JM 2015 32 2 198

Voicing the Doge’s Sacred Image
Author(s): Jamie Reuland

Source: The Journal of Musicology , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 198-245
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2015.32.2.198
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Voicing the Doge’s
Sacred Image
JAM IE R EULAN D
Doge Andrea Dandolo opens his Venetian his-

tory, the Chronica per extensum descripta (c. 1350), with a scene of pro-
phetic speech.1 The setting implies a genesis: a small vessel is buoyed
on an inhospitable primordial soup—the marshy lagoon onto which
a group of refugees would, some four centuries later, lay the foundations
of a great city. Asleep in the vessel lies the evangelist Mark, on course to
establish a church in Aquileia, when an angel appears to him in his dream
(fig. 1). The angel announces: ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, hic requiescet corpus
tuum’’ (Peace to you Mark, here will your body rest).2 What ensues
198
between Mark and the angel resembles the scene of Annunciation nar-
rated in Luke 1:28–38 (see table 1, which compares the two texts). Inter-
preting the angel’s message literally, Mark expresses alarm, but the angel
assuages his worries by forecasting the great glory that awaits him among
A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 2011

American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
I wish to thank Margaret Bent, Patricia Fortini Brown, Kevin
Brownlee, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Wendy Heller, Peter Jeffery,
Alejandro Planchart, Blake Wilson, Giovanni Zanovello, Anna
Zayaruznaya, and the anonymous readers for this journal for their
comments on this article. I am especially grateful to the late David
Rosand for encouraging this work in its early stage.
Manuscript sigla are as follows:
Gr Grottaferrata, Abbazia di Grottaferrata, Biblioteca, Kript. Lat. 224
Eg Montefiore dell’Aso, Biblioteca—Archivio di Francesco Egidi (now lost)
Q15 Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale MS Q 15
1
Dandolo, Chronica per extensum descripta aa. 46-1280 d. C., ed. Ester Pastorello in
Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Tomo XII, parte I (Bologna: Zanichelli,1938), 10. Although four
Venetian doges bore the patronymic Dandolo, I use this name throughout to refer to
Andrea (1342–1354) unless otherwise specified.
2
Ibid.
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 198–245, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2015
by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-
sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/JM.2015.32.2.198

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reuland
figure 1. Angel announces Mark’s predestination to Venice as

depicted in mosaic in Cappella Zen, Basilica San Marco. The
inscription reads: CUM TRANSITUM FACERET PER MARE
UBI NVNC POSITA EST ECCLESIA SCI MARCI ANGELVS EI
NUNCIATVIT QVOD POST ALIQVANTUM TEMPVS A
MORTE IPSIVS CORPVS EIVS HIC HONORIFICE
LOCARETVR (While he was making his sea voyage across
the area where the church of San Marco now stands, the
angel announced to him that at a certain point after his
death his body would be placed here with great honor).
199
future generations. The evangelist accepts the divine will with a fiat that
recalls Mary’s fiat to the angel Gabriel. By modeling Mark’s predestination
to Venice on the Annunciation, Dandolo renders Venice’s political gene-
sis in the image of Christ’s incarnation, and casts the crucial episode of
Mark’s Venetian vita within the framework of Christian soteriology.
Yet in fitting the narrative structure of the Annunciation to Mark’s
hagiography, Dandolo also amplified a nascent fourteenth-century myth
that set the day of the Annunciation as the Republic’s founding date

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t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y
TABLE 1
Comparison of Mark’s annunciation in the Chronica per extensum
descripta with the Annunciation in Luke 1:28–38.
Andrea Dandolo, Chronica per
extensum descripta.i Luke 1:28–38ii
And an angel of God appeared to him And the angel, being come in, said
in that very spot saying: Peace to you unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is
Mark, here will your body rest. with thee; blessed art though among
women.
To whom, hesitating as if about to Who, having heard, was troubled at his

suffer a shipwreck on that very spot, the saying and though with herself what
angel consoled: manner of salutation this should be. And
the angel said to her:
Fear not, evangelist of God, for a great Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found
road yet remains to you; and there will grace with God. Behold, thou shalt
be many things for you to suffer in the conceive in thy womb and shalt bring
name of Christ; after your martyrdom forth a son; and thou shalt call his
200 devoted and faithful people from name Jesus. He shall be great and shall
around this area, being constantly be called the Son of the Most High.
persecuted and desiring to avoid the And the Lord God shall give unto him
infidels, will construct a magnificent the throne of David his father; and he
city; and they will be worthy to receive shall reign in the house of Jacob
your body, which they will honor with forever. And of his kingdom there shall
the greatest amount of veneration, and be no end. And Mary said to the angel:
through their prayers and their merits How shall this be done, because I know
they will obtain a great many benefits. not man? And the angel, answering,
said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come
upon thee and the power of the Most
High shall overshadow thee. And
therefore also the Holy which shall be
born of thee shall be called the Son of
God. And behold, thy cousin Elizabeth,
she also hath conceived a son in her
old age; and this is the sixth month
with her that is called barren. Because
no word shall be impossible with God.
Then blessed Mark having woken gave And Mary said: Behold the handmaid
thanks to the Lord, saying: Lord, let of the Lord; be it done to me according
your will be done. to thy word.
And the angel departed from her.
(continued)

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TABLE 1 (continued)
Andrea Dandolo, Chronica per
extensum descripta. Luke 1:28–38
aparuitque ei, in estaxi posito, angelus 28. et ingressus angelus ad eam dixit
Dei dicens: Pax tibi Marce, hic have gratia plena Dominus tecum
requiescet corpus tuum. benedicta tu in mulieribus
Cui, cum se passarum illico 29. quae cum vidisset turbata est in
naufragium, hesitaret, subintulit sermone eius et cogitabat qualis esset
angelus: ista salutatio 30. et ait angelus ei
Ne timeas evangelista Dei, quia adhuc ne timeas Maria invenisti enim gratiam
tibi grandis restat via; multaque te, pro apud Deum 31. ecce concipies in utero
Christi nomine, opportet pati; post et paries filium et vocabis nomen eius
vero pasionem tuam circum vicinarum Iesum 32. hic erit magnus et Filius
regionum devoti et fideles populi, Altissimi vocabitur et dabit illi
infidelium crebras persecuciones Dominus Deus sedem David patris eius
declinare volentes, hic mirificam 33. et regnabit in domo Iacob in
urbem fabricabunt; et corpus tuum aeternum et regni eius non erit finis
denique habere merebuntur; quod 34. dixit autem Maria ad angelum 201
summa veneracione colent, tuisque quomodo fiet istud quoniam virum
meritis et precibus plurima beneficia non cognosco 35. Et respondens
consecuturi sunt. angelus dixit ei Spiritus Sanctus
superveniet in te et virtus Altissimi
obumbrabit tibi ideoque et quod
nascetur sanctum vocabitur Filius Dei
36. Et ecce Elisabeth cognata tua et
ipsa concepit filium in senecta sua et
hic mensis est sextus illi quae vocatur
sterilis 37. quia non erit inpossibile
apud Deum omne verbum
Tunc beatus Marcus expergefactus, 38. dixit autem Maria ecce ancilla
gratias egit Deo, dicens: Domine fiat Domini fiat mihi secundum verbum
voluntas tua. tuum
et discessit ab illa angelus.iii

i
Ed. Ester Pastorello (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938), 10. English translation my
own.
ii
The Holy Bible: Douay version, translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Cath-
olic Truth Society, 1957).
iii
Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. B. Fischer, et. al. (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).

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(25 March 421). The narrative structure of Dandolo’s account thus gave
historiographical authority to a myth that, over the course of the four-
teenth century, had become increasingly conspicuous in the city’s most
important political spaces.3 Depictions of Mary and Gabriel alluded in
iconographic shorthand to the state’s auspicious beginnings, while the
trope of angelic announcement—at play in Mark’s vita as much as in the
Annunciation story itself—functioned as a metonym for Venice’s status as
a divinely favored Christian empire. ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus,’’
the angelic utterance that encapsulated the city’s unique claims to Mark’s
patronage, assumed apotropaic significance for the Republic in its new
empire abroad, and a Lion of Saint Mark blazoned the divine motto in
every outpost of the Republic, signaling throughout the Mediterranean
that providential forces stood behind Venice’s imperial dominance.4
As the legend of the angel’s salutation to Mark attests, prophetic utter-
ances loomed large in the Venetian political imagination. The mythic, as
well as musical, role that voices could play in engendering the state preoc-
cupied political thought during the period. Indeed music made it possible
to hear this providential vision of the Venetian state. As a heightened form
of utterance, song had the potential to structure Venetian political dis-
202 course, reconstituting the angelic voices of the city’s founding myths
through musical performance. Listening closely, one finds the political
3
David Rosand explores the array of political associations that Annunciation imagery
accrued in Venetian state art in his Myths of Venice: Figurations of a State (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. 12–46.
4
The phrase ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus’’ is the source for the ‘‘Pax tibi Marce,
hic requiescet corpus tuum’’ announcement that appeared for the first time in Dandolo’s
Chronica. The former phraseology derives from Christ’s announcement to Mark during his
imprisonment in Alexandria in the saint’s pre-Venetian vita (see, for instance, Jacobus de
Voragine’s Legenda Aurea or Boninus Mombritius’Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum). Dandolo
reworked the dialogue of the Alexandrian apparitio Dei episode into the Venetian praedes-
tinatio (the term given by the Venetians to the legend of the angel’s announcement to
Mark) that had first been articulated by Martin da Canal in his thirteenth-century chron-
icle, Les estoires de Venise. Giulio Cattin uncovers the former version of the text in an
antiphon for vespers on the vigil of the feast of Saint Mark in several liturgical sources
from the ducal basilica: a thirteenth-century antiphoner and a contemporary Processionale-
Rituale (Venice, Museo Correr, Cicogna 1006, ff. 2v–3); a fourteenth-century antiphoner
(Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratia de Supra, Reg. 113–18); and a sixteenth-century Ordo
Orationalis (Venice, Museo Correr, Cicogna 1602, ff. 87v–88) where the antiphon is found
in a variety of liturgical situations. See Cattin, Musica e liturgia a San Marco: testi e melodie per la
liturgia delle ore dal XII al XVII secolo: dal graduale tropato del Duecento ai graduali cinquecenteschi,
4 vols. (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1990–1992), with a facsimile from Cicogna 1006 in vol. 2,
499, and a transcription in vol. 3, 5*–6*. Patricia Fortini Brown offers a useful overview of the
Lion of Saint Mark as a symbol of state in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 80–83. Debra Pincus brings the angelic legend to bear on Andrea
Mantegna’s use of the ‘‘Pax tibi’’ motto on an icon of Saint Mark in ‘‘Mark Gets the Message:
Mantegna and the ‘Praedestinatio’ in Fifteenth-Century Venice,’’ Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35
(1997): 135–46, whereas Hans R. Hahnloser and Renato Polacco discuss the appearance of
the ‘‘Pax tibi’’ motto in a scene depicting the angel’s annunciation to Mark on a tile in the
Pala d’oro in La Pala d’oro (Venice: Canal and Stamperia Editrice, 1994), 36–37.

