Accademia Degli Research Articles

Il primo (1611) e il secondo (1613) libro delle Musiche di Pietro Benedetti, monodista fiorentino

Within the context of early seventeenth-century monodism, Pietro Benedetti played an especially interesting role. A priest, a member of the Florentine Accademia degli Elevati (established by Marco da Gagliano), and a figure who counted among his contacts important artists and patrons of seventeenth-century Florence, Benedetti published four books of monodies, only three of which have survived. A large number of his monodies are characterised by sharp dissonances and chromaticisms that distinguish Benedetti’s writing from that of other contemporary monodists. In this essay, I shall examine the first two books (1611 and 1613) of Benedetti’s monodies, which have never since been reprinted, in order to explain the most important poetic and musical aspects of his works and make a first attempt at clarifying the composer’s role in the context of early seventeenth century monodism.

Bodily Figurae: Sex and Rhetoric in Early Libertine Venice, 1642-51

This essay will examine and compare two texts that originated in the Venetian Libertine milieu of the Accademia degli Incogniti: Ferrante Pallavicino's La retorica delle puttane ( The Whores' Rhetoric ; 1642) and Antonio Rocco's L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola ( Alcibiades the Schoolboy ; 1651). Pallavicino's work, a parody of a textbook for Jesuits, presents an oration in which an old former prostitute persuades a destitute young girl to embrace a career in whoredom. Here the rhetorical discourse, while also aiming at persuading, doubles as a taxonomy in which every figure of speech corresponds to a sexual act. This short circuit of elocution and (bodily) recreates the correspondence between figures ( skhemata ) of speech and copulative positions that provided a framework to the sex manuals of classical antiquity. In Rocco's text, a teacher of rhetoric engages his pupil Alcibiades in a diatribe on the righteousness and ethicality of sodomy, with the goal of not only persuading the reluctant boy but also to achieve the performance of that particular sexual act. A professor of rhetoric in Venice, Rocco was a paramount example of the contradictions and the circuitous heterodoxy of early Italian Libertines. A staunch Aristotelian in the Paduan tradition, he was at the same time a sworn enemy of the rising experimental method, of positive religions, and reason of state.

Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance Susan Nalezyty (bio) Kelly Helmstutler Di Dio . Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0754662341, $109.95. Kelly Helmstutler Di Dio turns our attention to a much explored art historical subject: the increased social status for Renaissance visual artists. During this time period painters and sculptors worked to elevate their standing above that of craftsmen to align themselves more closely with the liberal arts. Di Dio takes as her subject a fascinating case in point of this phenomenon: the sculptor and medalist Leone Leoni, who through a variety of strategies achieved a notable leap in status, from his humble birth as the son of a stone mason in Arezzo to his incredible rise in rank to a nobleman and courtier in Spanish-controlled Milan. This elevation in position was not an unbroken journey up the social ladder, but one interrupted by a number of criminal infractions, some of them quite violent. An important aspect of the book is that it addresses this seemingly contradictory behavior, as Leoni deliberately took pains to associate his artistic genius with his passionate vices. Di Dio divides her book into six chapters. The first chronologically orders major events in Leoni's life, into which his works are folded, with a particular emphasis on his patrons, who financially provided for Leoni and intervened to deliver the sculptor from the consequences of his crimes. Chapter Two examines the sculptor's network, which included among others Michelangelo, Titian, Pietro Aretino, and his key advocate Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Charles V's and Philip II's chief advisor. Leoni's association with this articulate man, as well as his membership in the scholarly academy, the Accademia degli Fenici, promoted Leoni's reputation as learned in letters, and provided a forum in which his works could be poetically memorialized. These surviving sonnets are provided in Appendix IV. The book's third chapter focuses on the rivalry between Leoni and the sculptor Benevenuto Cellini. The two competed not only for commissions, but also physically clashed—charges once were brought against Leoni for attempted poisoning of Cellini. Both artists possessed substantial, violent criminal records, and Di Dio explores this counterproductive behavior, casting these actions in light of Renaissance notions of honor; these sculptors both attached this aspect of their promoted prowess to create exceptional metalwork with its subfield of weaponry. [End Page 543] The following two chapters analyze in rich detail Leoni's primary signaling site to renegotiate his social standing: his house in Milan and its contents, noted as exceptional during and after his lifetime. Using archival material and surviving physical evidence of the house, Di Dio brilliantly treats the decorative program of Leoni's home, the Casa degli Omenoni, to reveal his message to privileged visitors. This chapter clarifies the mechanics of this sculptor's strategy to promote his sophisticated knowledge of antique and contemporary sculpture and classical philosophy. The artist devised a multi-layered program via his own architectural sculpture and calculated placement of works from his collection, which promoted Stoicism, a philosophy embraced by his greatest patron, Charles V; thus his home's ornamentation announced the owner as a courtier of the Habsburg. It was in fact Charles V who bestowed this property upon Leoni. The artist renovated and enlarged this modest space with a number of well-designed additions to display his art collection, which is the focus of the fifth chapter. Contemporary accounts allude to this house's pioneering aspect as a gallery space created by a gentleman of taste, the first in Milan, rather than as an artist's workshop with casts for copying. From surviving inventories, contemporary accounts, and buyers' correspondence, Di Dio convincingly reconstructs Leoni's collection; a cross-referenced list appears as Appendix V. She applies her research to illustrate his methods of display, showing that this domestic architecture followed exhibition requirements of many three-dimensional works of antique and contemporary sculpture, casts from important collections and prominent works, as well as numerous paintings and drawings. Di Dio concludes her study...

