Nuvole barocche: Clouds as synesthetic metaphors across baroque poetry and music

Abstract

In his 1961 song “Nuvole barocche” (Baroque Clouds), Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André commented on the fascination exerted by colorful clouds at sunset and their artistic representation as canonized by the visual culture of the baroque, fittingly emblematized by the transience of clouds themselves. The domain of the visual is turned into that of the acoustic, triggering the synesthetic interaction of forms of sense perception, which are usually conceived as separate from one another. The song thus reminds us that the polysemous nature of clouds makes them particularly suitable for forms of artistic representation that, moving across mediums, blur the boundaries of sense perception. This essay looks at how such interplay of sensory layers actually works and to what extent it fits the rhetoric and poetics of the Baroque. In order to do so, I chase the sound of baroque clouds through arias and songs that play with the ambiguous semantics of meteorology and make the singing voice convey anxieties about topics as diverse as the course of time, the volatility of love, devotional and spiritual concerns. After framing the discussion in rhetorical terms, with a focus on metaphors and similes, the essay examines works by John Dowland, Francesca Caccini, Sigimsondo D’India, and George Frideric Handel in order to assess some of the ways in which the unstable nature of clouds lends itself to a kind of metaphoric code that is best described in synesthetic terms.