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theology of late-medieval Venice engaged by an astonishing variety of

musical acts and works.
Sung ceremonies and musical compositions addressed to the doge
dramatized the idea that the voice could, through the act of announce-
ment, bring about real political or spiritual change in the state and its
leaders. The heavenly voices that ushered in Dandolo’s political history
are important in this regard. Both the angelic utterance to Mark and the
story of the Annunciation found provocative analogies in the ceremonial
acclamation (laudes) of the doge by which the Venetian vox populi legit-
imized his office. Throughout the year, the doge was acclaimed in a num-
ber of ritual contexts that underscored the imagined kinship between
the laudes—the populace’s sung proclamation of consent to their lea-
der’s election—and the city’s founding acts of angelic announcement.
Ritual and state myth worked in tandem to forge a symbolic resemblance
between ducal acclamation and angelic annunciation in order to position
the doge within Venice’s sacred and civic hierarchies.5
Contemporary political discourse emphasized the dual nature of the
doge’s power. Understood to be the personification of the Republic and
the earthly representative of the city’s patron saint Mark, the doge stood
at the intersection of Venice’s civic and celestial structures. His partici- 203
pation in the practical affairs of state gave embodied presence to the
government’s jointly popular and divine bases.6 Functioning much like
a devotional icon or relic, the doge channeled the presence of Saint
Mark, on whose guidance the government depended, and at the same
time represented the entire Venetian populace and its values. A 1447
decision made by the Council of Ten, for instance, required Doge Fran-
cesco Foscari’s attendance at council votes, reasoning that although Fos-
cari himself could not partake in the decision-making, his status as ‘‘that
Imago which represents the government of the Venetians’’ lent him a ‘‘sym-
bolic function [representationem]’’ within the workings of the government.7
5
Debra Pincus has shown how the doge’s role as an instrument of the divine and
mediator between Mark and the state found articulation in the visual sphere of late-medieval
Venice in chapter 8 of her The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 121–49, and in idem, ‘‘Hard Times and Ducal Radiance: Andrea Dandolo and
the Construction of the Ruler in Fourteenth-Century Venice,’’ in Venice Reconsidered: The
History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 89–136. For a broad discussion of the doge as a symbol
for the ideals of government, see chapter 2 of Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age
of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986), esp. 179.
6
Frederic C. Lane elucidates a central paradox in the Venetian government, wherein
the ducal office was administered through popular assembly, but the doge’s powers were
vested by Saint Mark in Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973), 87–101, and esp. 89–90.
7
Translated by Dennis Romano, who brought the relevant document to light, in his
The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari 1373–1457 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007), xxi. Romano interprets the document within fifteenth-century

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A repertory of occasional motets develops the notion that the voice,

imagined in musical terms, could activate the political and spiritual ideals of
the state, with the doge at its center.8 The two motets examined in this essay
elaborate different facets of this idea. The anonymous Marce, Marcum imi-
taris (c. 1365)9 makes a sonic analogy to the concept of the doge as Mark’s
image by figuring the likeness between Venice’s holy and secular rulers in
terms of musical imitation, whereas Johannes Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splen-
dor/Michael qui Stena domus (c. 1406)10 elides a text dedicated to the Annun-
ciate Virgin with one addressed to the doge, creating musical echoes and
simultaneities in its praises to Venice’s celestial and temporal leaders.
The confluence of available musical styles with political thought
during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries yielded a singular
-
political discourse on ducal power. Romano notes that not only did the term imago, here
applied to the doge, also denote devotional images, but that ‘‘the doge [was] like an icon,
transmitting the power of Saint Mark to his people,’’ ibid., xxi.
8
Julie Cumming situates the corpus of extant motets dedicated to doges within the
broader repertory of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century occasional motets, and shows how
their engagement with contemporary political thought pointed toward the musical and
rhetorical hallmarks of the fifteenth-century Italian motet. See Julie Cumming, ‘‘Concord
out of Discord: Occasional Motets of the Early Quattrocento’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of
204 California, Berkeley, 1987). Chapters 6, 8, and 9 deal expressly with the surviving motets
dedicated to doges. These include Ave corpus sanctum (anonymous) for Francesco Dandolo
(1329–39); Marce, Marcum imitaris (anonymous) for Marco Corner (1365–68); Principum no-
bilissime (anonymous, possibly Landini) for Andrea Contarini (1368–81) and for which only
a single voice survives; Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus (Johannes Ciconia) for
Michele Steno (1400–13); and Ducalis sedes/Stirps Mocinico (Antonio Romano) for Tommaso
Mocenigo (1414–23). In addition three motets survive for Francesco Foscari (1423–57):
Plaude decus mundi (Cristoforus de Monte); Carminibus/O requies (Antonio Romano); and
Christus vincit (Hugo de Lantins). Cumming understands the motets for Francesco Foscari
as indicative of a growing interest on the part of the Venetian state in cultivating polyphony for
state functions in Julie Cumming, ‘‘Music for the Doge in Early Renaissance Venice,’’ Speculum
67 (1992): 324–64.
9
Edited by Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo in their Italian Sacred and Ceremonial
Music. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XIII (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987),
197–201, no. 44. Cantus II was first published in Francesco Egidi, ‘‘Un frammento di codice
musicale del secolo XIV,’’ Nozze Bonmartini-Tracagni XIX novembre MCMXXV (Rome: La Sper-
anza, 1925). This fragment is now thought to be lost. All voices are preserved in Grottaferrata,
Biblioteca lat. 224, first published by Ursula Günther, who also provides a transcription in her
‘‘Quelques remarques sur des feuillets récemment découverts à Grottaferrata,’’ in L’ars nova
italiana del trecento III: Secondo Convegno Internazionale 17–22 luglio 1969 sotto il patrocinio della
Società Internazionale di Musicologia (Certaldo: Centro di Studi sull’Ars nova italiana del Tre-
cento, 1970), 329, 335, 369–75. A facsimile of the Egidi fragment is also reproduced, without
a transcription, in Giuliano di Bacco and John Nádas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels and Italian
Sources of Polyphony during the Great Schism,’’ in Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval
and Renaissance Rome, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 44–92.
10
Venecie/Michael is a unicum found on Arabic fol. 287v–288 in Bologna, Civico
Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS Q 15. For a facsimile edition see Margaret Bent, Bologna
Q 15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Mansucript II (Lucca: LIM Editrice, 2008), no. 257.
The work is edited by Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark in The Works of Johannes Ciconia.
Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XXIV (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985), 77–
80, no. 14. A transcription of the motet can also be found in Suzanne Clercx, Un musicien
liégeois et son temps (Vers 1335–1411) II (Brussels: Palais des académies, 1960), 183–86.

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moment within Venice’s musical history. Already by the second half of

the fifteenth century the increasingly limited powers of both the doge
and the Venetian people had divested acclamations of their political
efficacy.11 Metaphors of musical harmony used to describe in idealized
terms the Republic’s newly crystallized system of governance gradually
eclipsed the medieval function of musical performance as the ritual
enactment of Venetian political theology. The prestige of the chapel
of San Marco as a musical institution, virtually non-existent before the
fifteenth century, became the dominant mode of the state’s musical self-
fashioning. Yet in this lesser acknowledged and little understood period
of musical life in the late-medieval city, ceremonial song served as a vital
mechanism of government, attested as much in state literature and ico-
nography as in musical composition and ritual practice.
The Voice of the People and the Image of Mark
The fulfillment of the angelic prophecy to Mark—the translation of the

evangelist’s body from Alexandria to Venice in 828—is portrayed in
a thirteenth-century mosaic above the Porta Sant’Alipio of the Basilica 205
San Marco (fig. 2).12 Read against the background of contemporary
political thought and ceremonial life, the mosaic’s depiction of a scene
of announcement becomes the means by which it explores the nature
and origins of the doge’s authority. The mosaic’s allusion to a laudes
performance encourages the viewer to identify the doge with the relics
of Mark, thus clarifying the spiritual attributes of the doge (vis-à-vis his
relationship to Mark) by reference to a musical ceremony that conferred
his political authority.
Until the late twelfth century the entire populace had acclaimed the
new doge and conducted him to San Marco while they sang the Te Deum,
the Kyrie eleison, and the so-called laudes, or ducal acclamations.13 This
11
A clear indication of the Republic’s increasingly aristocratic tendency is the Great
Council’s 1423 decision to validate its own decrees without the populace’s ceremonial
endorsement, and also to abolish the people’s ritual agreement to the doge’s election. By
the second half of the fifteenth century, the term Commune Veneciarum was removed from
the doge’s official oath, and was replaced in common usage by the designation La Seren-
issima. See Lane, A Maritime Republic, 252.
12
The Porta Sant’Alipio mosaic, which faces the Piazza San Marco, is one of the most
conspicuous images in all of Venice. For an analysis of this image in the context of the
broader cycle to which it once belonged see Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), II/1, 201–206.
13
Domenico Tino’s eyewitness account of the ceremonial events of the election and
investiture of Domenico Selvo in 1071 is reproduced in Agostino Pertusi ‘‘‘Quedam regalia
insignia’: ricerche sulle insigne del potere ducale a Venezia durante il Medioevo,’’ Studi
Veneziani 7 (1965): 67–68. For the evolution of the investiture ceremony from the ninth
through fifteenth centuries, see also Gina Fasoli, ‘‘Liturgia e cerimoniale ducale,’’ in

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figure 2. Mark’s Translation to Venice as depicted in the Porta

Sant’Alipio mosaic, Basilica San Marco (Photo by Michael
Huneke)
206
voiced consent of the populace, expressed through the laudes, legiti-

mized the doge’s election, and without it the doge had no legal claim.
By the thirteenth century the chaplains of San Marco had assumed
responsibility for the performance. Yet even then, the singing of laudes
continued to connote the populace’s original right to authorize their
leader.14 The laudes’ connotations of popularly-granted authority could
be extended, moreover, to include the spiritual basis for the doge’s power:
his proximity, indeed his very likeness, to Mark.
This idea finds unique expression in the Sant’Alipio mosaic. The
image portrays the ninth-century reception of Saint Mark’s relics against
the backdrop of the city’s contemporary architectural refurbishments (of
-
Venezia e il Levante fino al secolo XV, ed. Agostino Pertusi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore,
1973). Iain Fenlon provides a useful gloss of Tino’s account in his The Ceremonial City:
History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
143–44.
14
Investiture ceremonies retained the constitutive role of the vox populi until 1423 by
allowing the populace to respond to the announcement ‘‘Questo è vostro Doge se vi piace’’
with ‘‘sia, sia!’’ as is described in Andrea da Mosto, I dogi di Venezia nella vita pubblica e privata
(Milan: A. Martello, 1960), xxii. Yet the original constitutive charge of the vox populi re-
mained in the political memory of the city far longer, for instance, in Francesco Sansovino’s
sixteenth-century Venetia Città Nobilissima: ‘‘in the beginning [the doge] was created by the
populace by voice or, created by others, was confirmed by the populace’’ (nel principio fu
creato dal popolo à voce, overo fatto da altri, fu dal popolo confermato). Francesco Sanso-
vino and Giustiniano Martinioni, Venetia Città Nobilissima (Venice: S. Curti, 1663), 473.

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which the mosaic itself was part), couched in the visual language of
thirteenth-century ducal ceremony. Both Otto Demus and Agostino Per-
tusi highlight what appears as a secondary topic within the mosaic: the
depiction of the moment when the newly invested doge—oath of office
in hand—first encounters the populace, who symbolically legitimize his
authority by means of sung acclamations, or laudes.15 Although Demus
and Pertusi argue persuasively for this secondary reading, it is just as
useful to understand the image not as depicting any single ceremonial
occasion, but as relying on the visual language of ducal ceremony, and
acclamation in particular, to interpret the mythic-historical event of Saint
Mark’s translation.
Musical topoi carry a special rhetorical charge within the image’s
design. On the left-hand side of the composition, the congregants leav-
ing the church make a gesture of speech or song—indicated by arms
raised at the elbow—toward the right, apparently motioning toward
Mark’s body being borne into the church at the central axis of the com-
position. The doge’s bent arm and pointing finger extend this gestural
motif so that it culminates in the scroll—interpreted by Demus and Pertusi
as the doge’s promissione, or oath of office—that he holds in his other
hand.16 By this interpretation, the viewer’s eye is drawn not merely to the 207
doge, but more specifically to the legal document that defines the scope of
his political jurisdiction. The result is that the doge, the city’s political
leader, forms an auxiliary focal point to Mark, the city’s spiritual leader.
An accompanying inscription helps the viewer interpret the gesture
of the populace on the left as directing song toward the right. At the
same time, it reinforces the thematic duality of the composition by merg-
ing devotional and political song:
COLLOCAT HUNC DIGNIS PLEBS LAUDIBUS ET COLIT HYMNIS/

UT VENETOS SERVET TERRAQUE MARIQUE GUBERNET.17
(The people establish him with worthy laudes and honor him with hymns/
So that he may preserve the Venetians and govern by land and sea.)
15
Otto Demus argues that the investiture ceremony depicted was that of Lorenzo
Tiepolo (Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice II/1, 202–206). Significantly, this is the
same investiture ceremony recounted in detail in Martin da Canal, Les estoires de Venise:
Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence:
L.S. Olschki, 1972), 279–83. The full iconographic cycle, of which the Sant’Alipio mosaic is
the only remaining original, is visible in Gentile Bellini’s Processione in piazza San Marco.
16
Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco II/1, 202–206; Pertusi, ‘‘Quedam Regalia Insig-
nia,’’ 45–46.
17
The second line of the inscription above the Sant’Alipio mosaic currently reads:
‘‘Ut Venetos semper sepit ab hoste suos,’’ which frustrates the hexameter set up in the first
line. This modification is the result of restoration to the mosaic likely undertaken sometime
in the nineteenth century (see Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice II/1, 201).

