Alter Orpheus: Masks of Virtuosity in Renaissance Portraits of Musical Improvisers

Abstract

The visual persona of the itinerant street singer who sang ballads and tales, reported the news, and prophesized future events in the markets and public squares of Renaissance Europe proves an elusive subject for the art historian. This is especially true in Italy for the period prior to the advent of the Commedia dell’arte. Before the late sixteenth century, the primary visual sources that purport to record the appearance of cantastorie, whether as individuals or generic types, are the woodcut illustrations to cheap printed editions of their repertoire. This article augments the limited visual information provided by such prints, casting a wider net to consider the portraiture of elite canterini (poet-musicians) and buffoni who also performed publicly in the manner of cantastorie in the streets and piazze of Renaissance Italy. With a focus on early sixteenth-century Venice, what unites the imagery of performers in the rich and varied corpus of paintings and prints examined here is a common visual and performative topos, that of Orphic poetic inspiration demonstrated through virtuosic improvisation on a chorded instrument.