"MANNERISM" IN

THE CINQUECENTO MADRIGAL?

By DON HARRAN

M ANNERISM is generally taken to denote a movement in the

visual arts covering roughly the years from 1520 to 1620. Its
influence was so potent and its diffusion so widespread that the term has

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come to be associated with a sizable portion of 16th-century painting
and sculpture1 in Italy and sometimes beyond. Where art historians have
for some forty years or more rejected the term "renascence" (in the sense
of a rebirth of arts and letters along classical lines) as inapplicable to the
Italian Cinquecento in its entirety, historians of music are, with few
exceptions, 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, 6th
ed. (Middlesex, 1960), pp. 289-381, and, of greater specificity, Erwin Panofsky,
"Zwei Fassadenentwurfe Domenico Bcccafumis und das Problem des Manierismus in
der Architektur" (an appendix to his essay on "Das erste Blatt aus dem 'Libro'
Giorgio Vasaris"), Stddel-Jahrbuch, VI (1930), 65-72, and Werner Hager, "Zur
Raumstruktur 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 of
the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London, 1965). Other key works on the
period 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 yielded
a dense crop of writings on mannerism; the subject seems to strike a responsive
note 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 europaische
Stilerscheinung (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 extensive
classified bibliography up to 1963, see Franzsepp Wurtenberger, Mannerism (London,
1963), pp. 241-46.

521
522 The Musical Quarterly

designation beyond classification into early, middle, late Renaissance,

English, French, Italian Renaissance, and the like.* For some reason or
other, the notion of a musical mannerism, though championed in a small
body of scholarly writings' has failed to win a following.
True, "mannerism" or "mannerist," as the case may be, can hardly
be deemed a felicitous choice of terminology; the words by themselves
are so charged with pejorative overtones as to predispose one to view
derogatorily whatever they are meant to designate. Yet equally unat-
tractive, for that matter, is the term Baroque (originally, bizarre or
grotesque), which has become a commonplace, ever since Wolfflin's
1
Leo Schrade warned of this terminological hardening of the arteries as far back

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as 1934 (see note 3, below). He wrote that "there are scarcely two estimates and
solutions of the Renaissance-Baroque problem to be found that are truly consonant
with 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 subject
to interpretation. Hence we should be occupied with freeing the music of the 16th
century 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 Kompoiition
in 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 played
by 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 form
of musical expression within the total span of the 16th century" (p. 170). In ^The
Aesthetic Problem of the Renaissance," Revue belg* de musicologU, IX (1955), 83-
102, Robert Wolf tentatively applies the expression "mannerism" to the period that
leads from the Renaissance to the Baroque; his ideas are worked out in greater detail
in "Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque: Three Styles, Three Periods," Les Colloques
dt 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 "Zwischen
Renaissance und Barock," Jahrbuch Peters, XXXIV [1927], 45-54) Beekman Can-
non, Alvin Johnson, and William Waite take up the subject in a separate chapter of
their Art of Music (New York, I960), and Maria Maniates points up mannerist
traits in the polyphonic music of the Netherlanders: "Mannerist Composition in
Franco-Flemish Polyphony," The Musical Quarterly, LII (1966), 17-36. In Claude
Palisca's "A Clarification of 'Musica Reservata' in Jean Taisnier's 'Astrologiae,' 1559,"
Ada musicologica, XXXI (1959). the word "mannerisim" is proposed (on p. 159) as
relevant to the peculiarities of musica rtservata. Henry Kaufman acts on Palisca's
luggestion and in his Life and Works of Nicola Vicentino (American Institute of
Musicology, Musicological Studies & Documents, No. 11; Rome, 1966) devotes an
entire chapter to "Reservata A Problem of Musical Mannerism" (pp. 175-224).
The second chapter of Daniel Rowland's MannerismStyle 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 as
Mannerist," Perspectives of New Music, V (1966), 75-92. (Prof. Hellmut Federhofer
recently informed me of a study of his on "the problem of mannerism in music" to be
published in the forthcoming Lenaerts Festschrift.)
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 523

Renaissance und Barock (1888), in the style criticism of art and of

music.4 Not all mannerism is "mannered," though. In its own time,
maniera was assigned two distinct, almost antithetical meanings. The
first, 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 such
by 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: "whether
you are walking, standing, or sitting, do it always with maniera"; or as
an indicator of similar qualities in works of art, as may be inferred from
a letter of Raphael's 6 in which, after dealing out praise to the architects
of antiquity, the artist characterizes Gothic edifices as "totally wanting
in charm and refinements" ("privi di ogni gratia, senza maniera al-