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In the sense that the mosaic conflates two separate events—the deposi-
tion of Mark’s relics in the basilica and a ducal ceremony—we can under-
stand the ‘‘laudibus’’ in this inscription to refer not only to the people’s
sung petitions to their patron saint, but also to the singing of laudes that
validated the doge as the Republic’s elected figurehead.18 The ‘‘laudi-
bus’’ and ‘‘hymnis,’’ in other words, could refer equally well to the Te
Deum, Kyrie eleison, and laudes with which the populace historically
greeted the doge’s election as it could to the people’s sung veneration
of Saint Mark’s relics. The overtly civic language with which the inscrip-
tion concludes (‘‘terraque marique gubernet’’) makes the subject of
both text and image all the more ambiguous, or perhaps extends it to
encompass the doge as Mark’s earthly representative.
Through its pictorial and textual punning, the Sant’Alipio mosaic
encourages the viewer to identify the doge with the source of his author-
ity. The populace’s posture of acclamation literally gestures through
song at the doge’s spiritual proximity to Mark, a proximity that predi-
cated his place at the head of the Republic.19 The mosaic thus evokes the
political prerogative of the vox populi by way of analogy to the spiritual
foundation for the doge’s authority: the presence of Mark’s relics within
208 the ducal basilica.20 Moreover, the image pictures the intercessory circuit
established in this spiritual economy. Whether the populace lauds the
relics or the ruler, the effect is the same. What is addressed to the image
is transferred to the prototype, and in acclaiming the doge they acclaim
Mark.
Sounding Unanimity
When Dandolo was composing his Chronica per extensum descripta in the
1350s, the Sant’Alipio mosaic was one of the highlights of the newly
18
Hans Hubach recognizes the viability of this reading in ‘‘Pontifices, Clerus –
Populus, Dux: Osservazioni sul più antico esempio di autorappresentazione politica della
società veneziana,’’ in San Marco: aspetti storici e agiografici: atti del convegno internazionale di
studi, Venezia, 26–29 April 1994, ed. Antonio Niero (Venice: Marsilio, 1996): ‘‘Lo stretto
nesso con l’investitura dogale si riflette chiaramente nell’inscrizione originaria del mosaico
situato al di sopra della porta di Sant’Alipio, la quale faceva riferimento all’usanza dell’ac-
clamazione del doge neoeletto da parte del popolo,’’ 396, n78.
19
On the complex spiritual relationship the doge was understood to share with St.
Mark see Staale Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography of
the Venetian Republic, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 5 (Rome:
L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1974).
20
Thomas E. A. Dale details the development of a mosaic program in San Marco that
increasingly stressed the doge’s role as part of a soteriological chain that extended from
Christ and reached the doge by way of Mark in his ‘‘Inventing a Sacred Past: Pictorial
Narratives of St. Mark the Evangelist in Aquileia and Venice, ca. 1000–1300,’’ Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 53–104.

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renovated basilica.21 Indeed the image may have loomed in Dandolo’s

mind when he described the election of Domenico Selvo.
Domenico Selvo was elected doge in the year of our Lord 1071. So, with
his predecessor not yet buried, the entire populace [cunctus populus]
unanimously acclaimed [unanimiter aclamavit] that doge in the church
of San Nicolò [al Lido] and led him with hymns and praises [hymnis et
laudibus] to the not-yet-complete church of San Marco, [where] he
received his investment with the standard of Saint Mark.22
Here ‘‘hymnis et laudibus’’ recalls the mosaic inscription (‘‘LAUDIBUS

ET . . . HYMNIS’’), and Selvo’s reception at the yet incomplete San Marco
brings to mind the mosaic’s depiction of a ducal reception in front of the
partially refurbished basilica. Yet it is precisely what the mosaic offered by
way of suggestion that this passage makes explicit: the legitimizing role of
the Venetian people in establishing their leader’s authority.
In its attention to the vocal participation of the populace, Dandolo’s
account of Selvo’s election is paradigmatic of a broader rhetorical strat-
egy in the Chronica. Each chapter of the Chronica begins with an account
of a new doge’s election, and Dandolo renders these openings in stock, 209
formulaic language. Verbs of speech in particular describe the mode by
which the doge’s power has been established. Dandolo frequently locates
the source of this constitutive voice with the populace: ‘‘Vitalis Michael
II . . . was acclaimed [laudatus] by public opinion, as was customary’’;23
‘‘Iacopo Tiepolo . . . was acclaimed [laudatur] by the public opinion . . .on
March 6 he was acclaimed doge [dux laudatus]’’;24 ‘‘Lorenzo Tiepolo was
announced doge [annunciatur] . . . and with the praise of the populace
[colaudacione populi] . . . they confirmed the form of election of the new
doge.’’25
21
On the creation of the Chronica within the milieu of early humanism, its rela-
tionship to earlier chronicles, and its subsequent influence, see Girolamo Arnaldi, ‘‘Andrea
Dandolo doge-cronista,’’ in La storiografia veneziana fino al secolo XVI. Aspetti e problemi, ed.
Agostino Pertusi (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1970), 127–268.
22
Dandolo, Chronica per extensum descripta aa, 46–1280 d. C., 214: ‘‘Dominicus Silvo
dux censetur anno Domini millesimo LXXI. Nam, predecessore nedum sepulto, cunctus
populus hunc ducem, in sancti Nicholai templo, unanimiter aclamavit: et ipsum, cum
ymnis et laudibus, in sancti Marci ecclesia nondum conplecta duxit, qui ibi investicionem
cum vexilo suscepit, ad quam perficiendam crebo operam dedit.’’
23
Ibid., 246: ‘‘Vitalis Michael II dux . . . Hic a concione, more solito, laudatus . . . ’’
24
Ibid., 291–92: ‘‘ Iacobus Theupulo dux . . . a concione laudatur . . . hic, die VI marcii
dux laudatus . . . ’’
25
Ibid., 315: ‘‘Laurencius Theupolo dux anunciatur . . . et colaudacione populi, for-
mam electionis futuris ducis . . . sanxerunt.’’ The frequent use of the noun laus and the verb
laudatur throughout the Chronica to describe ducal elections aligns the laudes performance
with the doge’s legitimate election.

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The sound of the populace’s sung accord to their leader thus rever-
berates throughout the Chronica, framing the civic and world-historical
events that unfold in each chapter. In this way, the scene of angelic
announcement with which the Chronica begins finds structural echoes
throughout the political history that ensues. Indeed, the trope of the
acclaiming vox populi that punctuates Dandolo’s narrative can be seen as
an extension—albeit on a political level—of the angelic voice that, in
predestining Venice’s future, engenders all that follows. The angel’s
annunciation grounds the inception of the state in divine will, while the
voice of a unanimous body politic regularly reaffirms Venice’s governing
structure by sounding accord to its leader. Dandolo would continue to
draw analogies between the laudes performance and angelic announce-
ment throughout his career as procurator of San Marco and, later, as doge.
As we shall see, his imaginative reconfigurations of the laudes in state
ceremony, iconography, and architectural design bolstered their ability
to point to both the popular and divine sources for the doge’s authority.
While the performance of the laudes invoked the electoral voice of
the people, its text gestured toward the divine reaches of the city’s ruling
structure. A concise articulation of the doge’s place within the Republic’s
210 sacro-political hierarchy, the laudes text pictures a chain of sovereignty
that originates in Christ and, through the intercession of Mark, extends
to the doge:
Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Domino nostro [N.N.], Dei gracia, inclito duci Venecie, Dalmacie atque
Croacie, et dominatori quarte partis et dimidie tocius imperii Romanie,
salus, honor, vita, et victoria:
Sancte Marce, Tu illum adiuva.26
26
The Venetian laudes clearly derive from the Frankish laudes regiae. Identical versions
of the Venetian laudes are used both by Martin da Canal in Les estoires de Venise and in Hugo
de Lantin’s polyphonic setting of the text for the election of Francesco Foscari in 1423. For
two different perspectives on de Lantin’s motet, see Cumming, ‘‘Music for the Doge,’’ 346–
53, and J. Michael Allsen, ‘‘Intertextuality and Compositional Process in Two Cantilena
Motets by Hugo de Lantins,’’ Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 174–202. Fenlon presents the
various ritual contexts in which the laudes were performed throughout the Venetian ritual
year and traces the historical development of these rituals in his The Ceremonial City, 130–31.
For an in-depth study of the laudes regiae from their antique origins into the twentieth
century, see Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and
Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946).
Although Kantorowicz devotes a full chapter to ‘‘Dalmatian and Venetian Laudes,’’ his
investigation focuses almost exclusively on their constitutive significance in Venice’s colo-
nial empire, whereas on the performance of laudes in the city of Venice itself he concludes
that ‘‘a few notes, not very specific, suggest that the doge on some occasions, for example at
his investiture, would be greeted with acclamations. But no text of the laudes seems to have
been preserved from San Marco,’’ ibid., 153. Kantorowicz appears not to have been familiar
with da Canal’s Les estoires or de Lantin’s setting of the laudes text. For a study on the place

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(Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands. To our lord [N.N.]

by the favor of God, the renowned doge of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croa-
tia, and ruler over quarter and a half of the entire Roman empire,
health, honor, life, and victory: Saint Mark, help him!)
Beneath the Christological tricolon that acclaims Christ’s military and

imperial attributes—‘‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imper-
at’’—the doge is hailed as ruler of his own territory—a territory that
included the newly acquired regions of the Byzantine Empire that
secured Venice’s undisputed dominance over the Mediterranean. Here
in the laudes, Christ’s spiritual triumphs, stated in the language of
empire, are mirrored in the acclaims to the doge as figurehead of this
great new maritime power. Mark is called upon to guide the doge,
through his relationship to whom he mediates between Christ’s kingdom
and its political image, the Republic of Venice.
The imperial tone conveyed in this text is echoed in one of the most
important spaces for the performance of acclamations: the south tran-
sept of San Marco, where the doge was first presented following his
election, and the populace’s approval formally solicited. The space is
unified through an iconographic program based on the theme of the 211
adventus Domini, which presents Christ in the language of imperial tri-
umph. Staale Sinding-Larsen has suggested that the adventus theme be
interpreted in light of the investiture ceremony enacted below it.27 He
points to the two inscriptions that adorn the pergolo (the platform from
which the doge was presented and acclaimed by the people), and that, in
keeping with the spirit of the adventus topos, invoke a term associated
with political ceremony (laus, pl. laudes) to describe the praise rendered
to Christ:
EX ORE INFANTIUM ET LACTENTIUM PERFECISTI LAUDEM.

(Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have perfected praise.)
(Ps. 8:3)
LAUS DECET ISTA DEUM, QUI SUMPSIT IN HOSTE TROPHEUM.
(This praise befits God, who takes triumph toward the enemy.)
Sinding-Larsen asks, ‘‘Could it be stated more clearly that the acclama-

tion of a new doge was in the last instance a praise of God, on whom the
well-being of the State depended?’’28 Yet meaning cuts both ways here. If
-
of the laudes regiae in Normandy and England see Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, ‘‘The
Anglo-Norman Laudes Regiae,’’ Viator 12 (1981): 37–78.
27
Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall, 202.
28
Ibid., 203.

