http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7873-2664
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for exploring the dynamic between the old and new, logic and rhetoric, absolute and relative knowledge, and scholasticism and humanism in writings on music from early fifteenth-century Padua. Early fifteenth-century Padua was a city of contrasts in which two intellectual traditions – one condemned by Petrarch and the other his legacy – ran alongside, and often entangled with, each other: scholasticism and early humanism. The writings on music of Paduan citizens Johannes Ciconia and Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi afford insights into the reception of these intellectual traditions. Ciconia’s Nova musica embraces the spirit of early humanism by proposing a revolutionary understanding of music as grammar and rhetoric, largely from the perspective of some of the oldest authors of Latin music theory. Prosdocimo’s scholastic approach to musical knowledge nonetheless demonstrates an interest in the aesthetics of listening that emphasises the role of emotion, especially pleasure, in musical experience. Yet, Ciconia alone provides the most forceful exposition of an emotional theory of musical expression that ultimately manifests itself in the music that he composed during the last decade or so of his life in Padua.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks two anonymous reviewers for the comments and suggested improvements.
Notes on contibutor
Jason Stoessel completed his PhD in 2003, and is currently a lecturer in Music at the University of New England. He has published widely on late medieval music and music theory. He is an associate investigator with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2014-2017), and holds a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant [DP150102135] examining canonic techniques and musical change, c. 1330-1530. He regularly blogs about his research at jjstoessel.wordpress.com.
ORCID
Jason Stoessel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7873-2664
Notes
1 Familiares IV, 1; Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch], Le Familiari, 153–61; Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch], Letters on Familiar Matters, 172–80.
2 Durling, “The Ascent”.
3 For example, Falkeid, “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux”; also see the following notes.
4 Feccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel”; Falkeid, “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux,” 5–28.
5 Durling, “The Ascent,” 32–4.
6 Falkeid, “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux,” 21–2.
7 See Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch, 81–101.
8 I need to acknowledge the influence on this article of Dorit Tanay, with whom I had several fruitful discussions about identity and subjectivity in the literature and music of the fourteenth century; many of her ideas on this topic are summarised in Tanay, “Music in the Age of Dante and Petrarch,” 269–91.
9 On Du Fay’s setting of Petrarch’s canzone and its possible connection with commemorations for the poet at Padua cathedral, see Bent, “Petrarch, Padua,” 86–96.
10 Kohl, “The Changing Concept of the Studia Humanitatis”. Reprinted in Kohl, Culture and Politics in Early Renaissance Padua, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS728, 185–209.
11 On some of the difficulties of defining Aristotelianism, see Grant, “Ways to Interpret the Terms ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Aristotelianism’”. Grant’s second approach where various “Aristotelianisms” are defined as species of a type, without the need for measuring them against any standard type but solely against one another is the one advocated here.
12 A recent succinct overview of Averroism and its late medieval controversies can be found in Martin, Subverting Aristotle, 11–27.
13 Martin, Subverting Aristotle, 29–30. Petrarch’s views on Averroes where shared by his successors at Florence, including Salutati and Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444); Ibid., 32–7.
14 Federici Vescovini, Astrologia e scienza.
15 Nardi, “Paolo Veneto e l’averroismo padovano,” 75–93.
16 Giletti, “Averroës and Averroism”.
17 On Barzizza’s career, see Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza.
18 On Vergerio’s life and works, see McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder. Vergerio never used the term studia humanitatis in his writings; rather he referred to the studia liberales, bonae artes and artes liberales, and attached novel and unusual importance to the subjects of rhetoric, history and moral philosophy. See Kohl, “The Changing Concept of the Studia humanitatis,” 194–5.
19 McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder, 51–70; Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises.
20 McManamon, “Innovation in Early Humanist Rhetoric”; McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals; McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder, 31–49, 121–35.