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cuna"). This meaning was recognized also by the'arch-mannerist Vasari,
who, in addition to heaping abuse upon the "monstrous and barbarous
Gothic 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 (with
which we are conversant today) of hollow virtuosity, of graces carried
to 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. (See
Encyclopaedia Britannka, 1967 ed., I l l , 190.). Rousseau (and later the art critici
Ruskin and Burckhardt) pinned a "baroque" label on works of art that violated
classic 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, charge de modulations
et dissonances, le chant dur et peu naturel, l'intonation difficile et le mouvement
contraint" {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 doppia
origine 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. I
of his Vite, chap. I l l ) with the words "May God preserve every country from
such 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 further
discourse from us." Le Vite de' eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1550),
ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878-1885), I, 138.
8
Cf. John Shearman, "Man\era as an Aesthetic Ideal," The Renaissance and
Mannerism (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art;
Princeton, 1963), II, 205.
 524 The Musical Quarterly

by a person who himself acknowledged the first, namely, Vasari." (His

equivocal 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 connotations
lies, to wit, between maniera as something positively construed and a
kind of "mannered" maniera, one might call it, a negative epithet
bandied about by artists and theorists bent on reform.
Perhaps one may draw a parallel here between developments in the
pictorial arts and the way Italian music towards the end of the 16th
century turned against the past. In art as in music there was a conscious-
ness of divergent styles, which correspond, in a way, to what Walter
Friedlander calls "mannerism" and "anti-mannerism"10 or to what
Monteverdi classified as a prima and seconda prattica; n a repudiation

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of the immediate past (how much vituperative abuse was leveled at this
past by Vincenzo Galilei!); u a longing for simplicity and a renewed
contact with reality; and a formulation, in theoretical terms, of the tenets
of 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 danger
always lurks of reading relationships a posteriori into the past in this
case a relationship between a matikre sonore and the visual arts of the
Cinquecento which may not have existed in fact. Since the issue at
hand is unbacked by documentary evidence what musical theorists
speak about maniera in the madrigal? 13 the watchword is obviously
8
It was taken up by Lodovico Dolce in hi* Dialogo delta pittura intitolato
I'Aretino (Venice, 1557) see note 26, below and then ran its course on down
to G. P. Bellori's Le Vite de' pittori, scultori et architttti moderni (Rome, 1672) and
C. 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 in
1925 and 1929.
11
Foreword to his Quinto libro de' madrigali (1605). Facs. reprint in Tutte le
opere di Claudio Monteverdi, ed. G. F. Malipiero, X, 69-72.
13
Dialogo delta musica antica e delta moderna (Venice, 1581; facs. ed. with
preface by Fabio Fano, Rome, 1934). Partly translated in Oliver Strunk, Source
Readings in Music History (New York, 1950), pp. 302-322.
11
During the 16th century maniera as employed by the theorists was roughly
equated 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 in
his compositions" ("& ha mostrato un'ordine ragionevole di componere con elegante
maniera ogni musical cantilena, & nelle sue compositioni egli ne hi data chiaroiimo
essempio") Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), facs. ed. (New York, 1965),
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 525

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 the
headings of artificiality, eclecticism, overpreoccupation with detail,
change as a constant of style and structure, and the generating influence
of 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 disorder
of the world outside. In proportion as wars and religious disturbances
threatened to topple established social structures, the courtiers withdrew
into the shell of an artificial code of ethics and deportment. Their activ-

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ities were played out against a make-believe setting of secular pomp and
ceremonial. The good manners and graces that Castiglione urged upon
the noble as the indispensable appurtenances of his station became in
time the very status symbols that set him apart from the plebs. Good
manners presuppose a taste for ritual, and ritual with its fixed behavioral
patterns 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 predilection
for 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 on
its development. In fact it was in the seclusion and secularism of the courts
that 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 (Praetorius
refers to singing "uff jetzige Italienische Manier" in connection with Bovicelli and
Caccini) to the addition of embellishments to instrumental music (F. W. Marpurg
distinguishes 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., Ill (1967), 543.
14
As a striking parallel to estrangement of this sort, one need only mention the
topography of the aristocratic household. In the Middle Ages the feudal lord built
his fortress in such a way as to encompass his tenant landowners. The Renaissance
noble chose for his palace a site in the midst of urban throngs. The new taste has it
that the dwelling be situated outside the city walls, away from humanity, in a rural
or silvan setting (Palazzo del Te, Pratolino, Villa d'Este). Nor was this enough; the
dwelling 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.
 526 The Musical Quarterly

poets whetted their taste for the amorous and the pastoral; here they
evolved their subtleties of thought and expression. A few decades back,
the Florentine court and the urban populace had been entertained to
sounds of the sprightly frottola (or more accurately its Florentine count-
erpart, the canto carnascialesco); the same ditties sung within the walls
of the palazzo were repeated even more lustily on the streets. It is a sign
of the intervening class stratification that the madrigal became an exclu-
sive diversion of the courts, while the masses were forced to seek their
amusements elsewhere in the popular song, the villota, the canzone
villanesca.
The madrigal picked up its refinements via its poetry, a poetry as
tasteful and graceful as the highbred society for whom it was created. It
builds on a number of artifices which, in their way, presage the marin-

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ism and gongorism of the 17th century: verbal tautology ("O Sole,
ov'e quel sole / Che gia solo solea . . . " ) ; solmization syllables that read
as vocables ("II dolce vostro sguardo ./ Sol mi fa l'aspra pena . . . " ) , a
remnant from the time of the frottola; the quotation of a well-known
verse as a kind of punch line (an example being Petrarch's "Fior
frond'herb'aria antr'ond'arm'arch'ombr'aura," forced into service as the
closing 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'l
felch'io rod'esuggo"). 15
In an era given over to incongruities of every form and coloring, it is
not 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 from
poems set, respectively, by Ruffo, Vincenzo Ferra, and Arcadelt in Libro terzo de
d[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 sonnet
Amor che meco al buon tempo (Canzioniere: CCCIII). The example of alliteration
is 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 du
Ponte in // secondo libro de li madrigali de diversi eccellentissimi autori a misura di
breve... (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 exactly
analogous to that urged by Bembo for poetry" (p. 74).
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 527

Madonna's presence, yet live from the hope of seeing her again; about
men who seek out the pleasures of love because they delight in wallowing
in its torments; about undaunted suitors who willingly suffer martyrdom
for her who only too willingly ordains their martyrdom; about their
more easily despairing confreres who, however much they try to escape
from love, become all the more entangled in its stratagems; about stem-
faced ladies who persist in their cruelty while deep down they crave
much the same thing as the objects of their cruelty.16 The conceits of the
madrigal work by way of antitheses. They unite "concepts" that are
mutually exclusive; they force a rationale on ideas which, when held up
to scrutiny, are irrational in their conjunction. Most characteristic of the
concetto, as the literary theorists would have it, is its sudden turn to the
unexpected, a turnabout in content that takes one by surprise. The pro-

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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 a
Convex Mirror; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).41 It springs from
a kind of "e'pater le bourgeois" mentality which, in Arnold Hauser's
words, would have "the commonplace.seem rare and exquisite and the
simple and readily intelligible complicated and sophisticated." 18 Symp-
tomatically, the theorist Gracian, author of a treatise on wit and conceit
entitled Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1649) refers to peripety as "crisis" "
a word which, in the context of this study, carries no little historical
weight.
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 it
were a concetto reduced to the level of words or groups of words. The
forms it takes (simile, allegory, personification, oxymoron, etc.) are so
many means at the poet's disposal for circumventing the obvious or the
prosaic. Metaphor stages its flight from reality by the pairing of notions
whose 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; the
madrigal Quando fia mai, set by Lamberto, p. 16; the sonnet Tant'e I'assentio, set
by 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.
528 The Musical Quarterly

It appeals to the imagination of the reader or listener, to his ability to

discern hidden similarities between apparent divergencies. Metaphorical
expression flourishes in times of "crisis"; it acts as a linguistic safeguard
against a reality whose presence must be disguised and transformed if it
is to be endurable. Like the "allegories" of Titian w or the "metaphor-
ical" portraits of the Milanese painter Arcimboldo, who discloses an
occult world of flora and fauna behind the countenance of his sitters,31
so the Italian madrigal, with its weighty metaphorical dress, suggests to
the consciousness an unexplored terrain of extra-meanings and analogies
lying 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 "secret
language marking off its users from the common herd." M This language

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was finished for that courtly society whose modus vivendi was itself an
example of metaphorical evasion or "a flight from things into words," to
use Karl Vossler's expression.24
Eclecticism in art is generally to be associated with periods of stress
and tension. It feeds on the vacillation of the artist, on his inability to
conceive a uniform point of view in the face of a diversity of styles or
traditions bidding for precedence. Its characteristics are the substitution of
the many for the one, the well-worn for the untried. One is reminded of
Giorgio Vasari's definition of "bella maniera," a style so beautiful in its
every part as to recommend it as the worthiest goal of painting: a "bella
20
The so-called Education of Cupid (Rome, Galleria Borghese), Sacred and
Profane Love (ibid.), Allegory of the Marquis d'Avalos (Paris, Louvre), Feast of
Venus (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 mannerist
painting. He entered the service of Emperor Ferdinand I in 1562 and stayed in
Prague twenty-six years, during which time he enjoyed the favor of Maximilian II
and, after 1576, his son, the great patron of icientific and artistic endeavors, Rudolph
II. Arcimboldo appears as the most representative of the painters of "portrait meta-
morphosis" (heads formed, trompe I'oeil, as flowers, vegetables, fish, quadrupeds, and
diverse utensils), the idea being to portray a theme through the use of "metaphor
ical" attributes. As typical a work as any is Summer (fruit, vegetables, wheat, and
greenery 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 his
time, writes in the following class-conscious manner: "The device should not be so
obscure 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.
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 529

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 applied
in every work for all figures." M For Lodovico Dolce, this "maniera" is
so "bella" that it becomes "mala," "cattiva," or, in short, a bore. Com-
mending Raphael for his painting, he writes that "there is not a shadow
in it of what the painters of today disdainfully call maniera, namely, bad
practice where forms and faces almost always look alike." M The same
sort of creeping eclecticism that overtook the artists and was sanctioned
by Vasari and his kind turns up, in a musical sphere, in the writings of
the theorists of music who set up this or that composer as an exemplar.
Thus Zarlino celebrates the achievements of Willaert, "truly one of the
rarest minds that ever practiced music" ("veramente uno de piu rari

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intelletti, che habbia la Musica prattica giamai essercitato"), and Gla-
rean singles out Josquin as that representative of a "perfect art to which
nothing 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 And
where the men were wanting for this imitation, then the theorists pressed
for an "imitazione della natura" which, as Leo Schrade noted, refers not
only to naturalistic depiction but to an evocation of nature in general
terms as well "One could reveal the 'verita del soggetto' [the truth of the
meaning of words] with crassly realistic means or one could idealize
'nature': the ground one stands on is, in the one and the other, the
same. The 'imitazione della natura' conditions the conceptual formation
of the mannerist style"; ". . . imitation is the supreme law obeyed by the
'maniera' of the artistic construction." M (Indeed, for Schrade the urge
to 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 gambe
aggiungnerle injieme, e fare una figura di tutte quelle bellezze che piu si poteva, e
metterla 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 as
well 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 o
ritrarre si possono con I'arte del disegno [Florence, 1567]).
M
" . . . in cid non appare ombre di quello che da' pittori oggi in mala parte 4
chiamata maniera, cioe cattiva pratica, ove si veggono forme e volti quasi sempre
simili" (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.
530 The Musical Quarterly

question; it is with this that he is preoccupied in his important mono-

graph.) And imitation, realistic or idealistic, of men or of nature, must
lead willy-nilly to a stylistic eclecticism.
The studied eclecticism of Italian painting from the forties on, so
the art historians point out, is bound up with the attempt to reconcile the
two generating traditions of Cinquecento art: the classicism of Raphael,
the anticlassicism of Michelangelo hence the variety of this art, its
several viewpoints, its concourse of divergent styles or "manners." The
madrigal seemed to veer toward a like diversification in its own attempt
to 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 variegated
stylistic garb; on the other, the less easily defined cisalpine tradition

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the villota, the mascherata, the canzona, a heterogeneous medley of
styles and structures still activated in large part by the precept of the
frottola. Contrasts of style, so evident in the early unfolding of the mad-
rigal, were sharpened no doubt by the above-mentioned oscillation of the
composers between, an idealistic and naturalistic approach to the setting
of 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's
eye ("disegno interno")29 of the painter or sculptor versus the realistic
depiction of nature, that is, the simulation of physical rather than emo-
tional properties of objects; in music, a general portrayal of affections
versus a more literal (and consequently less strictly musical) reproduc-
tion of verbal imagery through tone-painting. What we have here is
another round, now fought out in an artistic arena, in the age-old philo-
sophical conflict between Platonism and Aristotelianism or, in its later
forms, between Scholastic realism and nominalism or, again, Florentine
Neo-Platonism and rational skepticism.
The musical adversaries are somewhat less inexorable than their
philosopher colleagues; they cross over into the opposite ideological
camp, 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, alongside
madrigals of a more neutral caste; they are found not only within a
specific period or among composers of the same school but even within
the repertory of single composers, as is the case with Lasso, Marenzio,
M
T h e term used by the mannerist painter and theorist Federigo Zuccaro (1542-
1609) in L'idea dti scultori, pittori $ architettori (1607).
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 531

and any number of post-Rore madrigalists. The same ambivalence of

approach carries over into single madrigals in which the composer is apt
to teeter alternately in the direction of idealistic and of naturalistic han-
dling: madrigals whose impersonal first phrase is followed up by the
jolting realism of phrases two and three, only to return to their original
posture 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 dual
ancestry of the madrigal (to be discussed below). It thrives on the
uncertainty 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 almost
necessarily: its form evolved from a poetry whose theme deviated into
cunning refinements of sense and sentiment, a poetry where the sudden

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reversal, bilateral metaphors, and antithetical concetti were more highly
valued 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, and
not 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 to
allusion over clear statement,11 in its periphrastic deviation from general
ideas to their more specific attributes. When "torches" are substituted
for eyes, "fire" for love, or "arriving in port" for sexual consummation,
a conceptual dislocation takes place, and attention is fastened upon the
startling 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 Hauser
would have it, seems to derive from the way iu author relate! (or fails to relate) to
hU lurroundings. "Metaphorism being directed, not to things themselves, but to the
involved network of relations between them, is the only way of doing justice to the
unstable, 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 the
words which the writer uses are by themselves of a certain difficulty no, that is
not 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 more
attentive and alert. He tends to weigh matters more carefully, taking delight in the
ingenuity and the erudition of whoever is the author, and, as a, result of his struggle
to bring proper discernment to bear on his judgment, he tastes the pleasures to be
had 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.
532 The Musical Quarterly

simile or an adroitly handled oxymoron; he sees to it, accordingly, that

the 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 composition
into a series of individualized components. With the gradual importance
attached to the imitatio verborum as a technical procedure (from ca.
1540 on), there was a sharpening of the qualitative differences between
and within phrases. In time, the madrigal submitted its structure to the
conceptual peculiarities of its poetry. And a multifarious structure it was,
built on contrasts and dichotomies. Somewhere the balance of a classic
art has dissolved; the poetically actuated music of the madrigal, dis-

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posed as it was to the detail, presents a most undassical condition of
structural and emotional imbalance. It is a form, in truth, without focus
or orientation. Its phrases follow cumulatively upon one another, too
individualized to sustain a general mood or to impart a sense of direc-
tion.
This kind of structural-semantical disorientation has a counterpart, it
would seem, in the many weird, disjunct creations known to mannerist
art from Pontormo and Peruzzi to Vasari and Tintoretto. Though the
techniques of art and music, as we have said, remove the two beyond
comparison, certain general parallels may be drawn nonetheless: space
crowded with unwarranted figural detail; the scene split up into "areas
separated from each other externally and differently organized inter-
nally"; M objects set in incongruous relationships to one another and to
their surroundings; distortions in the size and shape of objects as part of
the attempt to achieve their individualization; the breach between the
purported subject or content of the work and the incompatible means of
its 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 the
matter otherwise. The conflict between means and realization stems, in his mind, from
the use of a polyphonic medium to convey a soloistic train of thought. "The air was
the expression of individual, personal, unique, subjective sentiments; the means were
polyphonic, that is, multiple, impersonal, generalized, and objective" ("Renaissance,
Mannerism, Baroque," [see note 3, above], p. 43). The solution to this conflict which
persisted through the 16th century came, as the author points out, in the form of
monody.
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 533

respect paid to adjunctive detail: if the subject be a Deposition, the

stress 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 into
plaits and folds, the pinkish skin hues of Madonna, her golden, elegantly
coifed locks, her jeweled adornments (Parmigianino). This obsession
with detail tends to dim out essentials in peripheral ornament. Take
Cellini's base for the Perseus group with its profusion of decorative ad-
denda statuettes of Diana and Jupiter in the niches, busts of Diana of
Ephesus at the corners, tragic masks and goat heads; " or the fac.ade of
the Palazzo Spada (designed by Meresi di Caravaggio, Rome) with its
abrogation of architectural solidity through a mass of sculptural embel-

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lishments." A dazzling front of minutiae is put up as a kind of ersatz for
what has been lost of classic control and congruity. The artist escapes
into 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, his
overloading of pictorial or sculptural detail, that all these, in short, can
serve as substitutes for deficiencies in originality, clear thinking and true
loftiness of spirit.
It is a deception that not only gained currency in the artistic domain
but formed something of a leitmotif for patrician circles as well. Revel-
ing in subordinate detail appears elemental to the pomp and panoply of
the courts. It is reflected in the emphasis put on specific conventions of
dress 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\of
an intellectual or spiritual order. His creation in 1528 of the socially
impeccable cortegiano had as its effect the widening of the gulf between
courtier and commoner: it strengthened the position of the former by
furnishing 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 dtl
collolungo.c*. 1535 (Florence, Uffizi).
"Dated between 1545-1554 (Florence, Loggia dei Lanzi). Also Cellini'i itatue
of 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.
534 The Musical Quarterly

ficial this courtly deportment was may be judged from Giovanni della
Casa'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 tone
of voice befitting address, the position of the arms during ambulation,
and like trivia. Between the calculated graces of our gentiluomo and that
deliberate floundering in circumstantial detail that hallmarks much of
the 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 to
superficies than to cogency of structure or statement the madrigalist
fastening on verbal characterization as an alternative for a binding larger
form, the poet grasping at an "exquisite, subtle, accomplished, highly
ornamented way of expression" out of the feeling that "language threat-

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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 madrigal
is the idea of change. It appears at one and the same time as result and
determinant of an art given to overemphasis on textual particulars.
There is something compellingly modern about this variety of art: it
conjures up a pre-Bergsonian concept of change as fundamental to es-
sence, as the elan vital propelling life forward in an ever-varying chain
of 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 or
economic mutations invest old or new forms with new content. The
breakdown 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 a
contrary reason. The great syntheses of a Hegelian bent in the late 19th
century 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 of
myriad schools, forms, and techniques competing for priority. Moving
back to the 16th century, the buoyant optimism given voice by the poet
and 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 their
studies, 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
 Alinari, Florence
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The Palazzo Spada in Rome

 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 535

conceptual content; the balance of a classically formed painting and

architecture, to the imbalance of an art projecting the troubled mind of
its creator.41 Here also disturbances of a socio-historical order sparked
off the changes that infiltrated the arts and letters of the time, forcing
traditional gains into novel structural usages. Take the example of linear
perspective in painting: no sooner was it applied as a means of tighten-
ing up form and content than it was diverted from this purpose, its
traits (spatial focusing, appropriate foreshortenings, simulation of rela-
tive distances) now made to serve the ends of an idiosyncratic artistic
vision. Or the example of tonal planning (avant la lettre) in the frottola
or the early madrigal: no sooner had the confused modal picture
crystallized into two basic modes, the natural minor (Aeolian, or Dorian
with B-flat) and the major (Lydian with B-flat) than these were sub-

