Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in

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Dominion of the Ear: Singing the Vernacular in
Piazza San Martino
Blake McDowell Wilson
Dickinson College
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LATIN AND VERNACULAR IN QUATTROCENTO FLORENCE AND BEYOND
Dominion of the Ear: Singing the
Vernacular in Piazza San Martino
Blake Wilson, Dickinson College
IT IS PROBA BLY SAFE
to say that most Florentines of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries learned what they knew of the world by hearing about it. Outside of a small group of well-educated readers, most learned about history, theology, science, geography, mythology, literature, and even the breaking news of
the hour by hearing it from preachers, orators, heralds, and the ceaseless chatter
and storytelling that coursed through home, workshop, and public space. Even
much of the material that found its way into the city’s countless literary scrapbooks (zibaldoni) bears the stamp of orality, having been either transcribed from
live performance or intended for storage in memory as fodder for future oral delivery. It was a loquacious and sonorous world that increasingly demanded various kinds of rhetorical skill on both sides of the oral discourse, and this torrent
of talk was born along by a Tuscan vernacular that was quickly coming of age as
a vehicle of eloquence. But to the great extent that we study this discourse through
its written residue, we receive a problematic and incomplete picture of Florentine oral culture and of the practice and development of Tuscan vernacular. One
of the least-understood performers in this oral discourse was also one of its purest practitioners, the oral poet who for over a century delighted, instructed, and
moved Florentines in song and verse at an unlikely location in the heart of the
city.
During the course of the late fourteenth century, a relatively small piazza in
the center of Florence, situated in the dense urban cluster between the Cathedral
and the Palazzo Vecchio, emerged as the primary venue for the public performances of the city’s canterini (or improvvisatori). Sporadic references beginning
Contact Blake Wilson at Dickinson College, 238 S. Pitt St., Carlisle, PA 17013 (wilson@dickinson
.edu).
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 16, number 1/2. © 2013 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2013/1612-0007$10.00
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in the thirteenth century suggest that similarly favored sites for public performance developed in other cities, but in fact Piazza San Martino is the only one
for which there is clear evidence of a continuous use and well-established tradition.1 It is surprising, therefore, that no serious effort has been made to trace the
history or significance of San Martino, which can begin only when we move beyond our anachronistic and largely negative perception of the phenomenon as
the conjunction of an “unwritten” practice with an unbuilt space.
There is some confusion about the exact location of this piazza, as there
were two adjacent piazzas that have born the same name. The small piazza currently named San Martino is so named for the charitable confraternity, the Buonomini di San Martino, that opens on to it. The confraternity was founded in
1442 by Archbishop (and later Saint) Antoninus to serve the poveri vergognosi,
the “shamed poor,” and one may wonder how these proud but temporarily impoverished Florentines would have felt about receiving food handouts in one of
the most public places in the city, if indeed this piazza was the arena of the canterini.2 Just to the west is the currently named Piazza dei Cimatori, which earlier was called the Piazza San Martino del Vescovo, or Piazza del Convento di
San Martino, after the ancient parish church of San Martino that faced this piazza (the other piazza bearing the name “seconda piazzuola di San Martino”).3
This in fact is the freestanding church depicted in the Codex Rustici compiled
by Marco di Bartolomeo Rustici around 1444; the faint remains of its central
arch are still visible on the eastern wall of this piazza.4 Its founding in 986 and subsequent donation to the monks of the nearby Florentine Badia were associated
with the bishop of Fiesole (hence the name “dal vescovo”), and it continued to
function as an important parish church until 1479, when the parish was sup1. Ezio Levi, “I cantari leggendari del popolo italiano nei secoli XIV e XV,” suppl., Giornale storico
della letteratura italiana 16 (1914): 1–159, 5–19. A book-length study of the Italian canterini, or improvvisatori, is forthcoming in my Dominion of the Ear: Memory, Song, and Oral Poetry in Early Renaissance Italy.
2. On the buonomini, see Dale Kent, “The Buonomini di San Martino: Charity for ‘the glory of
God, the honour of the city, and the commemoration of myself,’ ” in Cosimo “Il Vecchio” de’ Medici,
1389–1464, ed. F. Ames-Lewis (Oxford, 1992), 49–67; and more recently Samantha Hughes-Johnson,
“Early Medici Patronage and the Confraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino,” Confraternitas 22
(2011): 3–25.
3. Walther Limburger, Die Gebäude von Florenze: Architekten, Strassen und Plätze in alphabetischen Verzeichnissen (Leipzig, 1910), appendix. The Piazza had been renamed “dei Cimatori” by
1783.
4. For the Rustici image, see Giovanni Fanelli, Firenze architettura e città, 2 vols. (Florence, 1973),
2:65. There can be no certainty that Rustici’s image is an accurate depiction of San Martino; on the
cultural context of his codex, see Kathleen Olive, “The Codex Rustici and the Fifteenth-Century
Florentine Artisan,” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 593–608.
