voice, decorum and seduction in florigerio’s music lesson

Early Music, © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/em/caq054, available online at www.em.oxfordjournals.org

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The Music Lesson by Venetian artist Sebastiano Florigerio (c.1510 – between 1550 and 1564)

(illus.1) probably dates from the 1530s or 1540s, though nothing is known of the practical circumstances of its creation. The painting has thus far eluded thor-oughgoing interpretation at the hands of musicolo-gists, and been all but ignored by art historians.1 In this article, I hope to unlock the allegorical and emblematic aspects of the painting to reveal a con-cise study in social and moral aspects of musical per-formance in the early 16th century, and particularly in Venice.

A large group of paintings affording a central place to music-making survives from the early 16th century, although few or none can be considered directly equivalent to Florigerio’s.2 Some might be termed ‘programmatic’, in the sense that they seem to depict specific individuals participating in a real-life entertainment (as, for instance, Lorenzo Costa’s Concert in the National Gallery, London). Some are apparently allegorical, often associated with the three ages of man through music’s aptness as a symbol of the passing of time (as the Three Ages of Man usually ascribed to Giorgione, in Palazzo Pitti). Others are close in both spirit and appear-ance to the portrait-style paintings of beautiful and seductive women associated particularly with Giorgione, Titian and Palma Vecchio (for example Dosso’s Music rhomboid in the Galleria Estense). Florigerio’s picture shares elements with each of these types but is separated from them in the fact that not all of the characters depicted are directly involved in the music-making, whilst the music remains the focal point of the painting. The detail and subtlety of the allegory proceed partly from this difference.

In the foreground of the painting, grouped around a table, three well-dressed men and one richly presented woman pore over a music book. All four beat time with a finger, and one man keeps their place in the music, but only the man on the right is actually singing.3 This musician, older and more sumptuously dressed than the other men, has been identified as a priest on account of his bareta, although in fact his dress is typical of a Venetian layman of the upper or middle class.4 H. Colin Slim has suggested that he is the composer of his song, and assigns him a professional enthusiasm that detaches him from the intentions of the other men, which are perhaps less aesthetic.5 The former theory is, I suspect, musicological wishful thinking; the latter, as will soon be revealed, misrepresents the message of the painting.

The music book is the alto part from a set of four partbooks; one of the other books from the set lies on the table beneath it. Slim has identified it as a copy of the altus volume from a set entitled Motetti e canzone, Libro Primo, printed in Rome in 1520.6 The volume lies open at a page on which is notated almost all of a canzone set by Michele Pesenti, a work that stands between the frottola idiom and the early madrigal.7 It is highly unlikely that we are viewing a monophonic performance of a secular song. Frot-tole certainly were performed in this way, but the part abstracted was usually the cantus, sometimes the tenor; the alto is the least likely of all to stand on its own, and in fact was the first part dropped if an ensemble was a person short. The helpful actions of the other characters suggest that the older man is in fact learning his part in preparation for a perform-ance of the song by the whole group, or perhaps demonstrating it for the benefit of the woman. As

Tim Shephard

Voice, decorum and seduction in Florigerio’s

Music Lesson

Early Music Advance Access published July 9, 2010 by on July 10, 2010

http://em.oxfordjournals.org

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the partbook is placed before her, and as she seems to be the centre of attention, we can reasonably suppose that she will shortly sing herself. In either scenario, the three men supervise the woman’s engagement with the music in a way that is deeply physical, and sexually suspect—to the extent that a wholesome and decorous view of their relationships is difficult to sustain.

The association of music with seduction was absolutely endemic in the Renaissance. Paolo Cortese (1510) summarizes the views of his contemporaries very conveniently on this point, noting that ‘many, estranged from the natural disposition of the normal sense, not only reject it [music] because of some sad perversion of their nature, but even think it to be hurtful for the reason that it is somehow an invitation to idle pleasure, and above all, that its

merriment usually arouses the evil of lust’.8 A less cautious commentator, Pietro Aretino, explained more explicitly that ‘I suoni, i canti e le lettere che sanno le femmine [sono] le chiavi che aprono le porte della pudicizia loro’ (Musical instruments, songs and letters are among the accomplishments of women that are the keys to open the door to their modesty).9 On the same basis, music was associated with a concern for beautiful appearances—that is, with vanity. In a famous letter, Bembo cautioned his daughter Elena that playing musical instruments ‘è cosa da donna vana e leggiera’ (is a thing for vain and idle women).10 Alongside these moral concerns, Italian commentators of the 16th century made an increasingly close connection between the female singing voice and the courtesan’s arts of seduction. The much-discussed destabilizing proximity of the

