombre di quello che da' pittori oggi in mala parte 4chiamata maniera, cioe cattiva pratica, ove si veggono forme e volti quasi sempresimili" (from the Dialogo della piitura intitolato I'Aretino, see note 9, above). Quoted,Craig H. Smyth, Mannerism & 'Maniera,' pp. 4-5.

37 On this point, see Schrade, op. cit., pp. 99-100.a Ibid., pp. 20, 10. See note 3, above.

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question; it is with this that he is preoccupied in his important mono-graph.) And imitation, realistic or idealistic, of men or of nature, mustlead willy-nilly to a stylistic eclecticism.

The studied eclecticism of Italian painting from the forties on, sothe art historians point out, is bound up with the attempt to reconcile thetwo generating traditions of Cinquecento art: the classicism of Raphael,the anticlassicism of Michelangelo — hence the variety of this art, itsseveral viewpoints, its concourse of divergent styles or "manners." Themadrigal seemed to veer toward a like diversification in its own attemptto reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable strains of Netherlands and Ital-ian influence that impinged on its origins: on the one hand, the North-ern tradition — the chanson, the motet — in its already variegatedstylistic garb; on the other, the less easily defined cisalpine tradition —the villota, the mascherata, the canzona, a heterogeneous medley ofstyles and structures still activated in large part by the precept of thefrottola. Contrasts of style, so evident in the early unfolding of the mad-rigal, were sharpened no doubt by the above-mentioned oscillation of thecomposers between, an idealistic and naturalistic approach to the settingof verses. Throughout the 16th century an aesthetic battle was waged be-tween these two , now one, now the other gaining the upper hand:in art, the idealization of the subject, its recreation through the mind'seye ("disegno interno")29 of the painter or sculptor versus the realisticdepiction of nature, that is, the simulation of physical rather than emo-tional properties of objects; in music, a general portrayal of affectionsversus a more literal (and consequently less strictly musical) reproduc-tion of verbal imagery through tone-painting. What we have here isanother round, now fought out in an artistic arena, in the age-old philo-sophical conflict between Platonism and Aristotelianism or, in its laterforms, between Scholastic realism and nominalism or, again, FlorentineNeo-Platonism and rational skepticism.

The musical adversaries are somewhat less inexorable than theirphilosopher colleagues; they cross over into the opposite ideologicalcamp, then back again to their own, with few qualms of conscience.Thus it is not uncommon to meet with madrigals composed naturalisti-cally, i.e., with a wealth of descriptive detail ut pictura poesis, alongsidemadrigals of a more neutral caste; they are found not only within aspecific period or among composers of the same school but even withinthe repertory of single composers, as is the case with Lasso, Marenzio,

M The term used by the mannerist painter and theorist Federigo Zuccaro (1542-1609) in L'idea dti scultori, pittori $ architettori (1607).

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and any number of post-Rore madrigalists. The same ambivalence ofapproach carries over into single madrigals in which the composer is aptto teeter alternately in the direction of idealistic and of naturalistic han-dling: madrigals whose impersonal first phrase is followed up by thejolting realism of phrases two and three, only to return to their originalposture in phrases five and six, and so it goes. The very height of mu-sical eclecticism! The tendency is rooted, it would seem, in the dualancestry of the madrigal (to be discussed below). It thrives on theuncertainty of the composer who feels his way, during the early stages,in a new literary genre without musical precedents or a theoretical pro-gram to guide him. If the madrigal is eclectic in facture, it is so almostnecessarily: its form evolved from a poetry whose theme deviated intocunning refinements of sense and sentiment, a poetry where the suddenreversal, bilateral metaphors, and antithetical concetti were more highlyvalued than was the sustaining of a uniform argument.10

In a form addicted to courtly artifice, semantical double entendre,and contrasts of style, the detail was destined to assume greater im-portance than the whole. Madrigal poetry was written with words, andnot with ideas, to rephrase a point that Mallarme' once made to Degas.It was geared to the detail in its fine-drawn imagery, in its partiality toallusion over clear statement,11 in its periphrastic deviation from generalideas to their more specific attributes. When "torches" are substitutedfor eyes, "fire" for love, or "arriving in port" for sexual consummation,a conceptual dislocation takes place, and attention is fastened upon thestartling circumlocution as an object having an autonomous existence.The poet tends to become greatly involved in such details as a clever

so Just as the music seems to derive from its poetry, so the poetry, as Hauserwould have it, seems to derive from the way iu author relate! (or fails to relate) tohU lurroundings. "Metaphorism being directed, not to things themselves, but to theinvolved network of relations between them, is the only way of doing justice to theunstable, dynamic nature of a reality perpetually clothing itself in new forms" {Man-nerism, 1,295).