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verted by chromatic alterations edging their way into the melodic
fabric of the madrigal from the midcentury onward.
Like the 20th century, the later Renaissance had its philosophy of
change, taking the form of skepticism on the one hand, or a kind of
mysticism on the other. Both were fanned into being by the uncertainties
of an age acting as witness to its crumbling socio-religious institutions;
both were erected on this shifting groundwork as philosophies keynoting
change as more or less of a behavioral or cosmological inevitability. The
skeptics raised psychic unrest to a theoretical canon. They rationalized
their 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 of
human behavior, the insufficiency of rational thinking to cope with onto-
logical or epistemological questions. Montaigne's realization of his own
incapacity 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 doubters
were not all cynics, though. Giordano Bruno broke loose from thological
fetters, yet exulted all the while in his ability to puncture holes in the
dogma of the Church. If he inveighed against authority, it was, to his
mind, 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-Century
Music (Berkeley & Loi Angeles, 1962), pp. 3-14 and elsewhere.
536 The Musical Quarterly

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 in
fixed physical-theological terms; they sought rather to escape from the
external appearances of this reality through a preoccupation with sym-
bolistic number-letter doctrine, with the theories of emanation, with
eerie astrological, alchemistic speculations. Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Paracelsus, John Dee, Kepler, and others of a
similar 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 their
philosophy of change reality is envisioned as a flux of perpetually mu-

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tating forms, connecting with and converting into each other through the
action 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. Life
is drawn as a picture of relentless movement, an incessant becoming of
form and substance. Is there not something of the same spirit manifest in
iHe 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 in
that forceful Deposition by Pontormo (Florence, Santa Felicita) whose
crowded 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 curious
madrigal 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, as
images 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 moved
back and forth, then, between different levels of reality. They joined in
that 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.
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 537

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

Here as there a constant shimmying movement is initiated between the
real 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 it
did, between shifting semantic planes. Music was enticed, almost as a
competitive 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 be
traced in a number of details: the relaxation of stylistic invariability
through a mingling of styles and idioms brought into the service of
textual meanings; the abandoning of a performance practice in which
instruments participated on a parity with voices for the more personalized

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rendition made possible by voices on all parts; the smoothing over of
rhythmic bluntness and melodic angularities. And fresh significance was
accorded such niceties as deceptive cadences, cadences in which the root of
the 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 that
might have served music well in the days of the frottola, but destined it
to insignificance if perpetuated into the present. To the Frenchmen and
Netherlanders descending upon the peninsula, madrigal verse read quite
differently from the prose or poetry to which they were accustomed; it
45
The game was played by artists too. In the emblem, they translated literary
statements into visual allegories. Emblematic art brings the word (a set of verses and
an impresa) and its representation into a symbolic alliance. The effect is much like
that of the "imitazioni" of the madrigal reconciling verbal and sonorous ideas
through a symbolism of their own. Both actualize their content on different planes of
understanding, be they literary-musical (in the madrigal) or literary-pictorial (in the
emblem). One of the great collections of European emblems, the Emblematum libir
of Andreas Alciatus, came out in 1531 (the first collection of madrigals, the Madri-
gali de diversi musici, dates from 1530). Its popularity it went through 150 editions
would seem to indicate how deeply entrenched was that attitude that allowed
variant systems of meaning to convene within a single frame; and not merely to
convene, but to conjoin as a viable form of artistic expression. Alciatus, for one, set
out 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 may
sometimes 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 hierglyphica
apud 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 omnia
in quatuor tomos. . ., Vol. II, col. 1027.
538 The Musical Quarterly

exuded an intimacy, an elegant sensuality, that could nowhere be pointed

to in the Biblical extracts of their motets or the poetry of their chansons
or songs. In their writing they did not go beyond the expression of cer-
tain general feelings, usually sorrow or joy, contained in the text; but
that was back home, safe in the tradition of their forebears. Abstract
representation of that sort, it occurred to them, no longer befitted the
ultrapersonal vein of the madrigal; it did little justice to its subtle
"changes" of sound and meaning, to what Bembo called the variazione
of its poetry.*8
The inconclusiveness of style and structure that marks the madrigal
from its origins on harks back, no doubt, to the contradictions implicit
in its dual ancestry. A history of the madrigal reads, in a sense, as a
description of the struggle of composers to strike a balance between the

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antithetical demands of polyphony and homophony, chromaticism and
diatonicism, literal and abstract verse-settings. They relied on poetry to
bring law and order into a situation which, in its extreme form, could
only 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 to
be 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 a
wrenching of the balance and unity realized by a Josquin in music, a
Bramante in architecture, or a Raphael in painting. In classic art the
relation of form to content is, on the whole, unproblematical, for the
form of the work is its content, and vice versa. Conflicts are solved, if
there are conflicts, by subordination to general aesthetic tenets pre-exist-
ing the work itself unity, balance, aurea mediocritas, etc. Times have
changed: form and content have been dissolved of their unequivocal
relationship; the general aesthetic tenets in back of the art work are not
so easily defined. A style consciousness true sign of that break between
form 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, who
writes, among other things: "It was in the concept of variazione that we may find
the 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 as
detailed by Bembo]" (op. tit., p. 78).
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 539
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 a
wide variety of musical types, as did the Fleming Willaert, for example,
when he wrote, along with his Latin motets, French ditties of chanson
rustique stamp, Italian madrigals, popular villanesche, and instrumental
ricercari. 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 composer
broadened his hold on a number of styles. These he cultivated not after
the synthetical fashion of a Handel or Mozart or Josquin, but as so
many individual "manners" practiced ad hoc. Any paying of tribute to

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the goddess Diversita was bound to divest a classic art of its homogeneity.
The traditional formula of e pluribus unum was reversed: variety was
introduced in the place of uniformity, contrast in the place of unity.
What transpired within musical art as a whole or within the repertory
of a specific composer was mirrored in diminutive within the frame of
the single madrigal. Its variety is the result of a shifting approach; its
contrasts, 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, the
question may be raised to what extent Northern influence is responsible
for 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, is
outlandish.*8 The form is ridden at its origins, then, by a multiplicity of
styles and approaches which might threaten to get out of hand had the
composer 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 of
the 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 death
of Josquin. Once the master was dead, the pupili the great and the epigonic
both took it into their heads to spread the word: "Composen of the years 1520
to 1550 put a creative interpretation on 'maniera' as an ideal. They saw their goal to
lie 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 multiple
roots as one of the "aberrations" of music history: The Italian Madrigal (Princeton,
N. J., 1949), I, 153. See Mace, op. cit., p. 65.
540 The Musical Quarterly

Of the two generating traditions the Northern was the more vital: the
forms and content of its sacred and secular music changed with changes
in times and aesthetic criteria. The dynamic growth of Northern art
comes as no surprise: its rich complex of styles and practices provides
from within the seeds of development. That it scaled heights of technical
achievement is evident from its many polyphonic intricacies.
The Italian tradition, by contrast, strikes one as rather sluggish of
character, given to reiteration of what has been consecrated by time and
usage. It failed to bring about anything that might be called a major
renovation of form and content, satisfying itself with minor changes here
and there, changes too sporadic and undeliberate to reform the ground-
work of its practice. Italian music could not provide from within itself
the stimulus for change; it could not claim, nor did it care to claim, the

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contrapuntal triumphs of its Northern rival. Its means were restricted
by its predilection for the chordal: a vocal art which sets its goal at
chordal simultaneity has, admittedly, a somewhat limited potential for
growth. And it often happened that other limits were set by dividing the
ensemble into essential (soprano and bass) and inessential voices (alto
and tenor). The result was a textual impoverishment of an art which, to
start with, had been textually rather meagerly endowed.** It fell victim
in the long run to its own confining capacities. Even when the literary
scene altered, giving the composer an opportunity to sink his teeth into
poetry of improved quality, Italian secular music continued to draw from a
storehouse of formal-stylistic anachronisms, prevented from striking out
on an original path by the seeming prepossession of its composers. This
was 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 to
fit a new musical form to the new literary art at their disposal; we under-
stand, too, why they looked to the Netherlanders, with their greater
learning and their greater adaptability to changes in artistic climate, to
lay the foundations for the new musical art in the making.
The effects of Northern influence on the visual arts are less easily
evaluated. In his biography of Jacopo da Pontormo, one of the first
mannerists 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 (in
songs with lute accompaniment, for example) adumbrates developmenti that lead
ultimately to the creation of monody.
60
Depending on whether one dates the beginnings of this movement to the third
or second decade respectively. In Friedlander's time (see op. cit.), it was customary
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 541

specifically, Diirer-inspired: "No one should reprehend Pontormo for

imitating Diirer's original ideas. This by itself is no failing, for many
painters have done so in the past and still do so even now [sic]. He erred
rather in adopting the so-called German maniera in all matters of dress,
facial expression, and gesture. .. ,"61 From the turn of the century on
Flemish, French, and German artists swarmed in large numbers to the
Italian peninsula, setting up shop in Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples,
and Ferrara; M the majority, from all available evidence, appear to have
assimilated the Italian manner.63 Yet from the above passage by Vasari
and another (in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, 1547) in which he related
that the least Florentine cobbler was in possession of Flemish pictures,
it may be assumed that the example of these Northerners did not go
unheeded, even if it meant little more than the fomenting of a style con-