1 Music lesson, by Sebastiano Florigerio (c.1530–50) (Munich, Alte Pinakothek)

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‘honest’ courtesan to the gentlewoman in terms of dress and accomplishments certainly stretched to poetico-musical agency, and recent scholarship has done much to clarify the musical styles and per-forming practices associated with the courtesans of 16th-century Venice.11 I agree with some previ-ous writers on Florigerio’s painting that it is in this context that we can best understand his richly dressed lady, and her role as the fulcrum of her companions’ music-making.12

The extra people at the back of this painting encourage one to think of the scene as taking place within a larger context, although the background makes no obvious or specific reference to an ‘inte-rior’ as such. In locating the scene, Antonfrancesco Doni’s 1544 Dialogo della musica offers an illumi-nating point of reference.13 In the second part of his work, Doni describes the musical entertainments of a kind of private accademia, meeting in a Venetian salon. Seven men and one woman are present: their light conversation ranges over literary and musical matters, and is punctuated by the singing of madri-gals. The woman, named Selvaggia, is a musician of some accomplishment, and serves as the foil to her male companions’ amorous poetic meanderings. Other evidence confirms that prominent female lit-erati certainly attended such gatherings: the famous courtesan-poet Veronica Franco, for instance, was familiar in the circle of the slightly later Venetian academician Domenico Venier.14 Doni’s Selvaggia is easily read as a woman in Franco’s vein, and the scenario he builds through his dialogue is distinctly similar to that painted by Florigerio (though the latter’s intent is perhaps more allegorical than representational).

An amorous, even sexually charged, reading is further encouraged by the motto inscribed along the young lady’s neckline, falling either side of a necklace that plunges into her cleavage: ‘mal sta ascosto un bel sereno’. Bert Meijer has identified ‘bel sereno’ (beautiful serene) as a descriptive meta-phor, commonly used in the poetry of Petrarch and Ariosto to refer to a clear sky or a lovely face.15 As a result, the phrase is usually translated ‘it is wrong to hide a beautiful face’. Given that Ariosto finds it necessary to be more specific when he uses the meta-phor to that particular end (‘bel viso sereno’), one might prefer a looser rendering such as ‘beautiful

view’.16 Meijer also notes the similarity of ‘sereno’ and ‘seno’ (breast) which, together with the loca-tion of the motto, would suggest that the face is not the aspect of the young lady to which the words are meant to draw attention. Petrarch offers an attrac-tive precedent for the poetic pairing of these words in his canzone 359, giving exactly the formulation ‘bel seno’:

Un ramoscel di palmaet un di lauro trae del suo bel seno,et dice:‘Dal serenociel empireo et di quelle sante partimi mossi et vengo sol per consolarti’.

Drawing a branch of palmand one of laurel from her lovely breast,she says: ‘From the serenityof the empyreal heaven, a holy soul,I make my way to comfort and console’.17

A further, as yet unexplored, implication of the motto is unearthed by observing, with Meijer, that to get from ‘sereno’ to ‘seno’ one must remove ‘re’—a solmization syllable indicating a musical note. The breast, to which our attention is simul-taneously drawn, was (and is) commonly taken to be the seat and origin of the voice. Perhaps, there-fore, the motto means to imply that it is wrong to hide both a ‘beautiful breast’ and a ‘beautiful singing voice’.18

Both Meijer and Slim take the motto to be a liter-ary allusion, but neither is able to identify a specific source.19 A more explicit literary interpolation, and one of considerable help in further understanding our ‘bel seno’ and its voice, is the song itself, the anony-mous text of which runs as follows:

Alma gentil, se in voi fusse equalmentela pietade quanto è la beltade,l’angoscioso pianto ha[u]rebbe almen riposo.Ma seti sì sdegnosa e tanto altiera,che (de) dirvi non oso quel che tacendoel ben servir mio spera. Accendavila vera mia fede, dolce diva, una scintilladell’ amorosa fiamma che in me stilla.