31 The obscurer the wording, the better. Castiglione makes the point that "if thewords which the writer uses are by themselves of a certain difficulty — no, that isnot right, of a recondite subtlety that makes them less obvious than those used in or-dinary discourse, they lend greater authority to the writing and keep the reader moreattentive and alert. He tends to weigh matters more carefully, taking delight in theingenuity and the erudition of whoever is the author, and, as a, result of his struggleto bring proper discernment to bear on his judgment, he tastes the pleasures to behad from following through difficult things" (// libr-o del cortegiano, Bk. I, chap.XXX). See Open di Baldassare Castiglone, Giovanni della Casa, Benvenuto Cellini,ed. C. Cordie (La letteratura italiana, storia e testi, Vol. XXVII; Milan, 1960),p. 53.

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simile or an adroitly handled oxymoron; he sees to it, accordingly, thatthe subject matter be kept broad and hazy lest too specific a theme in-hibit him in his choice of striking metaphors, in his sallies of verbal wit."The apparent temerity of ideas conceals a desperate disorientation," "hence the proliferation of words and more words. Musically, the con-cern with detail comes to rend the expressive unity of the compositioninto a series of individualized components. With the gradual importanceattached to the imitatio verborum as a technical procedure (from ca.1540 on), there was a sharpening of the qualitative differences betweenand within phrases. In time, the madrigal submitted its structure to theconceptual peculiarities of its poetry. And a multifarious structure it was,built on contrasts and dichotomies. Somewhere the balance of a classicart has dissolved; the poetically actuated music of the madrigal, dis-posed as it was to the detail, presents a most undassical condition ofstructural and emotional imbalance. It is a form, in truth, without focusor orientation. Its phrases follow cumulatively upon one another, tooindividualized to sustain a general mood or to impart a sense of direc-tion.

This kind of structural-semantical disorientation has a counterpart, itwould seem, in the many weird, disjunct creations known to manneristart from Pontormo and Peruzzi to Vasari and Tintoretto. Though thetechniques of art and music, as we have said, remove the two beyondcomparison, certain general parallels may be drawn nonetheless: spacecrowded with unwarranted figural detail; the scene split up into "areasseparated from each other externally and differently organized inter-nally"; M objects set in incongruous relationships to one another and totheir surroundings; distortions in the size and shape of objects as part ofthe attempt to achieve their individualization; the breach between thepurported subject or content of the work and the incompatible means ofits realization.34 Everywhere structural cogency is shaken by an undue

n Haujer, Manntrism, I, 289.n Ibid., I, 278."By this I mean, in musical termi, the anomalous situation that arises when

details are delineated so sharply as to controvert the main theme of the verses (e.g.,speedy semiminims on "correre" in a poem steeped in melancholy). Wolf sees thematter otherwise. The conflict between means and realization stems, in his mind, fromthe use of a polyphonic medium to convey a soloistic train of thought. "The air wasthe expression of individual, personal, unique, subjective sentiments; the means werepolyphonic, that is, multiple, impersonal, generalized, and objective" ("Renaissance,Mannerism, Baroque," [see note 3, above], p. 43). The solution to this conflict whichpersisted through the 16th century came, as the author points out, in the form ofmonody.

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respect paid to adjunctive detail: if the subject be a Deposition, thestress laid on the three Marys or the motley crowd of spectators (Pon-tormo and Rosso Fiorentino);" if it be a Madonna and Child, the con-cern with accessorial features — the gleam of fabrics, their draping intoplaits and folds, the pinkish skin hues of Madonna, her golden, elegantlycoifed locks, her jeweled adornments (Parmigianino).™ This obsessionwith detail tends to dim out essentials in peripheral ornament. TakeCellini's base for the Perseus group with its profusion of decorative ad-denda — statuettes of Diana and Jupiter in the niches, busts of Diana ofEphesus at the corners, tragic masks and goat heads; " or the f ac.ade ofthe Palazzo Spada (designed by Meresi di Caravaggio, Rome) with itsabrogation of architectural solidity through a mass of sculptural embel-lishments." A dazzling front of minutiae is put up as a kind of ersatz forwhat has been lost of classic control and congruity. The artist escapesinto a world of courtly blandishments; poet, musician, painter, sculptor— each deludes himself into believing that his carefully turned meta-phors, his clever word paintings, his idiosyncratic musical phrases, hisoverloading of pictorial or sculptural detail, that all these, in short, canserve as substitutes for deficiencies in originality, clear thinking and trueloftiness of spirit.