Dominion of the Ear | 275
pressed and joined to that of San Procolo and its building divided into two
sections, the western part given to the Buonomini, the eastern part to the Compagnia dei Sarti.5
It must have been this second piazza, with its ancient social anchoring in one
of the primary parish churches of the late medieval city, that was the site of public singing.6 Performance activity at San Martino is datable to the late fourteenth
century, if not earlier, well before the foundation of the Buonomini, making this
other piazza a more obscure and less likely venue before 1442. The parish piazza
was also at the center of the city’s most important wool-processing district, the
Por San Piero district. The artisans of the many botteghe in this area were the primary producers and consumers of the popular poetry heard at San Martino, and
the audiences, whom we know to have been a mix of artisans and patricians, no
doubt included the wealthier patrons and buyers who had reason to visit this area
regularly. The nearby workshops were an essential component of the San Martino phenomenon, and it is not difficult to imagine some of the improvisations
made public in the piazza being given a first hearing among a small circle of friends
in a nearby bottega.7
It is not clear where a canterino of the generation of Antonio Pucci (1310–88)
would have performed. Pucci’s jab at public singers of verse who performed in
various disreputable places suggests that in the midtrecento there was as yet no
consensus.8 The earliest known reference to the performances at San Martino
occurs in the commentary of Filippo Villani (1325–1407) to the first canto of
Dante’s Inferno. When Virgil first speaks to Dante, he introduces himself as “poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto/ figliuol d’Anchise,” and it is Virgil’s “I sang” that
drew forth Villani’s digression on the contrast between ancient song and the
5. Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine divise ne’ suoi quartieri, 10 vols. (Rome,
1972; first published Florence, 1754–62), 1:208; Limburger, Die Gebäude von Florenze, 109; Walther
Paatz and Elizabeth Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1940–), 4:123–30;
Arnaldo Cocchi, Le chiese di Firenze dal secolo IV al secolo XX (Florence, 1903), 118–23.
6. Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 42–43.
7. The most frequently recorded profession among the city’s public poets is that of barber: Antonio da Bacchereto recorded in 1459 that he gave up his trade as a barber to become a full-time
canterino; Marco Villoresi, “Note e divagazioni sul canterino Antonio di Giovanni da Bacchereto
(ca1425–90),” Medioevo e rinascimento 13 (1999): 231–47, 233–34. The city’s most notorious popular
poet, Burchiello, was a barber, and its most famous canterino, Antonio di Guido, followed his father’s
footsteps when he was inscribed in the Arte dei medici e speziali as a barber in 1441; Lorenze
Böninger, “Ricerche sugli inizi della stampa fiorentina, 1471–1473,” La Bibliofilia 105 (2003): 225–48,
232.
8. Le Noie, lines 79–81, in Rimatori del Trecento, ed. Giuseppe Corsi (Turin, 1969), 883: “A noia
m’ è che è dicitore / dica per rima in luogo disonesto / e chi nel priega li fa poco onore.”
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“inhonesta” and “turpia” singing to be heard in “area Sancti Martini” (a protohumanist trope on the decadence of modern culture in relation to antiquity).9
The commentary was probably composed near the end of Villani’s life, during
circa 1391–1405 when he had assumed Boccaccio’s place as reader of Dante at
the Florentine Studio, and seems to describe a practice that was already well
established by this time. That he should take a negative view of the place is no
surprise, given that the self-important old scholar was prime fodder for the
savage caricatures that were part of the ritual of San Martino. In La Buca di
Montemorello, a long terza rima poem almost certainly tied to the San Martino
environment, Stefano Finiguerri (“Il Za”) created a series of such portraits, including a sketch of Villani as a bewildered and pedantic dotard.10
The fifteenth century was the golden age of public performances at San
Martino, when the venue acquired prestige, and an increasingly professionalized
class of canterini were drawn to it. Scattered among letters, tax reports, and poetry rubrics are dozens of references to the poets/singers who “canta [no] in panca
in San Martino” (who sing on the bench at San Martino). Andrea da Barberino,
who was described in one source as “Maestro Andrea che chantò in Sa’ Martino,”
probably began his poetic career there well before his death in 1431/3.11 Antonio
di Guido, the most famous public singer of the time, made his debut there as a
young singer in 1437 and was still performing there in the 1480s when Michele
Verino heard him “singing the wars of Orlando” in “vico Martini.” The rubrics
for his small but often-copied corpus of poems that survive in writing invariably refer to him as “Maestro Antonio che chanta in San Martino.”12
9. Filippo Villani, Expositio seu comentum super “Comedia” Dantis Allegheri, ed. Saverio Bellomo
(Florence, 1989), 148: “e cantai: Nobiles Grecorum iuvenes nescire canere sibi ad ignominiam
deputabant, et fydibus armoniam modulare; et talibus mellicis sonis in conviviis utebantur. Sic apud
Virgilium Yopa solis et lune canebat errores, deque prime etatis hominibus, et que talia. Non ut
nostris temporibus videmus puellas inhonesta et turpia decantare, ut torpentem excitent venerem; vel
etiam que vanissima et ab omni vertitate remota, lire temperamento, concinunt ioculares quidam,
persimiles comicis, quos pellendos ex urbibus Plato decrevit, in area Sancti Martini, ubi magnus
colligitur numerus proditorum. Et adverte quod versus poetarum ita ad organum et ad liram decantabantur, sicut psalmodie prophete.”