Kind soul, if in you there were as muchpity as there is beauty,my anguished lament at least would find its rest.But you are so scornful and so haughty, thatI dare not tell you that which, in keeping silent,my good service hopes for. You have litmy true faith, sweet goddess, a sparkof the amorous flame that rises in me.



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The opening formulation, ‘Alma gentil’, is (once again) familiar from Petrarch, and thus clearly indicates the poetic mood in which we find our-selves. The verse treats the absolutely paradigmatic Petrarchan subject of the cruel beauty who with-holds her charms, remaining aloof from her suitor. Here we have a direct parallel with the inscription, in which the withholding of beauty is criticized. The man standing behind the courtesan draws attention to the moment in the canzone where the point is most clearly felt—the word ‘pietade’ (com-passion). The woman in the picture has taken pity on her suitors and does not hide her ‘bel sereno’: she does indeed have as much ‘pietade’ as ‘beltade’. She is effectively the ideal ‘beauty’ of song.

Petrarch is a useful foil in further interpreting these texts, offering several clues concerning the role of the ‘seno’ (breast) or ‘pecto’ (chest) in the poet’s romance. It is indeed, he reveals, the seat of his voice (canzone 20): ‘Più volte già per dir le labbra apersi, / poi rimase la voce in mezzo ‘l pecto’ (Many times my lips have opened to speak, but my voice has remained in my chest). It is also the site of his ‘amo-rous flame’ (canzone 236): ‘Amor, io fallo, et veggio il mio fallire, / ma fo sí com’uom ch’arde e ‘l foco à ‘n seno’ (Love, I have sinned, and recognize my sin; but a great fire is blazing in my breast). This not least, one imagines, because it is the location of his heart (canzone 23): ‘Questa che col mirar gli animi fura, / m’aperse il petto, e ‘l cor prese con mano’ (She whose mere glance can steal the minds of men opened my breast, and took my heart in hand).20 The flame of love, he reveals, is ‘sparked’ in him by (among other things) his beloved’s breast (can-zone 160): ‘Qual miracolo è quel, . . . / . . . quand’ella preme / col suo candido seno un verde cespo!’ (Oh what a wonder, . . . when she leans her white breast against a bush in flower!). It is also inspired by her ‘ardenti voci et belle’ (ardent and beautiful voice), which was capable of generating ‘flaming sighs’ (‘fiamma i sospir’—both canzone 157).

Thus, it seems, there is manifest poetic logic in the invocation to reveal a ‘beautiful view’ that encom-passes both a ‘beautiful breast’ and its ‘beautiful voice’. It is them in particular that cause the ‘spark of amorous flame’, which ‘rises’ specifically in the poet’s own breast. In his breast, the flame finds itself co-located with his voice—in other words, the song,

emerging tangibly from the poet’s breast, stands as the symbol for his flame of love.21 The paint-ing, then, contains a double music, presenting two breasts and two voices, the one inspired by the other: one belonging to the woman, and one to the man who sings Alma gentil.

The conventional interpretation of the Music Lesson takes as its starting-point the prominent beat-ing of tactus, foregrounding the presence of musi-cal time. We are reminded that beauty is transitory, and will give way to the ugliness of old age: therefore we must make use of our beauty whilst we can (‘Mal sta ascosto un bel sereno’).22 More recently, Jane Hatter has pointed to a scientific association of musical time with aging and health.23 In the 1470s, Tinctoris used an association of musical beat with the human pulse developed by medical authorities, specifically Avicenna and Galen, to demonstrate the proposition that ‘music heals the sick’.24 Music theorists of the 16th century turned this idea on its head, offering the human pulse as the model of a ‘healthy’ musical beat.25 Thus Giovanni Maria Lan-franco, a professional musician contemporary with Florigerio active in Lombardy and the Veneto, could write in his compendious (and vernacular) Scintille di musica of 1533 that tactus was the ‘imitation of the motion of the healthy pulse by whoever leads rais-ing and lowering his hand’.26 To this I might add that Petrarch (again) offers a model for the adoption of the pulse into a poetic and amatory frame (canzone 328):

Qual à già i nervi e i polsi e i pensier’ egricui domestica febbre assalir deve,tal mi sentia, non sappiend’io che levevenisse ‘l fin de’ miei ben’ non integri.