It is a deception that not only gained currency in the artistic domainbut formed something of a leitmotif for patrician circles as well. Revel-ing in subordinate detail appears elemental to the pomp and panoply ofthe courts. It is reflected in the emphasis put on specific conventions ofdress and etiquette thought to appertain to an aristocratic gentry. Castig-lione at an early date is blameworthy of promulgating an ideal of style(i.e., maniera) over content, of good manners over, say, distinctions\ofan intellectual or spiritual order. His creation in 1528 of the sociallyimpeccable cortegiano had as its effect the widening of the gulf betweencourtier and commoner: it strengthened the position of the former byfurnishing him with a behavioral code proper to his station. How arti-

"1525-1528 (Florence, Santa Felicita) and 1521 (Volterra, Pinacoteca), re-spectively.

M Madonna dtlla rosa, 1528-1530 (Dresden, Gemaldegalerie); Madonna dtlcollolungo.c*. 1535 (Florence, Uffizi).

"Dated between 1545-1554 (Florence, Loggia dei Lanzi). Also Cellini'i itatueof Cosimo I de' Medici from the yean 1546-1548 (Florence, Bargello), with iu per-nickety rendering of garments, bristles of hair, etc.

»Ca. 1555 (Wurtenberger) or 1540 (Hauser). The Villa Medici in Rome(1544, designed by Annibale Lippi) displays a similar overloading of its wall sur-faces.

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ficial this courtly deportment was may be judged from Giovanni dellaCasa's book called // Galateo (1558), an updated version of // COT-tegiano.3* Its author draws up the social mores of a young gentiluomo,briefing him on the virtues of a suppressed yawn, silent sneeze, the toneof voice befitting address, the position of the arms during ambulation,and like trivia. Between the calculated graces of our gentiluomo and thatdeliberate floundering in circumstantial detail that hallmarks much ofthe art and music of the Cinquecento there exists a not uncertain affinity.Both issue from a frame of mind in which greater import is attributed tosuperficies than to cogency of structure or statement — the madrigalistfastening on verbal characterization as an alternative for a binding largerform, the poet grasping at an "exquisite, subtle, accomplished, highlyornamented way of expression" out of the feeling that "language threat-ens to fail," *° and the courtier embracing a set of dilettantish refine-ments as an excuse for genuine intellectual or spiritual eminence.

Intrinsic to the stylistic and structural heterogeneity of the madrigalis the idea of change. It appears at one and the same time as result anddeterminant of an art given to overemphasis on textual particulars.There is something compellingly modern about this variety of art: itconjures up a pre-Bergsonian concept of change as fundamental to es-sence, as the elan vital propelling life forward in an ever-varying chainof events, actions, ideas, and feelings that link in a continuum. A philos-ophy of change is usually to be identified with periods in which social oreconomic mutations invest old or new forms with new content. Thebreakdown of the force of tradition in the life and art of the 20th cen-tury suggests a relation of sorts between this period and the later Renais-sance, just as the 18th century and the earlier Renaissance relate for acontrary reason. The great syntheses of a Hegelian bent in the late 19thcentury deflated in our time into a diversified array of pragmatist, exis-tentialist, and analytic philosophies; grand-scale representations in paint-ing and overblown Gesamtkunstwerke in music, into an agglomeration ofmyriad schools, forms, and techniques competing for priority. Movingback to the 16th century, the buoyant optimism given voice by the poetand humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) — "It is a joy to live" —yields to a disenchantment with life, sometimes to a brooding pessimism;the yearning for past greatness that prodded the humanists in theirstudies, to a pedantic imitation of ancient rubrics detached from their

19 Full title: Galateo ovvero de' costumi. Printed in Optr* di Baldassart Casti-glione, Giovanni della Casa, Btnvtnuto Cellini (see note 31, above), pp. 367-44Q.

40 Theie are Haiuer'i words, Mannerism, I, 289.

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Alinari, Florence

The base of Cellini's Perseus group.Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

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The Palazzo Spada in RomeAlinari, Florence

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conceptual content; the balance of a classically formed painting andarchitecture, to the imbalance of an art projecting the troubled mind ofits creator.41 Here also disturbances of a socio-historical order sparkedoff the changes that infiltrated the arts and letters of the time, forcingtraditional gains into novel structural usages. Take the example of linearperspective in painting: no sooner was it applied as a means of tighten-ing up form and content than it was diverted from this purpose, itstraits (spatial focusing, appropriate foreshortenings, simulation of rela-tive distances) now made to serve the ends of an idiosyncratic artisticvision. Or the example of tonal planning (avant la lettre) in the frottolaor the early madrigal: ° no sooner had the confused modal picturecrystallized into two basic modes, the natural minor (Aeolian, or Dorianwith B-flat) and the major (Lydian with B-flat) than these were sub-verted by chromatic alterations edging their way into the melodicfabric of the madrigal from the midcentury onward.

Like the 20th century, the later Renaissance had its philosophy ofchange, taking the form of skepticism on the one hand, or a kind ofmysticism on the other. Both were fanned into being by the uncertaintiesof an age acting as witness to its crumbling socio-religious institutions;both were erected on this shifting groundwork as philosophies keynotingchange as more or less of a behavioral or cosmological inevitability. Theskeptics raised psychic unrest to a theoretical canon. They rationalizedtheir doubts and disquiet into a systematic discrediting of authority. Con-testing whatever smacked of the doctrinaire in religion, philosophy,astronomy, and the arts, they demonstrated instead that the only con-stants were inconstants: the unreliability of the senses, the fickleness ofhuman behavior, the insufficiency of rational thinking to cope with onto-logical or epistemological questions. Montaigne's realization of his ownincapacity and, by proxy, that of his fellow men to fathom their mer-curial surroundings — what an appalling confession is that "Que sais-je?" — leads him at times to an almost ruthless cynicism. The doubterswere not all cynics, though. Giordano Bruno broke loose from thologicalfetters, yet exulted all the while in his ability to puncture holes in thedogma of the Church. If he inveighed against authority, it was, to hismind, a prerogative of his intellectual freedom as a human being.

Neo-mystical trends came to the fore in the revival of those occult

41 For a clear-cut differentiation between classic and mannerist procedures in lit-erature, the reader is referred to ibid., I, 287ff.

43 Discussed in E. E. Lowinsky, Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-CenturyMusic (Berkeley & Loi Angeles, 1962), pp. 3-14 and elsewhere.

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pre-Christian philosophies of Hellenistic antiquity, Neo-Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and their derivatives. Their spokesmen were not moti-vated, as were the skeptics, to decry all forms of a reality grasped infixed physical-theological terms; they sought rather to escape from theexternal appearances of this reality through a preoccupation with sym-bolistic number-letter doctrine, with the theories of emanation, witheerie astrological, alchemistic speculations. Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,Agrippa von Nettesheim, Paracelsus, John Dee, Kepler, and others of asimilar eremitic bent bypass the semblances of reality to get at its sub-stratum of latent meanings and motivations (Pico's "occult concordances,"Paracelsus's "light of nature" or his "secretum magicum," Cardan's doc-trine of "subtility," Kepler's "cosmographic mysteries," etc.).41 In theirphilosophy of change reality is envisioned as a flux of perpetually mu-tating forms, connecting with and converting into each other through theaction of an inherent Logos or universal law.*4

Theosophic evolution, dynamic pantheism: everything moves, alters,transfuses, metamorphoses to the pull of a superior animating power. Lifeis drawn as a picture of relentless movement, an incessant becoming ofform and substance. Is there not something of the same spirit manifest iniHe torsions of Michelangelan sculpture, in the Apollo (Florence, Bargello),for example, its undulating curves provoking a never-ending circular mo-tion? Or in those Slaves of the Boboli Gardens (Florence, Accademia),twisting and turning to free themselves of their unfinished marble? Or inthat forceful Deposition by Pontormo (Florence, Santa Felicita) whosecrowded mass of figures, enclosed in an oval, spirals forward and back-ward, downward and upward, in a momentous surge of bodily energy?Or, in music, in the madrigale cromatico (i.e., a note nere), that curiousmadrigal species of the forties and early fifties whose smaller note values(semiminims, fusas, semifusas) drove music into a state of frenzied ani-mation?

This world of changing appearances was viewed hieroglyphically, asimages of covert ideas. Such a view encompassed in its sweep the mun-dane with the abstruse: numerals were affixed secret meanings; the al-phabet was interpreted cabalistically. The spectators of this world movedback and forth, then, between different levels of reality. They joined inthat same game of mental acrobatics played by the poets in their two-dimensional metaphors and similies or their apposition and reconciliation

43 Cf. Giorgio de Santillana, The Age of Adventure (Boston, 1957), p. 38.

•* Ibid., p. 34.

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(via an obscure logos) of seeming incompatibles, as in the concetto.*6

Here as there a constant shimmying movement is initiated between thereal and latent, between the objective qualities of an idea and its sub-cutaneous inner meanings.

It was no easy matter to compose music to a poetry oscillating, as itdid, between shifting semantic planes. Music was enticed, almost as acompetitive measure, to accommodate itself to its refined verses with refine-ments sui generis. How music was led ever so gradually to adopt an af-fective style in response to the affective content of its verses may betraced in a number of details: the relaxation of stylistic invariabilitythrough a mingling of styles and idioms brought into the service oftextual meanings; the abandoning of a performance practice in whichinstruments participated on a parity with voices for the more personalizedrendition made possible by voices on all parts; the smoothing over ofrhythmic bluntness and melodic angularities. And fresh significance wasaccorded such niceties as deceptive cadences, cadences in which the root ofthe final is replaced by the third, delayed resolutions, imitative displace-ments, appoggiaturas, and so on.

Italian composers came to discard that aloofness vis-a-vis text thatmight have served music well in the days of the frottola, but destined itto insignificance if perpetuated into the present. To the Frenchmen andNetherlanders descending upon the peninsula, madrigal verse read quitedifferently from the prose or poetry to which they were accustomed; it

45 The game was played by artists too. In the emblem, they translated literarystatements into visual allegories. Emblematic art brings the word (a set of verses andan impresa) and its representation into a symbolic alliance. The effect is much likethat of the "imitazioni" of the madrigal reconciling verbal and sonorous ideasthrough a symbolism of their own. Both actualize their content on different planes ofunderstanding, be they literary-musical (in the madrigal) or literary-pictorial (in theemblem). One of the great collections of European emblems, the Emblematum libirof Andreas Alciatus, came out in 1531 (the first collection of madrigals, the Madri-gali de diver si musici, dates from 1530). Its popularity — it went through 150 editions— would seem to indicate how deeply entrenched was that attitude that allowedvariant systems of meaning to convene within a single frame; and not merely toconvene, but to conjoin as a viable form of artistic expression. Alciatus, for one, setout to legitimatize this conjunction in his book of emblemata, as he makes clear else-where: "Words symbolize, and things are symbolized [by them]. Yet things too maysometimes be symbolized by other things, as in the hieroglyphics of Horus and Chaere-mon. To prove this, we compiled a book in verse entitled Embltmata" "(Verba sig-nificant, res significantur: tametsi & res quandoque etiam significent, ubi hierglyphicaapud Horum & Chaeremonem, cuius argumenti & nos carmine libellum composuimus,cui titului est Emblemata"), De verborum & rerum significatione [1530], in a 1582 ed.(Basel: Thomas Guarinus) of his complete works: D. Andreae Alciati . . . opera omniain quatuor tomos. . ., Vol. II, col. 1027.

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exuded an intimacy, an elegant sensuality, that could nowhere be pointedto in the Biblical extracts of their motets or the poetry of their chansonsor songs. In their writing they did not go beyond the expression of cer-tain general feelings, usually sorrow or joy, contained in the text; butthat was back home, safe in the tradition of their forebears. Abstractrepresentation of that sort, it occurred to them, no longer befitted theultrapersonal vein of the madrigal; it did little justice to its subtle"changes" of sound and meaning, to what Bembo called the variazioneof its poetry.*8

The inconclusiveness of style and structure that marks the madrigalfrom its origins on harks back, no doubt, to the contradictions implicitin its dual ancestry. A history of the madrigal reads, in a sense, as adescription of the struggle of composers to strike a balance between theantithetical demands of polyphony and homophony, chromaticism anddiatonicism, literal and abstract verse-settings. They relied on poetry tobring law and order into a situation which, in its extreme form, couldonly lead to musical anarchy. That this law and order was more appar-rent than real, that it could not ward off the final downfall of the mad-rigal, its bursting asunder through musical conflicts too fundamental tobe contained by poetic means — is this not what happened with Gesu-aldo? — is a point deserving consideration, yet mentioned here paren-thetically. The cleavage at the roots of the madrigal seems to be indica-tive of a wider cleavage at the roots of Cinquecento art. It betokens awrenching of the balance and unity realized by a Josquin in music, aBramante in architecture, or a Raphael in painting. In classic art therelation of form to content is, on the whole, unproblematical, for theform of the work is its content, and vice versa. Conflicts are solved, ifthere are conflicts, by subordination to general aesthetic tenets pre-exist-ing the work itself — unity, balance, aurea mediocritas, etc. Times havechanged: form and content have been dissolved of their unequivocalrelationship; the general aesthetic tenets in back of the art work are notso easily defined. A style consciousness — true sign of that break betweenform and content — takes hold of the artist who, become aware of stylis-tic multiples, ponders the appropriateness of his modes of writing, his

48 The affinity between musical and poetic change was highlighted by Mace, whowrites, among other things: "It was in the concept of variazione that we may findthe final and complete analogy between the Petrarchan style in poetry and its poly-phonic setting in the madrigal; in both poetry and music, rhythm, harmonies, nu-mero and suono were in constant change and reflected the constant movement be-tween piacevoltzza and gravita [the last two being the chief qualities of poetry asdetailed by Bembo]" (op. tit., p. 78).