10. Antonio Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Rinascimento, 1375–1449
(Rome, 1989), 294–95: “Giunsevi de’ Villan tutto ismarrito / messer Filippo, ed era in pelliccione, / e dove
era il mio Tier se ne fu ito, / dicendo:—Tier, tu sai mie condizione: / io sono stato un pezzo allo spedale;
/ E Tier li disse:—Predicar non vale, / ché se lasciasti lo spedale e ’l letto / facesti bene, e questo sare’
male. / La buca vi guarrà d’ogni difetto, / e potrebb’ esser ch’aresti due balle / d’oro massiccio, e anco vel
prometto– / Raddoppiògli la forza in sulle spalle, / e disse a Tieri:—I’ son tuo servidore / e seguirotti per
monte e per valle–” (III 64–78).
11. Gloria Allaire, Andrea da Barberino and the Language of Chivalry (Gainesville, FL, 1997), 6.
12. For example, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (hereafter BML), Conventi soppressi
109, fol. 18v.
Dominion of the Ear | 277
The Florentine most closely involved with San Martino was Michele di Nofri
del Giogante (1387–1463), an accountant, poet, and close friend of the Medici
who acted as a kind of teacher and impresario for the performances there. In
1435, shortly after the great canterino Niccolò Cieco d’Arezzo moved to Florence
with Michele’s help, the two had a falling out when Michele made unauthorized
transcriptions of some poems Niccolò recently “cantava in San Martino.”13 In
1454, Michele wrote to Cosimo’s son Piero de’ Medici requesting assistance for
the family of a teenaged boy, one Simone di Grazia, whom he had “already put
to singing improvisations on the bench at San Martino.” He went on to remind
Piero of the boy’s performances at a private dinner party, when the latter had
brought with him “a pleasing little book I had made for him, and he had sung a
good part of the material written in it at San Martino, including a little work
maestro Niccolò Cieco performed as a motet at San Martino.”14 The venue and
its poetic material were well known to Michele’s Medici patrons; Michele prepared a collection that he “made at the behest of my more than superior Piero di
Cosimo de’ Medici,” which contained “certain additions which you will see that I
found over time, and we know where: from that source from which these things
always spring, and known to all the crowd.”15
The last professional canterino to make San Martino his primary venue was
Cristoforo Fiorentino, “L’Altissimo,” who performed there during ca. 1480–1515.
Two works from this period are explicitly tied to San Martino, his Rotta di Ravenna (following a battle that took place in 1512), which was “sung in San Martino of Florence all’improviso by the Florentine poet Altissimo, poet laureate,
copied from live performance by various persons while he sang,” and his much
longer Primo libro de’ Reali, a cantare that occasioned ninety-four appearances at
San Martino spread across a year (1514–15), according to a more or less regular
calendar.16
We hear little about San Martino after Cristoforo departed for Venice in 1515,
and his great popularity may have sustained the site through the waning days of
13. Antonio Lanza, Lirici toscani del Quattrocento, 2 vols. (Rome, 1973), 1:671.
14. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo avanti il principato, xvii, 108; trans. in Dale Kent, Cosimo
de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, CT, 2000), 47–48.
15. These verses are part of Michele’s dedicatory poem; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale
(hereafter BNC), Mgl. XXV, 650, 1r (flyleaf ); trans. and discussed in ibid., 73, and Dale Kent,
“Michele del Giogante’s House of Memory,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, ed.
William Connell (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 110–36, 118–19: “fatto . . . con certe agiunte qual vedrai ch’i’
piglio / col tempo aute donde noi sapiamo, / là dove sempre germinò tal fonte, / palese all’universo.”
16. BML, Palatino 119, fol. 50r: “La rotta di Ravenna cantata in san martino allo improvise/ dallo
altissimo poeta fiorentino poeta laureato. copiata dalla viva voce da varie persone mentre cantava.” On
the performance schedule of the Primo libro, see Luca Degl’Innocenti, I “Reali” dell’Altissimo: Un ciclo
di cantari fra oralità e scrittura (Florence, 2008), 103–14, 235–39.
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the Florentine republic and during a period when print had begun to change the
way poetry was disseminated in Italy. But for nearly a century and a half, this
unique physical space was the focal point of a vital popular literary culture, one
recorded in an enormous body of poetry and prose but that was quintessentially
oral and expressed through performance at this site. What we know about it
suggests a scene quite different from what most might imagine today. The best
performers aspired to and prepared for their appearances there, and benches arrayed in the piazza could probably accommodate a crowd of one to two hundred
(including standing room). The performer mounted a bench, or panca, which
might have been either a stone bench built into the wall near the entrance to the
church of San Martino or a freestanding platform or a combination of the two.
A Florentine woodcut originally produced as the frontispiece for the first edition
of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante depicts an attentive crowd on rows of benches, with a
well-dressed canterino, lira da braccio in hand, seated well above the heads of
his audience (see fig. 1).17 We know the San Martino audiences were similarly
arrayed on benches, and in fact it is difficult to imagine any Florentine space but
San Martino that could have inspired this image.18 The acoustics of the small
piazza, completely surrounded on all sides as it was, would have worked both
to shut out the noise from without and to amplify a performer’s voice and instrument. However, any extraneous noise from the audience or adjacent streets
could easily disrupt the performance, but a performer surely commanded the attention (and subsequent payments) of his audience by the skill and charisma of
his performance. The audience in the Morgante woodcut does not look like a
group that suffered fools or mediocre performers lightly, and one would expect
no less from a tough-minded and sharp-witted Florentine borghese.