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the sentiment expressed in the inscriptions redirects the ducal acclama-

tions toward a higher power, it simultaneously casts a heavenly aura back
down onto the sung ceremony below, conferring on the doge the mili-
tant, victorious attributes of Christ and underscoring the congruence
between the state and Christ’s heavenly kingdom.
Moreover, the demonstrative ‘‘laus . . . ista’’ (italics mine) of the sec-
ond inscription had the potential to refer not only to the ‘‘laudem’’
mentioned in the psalm verse above it, but also to the acclamations
occasionally performed beneath it. The latter valence of the inscription
fixes the memory of a civic performance within liturgical space. The
laudes themselves did not belong to the liturgy at San Marco, and sources
describe the chaplains of San Marco singing them in extra-liturgical
processions, as was the case on Easter morning and on the feast of the
Translation of Saint Mark.29 It would appear, in fact, that the popular
acclamation of the doge from the pergolo occurred only during the
investiture ceremony itself. Yet the south transcript inscriptions flirt with
the boundaries of the civic and the liturgical by projecting a mute accla-
mation into the space the doge normally occupied while attending mass
at the basilica.30
212 Notably, the textual formula of the laudes first appears in a literary
work written contemporaneously with the creation of the Sant’Alipio
mosaic. Martin da Canal’s Les estoires de Venise furnishes vivid and reliable
information about civic events in the years 1267–1275. The chronicle thus
complements and clarifies aspects of the thirteenth-century ceremony that
the mosaic depicts.31 Performances of laudes to the doge emerge from the
pages of da Canal’s history as one of the most salient sonic features of
thirteenth-century state ceremony.32 Among the occasions for laudes that
29
Giulio Cattin’s monumental Musica e liturgia a San Marco has vastly improved our
understanding of the rito patriarchino in use at San Marco. Its four volumes describe and
inventory the liturgical books currently known to have furnished the ducal liturgy. Cattin
also provides a selective edition of texts and music from the Mass and Office, and tran-
scriptions of related sources, such as a portion of Bartolomeo Bonifacio’s 1564 Cerimoniale.
Giordana Mariani Canova contributes an essay on miniatures found in the liturgical books,
and Susy Marcon a codicological study of the manuscripts.
30
In the Middle Ages, versions of the so-called laudes regiae either formed part of the
episcopal mass or occasioned the coronation of kings (see Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae,
65–146). For that reason the inclusion of the ducal laudes within the liturgy at San Marco
would have grossly overstated the power of what was, in the end, an elected official.
31
Martin da Canal, Les estoires de Venise: Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini
al 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1972).
32
Da Canal describes laudes performed in extra-liturgical ceremonies on Easter Sun-
day and the feast of the Translation of Saint Mark, as well as those performed for the
election ceremonies of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo. He informs readers that the Easter perfor-
mance was repeated every Sunday of the Paschal season until Pentecost. It is beyond the
scope of this article to discuss the significance of each of these occasions. Susan Rankin has
considered the symbolism behind the singing of laudes within the thirteenth-century Easter
morning celebration that took place in the Piazza San Marco in her ‘‘From Liturgical

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da Canal describes is the election of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo in 1268, and it

is significant that the grosso coin minted during Tiepolo’s rule reproduces
the laudes text in visual terms.33 On the obverse of the coin, the patron
saint invests Tiepolo with the standard of Saint Mark—the emblem of
Mark’s endorsement of the ducal office—while on the reverse, Christ sits
enthroned (fig. 3). The grosso thus serves as a visual iteration of the
political theology expressed in the laudes.34 Both verbal and visual tokens
imagine Christ’s heavenly empire reflected in the Republic through the
doge’s spiritual relationship to Mark.35 Like the contemporary grosso, the
laudes encapsulate a political cosmology in which the doge—as Mark’s
representative—stands at the center of mirrored heavenly and human
branches. As a sonic performance, the laudes voice the unanimity of a pop-
ulace that sees the doge as its perfect embodiment. As a sung text, the
laudes articulate the doge’s place in a hierarchy that, through him, places
the entire state under divine management.
If we return to the Sant’Alipio mosaic, we notice that the image nods
toward the laudes as both text and act. Christ Pantokrator—a mosaic
within a mosaic, indeed, at its exact center—frames the resemblance
between the saint and doge constructed beneath it. We might recognize
in this configuration yet another echo of the laudes text that imagines an 213
imperial Christ, beneath whom Mark (through the presence of his relics
at the basilica) assists the doge in governing the Republic. Yet as we have
seen, the performance of laudes is also mutely suggested within the
scene’s diegesis. If the connections among Christ, Mark, and the doge
-
Ceremony to Public Ritual: ‘Quem queritis’ at St. Mark’s, Venice,’’ in Da Bisanzio a San
Marco. Musica e Liturgia, ed. Giulio Cattin (Venice: Il Mulino, 1997), esp. 150–56. Fenlon
offers an expert synthesis of the sources that describe the performance of laudes, including
a consideration of Les estoires, in his The Ceremonial City, 130–31. Da Canal’s recognition of
the laudes as a potent symbol of state is suggested by the personal prayer with which the
author begins the second half of Les estoires (the half that describes contemporary cere-
mony, and thus recounts the laudes performances): ‘‘Ge pri Jesu Crist et monseignor saint
Marc, qui done sauvement, henor, vie et victoire a monseignor li dus et a tos les Veneciens,
et comencerai mon conte tot en tel maniere,’’ ibid., 156. The prayer is modeled on the
structure of the laudes and invokes Christ and Mark to grant the doge imperial attributes.
33
Alan M. Stahl, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press; New York: in association with the American Numismatic Society, 2000),
16–18, 302–308. It seems significant that Enrico Dandolo (doge 1192-1205) introduced the
grosso, along with its characteristic imagery, into Venice’s monetary system: he was the first
doge to gain the epithet ‘‘renowned doge of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and ruler over
quarter and a half of the entire Roman empire,’’ with which subsequent doges were ac-
claimed thereafter.
34
For the relationship these coin programs bear to the ducal investiture ceremony,
see Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall, 166.
35
The gold ducat introduced into the monetary system in 1284 by Doge Giovanni
Dandolo reinforces this iconographic symbolism. As is the case for the grosso, the obverse
depicts the transaction of the vexillum between Mark and the doge. The reverse of the ducat
shows Christ Resurrected in a starry mandorla. See Stahl, Zecca, 28–32.

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figure 3. Grosso minted under Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo depicting

(obverse) Mark investing doge with standard (vexillum S.
Marci) and (reverse) Christ enthroned
are established along the composition’s vertical axis, then the acclaiming
214 populace, commanding the entire bottom register, forms a horizontal
axis that also includes saint and doge. This visual organization pictures
the full extent of the Republic’s reaches. Mirrored in one another, Mark
and doge fall at the hinge of this structure, which the acclaiming body
politic both joins and generates through its sung accord.
How might the political freight borne by such vocal acts—real, leg-
endary, or imagined—have found expression in contemporary musical
compositions? Among ceremonies that featured laudes, the doge’s inves-
titure would certainly have included the performance of polyphonic
compositions. We might see many of these works as reproducing ideol-
ogies underpinning the occasions for which they were composed. Motets
honoring the doge are particularly well represented within the
fourteenth-century Italian repertory.36 Several of these motets—which
36
Cumming investigates the motets composed for Doge Francesco Foscari in her
‘‘Music for the Doge in Early-Renaissance Venice,’’ 341–59. For a discussion of several other
ducal motets, see also Cumming’s dissertation, ‘‘Concord out of Discord.’’ For the place of
these works within the broader trecento repertory see Margaret Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-
Century Italian Motet,’’ in L’ars nova italiana del trecento VI. Atti del Congresso internazio-
nale ‘‘L’Europa e la musica del Trecento,’’ Certaldo, 19-21 July 1984 (Certaldo: Centro di
Studi sull’Ars nova italiana del Trecento, 1992). In addition to the motet repertory, an
anonymous and fragmentary ballade from the first half of the fifteenth century sets the first
vespers antiphon for the feast of Saint Mark that recounts the dialogue between Christ and
Mark that provided the textual model for the Venetian praedestinatio (see note 4 above).
Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder, A Veneto Liber cantus (c. 1440): Fragments in the Bayer-
ische Staatsbibliothek Munich and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Wiesbaden:
Reichert Verlag, 2012), 85–86, 116–17. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to

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we can imagine occupied their own type of privileged vocal status as

representatives of a high-art polyphonic genre—bear evidence of imag-
inative play with the notion that the voice could activate the political and
spiritual ideals of the state through the figure of the doge.37 An investi-
gation of one such motet, the anonymous Marce, Marcum imitaris, reveals
many of the same sonic themes explored in contemporary ceremony, art,
and historiography to be freshly imagined, amplified, and elaborated in
purely musical terms.
Echo as Image in Marce, Marcum imitaris
The rhetorical doubling between Mark and doge at work in the Sant’Alipio
mosaic finds a musical counterpart in Marce, Marcum imitaris (ex. 1).38
The motet was composed in honor of Doge Marco Corner (1365–1368)
and was likely intended for performance at one of the ceremonies cele-
brating his inauguration.39 Grounded in a political theology that, on the
-
consider the work here, its existence testifies to the use of polyphony well into the fifteenth
century to relate the angelic exchanges so central to Venetian political identity, and in 215
a genre other than the ceremonial motet.
37
Gina Fasoli was perhaps the first to anticipate the repertory’s potential to illuminate
the laudes in her ‘‘Liturgia e cerimoniale ducale.’’ Commenting on Antonio Romano’s Du-
calis sedes inclita/Stirps Mocinico and the anonymous Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani, Fasoli
notes that ‘‘l’uno e l’altro di questi motetti presentano interessanti risonanze delle accla-
mazioni imperiali: quello a Francesco Foscari [sic: Francesco Dandolo] si rivolge ad un certo
punto al doge dicendogli: ‘esto tu nobis [dux], via et vita’, mentre quello al Mocenigo for-
mula l’augurio che il doge ‘diu consistat solio, longo vivat imperio,’’’ ibid., 278.
38
Example 1 modified from Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, ed., Italian Sacred
and Ceremonial Music. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XIII (Monaco: Éditions de
l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987), 197–201, no. 44. For the purposes of the present discussion I have
redacted several of Fischer and Gallo’s reconstructions in order to clarify source lacunae.
39
Although Ursula Günther refutes Kurt von Fischer’s attribution of the motet to
Landini, Marce, Marcum in fact shares many of the features she highlights—generic
hybridity in particular—with Landini’s madrigal Si dolce non sono. See note 46 in this article
for comments on the motet’s relationship to the Italian caccia. As Günther has noted, the
shift from octonaria to senaria perfecta in the Amen section of Marce, Marcum is characteristic
of the trecento madrigal, and the isorhythmic tenor of Si dolce non sono would have
unmistakably evoked the motet genre. The madrigal’s staggering of the upper voice entries
with respect to the tenor isorhythm is a procedure that aligns it all the more closely to the
design of Marce, Marcum outlined here. Although no motets can be securely tied to
Landini, he received payment ‘‘pro quinque motectis’’ in 1379, and there are grounds for
attributing the motet Principum nobilissime, another ducal motet dedicated to Andrea
Contarini (doge 1368–1382) and for which only one voice survives, to the Florentine
composer. Dragan Plamenac has pointed out that the mention of ‘‘Franciscus peregre
canentem’’ in the text of Principum nobilissime may refer to the composer’s stay abroad in
Northern Italy in this period. Ursula Günther, ‘‘Quelques remarques sur des feuillets
récemment découverts à Grottaferrata,’’ 336–37; Kurt von Fischer, ‘‘Neue Quellen zur
Musik des 13., 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts,’’ Acta Musicologica 36 (1964): 92; and Dragan
Plamenac, ‘‘Another Paduan Fragment of Trecento Music,’’ Journal of the American Musi-
cological Society 8 (1955): 173–74.

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one hand, recognized the voice’s ability to bring about real change in its
leaders and, on the other, saw the doge as Mark’s spiritual image, Marce,
Marcum forges a novel musical metaphor by conflating sonic with spiri-
tual similitude. Its composer seizes upon the coincidence in name
between doge and saint, and Corner’s spiritual likeness to Mark, made
explicit in the first line of the motet, becomes its musical subject. Draw-
ing on the political concepts that cast the doge as Mark’s spiritual imago,
Marce, Marcum performs the musical joining of the evangelist and doge.
Though Marce, Marcum is sometimes held up as an important early
witness to the Italian motet tradition, only cursory notice has been given
to this motet as a vehicle for musical signification.40 In the view of Julie
Cumming, who first considered the work’s political rhetoric, Marce, Mar-
cum ‘‘fail[ed] to take advantage of the symbolic possibilities of the
motet,’’ and for that reason did ‘‘not constitute a native Venetian musical
tradition of full-blown laudatory motets.’’41 In particular, she points to
the use of a single text for both cantus voices as curious among trecento
motets. This leads her to conclude that the work ‘‘does not exploit the
symbolic and expressive possibilities [of] the polytextual motet.’’42
Indeed, Marce, Marcum is unique in this regard; it is the only extant
216 single-texted motet of the Italian trecento.43 Yet if it fails to anticipate
the defining polytextuality of the late-trecento and early-quattrocento
Italian motet, this breach of generic norms begs to be read as part of
the work’s broader rhetorical operations.
It is possible to argue that the work signifies precisely through its
constructions of one-to-one correspondences between the two equal-
range cantus voices. Viewed against the backdrop of the political theol-
ogy that posited likeness between doge and saint, the use of a single text
for the two cantus voices appears as one of several musical devices that
create aural analogies to the notion of the doge as Mark’s imago. It is thus
telling that the first stanza of the motet dwells explicitly on the concept of
similitude between the two Marks. In fact the first few words of the
poem—‘‘Marce, Marcum imitaris’’ (Mark you imitate Mark)—invite the
40
For the place of Marce, Marcum within the tradition of the Italian trecento motet see
Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet.’’ Also chapter 6 of Cumming, ‘‘Concord out of
Discord’’; Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels and Italian Sources of Polyphony during
the Great Schism’’; and Günther, ‘‘Quelques remarques,’’ 334–37.
41
Cumming, ‘‘Concord out of Discord,’’ 262. Cumming understands this ‘‘full-blown
phase’’ to be best represented by Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus
(discussed below), and by the group of motets related to the 1423 election of Doge Francesco
Foscari by Hugo de Lantins, Christeforus de Monte, and Antonio Romano.
42
Ibid., 259.
43
For a table that illustrates adherence to generic norms among extant Italian motets
c. 1300–1410, see Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,’’ 122–25. Four of the
motets Bent lists have missing voices, and it is therefore not possible to determine the
number of texts they use.