I felt like someone sick in nerves and pulse and thoughtswho feels a bout of fever coming on,although I could not tell how very soonmy far from perfect joys would reach their end.

The distortion of pulse brought about by his excitement in love is taken to be the harbinger of death. The musical tactus, then, could stand com-fortably as a marker of the age and health of the body, as indicated by its pulse—a phenomenon which, once again, one might easily associate with the breast, location of the heart.27 By the same token, it serves to draw attention to the physical aspect of music-making—of, for instance, the production of a ‘beautiful voice’ in the breast, but also of its sensual



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(and seductive) effect. Florigerio certainly intends to underline this last implication of tactus when he depicts the man standing behind the courtesan beat-ing time on her naked shoulder.

The idea of musical time carries also a more sub-tle implication, as Jane Hatter has pointed out: for the Renaissance, age and music were caught up into social constructions of decorum.28 Furthermore, we have yet to understand fully Florigerio’s invocation of voice. The ‘spark of amorous flame’ mentioned in the song, and in fact the song itself, which stands as its symbol, appear to have lodged specifically in the breast of the oldest male member of the party. In contrast, and diagonally opposite him in the com-position, the elderly woman in spartan dress covers her mouth in a powerfully reticent gesture. I suggest that through these two features and their interaction with the central group, the artist establishes two axes of exclusion, both of which allegorize different con-temporary anxieties over the decorum of musical performance.

Firstly, we must realize that the elderly man’s eager voice betrays his lack of decorum. Castiglione explains the problem concisely and humorously:29

it is certainly most unbecoming and unsightly when an old grey-haired gentleman, who is toothless and wrinkled, takes up the viola and plays and sings in front of a gather-ing of ladies, even if his performance is quite good. This is because the words of songs are nearly always amorous, and in old men love is altogether ridiculous.

The view was not exclusive to Castiglione: for example, Girolamo Parabosco, who began a career in Venice as a musician and literato in the 1540s, espoused an identical opinion (though, like the speaker in The courtier, he received censure for it).30 It is familiar, too, in a vulgar vein, from the whole armoury of poems of the late Middle Ages and Ren-aissance in which a woman laments her marriage to an elderly man. Our Venetian has fallen so far from the high moral standards he should espouse that, though an old man, he sings unselfconsciously of love in public.

Castiglione took up the question again later in The courtier, separately from his discussion of music.31 Following a restatement of the view that love is unsuitable to the elderly, he advances an alternative perspective through the voice of Pietro Bembo. Bembo, a churchman, argues that love can

even be entertained more happily by the old than by the young. To achieve his end, he offers an entirely desexualized view of love, describing it in Neopla-tonic terms as an intellectual effort to achieve comprehension of a transcendent spiritual beauty. The old, Castiglione implies, are ill-suited to sensual love, but are better equipped to aspire to a philo-sophically and spiritually preferable state—one that does not involve them in inappropriate affairs of the body. In fact, the text and the circumstances of our elderly man’s song indicate unequivocally that his love fails to achieve (or even to attempt) such lofty validation.

The folly of the man’s voice is further under-lined in the song itself. Employing a conceit familiar in Petrarch (canzone 18, 20, 23, 46 and others) and in 16th-century verse, the singer is made to claim, in song, that his ardour renders him silent. In the case of Alma gentil, the singer even goes so far as to place all his hope of success in the silence that he has already broken. This paradox of discretion drew on the established place of silence in the moral fabric of the day: the Ferrarese scholar Celio Calcagnini wrote a whole treatise on the wisdom of silence (Descriptio silentii), and its appropriate use was a widely recog-nized and important aspect of prudence. The older man’s mistake, so dramatically balanced by the older woman’s reticence, is in not knowing when to sing and when to remain silent.