Exploring the evidence of scientific and artistic patronage of Polish King Jan III Sobieski (1674-1696): A focus on the library in Wilanów Palace

The library one can still see at Wilanów Palace (former Villa Nova), a suburban villa of the Polish valiant King, Jan III Sobieski (1674-1696), no longer holds any book nor any print, as they were dispersed among the king’s inheritors, gathered in their various and distant estates, and then regretfully lost.What extants today from the Library is a stucco and painting decoration dating back to the 1680s, comprising two grand tondos and smaller medallions with effigies of Eruditorum et Sapientum. The two main images represent allegorical figures of Theology and Philosophy creating a perfect balanced expression of two fundamental disciplines of human thought. They patronize smaller medallions which are composed as double portraits — a representative of science and arts from modern times is always assisted by his antique or pagan predecessor, Fidias and Michelangelo, Ptolomeus and Copernicus, Archimedes and Galileus, etc.The ideological programme of this decoration still raises questions and encourages our research. Was it just a means of cataloguing books and a regular realization according to well-known iconography fit for libraries? Was it also a certain ideological and propaganda statement of the monarch who was regarded during his reign as one of the erudite kings? How does it relate to the general significance of Wilanów that was adorned on the façade according to Sobieski’s will with an inscription stating: Quod Vetus Urbs Colluit Nunc Nova Villa Tenet? My paper will point out relations between those elements which were a well-known set of motifs to adorn such interiors and those who appeared here due to the site specific of the place; Wilanów, a new antique villa for a King who was Primus Inter Pares, a voted sovereign for the Commonwealth of Two Nations, the nation that regarded its origins in the classical antiquity of Sarmatians. His reign, although dominated by Bellona’s actions, never ignored those which were dominated by Apollo and Muses. For the King himself supported (intellectually and financially) Jan Hevelius (astronomer), Adam Kochański (mathematician and physician) and Philippe Avril (French Jesuit missionary, geographer and explorer of far East) and in 1684 became a member and protector of the Accademia degli Argonauti founded in Venice in 1684. A perfect combination of bold and accurate attitude for the new science that spread across Europe found its pre-academic center in the court of Jan III Sobieski, on the Eastern boundaries of the Latin world. Its symptomatic and peculiar evidence remains the Library of Wilanów Palace.

'Ad utilita pubblica': Politique des bibliotheques et pratiques du livre a Florence au XVIIIe siecle. By EMANUELLE CHAPRON.

Florence in the eighteenth century was a city of 75,000 inhabitants, the same size as Genoa or Bologna, but half that of Rome or Venice, and a third of Naples. The Medici line came to an end in 1737 with the death of the Grand Duke Gian Gastone and was succeeded by the House of Lorraine in the shape of Duke François Etienne, Maria Teresa’s consort and from 1740, Emperor as Franz Stephan. After one visit he was an absentee ruler, government being exercised by mostly non-Italian ministers. He was succeeded in 1765 by his second son, Peter Leopold. Peter Leopold was a typical Enlightenment ruler. Church prerogatives were abolished, half the religious houses of the Grand Duchy dissolved, the Inquisition rendered powerless, the regular mercenary army dismissed and the civilian militia disbanded, a constitution drawn up, though never promulgated, and freedom of speech and press proclaimed. The amalgamation of the Accademia Fiorentina, the Accademia della Crusca, whose duty, like that of the Académie Française, was to protect the language, and the Accademia degli Apatisti caused grumbling among the intelligentsia, and the government’s free-trade policy and abolition of price control provoked a riot by impoverished silk-workers. The Grand Duke was hyperactive, inter fering everywhere and not allowing, for instance, the Uffizi to exchange a duplicate Museum Florentinum for a copy of Buc’hoz, Histoire universelle du règne vegetal.

Monteverdi's Voices: The Construction of Subjectivity

We often say that music speaks. Our conception of voice seems to be inseparable from the assumption that someone is addressing something to someone. “Hearing voices,” on the other hand, in itself is disquieting. After all, to whom are they speaking—or is there anyone speaking? There is one place, however, where we can feel free to indulge in the idea that everything that is spoken is spoken to us: the opera house, where we may surrender ourselves to the music as it enters the scene and addresses the audience. Once upon a time—the time of favole in musica (fables in music)—this was all new and marvelous, as, for example, when Alessandro Striggio’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was first performed for members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti on February 24, 1607, in Mantua’s Palazzo Ducale. Commenting on the novelty of the event, Carlo Magno at the Mantuan court, later ambassador for the Gonzagas in Rome, France, and Spain, wrote: “Tomorrow evening the Most Serene Lord the Prince is to sponsor a [play]. . . . It should be most unusual, as all the interlocutors are to sing their parts.” Thus L’Orfeo presented the beginning of a new style and a new genre, stile recitativo in genere rappresentativo—with Orpheus himself as its spokesman. The question then is: spokesman for what? Or for whom? In other words, and in the work’s own words: Chi parla? “The composer,” answers Edward T. Cone. When we listen to music, we listen to the composer’s voice, according to Cone’s renowned study. Even if we do not accept Cone’s uncomplicated assumption of a direct communication between virtual composer and a more or less real audience, his argument still reminds us of opera’s distinctive character: someone is singing to us. Thus Cone approaches opera from the point of view of the audience, before any theoretical construction gets in the way. We might say that he takes as his point

Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (review)

GENRE STUDIES: EAST AND WEST Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice. By Wendy Heller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [xix, 386 p. ISBN 0-520-20933-8. $65.00.] Music examples, notes, bibliography, index. Music historians have long needed a thematic treatment of seventeenth-century opera, and here it is. Wendy Heller's Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women's Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, taking off from Ellen Rosand's influential and monumental text Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), offers an interpretive critique that makes early-modern Venetian opera accessible to students and interested nonspecialists as well as to experts in the field. Those of us who teach opera history welcome Emblems of Eloquence for the engaging fodder it provides for stimulating discussion and the development of alternative perspectives. Heller is a bold scholar who brings a provocative voice to the often staid realm of Baroque opera. Heller's argument in Emblems of Eloquence is three-fold, alternately highlighting conceptions of women, opera, and Venice as a republic. She integrates into her discussions the evolving modes of female eloquence in Venetian opera, the ambivalent ways in which the male-dominated republic of Venice incorporated emblematic women into its mythology, and the ways in which the representation of women forged a relationship between opera and the ancient world (pp. xiii-xiv). For Heller, opera is the medium in which Venice's querelles des femmes were fought, and opera is a metaphor for the Serenissima itself. Strikingly, this confluence of proto-feminist ideology, opera, and the mythology of the state runs its course by the end of the seventeenth century, and Heller therefore defines the early-modern manifestation of the genre along these lines. Heller's book presents five discrete case studies, circumscribed by three introductory chapters (the unnumbered Introduction plus two numbered chapters), and a rather pallid five-page conclusion. introduction lays the groundwork for ensuing discussions. Categories addressed are: opera and the myths of Venice; opera, carnival, and ritual; virtue and the body; courtesan culture; opera and theatrical gender; and representing female eloquence. As one might surmise from the book's title, the first and last categories get the most play, and chapter 1, The Emblematic Woman rightly addresses the confrontation of women writers with seventeenth-century humanists. Heller's discussion here, as well as in chapter 2, Bizzarrie Feminile: Opera and the Accademia degli Incogniti, offers a fine contextualization of the history of humanistic fascination with extraordinary women. One facet of this history is offered in didactic treatises of the sort Heller discusses in chapter 1, where she focuses on the writings of Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, written in response to Giuseppe Passi's misogynist diatribe on the defects of women. Interested readers should not neglect also to consult recent publications from the University of Chicago Press's Other Voices in Early Modern Europe series, most notably Lucrezia Marinella, Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (ed. and trans. Anne Dunhill, introd. by Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999]), Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (ed. and trans. Virginia Cox [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997]), and Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny (ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004]). Another facet of this history is expressed in exchanges of letters between noted male humanists and prominent literary women. To Anthony Grafton's and Lisajardin's exposition of the letters of Isotta Nogarola with Guarino Guarini, and Cassandra Fedele with Angelo Poliziano (From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986]), and to this reviewer's examination of the correspondence between Isabella Andreini and Erycius Puteanus ( Women and Music of the Corn-media dell'arte in the I. …