The public performances at San Martino, along with other manifestations of
Florentine public life like the sacre rappresentazioni, outdoor preaching, and the
city’s many feste, might also be understood as the result of transformations of the
city’s late medieval politics and urban fabric. During much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the old center was a cluster of wooden houses, parish churches,
and the towers of the feudal nobility who dominated the neighborhoods and whose
need for security and enclosure had shaped these areas into twisted labyrinths
of narrow passageways, blind alleys, and tiny piazzas.19 By circa 1300 most of
17. Among the many reproductions of this woodcut, see James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and
Music in the Renaissance, 1350–1600 (Berkeley CA, 1986), plate 4.
18. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, 44; Rodolfo Renier, ed., Strambotti e sonetti dell’Altissimo (Turin,
1886), xi: “ma lo havere io di voi le banche piene.”
19. The character of these neighborhoods at this time rendered them utterly unsuitable for public
gatherings; see Paula Lois Spilner, “Ut Civitas Amplietur: Studies in Florentine Urban Development,
Dominion of the Ear | 279
Figure 1. Luigi Pulci, Morgante (Florence, ca. 1500), frontispiece, Piero Pacini
the wooden structures had been destroyed by fire and civil war, the towers symbolically cut back to fifty braccie (26.5 meters), and civic building was underway
throughout the city on an astonishing scale: the fourteenth-century city was transformed by the construction of a new cathedral, two large palaces to house the civic
government, a new prison, the guild palaces, the huge convents of the mendicant
orders, the Orsanmichele grain market and oratory, and a new set of city walls that
expanded its area from 200 to 1,500 acres. Integral to the new urban planning
were piazzas that, like those of the new cathedral and the Palazzo Vecchio, were
carved out at the great expense and effort of the communal government to raze
and relocate the property of citizens and churches. In particular, the construction
of the civic government complex (the Palazzo Pubblico, Loggia de’ Lanzi, and Piazza della Signoria), removed as it was from the city’s centers of commerce (the
Mercato Vecchio) and religion (the cathedral), constituted an especially bold formulation of the city’s new corporate and institutional order, and it has compelled
scholars to view the piazza as a quintessentially communal space within this re-
1282–1400,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987), 1:26: “The advantages of free circulation
and accessibility inherent in the original Roman plan were eschewed in favor of the security afforded
by enclosure, by the frustration of continuous passage, and by the isolation of clusters of buildings
focused inward on protected spaces.”
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mapped urban setting.20 Deliberations of the priorate regarding the piazza reveal
practical reasons for such a space: an appropriate setting for civic ceremonies like
the handing over of the banners of the civic militia to its gonfaloniers, for the
occasional public parlamento (or concio), and for the swearing in of civic officials like the Podestà, Captain of the People, the Priors, and the Gonfalonier of
Justice but also a space adequate to the mustering of the civic militia during periods of civic unrest. Trachtenberg has argued for the piazza as part of the “architectural apparatus for the spatiovisual production of power” by the regime (a
“dominion of the eye”), but Milner has taken issue with the passivity imputed to
the piazza occupants by this argument and posited a more dynamic “intersection
of communication, knowledge, and power” mediated through the ringhiera, the
raised platform constructed on the exterior of the Palazzo and opening onto the
piazza.21
Piazza San Martino was no such place of deliberate public planning, civic
contestations of power, and formalized rhetoric. Its character, in fact, derived
from both its proximity to such gathering places and its sufficient distance
from these more regulated environments of official religious and governmental
business. Even when the bustle of construction was not underway in the large
piazzas, they were noisy, open spaces ill-suited to the more intimate species of
vernacular oratory being practiced in San Martino. And this was probably no
less true of some of the older public sites, like the Mercato Vecchio and the Orsanmichele grain market.
San Martino was nevertheless the beneficiary of urban transformations that
altered the entire center of the late medieval city. It was originally inhabited by
two of the most fractious families in the city, the Cerchi (the remnant of whose
tower is still to be seen on the south side of the piazza) and the Donati, whose
legendary rivalry and clashes led, according to Dino Compagni, to the civil war
between the Whites and Blacks in which Dante became embroiled.22 The area
was a cluster of wooden houses, eventually destroyed by fire during the feuding,
20. Nicolai Rubinstein, “The Piazza della Signoria in Florence,” in Festschrift Herbert Siebenhüner,
ed. Erich Hubala and Gunter Schweikhart (Würzburg, 1978), 19–30.
21. Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern
Florence (Cambridge, 1997); Stephen J. Milner, “Citing the Ringhiera: The Politics of Place and Public
Address in Trecento Florence,” Italian Studies 55 (2000): 53–82, 79. It was Trachtenberg’s compelling
thesis in Dominion of the Eye that not only suggested the title of my article but helped me to theorize
the early modern piazza as a deliberate cultural space and to understand the unique quality of San
Martino as a public space resistant to usurpation by an elite special interest, where dominion of a
different and more traditionally Florentine sort obtained.
22. On the location of the Cerchi and Donati enclaves, see Loris Macci and Valeria Orgera,
Architettura e civiltà delle torri: Torri e famiglie nella Firenze medievale (Florence, 1994), 60.
Dominion of the Ear | 281
and it was a warren of narrow passages intended to frustrate easy passage and
favor inward-facing clusters of buildings that afforded the security of enclosure.
It was, in other words, a most unlikely site of public gatherings of any kind.
By the early fourteenth century, the guild-based government had dealt with
the area aggressively: the towers had been cut off at twenty-nine meters, and
new streets were punched right through the middle of the Cerchi compound toward the palace of the podesta (the Bargello), with the intention of opening the
area up to access by communal militia. Nonconforming families were literally attacked, and in his chronicle Dino Compagni describes having led a militia to destroy the Galigai enclave in the neighborhood.23 During the fourteenth century,
the area was transformed into the most prestigious and profitable of the city’s
four districts devoted to the production and sale of wool, the Por San Piero district. This area alone was licensed by the Wool Guild to process fine English wool
into the expensive luxury cloth that came to be known as “San Martino,” named
for the parish church that faced this piazza. This made the area the richest commercial and artisan district in the city, and at the heart of the Wool Guild’s carefully controlled itinerary by which foreign buyers were conducted among the many
workshops here was the Piazza di San Martino del Vescovo, as it had been called
for centuries by this time.24 The ancient parish church of San Martino del Vescovo
was one of the most important in the medieval city, so by 1400 the church and
its piazza stood at the center of a thriving commercial and parish district.
No great monuments of civic or religious authority impinged on the area, and
it was untouched by the wave of fifteenth-century palace building that transformed streets like Via de’ Ginori (behind the Medici palace) and Borgo
degli’Albizzi and that completely displaced the workshops of the wool district
across the river. A 1525 census of the area shows that the streets feeding onto this
piazza were still crammed with workshops whose artisans, proprietors, and customers had for over a century been the primary producers and consumers not
only of wool but of the poetry heard at San Martino.25 With the pacification
of the neighborhood, and its transformation into a center of Florentine artisan
culture, it became a prime site for attracting a citizenry that was increasingly ha23. John Najemy, “Florentine Politics and Urban Spaces,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social
History, ed. Roger Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cambridge, 2006), 19–54, 31.
24. Adrienne Atwell, “Ritual Trading at the Florentine Wool-Cloth Botteghe,” in Crum and
Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, 182–215, 201–3. Her reconstruction shows a T-shaped route, with
present-day Via de’ Tavolini running east from Orsanmichele and intersecting with Via dei Cerchi at
the Piazza San Martino del Vescovo.
25. BNC, Nuove accessioni 987, fols. 98r–98v; here the piazza is called “la piazza del convento di
san martino maggiore con cinque bocche,” while that of the Buonomini is “la piazza di San Martino
con quattro bocche.”
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bituated to the communal life of its piazzas and more closely identified with its
political life.
The vast and varied literary repertory in which Florentines of all kinds engaged San Martino can thus be viewed not simply as a vague manifestation of a
vital “popular culture.” Rather it forms a speculum of a shared discourse on a
range of topics that reinforced Florentine identity on a variety of fronts and reveals
the dynamic processes by which information and stories of all kinds were shaped,
reshaped, and transmitted.26 Although often conservative and nostalgic, the literary practice at San Martino was hardly unreflexive. The cantari are exemplary
in this respect: Florentines, like citizens in many Italian cities, seemed never to
tire of hearing about the deeds of the Carolingian paladins, a fascination manifested as well in both the Latin and volgare versions of Donato Acciaiuoli’s Vita
Karoli, Ugolino Verino’s Latin poem Carliade, and the burlesque treatment of
these stories in Pulci’s Morgante. The allure of these tales was, however, derived
also from the capacity of the canterini and their audiences to “read” into them
narratives of a particularly Florentine sort: the struggle against foreign usurpers
of liberty, a fascination with the trappings of feudal culture as a traditional language of power, and even a belief in Charlemagne as one of the legendary founders of the city.27 The cantare thus proved to be remarkably adaptable, capable of
absorbing an endless variety of new material through rifacimento and digression
and, thus, of developing its own oral version of an intertextual practice. The pin-
26. For overviews of fifteenth-century artigianale/borghese/municipale literature in general, see
Alessandro D’Ancona, La poesia popolare italiana (Livorno, 1906; repr., Bologna, 1974); Francesco
Flamini, La lirica toscana del rinascimento anteriore al tempo del Magnifico (Pisa 1891; repr.,
Florence, 1977); Emilio Pasquini, “Letteratura popolareggiante, comica e giocosa, lirica minore e
narrativa in volgare del Quattrocento,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, 14 vols. (Rome, 1995–2005),
3:803–911; Lanza, Lirici toscani, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Rinascimento, and
La letteratura tardogottica: Arte e poesia a Firenze e Siena nell’autunno del Medioevo (Rome, 1994);
Paolo Orvieto, Pulci medievale: Studio sulla poesia volgare fiorentina del quattrocento (Rome, 1978);
Gian-Mario Anselmi, Fulvio Pezzarossa, and Luisa Avellini, La “Memoria” dei Mercatores: Tendenze
ideologiche, ricordanze, artigianato in versi nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Bologna, 1980); Kent, Cosimo
de’ Medici, chap. 6. On that part of this literary tradition that was specifically a letteratura canterina,
see Emilio Pasquini, “Il codice di Filippo Scarlatti (Firenze, Biblioteca Venturi Ginori Lisci, 3),” Studi di
filologia italiana 22 (1964): 363–580; Armando Balduino, “Letteratura canterina,” in Boccaccio, Petrarca
e altri poeti del Trecento (Florence, 1984), 57–92; and Marco Villoresi, “La biblioteca del canterino
Michelangelo di Cristofano da Volterra,” in Il cantare italiano fra folklore e letteratura: Atti del convegno internazionale di Zurigo, Landesmuseum, 23–25 giugno 2005, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Luisa
Rubini (Florence, 2007), 175–209.