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listener to interpret musical imitation—instances of which the composer

presents textually, texturally, and motivically—in terms of the relation-
ship between the motet’s two subjects.
In this respect, the echoed interactions between the two texted
voices are perhaps the most innovative aspect of the motet’s design, and
prove central to the large-scale planning of the work. Example 1 indi-
cates these moments of textual echoing as letters A through E, begin-
ning on measures 1, 27, 62, 73, and 84, respectively. These sections of
structural misalignment between the cantus parts provide the major
moments of contrast in a texture otherwise characterized by simulta-
neous declamation in the two voices; a section of hocket also offers
textural contrast. Closer examination of the work reveals that this call-
and-response-style interaction between the cantus parts unfolds as
a musical process over the course of the motet, where the distance at
which the two voices echo text shortens progressively with each subse-
quent imitative section. The systematic compression of the interval
between vocal entries results in a musical mirror-imaging that brings the
two voices into alignment. Since the most likely occasion for the motet’s
performance (Marco Corner’s 1365 investiture) was fundamentally pro-
cessual, where during the inaugural ceremony the doge assumed the 217
role of the saint’s earthly image, this compositional strategy of organiz-
ing vocal entries performs a programmatic relationship to the event it
accompanied.
An imitative introitus setting the first syllable, Mar- of Marce, puts this
musical process in motion. Virginia Newes suggests that Marce, Marcum is
the earliest known example of a dedicatory motet with an extended echo
imitation introitus in an Italian source.44 As Newes’s statement implies,
such lengthy introductory imitations would become a hallmark of the
genre. Here in this early usage, however, the introitus works to establish
the symbolic horizons of the composition. Though both sources for the
motet—Grottaferrata 224 (Gr) and the Egidi fragment (Eg)—transmit
cantus II, only Gr transmits cantus I and tenor, and regrettably there is
a lacuna for cantus I in measures 7–15. Given that cantus II and tenor form
a grammatically complete, self-standing unit in this section, however, it
seems reasonable to conclude that the motet opens with two exact solo
repetitions of the Mar- melisma, successively declaimed by each cantus
voice over the tenor.
Suggestively, both manuscripts propose a text underlay for the in-
troitus that complements the musical image it creates. The first two
44
Virginia Newes, ‘‘The Relationship of Text to Imitative Techniques in 14th-century
Polyphony,’’ in Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ursula
Günther and Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, Basel, and London: Bärenreiter, 1984), 151. For the
use of imitative techniques in the fourteenth-century repertory, see ibid., 121–54.

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example 1. Marce, Marcum imitaris (Anonymous)

Gr., fol. 5v-6; Eg., fol. 2r (CII only) (fragment now lost)
218

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example 1. (Continued)
219

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220

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221

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222
Marce, Marcum imitaris text and translation

Marce, Marcum imitaris
probitatis radio,
nec ab ipso disgregaris
equitatis madio.
Miles dignus approbaris
virtutum efficacia.
Princeps iustus sublimaris
karismatum gratia.
Tu ducatus generosi
mundi pariferiam
circumducis virtuosi
ad prolem Corneriam.

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example 1. (continued)
Tu michi benignitatis
manum porrexisti.
Tu Venetie dignitatis
gradum addidisti.
Sic celestis claritatis
cui te commisisti,
Deus augeat largitatis
liliumque majestatis,
quod pie meruisti.
Amen.
Mark, you imitate Mark with a rod of uprightness, nor are you divided from
him; you are steeped in equity. Worthy soldier, you are confirmed by the
efficacy of your strength. Just prince, you are exalted by divine grace. You of
generous dogeship bear a feast to the world. You lead the virtuous to the
offspring of the Corner family. You offered me a hand of kindness. You
added to the degree of Venice’s worth. Thus by the heavenly splendor with
which you are united, may God augment the lily of largess and of majesty which
223
you piously earned. Amen.
words of the motet—‘‘Marce, Marcum’’—are the only instances in which

the shared proper name of the twin subjects appears, and their stark
juxtaposition at the very outset of the motet produces an immediate
graphic and auditory symmetry between the two. Only the vocative and
accusative endings (-e and -um) distinguish the two instantiations of the
name, pointing grammatically to the political and celestial referents,
respectively. Despite the length of the opening melisma, both Gr and
Eg suggest that the change of syllable from Mar- to -ce be deferred until
after the cadence of the introitus. While the scribes of Gr and Eg indicate
this differently (this is partly related to a musical discrepancy between the
two sources in this section), both clearly withhold the grammatical res-
olution of the name Marcus until beyond the introitus.45 The delay in
45
It is significant in this regard that the two manuscript sources that transmit Cantus
II and Tenor of Marce, Marcum—Grottaferrata lat. 224 (Gr) and the Egidi fragment (Eg)—
contain only one substantive scribal disagreement, and that this disagreement is in part
a matter of text underlay: Gr and Eg transmit a different underlay for cantus II in measures
14–15. Yet this very disparity perhaps helps to establish the interpretive horizons of the
work. If we adopt the underlay of Eg, the potential simultaneous declamation of Marce and
Marcum in measure 14 would be the only moment in which different words coincide in the
motet—a vivid musical accentuation of the equivalence between human and heavenly
Marks. Whether we adopt the underlay from Eg or from Gr, the availability of both possible
approaches to the text only underscores the semantic interchangeability of the two Marks
in the context of the motet’s subject.

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grammatical discrimination between the two Marks thus preserves the

unity of subject reflected in the echo imitation of the introitus. It is only
on the heels of this initial musical image that the two Marks are un-
coupled. What ensues throughout the remainder of the work is the
gradual restoration of the two subjects to this original state of unity.46
Reinforcing the sense that the text’s theme of similitude governs the
musical scheme, the next imitative exchange between cantus voices
(m. 27, passage B) sets the continuation of the first stanza that under-
lines the similarity between the two Marks: ‘‘Nor are you divided from
him [Mark], you are steeped in equity.’’47 Yet whereas in the introitus
(passage A) the repetition of the second cantus had followed the first by
a distance of twenty semibreves, here in passage B the second cantus
follows at a distance of only eight semibreves. With each subsequent
echoed section, the distance at which the voices echo the text is system-
atically shortened by two semibreves. In passage C the distance between
vocal entries contracts to six semibreves, in passage D to four, and in
passage E to two semibreves. Thus gradually, and at regular intervals, the
lag between vocal entries diminishes until the texted section of the motet
cadences with cantus I and II in perfect unison (m. 88). The Amen
224 section that follows, moreover, begins with the two voices sustaining
a unison long on G (mm. 90–91), and they continue in minims at the
unison until the end of the following measure (m. 92). Bridging the two
sections, the solo tenor (m. 89) heralds not only the new perfect men-
suration, but likewise the transformation that has occurred in the rela-
tionship between cantus voices.
While homorhythmic parallel motion between the cantus voices
abounds in Marce, Marcum, possibly related to the broader theme of the
46
Bent has stressed the generic commonalities between the Italian motet and the
caccia in her ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,’’ 104. Although the musical operation
at work in Marce, Marcum does not adhere to the caccia’s strict canonic technique, its
opening imitation, nodding toward the caccia, might be read as a metaphorical pursuit
in which cantus II catches up to cantus I over the course of the motet. Thus the physical
proximity of Marce, Marcum to Antonio Zacara’s caccia, Cacciando per gustar/Ay cinci ay toppi
within Eg is perhaps not coincidental, as observed by di Bacco and Nádas, ‘‘The Papal
Chapels and Italian Sources of Polyphony during the Great Schism,’’ 65–69. Di Bacco and
Nádas raise the possibility that ‘‘the outstanding musical artifice of [Zacara’s] caccia’s
opening canon between the top voices would have suggested its similarity to the opening
of Marce, Marcum in particular, sparking its inclusion in this collection,’’ ibid., 68ff. If we are
to read a metaphorical pursuit into Marce, Marcum, Michael Alan Anderson’s study of the
symbolic use of imitative introductory techniques in a later repertory of fifteenth-century
motets dedicated to John the Baptist proves instructive. See Michael Alan Anderson, ‘‘The
One Who Comes After Me: John the Baptist, Christian Time, and Symbolic Musical Tech-
niques,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 639–708, as well as his dis-
sertation, ‘‘Symbols of Saints: Theology, Ritual, and Kinship in Music for John the Baptist
and St. Anne (1175–1563)’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008).
47
Nec ab ipso disgregaris/Equitatis madio.

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work, this passage of unison that elides the texted and Amen sections
of the motet is especially striking. If the texted section had introduced
the cantus parts as juxtaposed images in the introitus, the Amen reveals
the voices in superimposition. The shift from imperfect (octonaria) to
perfect (senaria perfecta) meter only underscores the sense of a completed
transformation.
Moreover, if we are to see hocket as the ultimate form of vocal en-
twinement, the brief section of hocket that concludes the work (passage
F) puts a peculiar spin on the idea, for it is nothing but the literal
repetition of single pitches in a hocket texture. Thus the entire motet
ends with echo imitations at the interval of a semibreve before the final
cadence. The musical process that the echo introitus had set into motion
comes to its full realization in creating aural images at the level of the
individual pitch. The tenor, too, joins at the octave below in this final
mirroring of pitches, reinforcing the notion of sonic sameness with
which the work concludes.48
With the musical echo functioning here as an aural imago, Marce,
Marcum makes a musical analogy to a political concept that equated the
dual subjects of the motet’s text—human and heavenly Marks. If the first
poetic line, ‘‘Mark you imitate Mark,’’ establishes an interpretive frame- 225
work by which to understand its musical imitations, then the musical
process of aligning—even superimposing—the voices influences our
understanding of the poem. Not only does Corner imitate the spiritual
virtues of his patron, but he is completely identifiable with him. Since the
motet likely accompanied the Cappella San Marco’s sung affirmation of
the doge as Mark’s political representative, this musical operation per-
haps voices the real image-making function of laudes in the context of the
ducal investiture.
Two Annunciations
The final line of Marce, Marcum voices an obscure wish for the new doge:
‘‘May a bountiful God augment the lily of majesty, which you piously
earned.’’ To what might this politicized lily refer? We might arrive at a viable
interpretation by considering two images, both ubiquitous in Venetian state
imagery, juxtaposed: Saint Mark investing the doge with the vexillum S.
Marci at his investiture and Gabriel extending a lily to Mary at the scene
of Annunciation (figs. 4a and 4b). Might the poet and/or composer have
united these two images in the closing line of Marce, Marcum?
48
I infer the tenor pitch D in measure 109 based on the hocket pattern established in
the previous two measures.