The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse by Rebecca Messbarger (review)

1070 Reviews Given the predominant classicizing culture promoted by Leonelio and Guarino, vernacular lyric in Ferrara?to borrow the title of Chapter 2?was slow to establish itself and even slower to react to the experiments of Petrarch's rime. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the firstindications?analysed in Chapter 5?are to be found in Latin lyrics from the mid-century, in particular those of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (a tentative defender of 'modern' writers in the Politia), and subsequently those of Boiardo. Boiardo's emergence as the outstanding exponent of Petrarchan lyric in the fifteenthcentury is thus set in the context of his association both with the Latin lyric tradition and with individuals prominent in Ferrarese culture at the time of the Council, including his chief (but not native Ferrarese) predecessor in the canzoniere form, Giusto de' Conti. The wealth of information contained in each of Pantani's chapters, on topics ranging from book ownership (Chapter 1) to Humanist debates (Chapter 3) and the contribution of minor poets in the early part of the century (Chapter 2), is immensely valuable, though it threatens at times to overwhelm the reader, and Pantani's style in Italian?elaborate, Latinate, and academic?does not lend itself to quick and easy absorption of the argument. Nevertheless, the patient reader who perseveres will be rewarded with a stimulating and satisfying conclusion in which Pantani rightly em? phasizes just how rapidly the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta entered Ferrarese poetic consciousness once the vernacular was set free from the classicizing constraints of the cultural politics of Leonelio and Guarino, and how widely it was absorbed and reused, not only in the love lyric, but also in religious poetry. This wide-ranging survey should prove of much use to scholars working on many aspects of literature in fifteenth-centuryItaly. ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON JANEE. EVERSON The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse. By Rebecca Messbarger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xi + 209pp. ?28. ISBN 0-8020-3652-x. Rebecca Messbarger's volume seeks to throw light on the intricacies of the woman question in eighteenth-century Italy 'through an analysis of the prolific public dis? course about women produced by male and female authorities of the Settecento' (p. 3). To this end she focuseson five'paradigmatic eighteenth-century textual events' (p. 19): the debate on women's education held at the Accademiadei Ricovrati in Padua in 1723, Antonio Conti's 'scientific' misogynist tract (1721), Diamante Medaglia Faini's oration on women's education to the Accademia degli Unanimi (1763), Carlo Sebastiano Franci's article in defence ofwomen published in that most eminent of Ita? lian Enlightenment journals, //caffe,in the 1760s, and Gioseffa Cornoldi Caminer's journal La donna galante ed erudita (1786-88). Women's education was a frequent object of debate, and Chapters 1 and 3 focus precisely on this, giving close analytical readings of the contributions made by men at the 1723 Padua dispute, the changes involved in the transition to the printed version of 1729, the additions at this stage of two pieces written by women, in particular Aretafila Savini de' Rossi's Apologia infavor e degli studii delle donne, and also the ora? tion delivered some fortyyears later by Medaglia Faini, Quali studi convengano alle donne. The author points out not only the differingpositions among male contributors as to whether or not women should receive an education, and if so, what kind, but also the fundamental ambiguity of their positions, the perpetual oscillation between the conviction that women are quite simply incapable of certain types of study and the afflrmation that women risk losing their 'femininity' as a result of educational MLRy 99.4, 2004 1071 excesses. Women's debating techniques are also seen as fundamentally ambivalent inasmuch as they appropriate the modes of male discourse. In the debate on women in the Settecento, startling results sometimes ensue from the enlightened emphasis on a 'scientific' approach. The theories regarding the biological constitution of women put forward in 1721 by Antonio Conti, one of the most renowned exponents of enlightened philosophy, form the topic of Chapter 2. Conti maintained that women's muscles are weaker than...

Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera

Operas written in Venice in the 1640s feature surprisingly long melismas often setting seemingly insignificant words, in opposition to (although concurrently with) traditional madrigalisms. This magnification of pure voice over word meaning is consistent with the aesthetics presented by members of the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, known for its pro-opera stance. In previously unexplored works the academicians advocate the controversial concept of Nothing as an all-embracing phenomenon. This includes language, in which the Incogniti emphasize sound as independent from meaning-a claim with significant consequences for music aesthetics. The academy's emblem articulates a parallel discourse on voice through visual means. By musical means, passages from works by Barbara Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi (an oft-discussed melisma in Poppea, I, 6), and Francesco Cavalli also articulate Incogniti aesthetics. In elaborating their ideas the academicians relied upon a work that indeed presented a manifesto for sheer vocality, L'Adone (1623) by Giovanbattista Marino, an academy member. The Incogniti's Marinist aesthetics was to dominate the rest of the century until its object, pure voice, came under sharp criticism by members of yet another academy, the Arcadia.

The Accademia Fiorentina and the Question of the Language: The Politics of Theory in Ducal Florence*

AbstractFounded in 1540 as the Accademia degli Umidi, the Accademia Fiorentina quickly assumed a central role in the renewed language debate in Italy. Three Florentine protagonists of the debate, Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Giovambattista Gelli, and Carlo Lenzoni, all penned treatises in defense of contemporary Florentine as a language model, in opposition to solutions advocated by others, particularly Pietro Bembo and his followers, and Giovan Giorgio Trissino. Their writings variously support the expansionist political program of Duke Cosimo de' Medici, while at times contesting his more egalitarian domestic politics and his attempts to limit intellectual freedom.

THE DEBATE ON SONG IN THE ACCADEMIA FIORENTINA

For James Haar on his 70th BirthdayThe sixteenth century in Italy was a time when academies of all kinds flourished as venues, and often as arbiters, of literature and high culture. A casual look at the academies might give the impression that they were mostly social in nature, that they functioned as a pastime for bored aristocrats and ambitious letterati. As originally constituted, the Accademia degli Umidi, founded 1 November 1540, indeed fitted this description, but with one difference characteristic of Florentine society - it was organised by twelve men of various social classes with a common interest in poetry and language. The academy expanded considerably under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and on 25 March 1541 was reconstituted as the Accademia Fiorentina. Its avowed purpose was to promote the Tuscan language as an instrument of literature and knowledge, in an age when mastery of Latin was required of any educated man. In advancing the cause of vernacular literature, the Accademia Fiorentina, like other academies of the time, greatly extended the programme of Italian humanism, making available the fruits of humanist thought and enquiry to a larger public.

The Sources and Fortunes of Piranesi’s Archaeological Illustrations

Susan M. Dixon earned her doctorate from Cornell University in 1991 with a dissertation on the archaeological publications of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. She studies the history of pre–scientific archaeology, from Pirro Ligorio to Piranesi, with a particular focus on illustration as a means to convey historical knowledge. She has published on this subject in a variety of venues, and is beginning a book–length manuscript on the subject. In 1995–96, she was awarded a J. Paul Getty post–doctoral fellowship to study the Accademia degli Arcadi, a society founded in 1690 primarily to restore good taste in literature, and its successes and failures in bringing about the reform of Italian society and architecture. She has written a book entitled The Bosco Parrasio: Performance and Perfectibility in the Garden of the Arcadians, which focuses on their garden meeting place as a breeding ground for a utopian society. Dr Dixon teaches art history at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) developed a way of representing the archaeological past by using the multi–informational image, an engraved illustration which appears to be a composite of various drawings, on various surfaces, and employing various modes of representation, scale and detail. The cartographic tradition, particularly maps from sixteenth–century Europe, offer a precedent for this type of illustration. Piranesi found theoretical underpinnings for it in contemporary discussions about the workings of the human memory, which was identified as a viable tool for those pursuing historical knowledge. His illustrations make visible the processes of memory on an assemblage of archaeological information, and they were a means to historical reconstruction.Archaeologists of the generation after Piranesi did not use the multi–informational image as the science of archaeology underwent a sea change at the end of the century. However, some compilers of travel literature, in particular Jean–Laurent–Pierre HoÏel, author and illustrator of Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte, et de Lipari, found the format suitable to their purposes. Like Piranesi’s, Hoüel’s multi–informational images reveal the hand of the artist on the information he had diligently collected and ordered; Hoüel’s picturesque illustrations of the southern Italian islands’ people and places are self–consciously subjective. The format also makes apparent what was so appealing to many a voyager –the apparent survival of the past in the culture of the present.

Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in "L'incoronazione di Poppea"

This essay considers opera's use of a particular history in seventeenth-century Venice: Cornelius Tacitus's Annals of the Roman Empire as transformed in Monteverdi's and Busenello's L'incoronazione di Poppea. In contrast with a recent hypothesis linking Tacitus, Poppea, and the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti with Neostoicism, this essay argues that the members of the Accademia degli Incogniti used Tacitus's history of the Julio-Claudians as part of a highly specialized republican discourse on Venetian political superiority and sensual pleasures. After considering Incogniti philosophies and interest in the erotic in the context of Venetian political ideals and the influence of Tacitus on political and moral thought in early modern Europe, this essay places L'incoronazione di Poppea in the context of several other treatments of Tacitus produced during the mid-seventeenth century by Busenello's colleagues in the Accademia degli Incogniti, in which empire and the liabilities of female power are contrasted implicitly with Venice's male oligarchy. The Venetian rejection of Stoic philosophy and fascination with the erotic and the patriotic play themselves out in one of the opera's most peculiar distortions of the historical record-the scene following the death of Seneca in which the philosopher's nephew, the poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, known in Venice for his republican ideals, joins the emperor Nero in song to celebrate his uncle's death and Poppea's charms. As transformed by Monteverdi's sexually explicit music, Lucan's endorsement of artistic self-expression, sensual freedom, and republican ideals provides a critical counterpoint to Senecan support of the principate and moral restraint-a view that was far more compatible with Venetian concerns at midcentury.

Women in Arcadia

Women in Arcadia Susan M. Dixon (bio) The first Italian academy to admit women was the Accademia degli Arcadi. Founded in 1690, the Arcadian Society was primarily an institution dedicated to the reform of Italian literature. For almost forty years after its founding, the heyday of the Society’s growth and activity, it fostered and promoted the poetic output of its female members. Arcadian women produced at least eight percent of the literature printed in the organization’s official publications. Even after the mid-eighteenth century, when the Academy’s prestige and presence in Italian society had waned, some of the shepherdesses or pastorelle, as the female members were called, were well known in literary circles. Maria Maddelena Morelli, better known by her Arcadian pseudonym Corilla Olimpica, was crowned as poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in 1776. She shared this honor with two other poets: Petrarch, crowned in 1341, and Bernardo Perfetti, a fellow Arcadian, in 1725. 1 Little scholarly attention has been paid to this most uncommon quality: the considerable number of female Arcadians and their professional accomplishments. I believe this has much to do with the seemingly inconsistent and elusive nature of the Society. It was primarily a literary academy whose tenets called for a rejection of baroque conceits in favor of clear language, simple form, and an unexaggerated content. The women who were admitted were expected to be poets committed to this mode of writing. In addition, the Academy saw literary reform as related to larger societal reform, and it maintained a corollary goal to cultivate or sustain the study of the sciences—mathematics, astronomy, physics, jurisprudence and history—to that end. Its enlightened goals and rhetoric, however, seem to be contradicted by its courtly associations and habits. The secondary literature is polarized in assessing the institution either as frivolous and ineffectual, and under the machinations of the Papal court, or as effective in varying degrees at introducing enlightened ideas into an often censorious Papal Rome. 2 The women of Arcadia have been overlooked in the debate. In an attempt to encourage more research on the topic, this paper will outline the activity of Arcadian women. 3 Because the bulk of the information regarding the Society comes from the Society itself, the task is a bit problematic. The Accademia degli Arcadi officially represented its female members in two ways, as two very different kinds of Arcadian inhabitants. They [End Page 371] are both: pastorelle, whose literary accomplishments were as competent and deserving of publication as those of the pastori, their male counterparts; and nymphs, who instigated and played courtly games. This dual role seems further evidence of the complex and elusive agenda of the Society. The Academy’s attitude toward women was both egalitarian in recognizing their status as professional poets and traditional in its insistence on defining typical feminine behavior. During the first thirty-eight years of the organization’s history when the Society was under the custodianship of Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni, seventy-four women were admitted. 4 As the total membership in 1728 was 2,419, women then constituted just under three percent of its membership. While this percentage may seem small, it should be noted that after 1711, when significant numbers of Arcadians defected because of ideological differences, Crescimbeni instituted a campaign to increase the membership dramatically. Therefore, among the 2,419, there were many titular members, or members who met only the minimum requirements. 5 The population of writers and poets, that is, that portion of members with whom the women shared professional skills, is difficult to calculate given the records, but I estimate that women constituted about eight percent of that population. There were five ways to be admitted to the Academy, and one was reserved for women. Female candidates were nominated before the Collegio, a small elite deciding body within the Academy. The individual colleghi then cast their votes secretly. At least six memberships per year were reserved for female candidates. This method of accepting pastorelle was more guarded than others; for example, some nominations were put before the full assembled Adunanza and decided by acclamation. The secret balloting was enacted “to avoid prejudices,” presumably to counter the nominator’s...