Far from the aesthetic detachment proposed by Slim, or the philosophical purity described by Castiglione, our sumptuously dressed man’s engage-ment in the game of seduction is pointedly physi-cal, as he almost envelops the young woman’s hand in his fur-lined sleeve (from which his own hand emerges to beat the tactus). His voice reveals a pov-erty of decorum and, further, a lack of prudence sig-nalled by the very words of his song. Petrarch might also note that the fire of love in his breast will, in view of his age, dangerously distort the steady beat-ing of his heart nearby, resulting both in his death and a poor musical performance. The old woman, by contrast, covers her mouth—with a proper sense of the behaviour appropriate to her age, she polices her own voice, and remains silent. The pair there-fore stand in a polar relationship as a moral lesson in age and restraint: she knows how to age decorously, whereas he does not.



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A second exclusion, and a second moral lesson, concerns gender. The moral concerns over the female voice described above characterize a gen-dered attitude according to which female agency in the cultural and artistic sphere is a thing of some danger, and in need of supervision. Our view of Isabella d’Este, for instance, is (and was) transmit-ted not through her own agency, but through that of a gaggle of male tutors, secretaries, poets, artists and musicians. The voice of the young woman in Florigerio’s painting is mediated by no fewer than three male supervisors; only under these suffocat-ing circumstances is she afforded the privilege of agency. The relevance of this point is made particu-larly evident in the moment the painter has chosen to depict: though the circumstances clearly imply that the woman will soon sing, we are witnessing not voice itself but its mediation.

Ironically, the attentions that render her voice ‘safe’ are only forthcoming because, as the painting identifies so clearly, she is beautiful and does not seek to hide it. The ulterior intentions of her tutors are clearly signposted by their multiple extended fingers—their tactus which again (and now more coarsely) signifies music’s physicality. Thus, her musical decorum comes at the expense of her sexual decorum. The task of exemplifying proper conduct once again devolves upon the old woman who self-consciously excludes herself from song. Stripped of her beauty, there is no question of her aspiring to a voice, but equally there is no question of her com-promising her virtue. In the words of a contempo-rary Venetian poet:32

Ne si trovano donna cosi stranaNe tanta casta, che s’egli cantavaTosto non divenisse una puttana.

Never do we find a woman so rareNor so chaste, that if she singsShe does not at once become a whore.

Florigerio’s Music Lesson, then, depicts a salon scene in which song is acting as the lubricant to play-ful social relations involving a woman of uncertain chastity. Through the song, and through the inscrip-tion on her neckline, the artist weaves together a range of poetic cues of a distinctly Petrarchan cast to characterize the relationships between the painting’s protagonists. The inscription and the ominous pres-ence of the elderly woman, neither of which seem to merit a literal place in the scene (they are, one might say, non-diegetic), prompt an allegorical reading. Their interpretation reveals the significance of sev-eral further details in the depiction of music, in par-ticular tactus, voice and sensuality. Through these, the painting creates an index of contemporary social and moral attitudes towards musical performance—in particular as regards gender and age.

However, the artist’s own moral position is left in some doubt: the visual and decorative success of his painting relies precisely on the whole-hearted ren-dering of the sensual overtones to which it addresses its allegory. Similarly, it is impossible to imagine that many 16th-century viewers enjoyed the Music Lesson principally for its edifying message. Jacopo Sannazaro, in Chapter 4 of his Arcadia, conveniently describes the effect upon the contemporary mind of a view of an attractive breast:33

I saw on her tender bosom the small girlish breasts that like two round apples were thrusting forth the thin mate-rial; midway of these could be seen a little path, most lovely and immoderately pleasing to look upon, which inasmuch as it terminated in the secret parts was the cause of my thinking about those parts with the greater efficacy.

Tim Shephard has recently completed his doctoral studies at the University of Nottingham, where he also teaches. He works on music and identity at the Italian courts of the Renaissance, specializing in relations between musical and visual culture. He is also an active cellist. [email protected]

My thanks to Philip Weller for help with translations from Italian, and to Bonnie Blackburn and Jane Hatter for several helpful comments on earlier drafts.

1 The painting has been studied in R. Marini, Sebastiano Florigerio (Udine, 1956); B. W. Meijer, ‘Harmony and satire in the work of Niccolo

Frangipane: problems in the depiction of music’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vi (1973), pp.94–112, esp. pp.110–11; H. C. Slim, ‘Two paintings of “concert scenes” from the Veneto and the Morgan Library’s unique music print of 1520’, in In cantu et in sermone: for

Nino Pirrotta on his 80th birthday, ed. F. della Seta and F. Piperino (Florence, 1989), pp.155–74 (with more extensive bibliography); I. Fenlon, ‘Music in Italian Renaissance painting’, in Companion to medieval and Renaissance music, ed. T. Knighton and D. Fallows (London, 1997), pp.189–209;



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and D. E. Davies, ‘On music fit for a courtesan: representations of the courtesan and her music in sixteenth-century Italy’, in The courtesan’s arts: cross-cultural perspectives, ed. M. Feldman and B. Gordon (Oxford, 2006), pp.144–58. The painting was further discussed in a paper given at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference 2008 by Jane Hatter, entitled ‘Col tempo: the conceit of musical time in sixteenth-century paintings’; Hatter has been kind enough to send me a copy of her longer study, and my comments on tactus and time are considerably indebted to her work.

2 For a convenient portfolio of reproductions, see H. C. Slim, Painting music in the sixteenth century (Aldershot, 2002).

3 Some scholars have understood the man at the front left to be singing as well, but others (including me) think not.

4 On the older man as a priest, see Marini, Florigerio, pp.19–23; endorsed and expanded in Slim, ‘Two paintings’, p.172. On the dress of a wealthy Venetian layman of the early 16th century, see S. M. Newton, The dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot, 1988), p.9.

5 Slim, ‘Two paintings’, pp.172–3.

6 Slim, ‘Two paintings’, p.168. A recent description and inventory of the print can be found in I. Fenlon and J. Haar, The Italian madrigal in the early sixteenth century: sources and interpretation (Cambridge, 1988), pp.205–7.

7 The composition ‘Alma gentil’ is discussed in relation to these styles in W. H. Rubsamen, ‘From frottola to madrigal: the changing pattern of secular Italian vocal music’, in Chanson and madrigal 1480–1530: studies in comparison and contrast, ed. J. Haar (Cambridge, MA, 1964), pp.51–77, at p.67, with a transcription given at pp.213–18 of the same volume.

8 The third book of Paolo Cortese’s De cardinalatu is given in facsimile and translation in N. Pirrotta, ‘Music and cultural tendencies in 15th-century Italy’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xix (1966), pp.127–61. The passage quoted above can be found at p.148 and p.152.

9 Letter published in 1537, given in A. Einstein, The Italian madrigal, trans. A. H. Krappe, R. H. Sessions and O. Strunk, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1949), i, p.94.

10 Letter of 10 December 1541, discussed in Einstein, The Italian madrigal, pp.94–5.

11 On the ambiguous relationship between the dress of courtesans and that of gentlewomen in 16th-century Venice see, among many others, M. F. Rosenthal, ‘Cutting a good figure: the fashions of Venetian courtesans in the illustrated albums of early modern travellers’, in The courtesan’s arts, ed. Feldman and Gordon, pp.52–74, esp. at pp.53–4 and 56–67, noting the concern of the government of Venice to legislate a visible distinction between them. On the 16th-century courtesan’s musical accomplishments, and for an assessment of musical styles and genres associated with her, see M. Feldman, ‘The courtesan’s voice: Petrarchan lovers, pop philosophy and oral traditions’, in The courtesan’s arts, ed. Feldman and Gordon, pp.105–23, at pp.108–18, and other essays in the same volume.

12 Florigerio’s young woman is identified as a courtesan in Fenlon, ‘Music’, p.203, and again in Davies, ‘On music’, pp.147–8.

13 Doni’s Dialogo is available in modern edition as Anton-Francesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. G. F. Malipiero and V. Fagotto (Milan, 1965). It is discussed in the context of Venetian salons in M. Feldman, City culture and the madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, 1995), pp.18–23.