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maniere, to their corresponding textual content.*7

Musically speaking, the consequences of this stylistic crise de con-science were not insignificant: composers broadened their field of en-deavors, crossing national frontiers and generic barriers to dabble in awide variety of musical types, as did the Fleming Willaert, for example,when he wrote, along with his Latin motets, French ditties of chansonrustique stamp, Italian madrigals, popular villanesche, and instrumentalricercari. The frontiers of musical art were expanded in every direction.Urged on by his own restlessness to try his hand at different forms —another symptom of that courtly evasion of reality? — the composerbroadened his hold on a number of styles. These he cultivated not afterthe synthetical fashion of a Handel or Mozart or Josquin, but as somany individual "manners" practiced ad hoc. Any paying of tribute tothe goddess Diversita was bound to divest a classic art of its homogeneity.The traditional formula of e pluribus unum was reversed: variety wasintroduced in the place of uniformity, contrast in the place of unity.What transpired within musical art as a whole or within the repertoryof a specific composer was mirrored in diminutive within the frame ofthe single madrigal. Its variety is the result of a shifting approach; itscontrasts, the result of a split vision. A hybrid, changeable form it is,much like those Roman paintings of the late thirties and forties waver-ing between a Florentine, conception based on line — austere, exacting— and the sensuousness of Venetian colorism.

Returning to the matter of the dual origins of the madrigal, thequestion may be raised to what extent Northern influence is responsiblefor activating the music and art of the period. A musical species called"Italian madrigal" arose from the combined efforts of Netherlander,Frenchmen, and Italians — the very idea, when one thinks about it, isoutlandish.*8 The form is ridden at its origins, then, by a multiplicity ofstyles and approaches which might threaten to get out of hand had thecomposer not submitted them to the co-ordinating logic of his poetry.

*7 This style consciousness, as Schrade would have it, dates back to the period ofthe twenties to fifties, "the first phase where 'maniera' as a form of composition pene-trates artistic thinking, where one becomes aware of 'style' as a definite 'maniera' "(op. cit., pp. 3-4). He sees its origins to coincide (symptomatically) with the deathof Josquin. Once the master was dead, the pupili — the great and the epigonicboth — took it into their heads to spread the word: "Composen of the years 1520to 1550 put a creative interpretation on 'maniera' as an ideal. They saw their goal tolie in the diffusion of the 'buona maniera' over the whole domain of art music"(ibid., p. 100).

43 Einstein recognized the growth of a new Italian form out of such multipleroots as one of the "aberrations" of music history: The Italian Madrigal (Princeton,N. J., 1949), I, 153. See Mace, op. cit., p. 65.

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Of the two generating traditions the Northern was the more vital: theforms and content of its sacred and secular music changed with changesin times and aesthetic criteria. The dynamic growth of Northern artcomes as no surprise: its rich complex of styles and practices providesfrom within the seeds of development. That it scaled heights of technicalachievement is evident from its many polyphonic intricacies.

The Italian tradition, by contrast, strikes one as rather sluggish ofcharacter, given to reiteration of what has been consecrated by time andusage. It failed to bring about anything that might be called a majorrenovation of form and content, satisfying itself with minor changes hereand there, changes too sporadic and undeliberate to reform the ground-work of its practice. Italian music could not provide from within itselfthe stimulus for change; it could not claim, nor did it care to claim, thecontrapuntal triumphs of its Northern rival. Its means were restrictedby its predilection for the chordal: a vocal art which sets its goal atchordal simultaneity has, admittedly, a somewhat limited potential forgrowth. And it often happened that other limits were set by dividing theensemble into essential (soprano and bass) and inessential voices (altoand tenor). The result was a textual impoverishment of an art which, tostart with, had been textually rather meagerly endowed.** It fell victimin the long run to its own confining capacities. Even when the literaryscene altered, giving the composer an opportunity to sink his teeth intopoetry of improved quality, Italian secular music continued to draw from astorehouse of formal-stylistic anachronisms, prevented from striking outon an original path by the seeming prepossession of its composers. Thiswas the situation, more or less, that prevailed at the outset of the madri-gal. In the light of it we understand why the Italians were hard put tofit a new musical form to the new literary art at their disposal; we under-stand, too, why they looked to the Netherlanders, with their greaterlearning and their greater adaptability to changes in artistic climate, tolay the foundations for the new musical art in the making.

The effects of Northern influence on the visual arts are less easilyevaluated. In his biography of Jacopo da Pontormo, one of the firstmannerists or proto-mannerists,80 as the case may be, Vasari speaks re-provingly of the frescoes in the Certosa as German-inspired or, more

48 Where this kind of reduction of means worked to the benefit of music, though,was in its transfer to the instrumental domain. There the loprano-bass polarity (insongs with lute accompaniment, for example) adumbrates developmenti that leadultimately to the creation of monody.

