The Rhetorical Frame of Poussin's Theory of the Modes

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Notes

¹ For example, see R. Zeitler, ‘Il problema dei mode e la consapevolezza di Poussin’, Critica d'Arte, 12 (1965), 26–35; J. Bialostocki, ‘Das Modusproblem in den bildenden Kunsten’, in Stil und Ikonographie:Studien zur Kunstiwssenschaft (Dresden: Verlag der Kinst, 1966), 5–35; W. Messerer, ‘Die Modi im Werk von Poussin’, Festschrift Luipold Dussler (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1972), 335–56; L. Marin, ‘La Lecture du tableau d'après Poussin’, Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des Études Françaises, xxiv (1972), 251–66; T. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 29–31; O. Batschmann, Dialectics of Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 39–40.

² I mean the term ‘humanist’ in both a general and specific sense. In the general sense, I mean that Poussin participates in the early modern Italian meditation upon and emulation of Classical sources. Specifically, I mean the emulation of Ciceronian eloquence. On the importance of Ciceronian rhetoric in humanist culture, see J. Siegel, ‘“Civic Humanism” or Ciceronian Rhetoric?’, Past and Present, 34 (1966), 3–48. More generally, see A. Bullock, The Humanist Tradition in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985); The Question of Humanism, edited by D. Goicoechea, J. Luik, and T. Madigan (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991). On the impact of humanism in artistic culture in France, see T. Olson, Poussin and France: Painting, Humanism, and the Politics of Style (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Rensselaer Lee's article continues to be of great importance. See R.W. Lee, ‘Ut Pictora Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting’, Art Bulletin, 22:4 (1940), 197–269. Also see J. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993); and D. Posner, ‘Concerning the Mechanical Parts of Painting and the Artistic Culture of Seventeenth‐Century France’, Art Bulletin, 75:4 (1993), 583–98.

³ Anthony Blunt's seminal study, Nicolas Poussin (London: Phaidon Press, 1967), superseded the very limited idea of what engagement with classical texts could mean for an artist like Poussin. For example, he had previously argued that the Osservazioni, published by Bellori, do not ‘incorporate original ideas of the artist, but notes on his reading’. A. Blunt, ‘Poussin's Notes on Painting’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1:4 (1938), 344–51, at 345. A passive view of Poussin's intellectual development can also be found in the summary of Blunt's dissertation work by Paul Alfassa: P. Alfassa, ‘L'Origine de la Lettre de Poussin sur les Modes d'Après un Travail Récent’, Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de l'art Français, (1933), 125–43; and also in H. Bardon, ‘Poussin et la Littérature Latine’, in Nicolas Poussin; Ouvrage Publié Sous La Direction De André Chastel (Paris: CNRS, 1960), 123–35.

⁴ J. Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

⁵ T. Olson, Poussin and France (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002).

⁶ See A. Colantuono, ‘Poussin's Osservazioni sopra la pittura: Notes or Aphorisms?’, Studi Secenteschi, 41 (2000), 285–311. For an opposed, Mahon‐esque argument against Poussin's erudition, see H. Raben, ‘“An Oracle of Painting”: Re‐Reading Poussin's Letters’, Simiolus, 20:1–2 (2003), 34–53.

⁷ E. Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Dusseldorf Notebook (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 140–44.

⁸ P. Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–43. For a more universal view of the modes, and their cognitive function, see D. Freedberg, ‘Composition and Emotion’, in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, edited by M. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–92.

⁹ Jennifer Ebbler identifies a sustained Ciceronian influence on the development of Latin letter writing as beginning in the late second century C.E. See J. Ebbeler, ‘Caesar's Letters and the Ideology of Literary History’, Helios, 30:1 (2003), 3–19. Also see J. Nicholson, ‘The Survival of Cicero's letters’, in Studies in Latin literature and Roman history, edited by C. Deroux (Brussels: Latomus, 1998), 63–105; G.O. Hutchinson, Cicero's Correspondence: A Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), see note 4, pages 4–5; A. Riggsby, ‘Pliny on Cicero and Oratory: Self‐fashioning in the Public Eye’, American Journal of Philology, 116 (1995), 123–35; E. Gunderson, ‘Catullus, Pliny and Love‐letters’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 127(1997), 201–31.