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figure 4a. Mark invests the doge with the vexillum S. Marci (Princeton
Numismatics Collection, 2457)
226
Both Mark’s and Mary’s annunciations had, by the fourteenth cen-

tury, become powerful symbols for the divine origins of the state.49 Dan-
dolo’s Chronica, as we have seen, foregrounded angelic announcement as
the heavenly spark to Venice’s imperial progress. The iconographic use
of the Annunciation motif in political spaces, furthermore, served as
a concise expression of the angelic words that gave Venice its genesis.50
49
Venetian humanist Bernardo Giustiniani wrote: ‘‘The sacrosanct day was chosen on
which the divine message was brought by the Archangel to the most glorious Virgin with the
indescribable bending of the celestial highness to the abyss of humility. It was then that the
highest and eternal wisdom, the Word of God, descended into the womb of the most chaste
Virgin so that man, lying in the depths of pitiable darkness, might be raised to the most joyful
society of celestial spirits. But indeed, there is no measure to the divine wisdom. For He Who,
on that day, in choosing the Virgin for the redemption of the whole human race, looked
especially towards her humility, as she herself confessed, wished also that on the same day, in
a most humble place and from most humble men, a start should be made toward the raising of
this present Empire, a beginning of so great a work.’’ Bernardo Giustiniani, De origine urbis
Venetiarum (published posthumously in 1493), trans. in Patricia H. Labalme, Bernardo Giusti-
niani: A Venetian of the Quattrocento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969), 267.
50
Apart from the prominent use of the Annunciation in the decoration of the
Basilica San Marco, the placement of Mary and Gabriel on either side of the Rialto Bridge

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figure 4b. Giovanni Bellini, Annunciazione (Galleria dell’Accademia,

Venice)
227
As both a political and a liturgical site, the Basilica San Marco provided
a canvas against which to develop the Annunciation’s political resonance
for Venice. Reliefs of the Virgin Orant and of Gabriel, originally separate
pieces, were paired to form an Annunciation group on the western façade
of the church, and Mary and Gabriel’s dialogue was placed above the
basilica’s southern ceremonial portal.51 During Dandolo’s dogeship,
-
in the sixteenth century would have recalled the government’s founding location on the
Rialto on 25 March 421.
51
For a discussion of the many appearances of the Annunciation theme in Venetian
state art and of its symbolic resonances see chapter 1, ‘‘Miraculous Birth’’ of Rosand, Myths
of Venice, 6–46.

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statues of Gabriel and Mary were positioned on either side of the high altar
of San Marco, fixing the theme to the very spiritual core of the state. In the
early fifteenth century the corner aediculae of San Marco’s façade
received figures of Gabriel and Mary that staged what David Rosand
described as a ‘‘holy dialogue across the upper reaches of the basilica’’
that ‘‘reverberated’’ into the Piazza below.52 Common to each of these
configurations of the Annunciation motif is its use to enclose a politically
symbolic space—the high altar, a ceremonial entryway, the ducal chapel
itself—within a sacred framework.
In this sense, the Annunciation figures that bookend the tombs of
Doges Bartolomeo Gradenigo (1339–1342) and Andrea Dandolo envi-
sion the doge himself as a sacro-political locus (figs. 5a and 5b).53 Gabriel
and the Virgin stand on either corner of both tomb chests. In each case,
the person of the doge—representing the Republic—is cast as a semi-
sacred figure through the holy dialogue that extends across his body.
Given Dandolo’s involvement in the decoration of both tombs, it is per-
haps useful to recall the analogy his Chronica draws between Mary’s and
Mark’s angelic annunciations and the ceremonial acclamations to the
doge.
228 Moreover, in his will Dandolo requests his tomb be placed beneath
a dome mosaic in the basilica bearing the inscription ‘‘XPC VINCIT,
XPC REGNAT, XPC IMPERAT.’’54 In other words, beneath an inscrip-
tion of the ‘‘Christus vincit’’ tricolon with which the ducal laudes begin.
Dandolo’s request was not granted; nevertheless, in this unrealized
vision, political and angelic announcement provocatively intersect within
the architectural space of the basilica. The will locates the doge’s body
beneath the inscription, a position that in a sense visually restates the
laudes text, in which the Christological tricolon heralds the acclaim to the
doge (see text and translation on pp. 210–11). Thus while the Annunci-
ation extends laterally across the tomb, ducal acclamation is suggested
through the vertical alignment of the doge beneath an excerpt of the
laudes text. Giving spatial dimension to vocal acts, in other words, Dan-
dolo made the Annunciation and the laudes simultaneities.
State ceremony played with the slippage between the Annunciation
and the ducal laudes in a tradition that predated Dandolo’s tomb project:
the sung drama performed on the feast of the Translation of Saint Mark’s
52
Ibid., 16.
53
The inscription is located in the cupola of San Giovanni Evangelista in the north
transept of the basilica. Pincus, The Tombs, 128ff.
54
Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘‘Il testamento del Doge Andrea Dandolo,’’ Nuovo archivio veneto
7 (1904): 139–48. Dandolo’s specification survives in a will dated to 3 September 1354. The
inscription forms part of the dome’s twelfth-century mosaic work. See also Pincus, The
Tombs, 134–35.

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figure 5a. Tomb of Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo (Basilica San Marco,

Atrium) (Photo by Jamie Reuland)
figure 5b. Tomb of Andrea Dandolo (Basilica San Marco, Baptistery)
229

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relics to Venice, celebrated on 31 January.55 The event of Mark’s Transla-

tion, as depicted in the Sant’Alipio mosaic, was of crucial political impor-
tance to the state, since the presence of the evangelist’s relics at the ducal
chapel justified the city’s apostolic status and its unique claim to Mark’s
patronage. Celebrations for this feast day therefore centered on the per-
son of the doge, who was not only custodian to the relics, but their very
living embodiment.56 It is perhaps mere calendric happenstance, how-
ever, that the 31 January feast accrued Marian connotations, since it fell
within the week-long Festival of the Twelve Marys, a city-wide event related
to the Feast of the Purification.57 The procession that took place on 31
January thus amalgamates ducal and Marian elements, fusing a laudes
performance with the sacra rappresentazione of the Annunciation.
Da Canal’s Les estoires de Venise provides an account of the procession
as it occurred in 1275, which I have reproduced in appendix 1. He
reports that the procession was ‘‘doble,’’ since two separate groups pro-
cessed from the Piazza San Marco to the church of Santa Maria Formosa.
A priest apareillés de dras de dame (dressed in the clothes of a woman)
playing the part of the Virgin marched in the first procession, while
another representing Gabriel, aparillés a la guise d’un angle (dressed in
230 the guise of an angel), formed part of the second. Both men were carried
in procession on decorative thrones. When the first procession passed
beneath the ducal palace, three priests from the group stepped onto
a raised platform, where they sang the laudes to the doge (in this case
Ranieri Zeno) a haute vois (in a loud voice). The priest dressed as Mary
then approached the platform to salute the doge, who returned the
gesture, after which the entire group continued on to Santa Maria For-
mosa. The second procession followed the same sequence of events:
three priests repeated the laudes to Zeno, while the priest dressed as
Gabriel and the doge saluted one another in turn. Once both groups
had arrived at Santa Maria Formosa, the priests costumed as the Virgin
55
For comparison with the sacra rappresentazione of the Annunciation performed in
nearby Padua see Giuseppe Vecchi, Uffici drammatici padovani (Florence: L.S. Olschki,
1954).
56
State interest in promoting this event is further suggested by a now missing doc-
ument (Venice, Archivio di Stato, Ufficiali allo Estraordinario, cod. 131, last document) dated
to 16 September 1342, in which the procurators of San Marco specify the terms of the
commission to Paolo Veneziano, who was to provide the decorations for the sacra rappre-
sentazione. See Michelangelo Muraro, Paolo da Venezia (University Park, PA: The Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1970), 83.
57
For an overview of the weeklong events see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance
Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 135–56. Giovanni Musolino situates
the Festa delle Marie within the city’s broader Marian devotions in his ‘‘Culto Mariano,’’ in
Culto dei santi a Venezia, ed. Silvio Tramontin (Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Vene-
ziano, 1965), 256–60. Thomas Devaney offers a fresh perspective on the Festa delle Marie in
his ‘‘Competing Spectacles in the Venetian Festa delle Marie,’’ Viator 39 (2008): 107–25.

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and Gabriel entered the church, where they enacted the sacred drama of
the Annunciation—the culminating event of the day’s ceremonies (see
XCV in appendix 1).
Thus the singing of the laudes on the one hand, and the enactment
of the Annunciation on the other, underscored the respectively civic
(ducal palace) and religious (Santa Maria Formosa) spaces conjoined
through the procession. Both topographically and symbolically, the pro-
cession mapped a connection between the performance of laudes and
the act (or enactment) of Annunciation, thus literalizing the analogy
between angelic and political announcement through the processional
route. Gabriel’s and Mary’s roles not only as actors of the Annunciation,
but also as participants in the laudes performance in the Piazza, further
blurred the boundaries between the ceremony’s state and sacred ele-
ments. The salute (here an ambivalent term applicable to both perfor-
mances) to the doge assigned a political function to the voices of heavenly
agents.
A tradition of disruptive neighborhood feuding that accompanied
the Festival of the Twelve Marys led the government to abolish the cel-
ebration in 1379. It is likely that the 31 January procession ceased along
with it. The ceremony, however, remained alive in Republican historiog- 231
raphy. Boccaccio’s ribald account of the sacra rappresentazione in his tale
of Frate Alberto (Decameron 4.2) likewise contributed to its legacy.
Venice’s alliance with Padua in 1339 redoubled the political signif-
icance of the Annunciation to the Venetian state. Paduan proto-
humanists in the early fourteenth century had scripted their city into
the history of the Veneto by claiming Paduan founders for Venice in the
year 421, on the feast of the Annunciation.58 Following the 1339 alliance,
Venice eagerly assimilated the glorious cultural inheritance of Padua’s
Carrara dynasty and seized on the potential of the Annunciation myth
that the Paduans had exploited in their own state art.59 (It was, for
58
For the Annunciation legend in Paduan historiography and its absorption into
Venetian history in the 1330s see Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian
Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 38; and Pincus, The Tombs, 129.
59
Marchetto da Padova’s early fourteenth-century motet Ave regina/Mater innocencie
suggests that music was, for the Paduans, yet another outlet for their devotion to the
Annunciate Virgin. Both triplum and duplum texts are encomic poems to the Virgin of
the Annunciation that contain acrostics; the triplum embeds the Annunciation antiphon
‘‘Ave Maria gratia plena’’ and the duplum contains the name of the composer. Anne
Walters Robertson locates the Joseph Ite melody from the Annunciation liturgy in the
motet’s tenor voice in her ‘‘Remembering the Annunciation in Medieval Polyphony,’’
Speculum 70 (1995): 275–304. Both Robertson and F. Alberto Gallo connect the motet to
the 1305 consecration of the Scrovegni chapel dedicated to Mary of the Annunciation in
Padua. F. Alberto Gallo, ‘‘Marchetus in Padua und die ‘franco-venetische’ Musik des frühen
Trecento,’’ Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 31 (1974): 42–44. This dating has been challenged
on stylistic grounds by Kurt von Fischer, ‘‘Philippe de Vitry in Italy and an homage of
Landini to Philippe,’’ in L’Ars nova italiana del trecento IV. Atti del 3. Congresso

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instance, the use of the Annunciation figures on the tomb of Marsilio da

Carrara, Lord of Padua that provided a model for those of Gradenigo
and Dandolo).60 Following the Carrara model, the Annunciation origin
myth—fully articulated for the first time in Dandolo’s Chronica—became
part of the official history of the lagoon city.
It is against this backdrop of cultural and territorial appropriation
that Ciconia composed the motet Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena
domus (ex. 2).61 Written during the period in which he enjoyed the
patronage of Paduan canonist and ambassador Francesco Zabarella, the
work reflects the shared myth of the Annunciation as common to both
conquered and conquering cities.62 Bent identifies the 3 January 1406
ceremony in which Zabarella, in a formal gesture of submission, con-
signed the emblems of the city to Doge Michele Steno (1400–1413) in
front of the Basilica San Marco as the most probable occasion for the
work’s performance.63 Virgin Venice and Doge Steno form the twin
dedicatees of this bi-textual motet, which depicts Steno as the victor who
reigns over his domain together with the personified female Venetia.
As Cumming notes, the first cantus of Venecie/Michael alludes to
Venice in several of her common figurations, including Justice, Dea Roma
232 and the Virgin Mary.64 Yet while the text allows multiple personifications
of the state to coexist, the work’s poetic and musical structures hinge on
-
internazionale sul tema ‘‘La musica al tempo del Boccaccio e i suoi rapporti con la letter-
atura,’’ Siena-Certaldo 19–22 July 1975 (Certaldo: Centro di studi sull’Ars nova italiana del
Trecento, 1978), 227. It was also questioned by Margaret Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century
Italian Motet,’’ 97; and by Virginia Newes, ‘‘Early Fourteenth-Century Motets with Middle-
Voice Tenors: Interconnections, Modal Identity, and Tonal Coherence,’’ in Modality in the
Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Ursula Günther, Ludwig Finscher, and
Jeffrey Dean (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, Hänssler-Verlag
1996), 43. Given the ardent politicization of the cult of the Annunciation by the Carrarese
in the visual arts and in civic historiography, it is possible to imagine the motet’s abiding
relevance outside of any single occasion.
60
Pincus, The Tombs, 129–32.
61
Example 2 reproduces the Bent and Hallmark edition in Polyphonic Music of the
Fourteenth Century XXIV, no. 14.
62
For Zabarella’s patronage of Ciconia see Anne Hallmark, ‘‘Protector, imo versus
pater: Francesco Zabarella’s Patronage of Johannes Ciconia,’’ in Music in Renaissance Cities
and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M.
Cummings (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 153–68. See also Margaret Bent,
‘‘Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,’’ in Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 101–130.
63
On the textual resonances between the motet and Zabarella’s oration for this
occasion see Hallmark, ‘‘Protector, imo versus pater,’’ 163; and Bent and Hallmark, The
Works of Johannes Ciconia, xii.
64
Cumming, ‘‘Concord out of Discord,’’ 274. For the various traditions of the per-
sonification of the state, and from which Cumming draws these categories in her analysis of
Venecie/Michael, see David Rosand, ‘‘Venetia Figurata: The Iconography of a Myth,’’ in
Interpretazione Veneziane. Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David
Rosand (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1984), 177–96.