27. Marco Villoresi, “Firenze e i fiorentini in alcuni testi cavallereschi del quattrocento,” Medioevo
e Rinascimento 16 (2002): 75–100, and “Tra Andrea da Barberino e Luigi Pulci: La letteratura
cavalleresca a Firenze nel Quattrocento,” in Paladini di carta: Il modello cavalleresco fiorentino, ed.
Marco Villoresi (Rome, 2006), 9–30, 18–22.
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nacle (and perhaps limit) of the oral practice at San Martino was reached by
Cristoforo “L’Altissimo.” Near the end of his Florentine career, between June
1514 and July 1515, he appeared in Piazza San Martino on ninety-four occasions, singing and re-creating from memory the 3,700 stanzas of his Primo libro
de’ Reali. In this chivalric cantare, Cristoforo included some remarkable digressions, of the kind Florentine audiences had come to expect from their star performers; in this case, Cristoforo drew on elements from, among other sources,
Leonardo da Vinci’s writings on hydraulics, an early theological treatise by Marsilio Ficino (Di Dio et Anima), and Johann Ketham’s well-known medical treatise, Fasciculus medicinae.28
As Antonio Lanza pointed out some time ago, one of the two misconceptions
regarding the practice at San Martino is that the repertory was strictly “cavalleresco, amoroso, classico,” the other being the assumption that the piazza was
frequented only by lowbrow illiterates.29 The images that linger in modern imagination are those put forward by early humanist scholars, whose own critical
stances toward “texts” were diametrically opposed to the textual promiscuities of
the oral poets and who were perhaps particularly defensive about the precarious
status of Italian as a written literary language. During a visit to Treviso in 1304,
the Paduan protohumanist Lovato de’ Lovati encountered a canterino in a piazza
“roaring about Carolingian battle order and Gallic deeds.” In polished Latin verse
Lovati described hearing “songs consigned to the Frank’s tongue, ruined with barbaric interruptions everywhere, songs with no plot, dependent on no thread . . .
but the mob seemed to like them.”30
In a letter to Boccaccio written around 1364, Petrarch attacked both the trade
and the character of these singer-poets: “You know this vulgar and banal breed
that makes a living on words not its own; they have spread among us to the point
of nausea. They are men of no great talent, but great memory and great drive and
even greater effrontery, who frequent the palaces of rulers and powerful men,
devoid of anything of their own, yet dressed in others’ verses. Whatever someone
else has neatly said, especially in the vernacular, they declaim with inordinate
28. Degl’Innocenti, I “Reali” dell’Altissimo, 179–83.
29. Antonio Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Quattrocento: Storia e testi
(Rome, 1971), 104.
30. Edited and trans. in John Ahern, “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of Dante’s Comedy,” Annals of Scholarship 2 (1981): 17–40, 23–24: “Fontibus irriguam spatiabar forte per urbem, / que
tribus a vici nomen tenet, ocia passu / castigans modico, cum celsa in sede theatri / karoleas acies et
gallica gesta boantem / cantorem aspitio; pendet plebecula circum, / auribus arrectis; illam suus allicit
Orpheus. / Ausculto tacitus: Francorum dedita lingue / carmina barbarico passim deformat hiatu, /
tramite nulla suo, nulli innitentia penso / ad libitum volvens; vulgo tamen illa placebant.”
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emphasis, seeking the nobility’s favor, money, clothing, and gifts.”31 Early quattrocento Florentine humanists were no kinder in their views of both the performers and their gullible audiences. In his Facezie, Poggio Bracciolini recounts
the story of a man from Milan who, after hearing “one of those singers who sing
the deeds of heroes recounting the death of Orlando,” returned home to his wife
in tears and inconsolable to report: “Orlando is dead, the sole defender of Christians.”32 The next fable recounts a canterino who is heard performing the Trojan
Wars, and when the singer announces at the end of his performance that he will
return the next day to deliver the Mortem Hectoris, a transfixed listener offers
to pay the canterino if he will agree to delay the death of such a great hero as
Hector. The canterino delays the famous death until the poor fool runs out of
money, whereupon Hector is promptly killed off and the fellow is left in a desperate state.33
But this can hardly be taken as a widespread view, even among well-educated
Florentines. Cristoforo described his audiences at San Martino as composed of
“tante nobil persone,” and a particular fan of San Martino was the promising
young humanist scholar Michele Verino, who sometime in the early 1480s was
dazzled there by a performance of the “wars of Orlando” delivered by an aging
Antonio di Guido.34 Among the most active patrons of the San Martino poets and
performers were the Medici themselves, and Lorenzo not only practiced the canterino’s art but in his rare leisure moments sought out the company of Antonio di
Guido and his lira da braccio.35
The full breadth of the letteratura canterina heard at San Martino overlapped
with that performed in the more specialized environments of the Palazzo Pub31. Francis Petrarch, Letters of Old Age Rerum senilium libri I–XVIII, vol. 2, trans. Aldo Bernardo,
Saul Levin, and Reta Bernardo (Baltimore, 1992), 157–66.