¹⁰ The ‘inadequate’ painting was the Ordination (1647) from the second Sacrament series. The preferred painting of Pointel was the Finding of Moses (1647). See Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (London: Pallas Athene, 1995), 225.

¹¹ My citations of Poussin's letter, and the English translations, are from Blunt's study, republished in 1995. Blunt, Poussin, 367–70.

¹² See S. Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives’, Journal of the Warbug and Courtald Institutes, 23 (1960), 19–215.

¹³ On the use of the modes in academic instruction and practice, see Jennifer Montagu's article, which astutely traces how Poussin's theory was applied and transformed: J. Montagu, ‘Theory of the Musical Modes in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55 (1992), 233–48.

¹⁸ Cicero, The Letters of Cicero, edited by E.S. Shuckburgh (London: G. Bell, 1905), IX.3, letter 19, 133.

¹⁴ J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth‐Century France’, The American Historical Review, 85:2 (1980), 307–33, at 310.

¹⁵ On Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's letters, see M. Bishop, Petrarch and His World (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1963). Also see Bishop's edited volume of Petrarch's own letters, which were modelled after those of Cicero and Pliny. Petrarch's Epistle to Posterity, especially, is influenced by Petrarch's own discovery of the ancient letters. See M. Bishop, Letters from Petrarch (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1966).

¹⁶ C. Edwards, ‘Epistolography’, in Companion to Latin Literature, edited by S. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 273. John Dugan provides a sophisticated analysis and close detailed study of Cicero's self‐fashioning within the rhetorical treatises. See J. Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self‐Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For further evidence of Poussin's Ciceronian style of the 1640s, one need only compare the style of letters of that decade to the style of his early letters. See A. Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: lettres et propos sur l'art, Miroirs de l'art (Paris: Hermann, 1964).

¹⁷ A great deal of Cicero's letters are written, at least in part, in rhythmic prose, just as his published works had been. On the rhythmic patterns, see G.O. Hutchinson, Cicero's Correspondence: A Literary Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

¹⁹ See Hutchinson, Cicero's Correspondence for a thematic and general view of Cicero's letters based upon close readings of the rhetorical structure of several of Cicero's letters, not including those discussed here.

²⁰ For example, the exaggerated blame cast upon Clodius, Gabinius and Piso in order to praise and exculpate Publius Sestius. See Cicero, The Speeches: Pro Sestio and in Vatinium, edited by R. Gardner Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

²¹ For example, ‘Cum singulis disputem? Quid? Non habuisti quod dares. Habuisse se dicet. Quis id sciet? Quis iudicabit? Non fuisse causam. Finget fuisse. Qui refellemus? Potuisse non dare si noluisset. Vi ereptum esse dicet.’ (Pro Scauro, IX.19.) Or, ‘Cuius latus ille mucro petebat? Qui sensus erat armorum tuorum? Qua tua mens, oculi, manus, ardor animi? Quid cupiebas, quid optabas? Nimis urgeo; commoveri videtur adulescens. Ad me revertar. Isdem in armis fui.’ (Pro Ligario, III.9).

²² Cicero, Cicero's Letters to Atticus, vol. 2, edited by D.R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 88. His translation of: ‘Ain tu? An me existimas ab ullo malle mea legi probarique quam ⟨a⟩ te? Cur igitur cuiquam misi prius? urgebar ab eo ad quem misi et non habebam exempla duo’. On the historical circumstances surrounding this letter, see D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero (London: Duckworth, 1971), 84–95.

²³ ‘Je n'en veux pas dire davantage il faudroit sortir des termes de la servitu que je vous ay vouée.’

²⁴ On the relationship between Chantelou and Poussin, see especially Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 177–215.

²⁵ ‘S'il estoit ainsi pourquoy vous aurois je préféré depuis l'espace de cinq ans à tant de personne de mérite et de qualité […].’

²⁶ ‘Le bien juger est très difficille si l'on n'a en cet art grande Théorie et pratique jointes ensemble.’

²⁹ Blunt, Poussin, 363. Translated from Bellori, Le Vite de'pittori scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), 460–62.

²⁷ See G.P. Bellori, The Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, edited by A.S. Wohl and T. Montanari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 333.

²⁸ See references in fns. 3 and 6.

³⁰ Blunt, ‘Poussin's notes on painting’, 345.