14 On Venier and his salon, see Feldman, City culture, pp.83–122; esp. on Franco pp.102ff.

15 Meijer, ‘Harmony and satire’, p.110 n.64.

16 Meijer offers several references to this metaphor in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.

17 Here and hereafter I use the translations of Petrarch given in Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester, 2000). Occasionally I have altered them slightly to bring them closer to the original.

18 For a survey of the philosophical relationship between female beauty and the singing voice, founded on Neoplatonic perspectives contemporary with our painting, see S. Lorenzetti, ‘“Quel celeste cantar che mi disface”: Immagine della donna ed educazione alla musica nell’ideale pedagogico del rinascimento italiano’, Studi musicali, xxiii (1994), pp.241–61, at pp.253–8, esp. pp.254–6.

19 Slim draws attention to a passage in Bembo’s Gli asolani in which ‘seno’ is punned with ‘senno’ (sense, judgement): Slim, ‘Two paintings’, p.169.

20 Castiglione, in his Tirsi, offers the even more explicit formulation ‘la fiamma del mio cor cantai’; the passage is discussed in J. D. Falvo, ‘Urbino and the apotheosis of power’, Modern Language Notes, ci (1986), pp.114–46, at p.137.

21 An equivalent and more explicit equation of a song with an amorous flame is to be found in Bembo’s Gli asolani—see the passage given and discussed in Lorenzetti, ‘“Quel celeste cantar che mi disface”’, p.253.

22 This is the allegorical reading given in Slim, ‘Two paintings’, pp.170–1, and repeated in Fenlon, ‘Music’, p.202.

23 Hatter, ‘Col tempo’.

24 Johannes Tinctoris, Complexus effectuum musices, ch.14. Edition, translation and commentary published as J. D. Cullington (ed. and trans.), ‘That liberal and virtuous art’: three humanist treatises on music (Ulster, 2001), pp.58–86, with an introductory essay by Reinhard Strohm at pp.7–18. Hatter does not mention this example.

25 See Hatter, ‘Col tempo’. She gives a significantly more detailed consideration of these points.

26 Hatter, ‘Col tempo’, which in turn quotes B. Lee, ‘Giovanni Maria Lanfranco’s Scintille di musica and its relation to sixteenth-century music theory’ (Ph.D diss., Cornell University, 1961), p.149.

27 For further discussion of the interrelated dangers of love and song to the health, see Lorenzetti, ‘“Quel celeste cantar che mi disface”’, pp.257–8.

28 Hatter, ‘Col tempo’.



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29 B. Castiglione, The book of the courtier, trans. G. Bull (London, 1967), p.121. Jane Hatter uses this text to similar effect in the interpretation of Giorgione’s so-called Education of Marcus Aurelius.

30 Feldman, City culture, pp.17–18.

31 Castiglione, Courtier, pp.322–45.

32 These lines come from a satirical poem addressed to Adrian Willaert by Girolamo Fenaruolo. The whole poem appears in E. Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle, 8 vols. (Brussels, 1867–88; r/New

York, 1969, facs. in 4 vols.), vi, pp.218–22, and this extract is discussed briefly in Feldman, ‘The courtesan’s voice’, p.108.

33 J. Sannazaro, Arcadia and piscatorial eclogues, trans. R. Nash (Detroit, 1966), p.49.



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Abstracts

Tim Shephard

Voice, decorum and seduction in Florigerio’s Music LessonThe co-called Music Lesson (c.1530–50) by Venetian artist Sebastiano Florigerio presents an enigmatic musical scene that has thus far eluded wholly convincing interpretation. This article seeks to revise and extend previous efforts, placing the scene in the context of contemporary views on the decorum of musical performance. It offers a Petrarch-

inspired analysis of the text to the song represented in the painting, as a way of re-reading the dynamics of the scene; and argues that the painting allegorizes questions of music and morality relating to gender and old age. However, it finds that the allegory is playfully undermined by the (beautiful) physical reality of the painting. As a whole, the work represents important aspects of what one might call the aesthetics of musical performance in early to mid- 16th-century Italy.

Keywords: Sebastiano Florigerio; Venice; Michele Pesenti; decorum; performance; Petrarch; gender; age; Renaissance



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voice, decorum and seduction in florigerio’s music lesson

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