21 Zonta, Francesco Zabarella (1360–1417), 18–26.
22 Hallmark. “Protector, imo verus pater,” 153–68.
23 Hallmark, “Johannes Ciconia,” 265–85. At the time of the completing this article, my own research has uncovered several archival references to Ciconia that have not appeared in the literature. These include (where ACP = Archivio Capitolare, Padua; ASP = Archivio di Stato, Padua; and AN = Archivio notarile): ACP Canipa 1, 106v (1404); ACP Diversorum 13, 54r (30 May 1405); ASP AN 342, 74r-v (26 July 1405); ASP AN 627, 46r-v (29 July 1405); ASP AN 342, 185r (22 Dec 1405); ASP AN 41, 187r (19 Mar 1406); ACP Mensa Vescovile, Feudi 13, 50r (21 Mar 1407) and 136v–137r (31 March 1407); ASP AN 286, 235r (16 Jan 1408); ACP Diversorum 14, 27r (26 Mar 1410); ACP Men. Vesc., Feudi 14, 38v (9 Aug 1410); ASP AN 44, 64v–65r (7 Jan 1411), 70v–71r (28 Jan 1411), 72r (30 Jan 1411), 78v–79r (10 Feb 1411) and 214v (4 Mar 1411). These and further discoveries will be detailed and discussed in my book on music and humanism in Ciconia’s Padua. I am particularly grateful to the director, Francesca Fantini D’Onofrio, and staff of the ASP and the director, Stefano Dal Santo, and staff of the ACP for their assistance with consulting archival material in their respective collections.
24 Stoessel, “Music and Moral Philosophy”.
25 Stoessel, “Con lagreme bagnandome el viso”.
26 Favaro, “Intorno alla vita”; Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform.
27 Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi, Plana musica, 156–7.
28 Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza, 132–7; Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre, 1–92; Trolese, Ludovico Barbo e S. Giustina.
29 Bent, “Pietro Emiliani’s Chaplain Bartolomeo Rossi da Carpi”; Bent, “Some Singers of Polyphony”.
30 Favaro, “Intorno alla vita,” 1–74, 250–51, 405–23.
31 Prosdocimo, for example, drew on Aristotle’s Metaphysics for explaining the relationship between musical notation and the sung note; Stoessel, “The Interpretation of Unusual Mensuration Signs,” 182–3.
32 He is unable, for example, to accept the notational convention of using void red notes to indicate a 4:3 proportion; see Stoessel, “Symbolic Innovation,” 143–4.
33 It needs to be noted that Barbara Haggh has offered philological evidence which links some of the quotations in Ciconia’s Nova musica with sources from Bologna; Haggh, “Ciconia’s Nova musica”.
34 Gallo and Mantese, Ricerche sulle origini della, 14–15; Bent, “Bishop Francesco Malipiero,” 164–5; Bent, “Some Singers of Polyphony,” 288–9.
35 Edition: Ciconia, Nova Musica and De Proportionibus.
36 Translation: ibid., 53–5.
37 Bent, “Grammar and Rhetoric in Late Medieval Polyphony,” 52–71. Oddly, in discussing grammatical and rhetorical concepts applied to music, Bent fails to mention Ciconia’s Nova musica, skipping from Johannes de Boen to Johannes Tinctoris.
38 Kallendorf, Humanist Educational Treatises, 52–3.
39 Compare McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder, 104.
40 Ibid., 50–1.
41 Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform, 117.
42 Schmid, Musica et Scolia Enchiriadis.
43 Fuller, “Contrapunctus,” 122–3. As Prosdocimo notes in his Contrapunctus (1412): “know that the skill of counterpoint presupposes skill in practical plainchant, without which nothing of the present manner of knowledge could be understood” [sciendum quod hec ars contrapuncti artem pratice cantus plani presupponit, absque qua nichil huiusmodi scientie haberi poterit]; Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi, Contrapunctus, 32.
44 Ciconia, Nova Musica, 14–15.
45 Dyer, “The Place of Musica,” 3–71; Dyer, “Speculative ‘Musica’,” 177–204.
46 Ciconia, Nova Musica, 25. On the possible influence of Ciconia’s rejection of solmisation syllables and the hexachord in general, see Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform, 128–30.