³¹ Cicero, Brutus, Orator, translated by G.L. Hendrickson and H.M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 347.

³² Cicero, Brutus, Orator, 347.

³³ M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

³⁴ R.W. Lee, Ut Pictora Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967); C. van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

³⁵ For example, see M. Barasch, The Language of Art. Studies in Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 302–19; The Language of Gesture in the Renaissance, edited by K. Eisenblicher and P. Sohm (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); C. Goldstein, ‘Rhetoric and Art History in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque’, Art Bulletin, 73 (1991), 641–52; J.R. Spencer, ‘Ut Pictura Rhetorica: A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 26–44.

³⁶ While it might be argued that Poussin is in fact following an early Modern interpretation of rhetoric such as the Ramists. The commentaries of Johannes Bisterfeldius and Hermannus Hausmannus, for example, followed the arguments of Petrus Ramus, who omitted inventio, dispositio and memoria from Cicero's traditional five‐part division of rhetoric. By focusing on actio and pronuntatio, it might be said that Poussin is following a Ramist division of rhetoric. However, two points suggest that Poussin is not following a Ramist conception of rhetoric. First, Poussin is not defining rhetoric, per se, but speaking only about affect with respect to listeners and later, viewers. Second, as I argue above, Poussin is quite faithful to Cicero's text. The fact that Cicero, who maintains a five‐part view of rhetoric, focuses on these two parts of rhetoric means that the two can be discussed as important without negating the importance of inventio or dispositio, which had been discussed in previous sections of Cicero's text. If Ramist views of rhetoric had guided Poussin's views, demonstrating fidelity to Cicero's text would not only be unnecessary, but also counter‐productive.

³⁷ Joseph C. Allard points out that musical theory had a long, venerated history from which artistic theory could draw. See J.C. Allard, ‘Mechanism, Music and Painting in Seventeenth‐Century France’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40 (1982), 269–79 (especially fns. 7 and 8). On Lomazzo's use of Neo‐Platonic theory, see R. Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth‐Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123–86. But, as we will see, Poussin did not rely on a pre‐existent relationship between musical and artistic theory.

³⁸ Cicero, De Oratore, Book III, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 21–2.

³⁹ It must be noted that the phrase in question is Poussin's own, and is not to be found in Zarlino's treatise.

⁴⁰ Cicero begins the third book lamenting the death of Crassus, who died shortly after the dialogue. Cicero admits ‘I was not myself present at the conversation, and have only received a report from Gaius Cotta of the general lines of argument and opinions expressed in this debate’ (De Orat. III.4, 16. Translated by Rackham). Thus Crassus plays much the same role of imagined interlocutor and model for Cicero as he did for Poussin.

⁴¹ For a discussion of Cicero's urbane language, and further references, see Cicero, Cato Maior de Senectute, edited by J.G. Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 103.

⁴² Shackleton Bailey provides a much better translation, although Cicero, not the palinode, is made the active agent: ‘There was also the fact (I might as well stop nibbling at what has to be swallowed) that I was not exactly proud of my palinode’. See Cicero's Letters, 88.

⁴³ L. Laurand, Études sur le style des discours de Cicéron avec une esquisse de l'histoire du ‘cursus’ (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1965), 261–77.

⁴⁴ Laurand, Études sur le style des discours de Cicéron, 70. This was in opposition to the almost anti‐hellenism of Cicero's speeches: ‘il s'efforce plus encore qu'ailleurs de n'employer que des mots appartenant à l'ancien fonds de la langue latine et encore usités couramment, compréhensibles pour tous, enfin qui ne poussent choquer personne’, p. 90. See also B. Baldwin, ‘Greek in Cicero's Letters’, Acta Classica, 35 (1992), 1–17.

⁴⁵ Zarlino cites numerous Latin and Greek authors. See G. Zarlino, On the Modes: Part Four of Le Institutioni Harmoniche, 1558, translated by V. Cohen and edited by C. Palisca (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983).

⁴⁶ ‘[…] leur théorie de la musique nous introduit en un monde de correspondances qui ne se laissent pas enfermer dans les bornes de l'expérience humaine [… L]e nombre est à la fois ce qui charme nos yeux et ce qui charme nos oreilles [… ils croyaient] qu'il y a une harmonie céleste, un concert enchanté, que la faiblesse ordinaire de l'homme ne leur permet pas de percevoir.’ L. Brunschvicg, Le rôle du Pythagorisme dans l’évolution des Idées (Paris: Actualités Scientifiques et Industrielles, 1937), 9–10. On Pythagorean music and its sources, see W. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, translated by E. Minar Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 369–400.