60 Depending on whether one dates the beginnings of this movement to the thirdor second decade respectively. In Friedlander's time (see op. cit.), it was customary

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specifically, Diirer-inspired: "No one should reprehend Pontormo forimitating Diirer's original ideas. This by itself is no failing, for manypainters have done so in the past and still do so even now [sic]. He erredrather in adopting the so-called German maniera in all matters of dress,facial expression, and gesture. . . ,"61 From the turn of the century onFlemish, French, and German artists swarmed in large numbers to theItalian peninsula, setting up shop in Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples,and Ferrara; M the majority, from all available evidence, appear to haveassimilated the Italian manner.63 Yet from the above passage by Vasariand another (in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, 1547) in which he relatedthat the least Florentine cobbler was in possession of Flemish pictures,it may be assumed that the example of these Northerners did not gounheeded, even if it meant little more than the fomenting of a style con-sciousness among the Italians. When all is said and done, though, North-ern art played a tangential role — Pontormo's frescoes in the Certosa orthe awakening to different styles or maniere notwithstanding — in theformation of the new style in painting (and sculpture). Unlike the mad-rigal where, after predominantly Netherlandish beginnings, Italians andNortherners were to stake equal claims to fame, the triumphs of Cin-quecento art devolve upon Italians, and Italians alone.64

to treat the Florentines Pontormo, Rosso, and Michelangelo as representative of thefirst phase of mannerism. Modern critics have retrenched somewhat, featuring theprecious, courtly style of Salviati, Vasari, Jacopino del Conte, and others as a morecharacteristic manifestation of maniera. They tend to lump the earlier artists into aproto-mannerist category. Cf. The Renaissance and Mannerism (see note 8, above),especially the articles by Craig Smyth (pp. 174-199) and Deoclecio de Campos (pp.254-255).

81 Vasari, op. cit., VI, 270.M A staggering list of names appears in Jacques Bousquet, La peintun mani-

irisU (Neuchatel, 1964), p. 74.83 Vasari writes about this point: "Or non sapeva il Puntormo che i Tedeschi

e Fiamminghi vengono in queste parti per imparare la maniera italiana, che egli contanta fatica cercd, come cattiva, d'abbandonare?" (op. cit., VI, 267).

M For an extended study of Northern art in Italy, the reader is referred to thearticle by Erwin Panofsky mentioned in note 1, above. (It is subtitled "eine Studieuber der Beurteilung der Gotik in der italienischen Renaissance.") Panofsky tends toconsider mannerism as a reactivation of Gothic (i.e., anticlassic) tendencies embod-ied within Quattrocento art, and not as founded on an imitation or emulation ofNorthern models (as happened in music). There was no need for looking to suchmodels in art, for the Italians were surrounded by the maniere tedesca in numerousexamples from the time, of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. At the risk ofsounding hyperbolical, this maniera was for them, I suppose, either part of their"second nature" — the alter ego ever nudging them from behind the gregariousfacade — or, in the case of those trying to escape their nature (Vasari and mostmannerists in general), an art decidedly "second-rate."

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Why music was influenced by the North to a degree far exceedingsuch influence in the visual arts is one of those misty ontological ques-tions that admits of no single answer. It hinges for part of its elucidation,perhaps, on the answer to another question, mistier still: how does oneaccount for the fact that the Italian Renaissance yielded forth a plethoraof incomparable masterworks in the painterly and sculptural arts whereasmusic, in the heyday of an Alberti, a Leonardo, or an Andrea del Sarto,had little more to proffer than its homely frottolas? I would suggest asone possible explanation the composers' incapacity to draw sustenancefrom the very trends with which the Renaissance is connected, its hu-manism, its strongly classical orientation. A most potent agent in therebirth of the arts in Italy, no doubt, was the uncovering of the sculp-tural and architectural remains of antiquity. There were no such re-mains in music, and this was bound to come as a serious handicap. Thefew enigmatic fragments of Greek melos later published by VincenzoGalilei were unknown throughout the 15th and greater part of the 16thcenturies; even so, what influence could they have exerted, so slight inproportions and character as they were, when compared with the find,say, of a Laocoon? There was little to kindle the creative spark of com-posers whose dream of resuscitating a distant Golden Age in music hadhardly more to go on than the verbal descriptions of the theorists. Per-haps this is the explanation for the hiatus in Italian music, the greatwasteland that separates the proto-Renaissance of the Trecento from themannerist Cinquecento. That the Italian composers were prevented fromrenewing their practice might be ascribed, then, to insufficient promptingof a purely musical variety. Understood thus, the role of the Northernersin setting the foundations of a new Italian art as it took shape in themadrigal loses much of its incongruity. What happened was simply thatthe Northerners, who could boast an unbroken musical tradition, lent ahelping hand to their Southern neighbors, come to a creative deadlock;they offered something of their own achievements as a way of compen-sating for those deficient humanistic impulses without which an ItalianRenaissance, in no matter what area of arts and letters, is unthinkable.

One must distinguish, then, between Northern influence as operativein music and in the visual arts. In music, it was more or less of a neces-sity, the conditio sine qua non on which the very origins and later devel-opment of the madrigal were premised; in painting and sculpture, whosehistorical continuity rendered them quite without need of transalpine in-centives, it took the form of a similarity to (or, in Pontormo's case, animitation of) an art whose strangeness of form and of expression cor-

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responded after a fashion to the dictates of the troubled mannerist con-science. Music drew upon Northern art for its operational procedure;painting and sculpture found in it a confirmation of their spiritual dis-position. Both were beholden to Northern art, then, though for differentreasons; their mutual association with it adds another link to the chain ofaffinities that bind the music and visual arts of the Cinquecento.