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example 2. Venecie, mundi splendor – Michael, qui Stena domus
233

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234

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235

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236

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237
Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus text and translation
Cantus I Venecie, mundi splendor, Venice, splendor of the world

Italie cum sis decor, and ornament of Italy,
in te viget omnis livor in you all desire
regulis mundicie. for the standards of elegance flourishes.
Gaude, mater maris, salus, Rejoice, mother of the sea, saving force
qua purgatur quisque malus. by which each evildoer is cleansed.
Terre ponti tu es palus, You are a mainstay to land and sea,
miserorum baiula. a support for the wretched.
Gaude late, virgo digna, Rejoice greatly, worthy virgin

principatus portas signa You bear the signs
(tibi soli sunt condigna) of ducal dominion
ducalis dominii. to you alone are they befitting.
Gaude, victrix exterorum, Rejoice, conqueress of heathens,

nam potestas Venetorum for the power of Venice,
nulli cedit perversorum, that tames the land and seas,
domans terram, maria; yields to none of the depraved;

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example 2. (continued)
[Nam] tu vincis manus fortis, For you conquer the forces of the mighty,
pacem reddis tuis portis, you restore peace to the gates of
et disrumpis fauce[s] mo[r]tis, your faithful ones
tuorum fidelium. and you shatter the jaws of death.
Pro te canit voce pia For you, with pious voice, sings
(tui statum in hac via (that God and Mary may in this way
El conservet et Maria) preserve your rank)
Johannes Ciconia. Johannes Ciconia.
Cantus II Michael, qui Stena domus Michael of the house of Steno

tu ducatus portas onus, you bear the burden of leadership,
honor tibi, quia bonus honor to you, for you, a good man
vitam duces celibem. lead a celibate life.
Phebo compar, princeps alme, Kindly prince, equal to Phoebus,

tibi mundus promit ‘salve’; the world renders you ‘salve’;
spargis tuis fructum palme, you scatter the fruit of victory to your
victor semper [nobilis]. people, ever-noble victor.
238
Clemens, justus approbaris, You are acclaimed as merciful and fair,
decus morum appellaris, you are called a paragon of virtue,
tu defensor estimaris you are esteemed the defender
fidei catholice. of the catholic faith.
Bon[i]s pandis m[u]nus dignum, You bestow proper reward on the good,
malis fundis pene signum while on the evil you
leges suas ad condignum impose your laws as a proper token
gladio justitie. with the sword of justice.
Sagax, prudens, mitis pater, Keen, prudent, humble father

(lex divina, cum sis mater) (while you, divine law, are the mother)
mentis virtus tibi frater, facility of mind is your brother,
zelator reipublice. O guardian of the state.
Sedem precor tibi dari, I pray that a place be given to you,

Deo celi famulari, that you may serve God in heaven,
ejus throno copulari that you be united to his throne
per eterna secula. through eternal ages.
Amen. Amen.

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the personification of Venice as the Virgin Mary, and more particularly as

the Virgin of the Annunciation.65 Slippage between Marian salute and
ducal acclamation becomes the structural focal point of the work, with
key musical events occurring around textual allusions to the Annuncia-
tion. Ciconia commingles language from the laudes with that of Marian
Annunciation to create a musical analogy between these two potent verbal
acts, with both cantus parts drawing interchangeably on the language of
the laudes and on the Annunciation script. Thus capitalizing on the inter-
textual possibilities of the bi-textual motet, Venecie/Michael elides images of
the Annunciate Virgin with those of the doge acclaimed, and merges
Venice’s ceremonial and sacred landscapes in the act of salutation.66
If the feast of the Translation of St. Mark joins the ducal laudes and the
Annunciation through processional space and performance, Ciconia
uses polyphonic means to give them synchronous expression in Venecie/
Michael.
One of the ways Ciconia invites listeners to hear commonalities
between political and angelic announcement is by calling attention to the
work’s own vocal status as a form of apostrophe. Beyond the vocative
openings, ‘‘Venecie’’ and ‘‘Michael’’ (which is conventional in dedicatory
motets), the imperative ‘‘gaude’’ that begins stanzas two, three, and four of 239
cantus I self-reflexively highlights the vocal nature of the musical and
poetic address. So, too, does the final stanza, in which the composer calls
attention to his own singing voice (‘‘pro te canit voce pia . . . Johannes
Ciconia’’/‘‘for you, with pious voice, sings . . . Johannes Ciconia’’)—his
own vocal participation, in other words, in the imagined musical event
of the work’s performance.
Significant in this respect, too, is the double entendre created by the
word ‘‘maria’’ (line 16/mm. 59–60) with which the exhortatory portion
of the poem (quatrains 1–4) ends. One can interpret ‘‘maria’’ not only as
a second direct object after ‘‘terram’’ (yielding ‘‘conquering land and
seas’’), but likewise as the vocative form of Maria. The latter reading
has the rhetorical effect of retrospectively naming Mary as the addressee
of the entire exhortation. It also yields a poetic symmetry wherein the
65
Significant contributions to the topic of the Annunciation in medieval polyphony
include Robertson, ‘‘Remembering the Annunciation’’; David Rothenberg, ‘‘Marian Feasts,
Seasons, and Songs in Medieval Polyphony: Studies in Musical Symbolism’’ (Ph.D. diss.,
Yale University, 2004); Jessie Ann Owens, ‘‘‘And the angel said . . . ’: Conversations with
Angels in Early Modern Music,’’ in Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of
Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700, ed. Joad Raymond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2011), 230–49; and Robert Nosow, Ritual Meanings in the Fifteenth-Century Motet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 79–83.
66
Jane Alden explores modes of intertextuality in Ciconia’s ceremonial motets in her
‘‘Text/Music Design in Ciconia’s Ceremonial Motets,’’ in Johannes Ciconia, musicien de la
transition, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 39–64.

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exhortation both begins and ends with an invocation to its dedicatee. This
symmetry fosters the semantic equivalence of ‘‘Venecie’’ with ‘‘Maria.’’67
The operative anaphoric ‘‘gaude,’’ moreover, recalls Gabriel’s ‘‘Ave’’
to Mary at the scene of the Annunciation. ‘‘Gaude’’ in this motet serves
not only as a poetic device, but also as a powerful principle in the work’s
musical organization. Key motivic, structural, and semantic events coa-
lesce around occurrences of the word. Appearances of ‘‘gaude’’ in cantus
I begin with a fanfare-like descent through the voice’s upper tessitura
(mm. 18, 36, and 49). This descending gesture’s heraldic quality high-
lights the word’s hortatory charge. Thus not only does the motive artic-
ulate the underlying stanzaic structure; it also bears a programmatic
relationship to the text it sets by musically accentuating the association
between ‘‘gaude’’ and the ‘‘Ave’’ salute of the Annunciation.68
It is fitting that the ‘‘gaude’’ motif should belong to cantus I, since
that voice addresses Venice in her personification as the Virgin Mary. But
cantus II shares in the preoccupation with announcement. This is par-
ticularly apparent when in measures 25–27, shortly after cantus I’s first
‘‘gaude’’ statement, cantus II declaims, ‘‘Tibi mundus promit ‘salve’’’
(The world renders you [Michele Steno] ‘‘salve’’). We might recall here
240 the historiographic trope of the acclaiming populace, the unanimous
voice of the people that grants validity to the doge’s authority. Use of
direct speech (‘‘salve’’) furthermore dramatizes the textual moment,
interpolating an imaginary acclaiming populace into the work’s diegesis.
But ‘‘salve’’ also points in two directions: toward ducal ceremony and
toward the Annunciation. It is instructive in this respect to return to da
Canal’s description of the Annunciation-themed procession on 31 Jan-
uary, in which the priests portraying Gabriel and Mary, ‘‘coming before
the doge, saluted him (si le salue), who [in return] rendered his salute’’
(quant il est tres parmi monsignor li dus, si le salue et il li rent son salus).
The performance of this political gesture by priests costumed as Gabriel
67
The epithets that follow each of the ‘‘gaude’’ statements can be read to refer
ambiguously to the personified Virgin Venice and the Virgin Mary. ‘‘Gaude mater maris’’
(stanza 2) perhaps most closely points to Virgin Venice as the Virgin Mary, calling to mind
the Marian hymn ‘‘Ave maris stella.’’
68
Versions of this motive occur in other contexts in the motet as well, for instance in
the chain of imitative exchanges between the cantus parts initiated in measure 23, which
culminates in the second ‘‘gaude’’ section (m. 36). In fact, Ciconia generates the entire
melodic fabric of the motet through the (often imitative) exchange of a handful of such
rhythmic and melodic gestures between the two cantus voices. Yet comparison of the
musical design of the ‘‘gaude’’ openings with the opening of stanza five (m. 62) supports
this motive’s special association with acts of speech. Notably, this is the only quatrain in the
first cantus that does not begin by framing itself as a vocal utterance. Indeed not only does
Ciconia set the first line of the fifth stanza (‘‘[nam] tu vincis manus fortis’’) in an entirely
different fashion; the stanza as a whole makes almost no reference to this otherwise pro-
minent motive whatsoever.

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and Mary must have lent a Christian significance to the salute. So, too, in
this motet the proximity of ‘‘gaude’’ and ‘‘salve’’ complicates the rela-
tionship between their respective Christian and secular referents.
Ciconia presents the second ‘‘gaude’’ statement in an arresting
moment of synchrony between the upper voices (mm. 36–37). This
moment of rhythmic coordination between cantus parts initiates an
extended passage of referential ambivalence between the voices and
their texts, where Steno partakes of the salutations rendered to the Vir-
gin (mm. 36–46). Homophonic superimposition of ‘‘gaude’’ in cantus
I and ‘‘approbaris’’ (‘‘you are confirmed’’) in cantus II (mm. 36–37)
musically aligns the act of salutation (here addressed to the Virgin) with
the political effect of ducal acclamation—that is, the endorsement of
ducal authority. Following this, cantus I declaims: ‘‘you bear the signs
(or emblems) of ducal dominion, to you alone are they befitting’’ (mm.
38–46). Technically this text is addressed to the Virgin. Yet Ciconia likely
composed Venecie/Michael for a ceremony whose central event was
Zabarella’s consignment of real emblems of dominion—those granted
as a sign of the Paduan Signoria’s submission—to Michele Steno. More-
over, while the language of cantus I takes a patently political turn, cantus
II simultaneously adopts a Christian tone (‘‘decus morum’’/‘‘paragon of 241
virtue and ‘‘defensor . . . fidei catholice’’/‘‘defender of the Catholic
faith’’). Voice crossings between cantus parts throughout this passage
only further ambiguate the two subjects.
In measures 47–49 ‘‘gaude mater late digna’’ (rejoice greatly, worthy
mother) is announced by the tenor in a striking solo statement. The fact
that this is the tenor’s first solo appearance increases the dramatic effect
of this passage in which the voices seem to reenact the real ceremony of
acclamation.69 The tenor’s ‘‘gaude’’ and its immediate redoubling by
cantus I (m. 49) create the musical illusion of a response to the granting
of ‘‘emblems of ducal dominion’’ (signa . . . ducalis domini). The aural
impression is that the announcement of the doge’s authority is con-
firmed by a new and unexpected voice, which we might imagine to be
the voice of the Paduan and Venetian people.
Notably this tenor announcement bisects the texted section of the
motet. Indeed, if the motet’s three-breve introitus is not included in our
reckoning, it falls exactly at the halfway point of the texted section. The
unusual transfer of this ‘‘gaude’’ announcement to the tenor—one of only
two places in which texted tenor stands alone in the work—as well as the
inversion of the melodic profile of the ‘‘announcing’’ motive intensify the
69
The only other passage of texted solo tenor (mm. 73–75) also points to the vocal
status of the work, even locating the source of the musical utterance with the composer
himself.