⁴⁷ As Anthony Blunt keenly notes, Poussin is echoing Stoic doctrine. (Blunt, Poussin, 157–76.) More specifically, I would argue that the doctrine of oikeiosis (the conforming of one's soul to the orderliness of the universe) underlies Poussin's use of Pythagorean music theory. Indeed, one might say that just as Zarlino compiles and synthesises ancient sources in the service of a Pythagorean project, so too Poussin compiles his sources in the service of a Stoic project. On the relationship between eloquence the natural order of the universe, see A. Michel, Rhetorique et philosophie chez Cicéron: Essai sur les fondaments philosophiques de l'art de persuader (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1960), 123–7. On the pedagogical use of music by the Stoic sage, see M. Protopapas‐Marneli, La rhétorique des Stoïciens (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 96–131. And most importantly for our purposes, see chapter nine (‘The Harmonics of Stoic Virtue’) of Anthony Long's book, which connects the Stoic image of harmonious living with Greek musical theory. A.A. Long, Stoic Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 202–21.

⁴⁸ See for example W.K.C. Guthrie, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 258.

⁴⁹ J.G.F. Powell notes about Cicero's handling of Greek philosophical terms: ‘[Cicero's] methods are neatly enumerated in Fin. 3.15. First, the use of a more ordinary, less technical word than the Greek equivalent. Second, the use of a number of words to translate the Greek word. Third, the direct borrowing of the Greek word itself’. J.G.F. Powell, ‘Cicero's Translations from Greek’, in Cicero the Philosopher, edited by J.G.F. Powell (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1995), 273–300. Poussin used the third option, translating Zarlino's philosophically loaded Italian into French.

⁵⁰ Zarlino, On the Modes, vii–viii.

⁵¹ C.M. Bower, ‘The Modes of Boethius’, Journal of Musicology, 3:3 (1984), 252–63 at 253. Bower also convincingly argues that Boethius's own source was Nicomachus's Manual of Harmonics. See C.M. Bower, ‘Boethius and Nicomachus: An Essay Concerning the Sources of De Institutione musica’, Vivarium, 16 (1978), 1–45. On Nicomachus, see F.R. Levin, The Harmonics of Nicomachus and the Pythagorean Tradition, American Classical Studies, 1 (University Park, PA: American Philological Association, 1975). Levin, like Bower, argues that the treatise should be read less as a technical treatise, and more as an advancement of a particularly Pythagorean, religious outlook.

⁵² See Allard, ‘Mechanism, Music and Painting’; D.P. Walker, ‘Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th centuries, Part 3’, The Music Review, 2 (1941) 220–27; F. Hammond, Poussin et les modes: le point de vue d'un musicien, edited by O. Bonfait, Poussin Et Rome: Actes du Colloque à L'academie de France à Rome et à La Bibliotheca Hertziana, 16–18 Novembre 1994 (Paris: RMN, 1996).

⁵³ ‘The basis for Gorgias's aesthetic and rhetorical theory is thus the awareness of the emotional effects which the poiesis of the arts, guided by the particular techne involved, creates in the psyche.’ C.P. Segal, ‘Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 66 (1962), 99–155, at 124. For an excellent description of Gorgias's place in the history of rhetoric see J. de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). See also B. McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); and E. Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999).

⁵⁴ If Sheila Barker's recent article is correct, there is in fact a pharmacological aspect to both Pythagorean and Gorgianic theory, which would have appealed to Poussin. Writing about Poussin's painting of the early 1630s, Barker explains: ‘Poussin's interest in paintings that cure reflects his scientific fascination with the “magic power” of images to produce in living beings their truly wondrous effects.’ S. Barker, ‘Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine’, The Art Bulletin, 86:4 (2004), 659–89, at 684.

⁵⁵ While there was a history of the marvelous to be found in Pseudo‐Longinus's De Sublimitate, Poussin's lack of investment in innovation for its own sake, and repeatedly demonstrated attempts to emulate Cicero, make Cicero's text, and the figure of Crassus, a much more likely textual source.