Agostino Agazzari (1578-After 1640): The Theoretical Writings

For Agostino Agazzari, a Sienese noble, to be praised as his merit requires one would need the eloquence of the most famous writers of this century, because in truth his skill in the field of music is as much as [that of] any other [person] described [in this volume]. First in Siena he showed while he was young that the city had nothing to envy elsewhere, [for there was] no performer, no composer more excellent that he, because in playing the organ he was most imaginative and delicate, and in [his] compositions harmonious and lively. Therefore he was rewarded with a place in the Accademia degli Intronati. He then visited Germany, where he became known at the court of the Emperor Matthias, who having discovered his great learning wished to keep him in his service. But desirous of liberty, he did not wish to bind himself with that chain of gold, and returned to Italy, carrying with him a musical instrument never before seen or heard called the pandora, which he played sweetly. He went to Rome, where he was not only maestro of the famous cappella of S Apollinare, but [was] also called one of the first to introduce theconcertostyle, which he learnt from brief contact with Father Viadana. With regard to his compositions, he left, in addition to numerous manuscripts, twenty-four to twenty-six works printed at various times and in various places, includingcanzonette, madrigals, motets, masses, psalms in which he showed great [understanding of] counterpoint and harmony. On returning to Siena he was made director of the cappella of the Cathedral, in which post he died recently to the universal sorrow of virtuous men.

Monteverdi's Mantuan Orfeo Some new documentation

Orfeo was written to be performed by Mantuan court musicians during the Carnival season of 1607 for the entertainment of the members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti. Monteverdi's librettist Alessandro Striggio was a member of the Invaghiti, and the titular head of the academy at the time was Prince Francesco Gonzaga, heir to the Mantuan duchy. The established facts about the first performance of Orfeo are, then, few. But a series of letters between Francesco and Ferdinando Gonzaga most of which have not previously been published, adds a good deal and helps to resolve some of the problems and discrepancies that surround the text of the work and its first performance. The complete series of letters between Francesco and Ferdinando Gonzaga solves some quite specific questions that have been asked about Orfeo and suggests answers to others.

GLI INGANNATIAS A TEXT FOR PERFORMANCE

The anonymous comedy GLI INGANNATI, performed in Sienaby the Accademia degli Intronati on the last day of Carnival in 1532, has been the object of much critical and historical attention in recent years, commensurate with the popularity and interest which the play aroused in the sixteenth century. The question of its authorship has been reopened in a striking manner by Giovanni Aquilecchia, who suggests a collaboration between Francesco Maria Molza and Claudio Tolomei, to replace the claims previously advanced on behalf of Castelvetro. Professor Aquilecchia's arguments, very difficult to dismiss in themselves, perhaps await corroboration from further research on the precise political stance of the Intronati in the early 1530S (which mayor may not tally with the probable pro-Medici views of the putative authors): such research is proceeding apace, though it has so far borne more fruit in relation to slightly later periods, where the evidence is more plentiful. Further discoveries are being made about the textual history of the play, which could eventually result in an improved text or even in successive modified versions; and the text so far regarded as standard is available in a number of modern Italian editions and in one English translation.