32. Poggio Bracciolini, Facezie, ed. and trans. Marcello Ciccuto (Milan, 1983), 200–202: “Hic
presimilis est viro Mediolanensi, qui, die festo, cum audisset unum et grege cantorum (qui gesta
heroum ad plebem decantant) recitantem mortem Rolandi . . . ‘Heu! Mea uxor . . . mortuus est
Rolandus, qui solus tuebatur Christianos.’ ”
33. Ibid., 202. Although not Bracciolini’s intention, these stories also testify to the performative
abilities of these canterini. It also bears emphasizing here that the Latin text refers quite clearly to the
performers as singers (cantor) and what they do as both decantare and recitare, underscoring an
important point: while at times these performers may have simply recited rather than sang, there is
rarely a clear distinction, suggesting that what they did most often, if not always, was pitched singing
with a flexible verbal rhythm that gave the impression of recitation (vs. “song”).
34. Il primo libro de’ Reali (Venice, 1533), cantare LXXX; cited in Renier, Strambotti e sonetti, xii–
xiii. Verino’s letter is in Armando Verde, ed., Lo studio fiorentino, 1473–1503: Ricerche e documenti,
6 vols. (Pistoia, 1977), 4, pt. 2:689.
35. Mario Martelli, Studi laurenziani (Florence, 1965), 122–25; Blake Wilson, “Canterino and
Improvvisatori: Oral Poetry and Performance,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music,
ed. Anna-Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin (Cambridge, forthcoming).
Dominion of the Ear | 285
blico (especially during the mensa) and in private homes, and its expressive
range, rhetorical strategies, functional variety, and social context constitute one
of the most significant manifestations of civic culture in the city.36 As a “literature” inextricably linked to the personalities and performances of individual
singers and to the immediate oral context of those performances, it is best approached as a component in what Zumthor called the “totalizing function” of oral
performance: the performer, his “text,” the occasion, and the audience are so
intertwined as to be inseparable.37
It was the public dimension of San Martino as a piazza, a space controlled by
no special interests, which guaranteed that the materia and the performers heard
there would undergo a much broader dissemination. After Cristoforo’s Rotta di
Ravenna was transcribed by hearers from live performances at San Martino, it
was eventually printed (in 1516), as was his Primo libro de’ Reali, and the last
chapter of his career unfolded in Venice, where a new generation of canterini
would find new life in the interactive, hybrid world of oral performance and
print.38 Antonio di Guido performed at San Martino throughout his nearly halfcentury career, but he was also to be found in the intimate circles of three generations of Medici from Cosimo to Lorenzo, and in the 1470s he was involved
in the early Florentine book trade, specifically with the financing and sale of the
first printed edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron.39 Most of the surviving poetry
of Niccolò Cieco was composed before he moved to Florence around 1435, but
redactions into manuscript of the blind canterino’s works appear to have taken
place almost entirely in Florence. The fame of his San Martino performances was
known to Giovanni Pontano in Naples long after Niccolo’s death in the 1440s,
and his poetry flowed from San Martino transcriptions into the personal anthologies and zibaldoni of countless Florentines. The humanist poet and notary
Alessandro Braccesi (1445–1503) recorded a sonnet “in laude Nicolo Ciecho,” and
the well-known library of Giovanni Mazzuoli (Padre Stradino; ca. 1480–1549)
included a book of “canzoni di maestro Niccolo Cieco.”40 Michele del Giogante
was a veritable conduit of poetry and performers between San Martino and his
36. On the singers of the mensa, see Timothy J. McGee, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence (Bloomington, IN, 2009), 92–97, 133–37.
37. Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Minneapolis,
1990), 117–18.
38. Rosa Salzberg, “In the Mouths of Charlatans: Street Performers and the Dissemination of
Pamphlets in Italy,” Renaissance Studies 24 (2010): 638–53.
39. Böninger, “Ricerche sugli inizi,” 231–35.
40. On Braccesi, see BML, Plut. 91 supp., cod. 41, fols. 93v–94r; Berta Maracchi Biagiarelli,
“L’Armadiaccio di Padre Stradino,” Bibliofilia 84 (1982): 51–57.