⁵⁶ ‘[…] one may read the De Oratore as a sustained counter‐attack against Plato's condemnation of rhetoric in the latter work’. Dugan, Making a New Man, 84. See also P. MacKendrick, The Philosophical Books of Cicero (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); B. Wisniewski, ‘Gorgias, Hippias, et le De Oratore de Cicéron’, Prometheus, 6 (1980), 248–58. Poussin's reading is thus, a very specific reading of the De Oratore, but not the Orator (100).

⁵⁷ Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, translated by W.R.M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925).

⁵⁸ Dugan, Making a New Man, 85.

⁵⁹ The beginning of book three begins with a lament for the eloquent Crassus. Cicero had not been present at the dialogue, a point about which he is very explicit: ‘when reading the admirable volumes of Plato, almost all of them containing a picture of Socrates, there is not one of us who, although they are works of genius, yet does not imagine something on a larger scale in regard to the personality that is their subject; and I make a similar claim […] upon everybody else who takes this work into his hands, that he shall form a mental picture of Lucius Crassus on a larger scale than the sketch that I shall draw. For I was not myself present at the conversation and have only received a report from Gaius Cotta of the general lines of argument […].’ (De Or. III.4, 15–16.)

⁶⁰ As Elaine Fantham puts it, ‘Crassus triumphantly rounds off his reinterpretation of Greek cultural history with the figure of the philosophic orator or orator‐philosopher: but he awards the prize to the educated orator [… H]is opponents […] must admit that the perfect orator will possess philosophic knowledge, whereas a philosopher may lack eloquence’. E. Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero's De Oratore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 262.

⁶¹ ‘Ses deus manières et nulle autres furent louées et approuvées de Platon et Aristote estimant les autres inutiles […].’

⁶² Of course, the notion of Platonic unity Poussin turned away from differed from the Platonic unity against which Cicero is working. As Pierre Boyancé notes, ‘[…] ce que Cicéron doit à Platon est qu'il ne peut y avoir orateur véritable sans formation philosophique. Mais pour Platon une telle formation reste en elle‐même le but essentiel. Tout est subordonné à la recherche de la vérité. Cicéron est d'un temps où les longues controverses des écoles ont amené à douter que cette recherche puisse aboutir aussi aisément à une science que Platon le pensait’. P. Boyancé, Études sur l'humanisme cicéronien (Brussels: Latomus, 1970), 236.

⁶³ J. Bell ‘Cassiano Dal Pozzo's Copy of The Zaccolini Manuscripts’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 51 (1988), 103–25; J. Bialostocki, ‘Une ideé de Léonard réalisée par Poussin’, Revue des arts, 4 (1954), 131–6; E. Cropper, ‘Poussin and Leonardo: Evidence from the Zaccolini Mss’, Art Bulletin, 62:4 (1980), 570–83.

⁶⁴ Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by J.‐P. Richter, National Gallery of Art, Kress Foundation studies in the history of European Art, 5 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 347.

⁶⁵ Leonardo even compares musical harmony to geometric proportions of perspective, which is clearly very different from Poussin's use of the concept of musical harmony. See Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone, translated by C. Farago (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992). The Paragone redefines humanism, not as rhetorical, philosophical, or philological, but as essentially visual. This displaces Alberti's theory of composition as a response to George of Trizbond's idea of a correct compositus periodic sentence. On early humanist theories of rhetoric, the reorganization of consciousness it began, and its effect on the critical discourse about art, see Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators.

⁶⁶ For a detailed analysis of Pietro Bembo's intervention, and his debates with Pico della Mirandola, see M.L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: the theory and practice of literary imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

⁶⁷ D.T. Mace, ‘Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal’, Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969), 65–86, at 80. Don Harrán adds: ‘Like rhetoric, music is concerned with the effective deployment of its means to communicated ideas to the consciousness and sensibilities of the listener. Music as rhetoric: the transfer of the principles of eloquence and persuasiveness from rhetoric to the theory and practice of music was one of the great achievements of the humanist movement in the Renaissance’. D. Harrán, In Search of Harmony: Hebrew and Humanist Elements in Sixteenth‐Century Musical Thought, Musicological Studies and Documents, 42 (Stuttgart: Hänssler Verlag, 1988). See especially chapter 7 on Zarlino and the history of rhetoric.