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sciousness among the Italians. When all is said and done, though, North-
ern art played a tangential role Pontormo's frescoes in the Certosa or
the awakening to different styles or maniere notwithstanding in the
formation of the new style in painting (and sculpture). Unlike the mad-
rigal where, after predominantly Netherlandish beginnings, Italians and
Northerners 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 the

first phase of mannerism. Modern critics have retrenched somewhat, featuring the
precious, courtly style of Salviati, Vasari, Jacopino del Conte, and others as a more
characteristic manifestation of maniera. They tend to lump the earlier artists into a
proto-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 con
tanta 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 the
article by Erwin Panofsky mentioned in note 1, above. (It is subtitled "eine Studie
uber der Beurteilung der Gotik in der italienischen Renaissance.") Panofsky tends to
consider mannerism as a reactivation of Gothic (i.e., anticlassic) tendencies embod-
ied within Quattrocento art, and not as founded on an imitation or emulation of
Northern models (as happened in music). There was no need for looking to such
models in art, for the Italians were surrounded by the maniere tedesca in numerous
examples from the time, of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. At the risk of
sounding hyperbolical, this maniera was for them, I suppose, either part of their
"second nature" the alter ego ever nudging them from behind the gregarious
facade or, in the case of those trying to escape their nature (Vasari and most
mannerists in general), an art decidedly "second-rate."
542 The Musical Quarterly

Why music was influenced by the North to a degree far exceeding

such 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 one
account for the fact that the Italian Renaissance yielded forth a plethora
of incomparable masterworks in the painterly and sculptural arts whereas
music, 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 as
one possible explanation the composers' incapacity to draw sustenance
from the very trends with which the Renaissance is connected, its hu-
manism, its strongly classical orientation. A most potent agent in the
rebirth of the arts in Italy, no doubt, was the uncovering of the sculp-
tural and architectural remains of antiquity. There were no such re-

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mains in music, and this was bound to come as a serious handicap. The
few enigmatic fragments of Greek melos later published by Vincenzo
Galilei were unknown throughout the 15th and greater part of the 16th
centuries; even so, what influence could they have exerted, so slight in
proportions 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 had
hardly more to go on than the verbal descriptions of the theorists. Per-
haps this is the explanation for the hiatus in Italian music, the great
wasteland that separates the proto-Renaissance of the Trecento from the
mannerist Cinquecento. That the Italian composers were prevented from
renewing their practice might be ascribed, then, to insufficient prompting
of a purely musical variety. Understood thus, the role of the Northerners
in setting the foundations of a new Italian art as it took shape in the
madrigal loses much of its incongruity. What happened was simply that
the Northerners, who could boast an unbroken musical tradition, lent a
helping 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 Italian
Renaissance, in no matter what area of arts and letters, is unthinkable.
One must distinguish, then, between Northern influence as operative
in 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, whose
historical continuity rendered them quite without need of transalpine in-
centives, it took the form of a similarity to (or, in Pontormo's case, an
imitation of) an art whose strangeness of form and of expression cor-
 "Mannerism" in the Cinquecento Madrigal? 543

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 different
reasons; their mutual association with it adds another link to the chain of
affinities that bind the music and visual arts of the Cinquecento.
Mannerism in the madrigal: the hypothesis needs further elaboration
if 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 a
hedonistic courtly entertainment while mannerist painting first went
through turbulent, almost psychopathic beginnings before lapsing into a
courtly style? What relationship does the agitated madrigale cromatico

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bear 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," with
mannerist currents in the arts? It would seem that that passage of
Vicentino's providing a sociological explanation for the use of chromatic
and enharmonic modesM can be brought to bear, if not on the first
period of the madrigal, at least on its more colorful middle and later
developments. To what extent does maniera invade the realm of sacred
music? In painting, sacred themes were invested with the sensuality of
profane art, as in those lusciously modeled saints whose martyrdom
seems a pretext for the more important business of uncovering the female
body; something of the same order occurs later on in the madrigale
spirituale, a "sacred" madrigal decked out with the graces of its secular
counterpart.
Is the madrigal to be seen as an isolated instance of mannerism in
music, or can one claim for it historical precedents in some of those over-
exuberant Graduals of Gregorian chant? In the "Gothic" angularity of
the 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 Musica
riserbata che la Diatonica, perche questa in feste publiche in luoghi communi a uso
delle 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 mannerist
art (in the positive sense of the word) whose expression runs the gauntlet from the
 544 The Musical Quarterly

In the fin de siicle eccentricities that crop up during the wane of the
14th century? What about the relationship of the madrigal to the later
Rococo, to the "vermanierten Mannheimer Gout" for which Leopold
Mozart reproached his son, to art nouveau, to Jugendstil? Are we deal-
ing here, perhaps, with a constant principle in Western arts? This last
question, 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 into
focus with the broad mainstream of musical as well as cultural history.

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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 an
extended 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 the
same thing, for signifying the continuity of the mannerist tradition. Thui Ren6 Bray
in 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. (Wolfs
article does the same for these terminological distinctions in music. By the way, Wolf
was later to abandon the word "mannerist" for "counter-Rennaissance," though it is
hard to understand why, after all the incuive argumentation he put forward in its
favor, "mannerist" would still not do. See "Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque," note
to p. 80.)