Mannerism in the madrigal: the hypothesis needs further elaborationif it is to prove its validity. Many of the cardinal points have been ad-vanced in this article; still other aspects of maniera remain to be in-vestigated. Why is it, for example, that the madrigal started out as ahedonistic courtly entertainment while mannerist painting first wentthrough turbulent, almost psychopathic beginnings before lapsing into acourtly style? What relationship does the agitated madrigale cromaticobear to maniera? Is it perchance a musical parallel, come at a later date,to the toss and turmoil of early painterly mannerism? And musica reser-vata: does it not fall into line, as Claude Palisca has suggested," withmannerist currents in the arts? It would seem that that passage ofVicentino's providing a sociological explanation for the use of chromaticand enharmonic modesM can be brought to bear, if not on the firstperiod of the madrigal, at least on its more colorful middle and laterdevelopments. To what extent does maniera invade the realm of sacredmusic? In painting, sacred themes were invested with the sensuality ofprofane art, as in those lusciously modeled saints whose martyrdomseems a pretext for the more important business of uncovering the femalebody; something of the same order occurs later on in the madrigalespirituale, a "sacred" madrigal decked out with the graces of its secularcounterpart.

Is the madrigal to be seen as an isolated instance of mannerism inmusic, or can one claim for it historical precedents in some of those over-exuberant Graduals of Gregorian chant? In the "Gothic" angularity ofthe medieval motet61 or the nervous vocal writing of Pierre de la Croix?

M See note 3, above.M The passage, quoted often enough by Lowinsky, Kaufmann, and others, runs

as follows: " . . . e r a raeritamente ad altro uso la Cromatica & Enarmonics Musicariserbata che la Diatonica, perche questa in feste publiche in luoghi communi a usodelle vulgari orecchie si cantava: quelle fra li privati sollazzi de Signori e Principi,ad uso delle purgate orecchie in lode di gran personaggi et Heroi s'adoperavano."From Nicola Vicentino, L'antica musica ridotta alia moderna pr attic a (Rome: A.Barre, 1555), facs. ed. (Documenta Musicologica, first series, Vol. XVII; Kassel,1959), fol. 10T.

67 For Ruskin (The Stones of Venice) the Gothic became a kind of manneristart (in the positive sense of the word) whose expression runs the gauntlet from the

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In the fin de siicle eccentricities that crop up during the wane of the14th century? What about the relationship of the madrigal to the laterRococo, to the "vermanierten Mannheimer Gout" for which LeopoldMozart reproached his son, to art nouveau, to Jugendstil? Are we deal-ing here, perhaps, with a constant principle in Western arts? This lastquestion, touching as it does on the possibility of a unified historical un-folding of mannerism — what one literary critic has described as an"academic tradition of the anti-academic" M — intimates a most chal-lenging line of further investigation. It is a question that must be an-swered if the subject of mannerism in the madrigal is to be brought intofocus with the broad mainstream of musical as well as cultural history.

savage and the grotesque to the naturalistic and the idyllic. See Wylie Sypher, Ro-coco to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York, 1960), pp. 107-109.

M Gustav Rene1 Hocke in his Manierismus in der Literatur (see note 19, above),p. 304 Cf. Sypher on "neo-mannerism" in Four Stages of Renaissance Style, pp. 156-168, and Hauser, Mannerism, Vol. I (part III: Modern), pp. 353-393. For anextended survey of "manner and mania" in European art from 1520 to the present,see Hocke's Die Welt als Labyrinth {Rowohlts deutsche Enzyklopidie, Vol. 50/51;Hamburg, 1957). Other writers use different terms, though mean approximately thesame thing, for signifying the continuity of the mannerist tradition. Thui Ren6 Brayin La Priciositi et Us Pricieux de Thibault de Champagne a Jean Giraudoux (Paris,1948) opts for "preciosity" as a broad designation that includes the qualities of man-nerism within its fold. The "precious" or mannerist cannot, and should not, be con-founded with the distortions of a Baroque art, however. For the comparison of "man-nerist" and "Baroque" in the fine arts, see Hauser, Mannerism, I, 274f. (Wolfsarticle does the same for these terminological distinctions in music. By the way, Wolfwas later to abandon the word "mannerist" for "counter-Rennaissance," though it ishard to understand why, after all the incuive argumentation he put forward in itsfavor, "mannerist" would still not do. See "Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque," noteto p. 80.)

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Mannerism in Cinquecento Madrigal

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