47 Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform, 127–8.
48 Ciconia, Nova Musica, 308–9. The sources that Ciconia quotes are Amalarius of Metz, Liber officialis, 3.3.6; 3.11.20 (ed. J.M. Hanssens, Vatican City, 1948); Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 7.12 (ed. W.M. Lindsay, Oxford, 1911, repr. 1957).
49 Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform, 128.
50 Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform, 117–21.
51 Trolese, Ludovico Barbo e S. Giustina, 191–4.
52 Cattin, “Tradizione e tendenze innovatrici,” 259, note 27.
53 Palisca, “Sense over Reason,” 30–1.
54 In the same respect, Leofranc Holford-Strevens is possibly a little harsh in judging the prose and poetry of Ciconia in terms of later humanism’s (and classical antiquity’s) expectations in his “Humanism and the Language,” and “The Latin Poetry,” 437–70.
55 Herlinger, The Lucidarium, 130–60; Herlinger’s edition is reproduced with a new Italian translation in Marchetto da Padova, Lucidarium, 42–51. The dating of the Lucidarium is discussed in Strunk, “Intorno a Marchetto da Padova”; Strunk, “On the Date of Marchetto of Padova”; Pirrotta, “Marchetto da Padova”; Herlinger, The Lucidarium, 3–4.
56 Herlinger, “Marchetto’s Division of the Whole Tone”.
57 Lovato, “Dottrine musicali,” 221–3.
58 See Mauro, “La musica nei commenti ai Problemi,” 33–45.
59 See, for example, Jeffreys, “Some Early References,” 83–105.
60 Lovato, “Dottrine musicali,” 217–20.
61 Herlinger, The Lucidarium, 204; Lovato, “Dottrine musicali,” 220. For additional perspective on modes of musical aesthetics and listening in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in the writings of Englebert of Admont, Jacobus de Ispania, and Johannes Boen, see Fuller, “Delectabatur in hoc auris”. Fuller gives the name of the author of the Speculum musice as Jacques de Liège, but this attribution is in doubt following Margaret Bent’s recent discovery of the author’s true name, Jacobus de Ispania; Bent, Magister Jacobus de Ispania.
62 Bellinati, Contributo alla storia della, 91–5, with an edition of the documents 111–25.
63 Trans. Stoessel. Secunda regula est hec, quod contrapunctus nunquam incipi vel finiri debet nisi in combinationibus perfectis, scilicet in unisono vel in quinta maiori vel octava maiori vel in hiis equivalentibus, et ratio huius est quoniam si auditor per armonias mulceri habet, oportet ipsum primitus admoveri per armonias dulciores et nature amicabiliores, que sunt consonantie perfecte superius nominate, et sic ipse preponende sunt. Demum etiam ipse auditor dimitti debet cum dulcore et armonia nature delectabili, ne ipsius auditoris anima dulci consonantia precedente mota duritie consonantie finalis ab eo quod per armoniam intenditur, scilicet gaudio et delectatione, amoveatur. Herlinger’s translation: ‘The second rule is this: that counterpoint ought to begin and end only with perfect intervals – with the unison, the major fifth, major octave, and their equivalents; the reason for this is if the listener is to be charmed by these [sic] harmonies, he should at first be moved by the harmonies that are sweeter and more amicable by nature; these are the perfect consonances named above, and thus they are to be placed first. Finally, the listener ought to be sent away with the sweetness and harmony delectable to nature, lest the listener’s spirit, moved by the sweet preceding consonance, be repelled by the harshness of the final consonance from that towards which harmony is directed, enjoyment and delight’. Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi, Contrapunctus, 59–61. The main difference in my reading is that duritie is read as the relative dative after mota, to which also belongs ablative of separation dulci consonantia precedente. Finalis ab eo is the indirect object (ablative of separation) with admoveatur.
64 Bent, “The Grammar of Early Music”.
65 Stoessel, “Con lagreme bagnandome el viso,” 81–89.