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musical markedness of the halfway arrival. The clear structural function of

this ‘‘gaude’’ in a motet honoring the doge assumes the same framing
effect that we have seen in ducal imagery, in which the Annunciation
theme inflects a political topic with a sacred framework. Here, this spiri-
tual inflection is amplified through the analogy, indeed the ambiguity,
between Marian Annunciation and ducal acclamation.
What would Ciconia’s interest have been in this musical near deifi-
cation of the doge? The infelicity of the motet’s occasion for Ciconia’s
Paduan patron makes it difficult to read the tone of this work. Yet it is
possible that Ciconia subtly nods here toward Venice’s Paduan roots.
The motet’s reference to the Annunciation, after all, alludes to a facet
of Venetian history particularly favorable to Padua, one in which Padua
lays the foundation of the Republic.70 Perhaps it is a subtle reminder that
‘‘Victrix’’ Venice, after all, bears the cultural impress of her new territory.
Ciconia would likely have been acquainted with Marce, Marcum, for
the motet circulated within the papal chapels during the composer’s
residency in Rome.71 Giovanni Di Bacco and John Nádas have demon-
strated that the anonymous motet and the northern composer would
have crossed paths in the papal courts in the 1390s.72 While the political
242 climate of the Veneto during Ciconia’s Paduan years certainly would
have left him fluent in the political rhetoric of the Republic, it is note-
worthy that his exposure to this rhetoric indeed predated his arrival
in the Veneto. It is hardly possible to imagine Ciconia so readily assim-
ilating the Italian style he encountered in Marce, Marcum without appre-
hending the Venetian state mythology it heralded.
It may also be that Ciconia’s combination of dialogic elements from
Venetian civic ceremony and the Annunciation narrative in Venecie/
Michael served in turn as a model for Pietro Rosso’s motet Missus est
Gabriel angelus, composed for the Annunciation celebrations in Treviso,
and performed there each year from 1434 until 1447.73 David Rothen-
berg has shown how alternating sections of narration and dialogue that
70
For the Annunciation legend in Paduan historiography and its afterlife in the Ve-
netian historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries see Brown, Venice and
Antiquity, 38; and Pincus The Tombs, 129. For Padua’s legendary role in the founding of Venice
more generally see Antonio Carile and Giorgio Fedalto, Le origini di Venezia (Bologna: Pàtron
Editore, 1978), 55–108.
71
Di Bacco and Nádas argue that both sources for Marce, Marcum (Gr and Eg) are of
central Italian provenance with papal connections, and that Ciconia would likely have
come in contact with these sources while resident in Rome in the 1390s. Di Bacco and
Nádas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels,’’ 61–77.
72
Ibid., 69–70.
73
Treviso was, at that time, Venice’s oldest and most loyal subject city on the terra
ferma. Nosow recovers the importance of Missus est for the confraternity of Santa Maria dei
Battuti in Treviso and the tradition of the motet’s performance in that city’s annual pro-
cession on the feast of the Annunciation. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 79–83.

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result from Rosso’s novel disposition of textures yield a quasi-dramatic

rendering of the Annunciation text.74 Annual reenactments of the
Annunciation at the Treviso cathedral may have motivated the dramatic
structure of the motet, similar to the way in which Venice’s uniquely
politicized sacra rappresentazione left its mark on Venecie/Michael. Jessie
Ann Owens views Missus est as the earliest in a growing corpus of poly-
phonic works that enacted ‘‘conversations with angels’’ in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries.75
Yet Venecie/Michael, which predates Missus est by a quarter century,
uses the motet as a vehicle to mingle angelic conversations with the din
of political ceremony. Its polyphonic framework allows for the musical
literalization of an analogy that related angelic voices to ceremonial
song—an analogy that coursed through late-medieval Venetian society,
finding expression in visual and material culture, structuring political
texts, and informing ritual space. Indeed the motets composed for Ve-
netian ceremony represent only one medium for the expression of polit-
ical thought through musical performance. The ritual occasion to
reaffirm the relationship between Venice’s leader and its people or reen-
act the city’s providential history through song ensured a state in har-
mony with its heavenly guides. 243
Appendix 1. Description of Procession from the Piazza San Marco to

Santa Maria Formosa on 31 January from Martin da Canal in Les estoires de
Venise; Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed.
A. Limentani (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1972), 254–56
Or vos ai conté de la vegile, et après vos conterai dou jors de monsignor saint
Marc.
[XCIII] Sachés, signors, que le derain jor de jener est la feste et la procession
doble, que l’unde de ces .ij contrees dont je vos ai fait mencion s’en vienent li
damosiaus et li homes d’aage en aive au palés de monsignor li dus et desendent
en seche terre et donent plus de.d. banieres as petis enfans et les envoient a .ij.
a .ij tres devant l’iglise de monsignor saint Marc. Et aprés vont greignors enfans et
portent en lor mains plus de.c. cruis d’arjant. Et aprés vient la clergie, trestos
vestus de pluvials et de samit a or, et les tronbes et les chinbes; et vient un clerc en
la rote apareillés de dras de dame, trestuit a or. Et siet celui clerc desour une
chaere mult richement aparillee et le portent .iiij. homes desor lor espaules, et
devant et encoste les confanons a or; et li clers vont chantant la procession.
Endementiers que il vont ensi, issent .iij. clers de la procession et la ou il voient
74
See Rothenberg, ‘‘Marian Feasts, Seasons, and Songs in Medieval Polyphony,’’ 115ff.
75
Owens, ‘‘‘And the angel said . . . ’: Conversations with Angels in Early Modern Music,’’
230–33.

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monsignor li dus as fenestres de son palés, en la conpagnie des nobles veneciens,

il montent desor un dois et chantent a haute vois et dient tuit ensi:
—Criste vince, Criste regne, Criste inpere: nostre signor Ranier Gen, Des grace
inclit dus de Venise, Dalmace et Groace, et dominator quarte part et demi de tot
l’enpire de Romanie, sauvement, honor, vie et victoire: saint Marc, tu le aı̈e !—
Et quant les loenges sunt finees, il desendent desor li dois et monsignor li dus lor
fait geter a val de ses mehailles a planté, et il s’en retornent en la procession aveuc
les autres, que totesvoies les atendoient. Et lors vient avant li clerc que porte
corone d’or et est aparillés si richement con je vos ai conté; et quant il est tres
parmi monsignor li dus, si le salue et il li rent son salus. Et lors s’en vont avant
ciaus que le portent desor les espaules et sivent la procession, et s’en vont en
l’iglise de nostre dame sainte Marie et atendent tant illeuc, que ciaus de l’autre
contree vienent tot en tel maniere, que de banieres que de cruis que de prestres,
et funt chante .iij. clers autretel loenges tres devant monsignor li dus, con firent
les autres; et monsignor li dus lor fait geter de ses mehailles. Et sachés que
monsignor li dus est vestus a or, et a corone d’or en son chief. Et a veoir ceste
procession que se fait a henor de Nostre Dame, sont li gentis homes de Venise et
tos li peuple et grant planté de dames et de damoselles, et entrevoies et desor li
Palés en sunt a planté.
244
[XCIV] Quant il trois clers ont chanté les loenges de monsignor li dus tot en tel
maniere con ont fait les autres que s’en alerent devant, il se mistrent en la
procesion; et lors vient avant un autre clerc, que seoit desor une chaere, mult
richement aparillés a la guise d’une angle, et le portent desor les espaules .iiij.
homes. Et quant il fu parmi ou monsignor li dus estoit, il le salue et monsignor li
dus li rent son salus. Et aprés se, il s’en vont en la procession que les clers vont
chantant; en sachés que andeus les processions ont bons destrenceors, et clers et
lais. Et tant s’en vont, que il entrent en l’iglise de nostre dame sainte Marie; et
quant celui clers qu’est aparillés en senefiance de angle est entrés dedens l’iglise
et il voit l’autre qu’est aparillés en senefiance de la virge Marie, il se lieve en
estant et dit tot ensi:
[XCV] —Ave Marie, ploine de grace, le Signor est aveuc toi, beneoite entre les
femes et beneoit li fruit de ton ventre: ce dit nostre Sire.—
Et celui que en senefiance de Nostre Dame est aparillés respont et dist:
—Coment peut ce estre, angle Dei, en parce que je ne conois home, por
avoir enfant?—
Et li angles li redit:
—Spirit Saint desent en toi, Marie: n’aies paor, auras dedens ton ventre le
fils Dieu—
Et cele li respont et dist:
—Et je sui ancelle dou Signor: viegne a moi selonc ta parole—

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ABSTRACT
During the fourteenth century, Venetian chronicles, art, and cere-
mony fostered provocative analogies between angelic annunciation and
the political voice of the Venetian populace. Such analogies imagined
a city whose civic and heavenly members were united through the sound
of unanimity. At the intersection of the state’s civic and celestial bodies
stood the doge, considered to be the image of the Republic and of its
patron, Saint Mark. A complex of sung ceremonies and musical com-
positions addressed to the doge dramatized the notion that the voice, as
a ritual instrument, could engender real political or spiritual change in
the state and its leaders. Performances of acclamations to the doge
positioned him within Venice’s sacred and civic hierarchies, while state
art and ceremony forged symbolic resemblances between ducal accla-
mation and angelic annunciation. A repertory of occasional motets evi-
dences polyphonic play with the notion that vocal rituals centered on the
doge could activate the spiritual ideals of the state: the anonymous Marce,
Marcum imitaris (c. 1365) draws a sonic analogy between spiritual likeness
and musical imitation in order to dramatize the concept of the doge as
Mark’s image, whereas Johannes Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splendor/Michael
245
qui Stena domus elides a text dedicated to the Annunciate Virgin with one
addressed to the doge, creating musical echoes and simultaneities in its
praises of Venice’s temporal and celestial leaders.
Keywords: acclamation, Johannes Ciconia, civic ritual, historiography,

motet, Venice

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Voicing the Doge’s Sacred Image

Author(s): Jamie Reuland

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Doge Andrea Dandolo opens his Venetian his-

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 2011

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figure 1. Angel announces Mark’s predestination to Venice as

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To whom, hesitating as if about to Who, having heard, was troubled at his

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et discessit ab illa angelus.iii

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theology of late-medieval Venice engaged by an astonishing variety of

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A repertory of occasional motets develops the notion that the voice,

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moment within Venice’s musical history. Already by the second half of

The Voice of the People and the Image of Mark

The fulfillment of the angelic prophecy to Mark—the translation of the

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figure 2. Mark’s Translation to Venice as depicted in the Porta

voiced consent of the populace, expressed through the laudes, legiti-

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COLLOCAT HUNC DIGNIS PLEBS LAUDIBUS ET COLIT HYMNIS/

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renovated basilica.21 Indeed the image may have loomed in Dandolo’s

Here ‘‘hymnis et laudibus’’ recalls the mosaic inscription (‘‘LAUDIBUS

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Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

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(Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands. To our lord [N.N.]

Beneath the Christological tricolon that acclaims Christ’s military and

EX ORE INFANTIUM ET LACTENTIUM PERFECISTI LAUDEM.

Sinding-Larsen asks, ‘‘Could it be stated more clearly that the acclama-

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the sentiment expressed in the inscriptions redirects the ducal acclama-

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da Canal describes is the election of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo in 1268, and it

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figure 3. Grosso minted under Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo depicting

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we can imagine occupied their own type of privileged vocal status as

Echo as Image in Marce, Marcum imitaris

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listener to interpret musical imitation—instances of which the composer

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example 1. Marce, Marcum imitaris (Anonymous)

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Marce, Marcum imitaris text and translation

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words of the motet—‘‘Marce, Marcum’’—are the only instances in which

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grammatical discrimination between the two Marks thus preserves the

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Both Mark’s and Mary’s annunciations had, by the fourteenth cen-

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