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wide circle of friends and patrons. That circle included Leon Battista Alberti and
Piero de’ Medici, the cosponsors of the 1441 Certame Coronario in which Michele
was a participant.41 The Certame was a juried competition among a select group
of poets whose submissions on the topic of amicitia were to demonstrate the
capability of Italian vernacular to rival Latin with respect to specific parameters
such as invention, ornament, and the use of sentenzie. Notwithstanding the uncertain results of the competition, the event was a landmark in the history of the
volgare. By the 1460s, the efforts of a new generation of Florentine literati to
revitalize Italian as a language of culture had grown in intensity and sophistication; a product of this environment was the Raccolta Aragonese, an anthology of
Tuscan poetry compiled under Poliziano’s supervision and delivered by Lorenzo
de’ Medici to Federico d’Aragona around 1477. The collection included works by
Niccolò Cieco, Michele del Giogante, and their contemporaries and signaled a
broadened view of Tuscan literary achievement.
However, the Raccolta was but a precursor to one of the most significant
chapters in the history of Tuscan lyric poetry, during which Lorenzo, Poliziano,
and the other poets in Laurentian circles fused in their own poetry elements
drawn from both the aulic and popular traditions represented in the Raccolta.42
The dissemination of this poesia strambottistica (or poesia rispettistica, named for
the central role the ottava played in this tradition) within and beyond Florence
was the work of Baccio Ugolini, Jacopo Corsi, and other Florentine poeti performativi.43 However much these humanist improvisers would claim ancient models for their practice of improvised and instrumentally accompanied performance
of poetry, that practice descended directly from the oral practices of the San
Martino environment.44 In a similar manner, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante constitutes
a critical link between the oral cantari performed at San Martino, from which
Pulci drew direct inspiration, and the literary exaltation of Carolingian epic in
the works of Boiardo and Tasso.45
41. Lucia Bertolini, “Michele di Nofri del Giogante e il Certame Coronario,” Rivista di letteratura
italiana 5 (1987): 467–77, 473.
42. Giovanni Bronzini, Tradizione di stile aedico dai cantari al “Furioso” (Florence, 1966). Wilson,
“Canterino and Improvvisatori.”
43. Alessandra Curti, “Le rime di Baccio Ugolini,” Rinascimento 38 (1998): 163–203, 166–69;
Marco Villoresi, “Panoramica sui poeti performativi d’età laurenziana,” Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana 34 (2009): 11–33, 19–29.
44. This was true, as well, of the primary accompanying instrument of the improvvisatori, the
nomenclature of which shifted gradually from “viuola” to the classically-inspired “lira da braccio,”
although the instrument remained a product of local, vernacular culture without ancient precedent.
45. On the relationship of Morgante to Florentine canterino culture, including the role of Antonio
di Guido in Pulci’s work, see Luca Degl’Innocenti, “Il poeta, la viola e l’incanto: Note sull’iconografia
del canterino nel primo Cinquecento,” Paragone Letteratura 93–95 (2011): 141–56; and Orvieto, Pulci
Dominion of the Ear | 287
As Peter Howard has observed with respect to the “aural space of the sacred,”
fifteenth-century Florentines were accustomed to moving about their city, seeking out its public spaces, and having their visual imaginations stimulated by
hearing the live voice, whether from preachers, heralds, political leaders, merchants, or a variety of public performers.46 San Martino was the manifestation of
a Florentine oral environment that was at once local, vernacular, and reflective
of the city’s social values and attitudes, in which “performers” of various kinds
brought their own brands of eloquence to bear on audiences they were particularly adept at gauging. But unlike the piazzas fronting large churches, administrative buildings, or private palazzi, San Martino was not a “practiced place” where
a dominant group sought to impose its symbols of authority, and it certainly was
not a site where one could be tempted to speak of passive and politically disenfranchised crowds subject to a “dominion of the eye” that piazzas potentially
afforded.47 The communal practice at San Martino was socially heterogeneous
and intensely interactive, and whereas the Tuscan vernacular was the tool of eloquence elsewhere, it was singularly on display here, as a poetic language continually being forged and reforged, tried on a vast array of subjects, and dispersed
through the operations of memory and transcription into writing. As Lorenzo
de’ Medici and Poliziano tacitly acknowledged in the Raccolta Aragonese, if one
wanted to hear the language at the wellsprings of its emergence, one could no
better than visit “we know where, that source from which these things always
spring, and known to all the crowd.”
medievale, 178–86. These works by Pulci, Boiardo, and Tasso were all printed while yet retaining their
connection to the oral world of the improvvisatori, which suggests something of the complex relationship between oral and written dissemination that surrounded the cantari, a situation that drew some
canterini into the print business; see James Haar, “From Cantimbanco to Court: the Musical Fortunes
of Ariosto in Florentine Society,” in L’arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Massimiliano Rossi and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence, 2004), 179–97; and
Marco Villoresi, “Zanobi della Barba, canterino ed editore del rinascimento,” in Picone and Rubini, Il
cantare italiano fra folklore e letteratura, 461–73.
46. Peter Howard, “The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence,” in Crum and
Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, 376–93, 380–87.
47. Stephen J. Milner, “The Florentine Piazza della Signoria as Practiced Place,” in Crum and
Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, 83–103. San Martino also differed from the large, heterogeneous spaces
shared by preachers, haranguers, hawkers, and entertainers of the scope idealized in Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina,
2 vols. (Turin, 1996).
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