Abstract

228 RHETORICA titre de son recueil. Cette image, empruntée à Quintilien (VUI, v, 34), l'auteur la lie au symbolisme du paon. Elle pourrait éventuellement s'appliquer au recueil même, qui déplie, tout comme le plumage du paon, un brillant éventail de splendeurs. Paul J. Smith Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press, 1995), xxxi + 473 pp. with 20 plates, 13 tables, 68 music examples, and 2 figures. A book with a title like this is not an obvious candidate for review in the pages of Rhetorica. A rhetorical way of thinking, however, often sur­ faces in unexpected places. For example, as Paul Grendler has recently confirmed, Cicero played a central role in the educational practice of six­ teenth-century Venice,1 providing some of the key principles by which those who lived and worked there constructed and articulated their own distinctive culture. Feldman begins from the premise that music is a part of this culture and shows that the compositional practice of the day evolved along distinctly rhetorical lines. The key text in this story is Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which advocates Italian rather than Latin as the language of literary expression and Petrarch in particular as the model for the vernacular lyric. In part Bembo and the rhetorical culture for which he wrote were attracted to Petrarch's mastery of sound, and previous music historians have traced this aspect of Bembo's poetics in the practice of the madrigalists of his day. Feldman, however, argues that the influence of the treatise is far greater than previous scholars have believed. Bembo read Petrarch through a Ciceronian filter in which three principles assumed special importance: first, style should be separated into three distinct levels, high, middle, and low; second, the principle of variazione (variation) should create a balance within each style between gravitd (gravity) and piacevolezza (pleasingness); and third, styles should be matched to subjects through decoro (propriety). In particular, Bembo made decoro defined as "moderation" the fundamen1Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 203-34. Reviews 229 tai principle of his stylistics and linked it to variazione, creating a procedure for moderating extremes through variation to avoid excessive emphasis in any single rhetorical register. Such self-expression through a moderation of extremes, Feldman argues, is peculiarly Venetian, for Bembo's readers were accustomed to constructing a stylized self-presentation based on reserve and discretion. Bembo's treatise, in other words, connects Venetian civic identity, rhetorical principles, and expressive idioms in a distinctive, all-encompassing way. This argument is developed in detail in the fifth of ten chapters in the book. The four preceding chapters lay the groundwork by studying the men who patronized composers in sixteenth-century Venice and the infor­ mal "academies" in which patrons and composers (and others) came together to exchange ideas. Two Florentine exiles, Neri Capponi and Ruberto Strozzi, appear to have been the main benefactors of Venice's two most famous mid-century madrigalists, Adrian Willaert and Cipriano de Rore. As wealthy nobles, Capponi and Strozzi practiced an elite, private sort of patronage, in contrast to that of "new men" like Gottardo Occagna, who supported the publication of music in an effort to make himself upwardly mobile, and of Venetian patricians like Antonio Zantani, who added the printing of music to the collection of antiquities, the commis­ sioning of portraits, and other cultural activities designed to bring public recognition and honor to his family. The most renowned vernacular liter­ ary academy in mid-century Venice, however, was presided over by Domenico Venier. Venier himself wrote Petrarchan poetry and provided a drawing room in which musical settings of that poetry were performed, in accordance with Bembo's interpretation of Ciceronian principles. The last five chapters of the book focus more specifically on the theory and composition of this rhetoricized music. The first significant effort to link language and sound came from a priest named Giovanni del Lago, but the link was not really consolidated until 1558, when Gioseffo Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche...