The fifteenth century saw Italy well advanced toward the state in which it has been compared to ancient Greece. The work begun by Petrarch had made mighty strides, the recovery of ancient learning and ancient art had become the great passion of the age, and the worship of beauty was the second, if not the first, creed of a people but recently emerged from the broils of civil war and settled down to a prosperous period, under a benevolent tyranny of which the rule of the Medici at Florence was the arch-type. Learning and culture had become a badge of nobility and the patronage of the arts an instrument of power. That music shared in the boon which came to art is unquestionable; a musical education was once again, as in ancient Greece, an essential part of a gentleman’s equipment; poets and musicians shared the patronage of princes, who themselves had no greater ambition than to be accounted men of genius—in truth, Florence had become the Athens of the modern world.
Cosimo de Medici returned from his Venetian exile in 1434 and, once installed in power, we see him surrounded by such men as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia. Gemistos Plethos, the Byzantine Greek, fires his passion for Plato’s philosophy and Marsilio Ficino is trained under his patronage to translate the works of the sage. Vespasiano assures us of his versatility as follows: ‘When giving audience to a scholar, he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, ... astrologers found him well versed in their science, ... musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he much delighted.’
Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), far surpassed his grandsire in talent and culture. He was a writer of prose and poetry, gave the impulse to the revival of a national literature, and may be said to have raised popular poetry to the dignity of an art, in writing new verses for the canzone a ballo which the young men and girls sang and danced upon the squares of Florence to celebrate the return of May, and the canti carnascialeschi, the songs that the Florentine populace sang, masked, at carnival times. He organized for these occasions great pageants in which he himself took part, engaging the best artists for the embellishment of chariots and the designing of costumes, while he himself wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars, causing new musical settings to be made by eminent composers. ‘Every festivity,’ says Symonds, ‘May morning tournaments, summer evening dances on the squares of Florence, weddings, carnival processions, and vintage banquets at the villa, had their own lyrics with music and the Carola.’
Lorenzo’s famous academy constituted perhaps the greatest intellectual galaxy of the age, for at his table sat Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Luigi Pulci. Surrounded by these companions we behold him in the streets of Florence, not disdaining to perform his own songs, in the midst of an approving populace, or, perchance, ‘when Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno and the large Italian stars come forth above,’ accompanied by a few kindred spirits, lute in hand, singing the verses of a Dante or a Petrarch to the accompaniment of soft Italian zephyrs; or, again, in his villa ‘on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole,’ with Michael Angelo, ‘seated between Ficino and Politian, with the voices of prophets vibrating in his memory and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears ... till Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last-made ballata.’[105]
To such gatherings of boon companions and to the small domestic circle the cantori a liuto were finally relegated, for, as we shall see, their usefulness had been outlived. Such men as these were the perpetuators of their art and the last, perhaps, to cultivate the spontaneous monodies of their Florentine forbears, for it is unthinkable that these worshippers of beauty, these æsthetic sentimentalists should have escaped the charm of that school and have forgone it in favor of that which followed. For meantime the musicians of the Netherland school continued to spread their propaganda in Italy, and so successfully, that their contrapuntal works began to supersede the native monodic style.
Altar of the Virgin.
After the painting by Bellini (Venice Academy).
Their method had, indeed, undergone great improvement: Josquin des Près and his more expressive style had achieved tremendous popularity throughout Europe.[106] Toward the end of the fifteenth century these masters cultivated the secular forms more and more, always, of course, in their wonted contrapuntal method. They would frequently take the melody of a favorite folk-song, use it as their tenor (the middle part) around which they wove an artful counterpoint. In Germany the ‘harmonization’ of popular melodies, or melodies in the popular vein, had been going forward for some time, and it is a noteworthy fact that Heinrich Isaac, one of those most prominently engaged in this work, was organist in Florence from 1484 to 1494 and again after 1514. The style of writing adopted in these popular settings was a simple ‘note against note,’ which emphasized chord progressions rather than melodic integrity.