“Barbara di Santa Sofia” and “Il Prete Genovese”: On the Identity of a Portrait by Bernardo Strozzi

This study identifies a painting by Strozzi as the portrait of Barbara Strozzi (no relation), a celebrated singer and composer in Venice. Although cast in the typological mold of Saint Cecilia, the picture, in its tone and its sitter's pose and dress, suggests a different morality, interpretable through Barbara's involvement in the Accademia degli Unisoni and relation to members of the Accademia degli Incogniti. The picture can be traced to that same circle of libertine intellectuals whose members provided the “powerful protectors” of Bernardo Strozzi when the renegade Capuchin fled Genoa. This clarification of his Venetian patronage would seem to lend credence to Soprani's romantic account of Strozzi's escape from monastic captivity, often dismissed as theatrical.

NEW LIGHT ON THE ACCADEMIA DEGLI ELEVATI OF FLORENCE

NEW LIGHT ON THE ACCADEMIA DEGLI ELEVATI OF FLORENCE Get access EDMOND STRAINCHAMPS EDMOND STRAINCHAMPS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume LXII, Issue 4, October 1976, Pages 507–535, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/LXII.4.507 Published: 01 October 1976

The Scientific Work of Allesandro Piccolomini

Previous articleNext article No AccessDocuments & TranslationsThe Scientific Work of Allesandro PiccolominiRufus Suter and Allesandro PiccolominiRufus Suter Search for more articles by this author and Allesandro Piccolomini Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 60, Number 2Summer, 1969 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/350470 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1969 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Marco Sgarbi The Epistemology of Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Alessandro Piccolomini, Aither 12, no.2424 (Sep 2020): 190–215.https://doi.org/10.5507/aither.2020.011Jürgen Mittelstraß P, (Jan 2016): 74–523.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-00141-2_2Ronald Brashear Piccolomini, Alessandro, (Dec 2016): 1708–1709.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1089Luís Miguel Carolino Cristoforo Borri and the epistemological status of mathematics in seventeenth-century Portugal, Historia Mathematica 34, no.22 (May 2007): 187–205.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2006.05.002Daniele Cozzoli Alessandro Piccolomini and the certitude of mathematics, History and Philosophy of Logic 28, no.22 (May 2007): 151–171.https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340701230576Anneliese Schnell, Richard A. Jarrell, Dorrit Hoffleit, Christoffel Waelkens, Thomas R. Williams, Thomas Nelson Winter, Narahari Achar, Yuri N. Efremov, A. Clive Davenhall, Ian Elliott, Ian Elliott, Stuart F. Pawsey, Katherine Haramundanis, Jordan D. Marché, Richard A. Jarrell, Thomas R. Williams, Raghini S. Suresh, Norriss S. Hetherington, John Rogers, Jeff Suzuki, Derek Jensen, Edgar Laird, Brenda G. Corbin, Adam Mosley, Thomas R. Williams, Horst Kant, Scott W. Teare, Raymonde Barthalot, Michael Meo, Michael Meo, Suzanne Débarbat, Marjorie Steele Meinel, Adam Mosley, Daniel W. E. Green, Virginia Trimble, Robert McGown, Roberto Torretti, Christian Wildberg, Clifford J. Cunningham, Raymonde Barthalot, Ronald Brashear, Horace A. Smith, Jordan D. Marché, Alan H. Batten, Simone Dumont, Nidia Irene Morrell, Pasquale Tucci, Peter Nockolds, Sven Widmalm, Jordan D. Marché, Richard A. Jarrell, Paul Keyser, Adriaan Blaauw, Alistair Kwan, Ian T. Durham, Alistair Kwan, Clifford J. Cunningham, Dennis Danielson, Keith Snedegar, Tim Trachet, Michael Meo, Naomi Pasachoff, Jay M. Pasachoff, Robert D. McGown, Claud H. Lacy, Yuri V. Balashov, Thomas R. Williams, Jordan D. Marché, Ian T. Durham, Françoise Launay, Suhasini Kumar, Leif J. Robinson, Thomas R. Williams, Mark Hurn, Lucas Siorvanes, Patrick Moore, Richard Baum, Norriss S. Hetherington, Thomas Klöti, Nicolaas Bloembergen, James Dye Piccolomini, Alessandro, (Jan 2007): 904–905.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1089C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, Jill Kraye The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 108 (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521251044 Paul Lawrence Rose , and Stillman Drake The Pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics in Renaissance Culture, Studies in the Renaissance 18 (Oct 2015): 65–104.https://doi.org/10.2307/2857079