Madrigals and Sannazaro's Arcadia

The Madrigal and its Outcasts: Marenzio, Giovannelli, and the Revival of Sannazaro's
Arcadia
Author(s): Giuseppe Gerbino
Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 3-45
Published by: University of California Press
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The Madrigal and its
Outcasts: Marenzio,
Giovannelli, and the Revival
of Sannazaro’s Arcadia
GIUSEPPE GERBINO
A
mong the madrigals published in Luca
Marenzio’s only book for four voices is a setting of the concluding lines
of eclogue VIII from Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Marenzio drew exten-
sively from the works of Sannazaro, but this is one of his most beautiful
and yet curious pastoral landscapes:
3
Vedi le valli e i campi che si smaltano Behold the valleys and fields how
they are enameled
di color mille; e con la piva e ’l crotalo With a thousand colors; and how
with bagpipe and castanet
Intorno ai fonti i pastor lieti saltano. The joyous shepherds dance about
the fountains.
Vedi il monton di Frisso, e segna e Behold the Ram of Phrixus, and mark
notalo, it and note it,
Clonico dolce, e non ti vinca il tedïo; Sweet Clonico; and let not tedium
master you
Ché ’n pochi dí convien che ’l sol For in a few days the sun must surely
percotalo. strike it.1
An earlier version of this article was read at the 1999 meeting of

the American Musicological Society in Toronto, Canada. I am
most grateful to James Haar, John Nádas, and the anonymous
readers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
1 English translation from Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, trans.
Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1966), 89. The “monton di Frisso” is an
erudite astrological allusion to Spring, but the meaning of the last line is not very clear.
It might refer to the imminent arrival of Summer. See Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed.
Francesco Erspamer (Milan: Mursia, 1990), 145–46.
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 3–45, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.
© 2004 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
the journal of musicology
Clonico is a love-struck shepherd who is ready to die. The cruel woman

who inflamed his heart leaves him no choice other than to kill himself
and thus extinguish the all-consuming desire that makes existence
unbearable. Eugenio, the fellow shepherd who utters the lines set to
music by Marenzio, seeks to console him. The eclogue begins with
Clonico’s lament and ends with Eugenio’s remedium amoris: the tough
but simple life of the shepherd will make you forget: “così si scaccia
amore” (thus love is chased away). It is a gloomy affair, although this is
not the atmosphere Marenzio’s madrigal conveys. What we are asked to
imagine is a rather conventional scene of bucolic carelessness.
“Vedi le valli” exhibits all the stylistic features of the light-hearted
madrigal that made Marenzio famous in the 1580s. Indeed, Marenzio’s
leisurely approach to the text somewhat clashes with the actual affective
content of Sannazaro’s poem. Optical illusions of this kind are not un-
common in the musical repertory of pastoral inspiration fashionable in
the 1580s. Almost any naturalistic description, once cropped out of its
original context, can be “sold” as a miniature idyllic landscape portray-
ing the eternal beatitude of the mythical inhabitants of Arcadia. How-
ever, a closer look at both poetry and music reveals another, less evident
4 clash, that between the modern, fashionably progressive style of Maren-
zio’s music and the archaic, unconventional flair of Sannazaro’s poetry.
Although more than 80 years separated the first authorized edition
of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504) from Marenzio’s musical setting (1585),
chronology tells only half the story. What renders this madrigal some-
thing of a curiosity is the metrical structure of the text, i.e. tercets of
versi sdruccioli. A sdrucciolo line is one in which the last accented syllable
is followed by two unaccented ones. Or to put it differently, the ending
of the line coincides with a proparoxytone word (smáltano, crótalo,
etc.). Italian verse overwhelmingly privileges the regular pace of piano
endings (words in which the accent falls on the penultimate syllable).
And this is the reason why sdrucciolo lines tend to sound somewhat “off
measure.” In the linguistic culture of 16th-century Italy, issues of verbal
rhythm and metrical organization were central to the definition of the
rhetorical boundaries of poetry. But compositions such as “Vedi le valli”
do not conform to the highly controlled Petrarchan vocabulary inform-
ing the madrigal repertory, a vocabulary that banned, among other
things, the use of sdrucciolo lines. On the contrary, they seem to flaunt
the exceptionality of the sdrucciolo. They appear as diversions from the
norm, educated gestures of linguistic non-compliance.
They often exhibit rather distinctive musical features as well. The
best way to set a proparoxytone word to music is to further its natural
dactylic rhythm with a figuration of this kind: . A composer may
choose to emphasize or downplay the rhythmic drive of the sdrucciolo,
gerbino
but its effects on the music are unmistakable. A brief analysis of the
central episode of Marenzio’s madrigal will help illustrate the potential
musical repercussions of this metrical configuration.
Rhythm is the essence of Marenzio’s setting. Lilting figurations in
dotted rhythm animate the madrigal throughout. They serve to evoke,
for example, the rustic sounds of the “piva” and “crotalo” in measures
15–19 (see Ex. 1). They also accompany, with an even greater iconic
force, the main verb at the end of line 3, “saltano,” on which a large
part of this long musical episode is built. It is on this dance scene (lines
2–3, mm. 15–42) that Marenzio’s musical narrative lingers, stretching
the temporal perception of this single event well beyond its syntactic
value. The rest of the poem recedes to the background. In measures
26–34, the second hemistich of line 2 (“et con la piva e il crotalo” ) is
ingeniously combined with the bouncing verb “saltano.” In a typically
Marenzian style, contrapuntal intensification is achieved through a sort
of chessboard texture in which the two lower voices exchange parts
with the upper voices. The purely spatial conception of this contrapun-
tal writing enhances the kinetic madrigalism, as it were, associated with
the reiteration of “saltano,” a three-note motive whose alternately as-
cending and descending appearances indeed seem to bounce against 5
each other. The music revels in an almost three-dimensional sensation
of space and movement. The image of shepherds dancing and jumping
around the fountains to the sounds of “pive” and “crotali” materializes
before our eyes with astonishing acoustic realism.
The dance is eventually brought to an end by a stretto of sorts on the
“saltano” motive (mm. 38–42), leading, through a sudden harmonic ac-
celeration crossing the circle of fifths (g–c–f–b ), to the climactic point
of repose provided by the repetition of “vedi” (a textual anaphora that
Marenzio underscores with an analogous musical gesture). The decla-
mation of the text now moves at a faster, more cursory pace. The some-
what sibylline imagery of the poetry does not seem to have had much to
offer the composer’s imagination. Dotted rhythms flicker in the re-
maining three lines.
Marenzio’s output includes six madrigals incorporating sdrucciolo
lines, two in the third book for five voices (1582), and four in the book
for four voices (1585).2 In 1585, Ruggero Giovannelli, Marenzio’s most
2 Luca Marenzio, Il terzo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1582): no.
5 “La pastorella mia” (second part “Eco rimbomba”); idem, Madrigali a quattro voci, libro
primo (Rome: Gardano, 1585): no. 9 “Vedi le valli,” no. 16 “I lieti amanti e le fanciulle
tenere,” and no. 21 “Vienne Montan, mentre le nostre tormora” (second part “Corbo
malvagio,” third part, in terza rima piana, “La santa Pale”). As I mentioned at the outset,
Marenzio’s involvement with Sannazaro’s poetry extended well beyond the sdrucciolo
madrigals. His output contains an unusually high number of settings from both the Arca-
dia and Rime, a circumstance that probably reflected the literary interests of the Roman
example 1. Marenzio, “Vedi le valli,” mm. 15–43
$15 Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł ð
Š .. ½ ¼
et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo

Š .. ½ ¼ Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł ð

et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo
²ð Ł Ł ÿ ÿ ÿ ½ Ł
Š .. ¼
+ in -
Ý. ð Ł Ł Ł
ÿ ÿ ÿ ½ ¼
% . in -
$20 ŁŁð Ł ý Ł ² Ł ý Ł ð
Š ÿ ÿ ½ ¼ ð Ł
i pa-stor lie - ti sal - ta -no lie - ti
6
ÿ ÿ
Š ŁŁð ð ð Łý Ł ð Łý Ł ð
i pa-stor lie - ti sal - ta -no sal - ta -no
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð Ł Ł ð Ł ý Ł ²Ł ý Ł ð ½ Ł ý Ł ² Ł ý Ł ð
Š Ł
+ tor - no ai fon - ti i pa - stor lie - ti sal - ta-no
Ł Ł Ł ð Ł Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł
lie - ti sal - ta - no
Ý Ł Ł Ł
Ł
%
tor - no ai fon - ti i pa - stor lie - ti lie - ti lie - ti sal - ta -
$26 Łý Ł ð
Š ½ Łý Ł ð ¼
Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł ð Łý Ł ð

sal - ta -no sal - ta - no et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo sal - ta - no

Š Łý Ł ð ÿ Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł ð ½ Łý Ł

sal - ta -no sal - ta -no et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo sal - ta -
ð Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł ð ½ Łý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Ł ý Ł
Š ¼
+
ý Ł Ł ý Ł Łý Ł
et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo sal - ta - no et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta -
Ý ð ¼ Ł Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł ð Ł Łý
ÿ ¼
% no et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta -
gerbino
example 1. (continued )
$32 Łý Ł Ł Łý Ł ð Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁŁ Ł ð Ł Ł ð ½
Š ¼ Ł

sal - ta -no sal - ta - no sal - ta-no in - tor - no ai fon - ti i pa - stor

Š ð ¼ Ł ŁŁŁ ¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¼ Ł ŁŁŁŁŁ Ł ð Ł Ł ð ð
no sal - ta-no sal - ta - no in - tor - no ai fon - ti i pa - stor lie -
Ł Ł ý Łý Ł Łý Ł Ð Ł ý Ł ² Ł ý Ł
Š Łý Ł
ÿ ÿ
+ lo et con la pi - va e’l cro - ta - lo lie - ti sal - ta -
ý ý ŁŁŁŁ Ł Ł
Ý Ł Ł Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ð ÿ ÿ
% lo et con la pi - vae’l cro - ta - lo lie - ti
$38 Ł ý Ł ²Ł ý Ł ð Łý Ł ð Ł ŁŁŁ ð ð ²ð
Š ¼ Ł ŁŁð

lie - ti sal - ta - no sal - ta - no sal - ta-no sal - ta-no Ve - di
7
Łý Ł ð
Šð Łý Ł ð Łý Ł ð −Ł ý Ł ð ð ð ð

ti sal - ta - no sal - ta - no sal - ta - no sal - ta - no Ve - di
ð Łý Ł ð Łý Ł ð Łý Ł ð Ð Ð
Š ½

+
Łý Ł −ð
no sal - ta-no sal - ta-no sal - ta - no Ve - di
Ł Łý Ł ð Ð
Ý ŁŁŁŁ Ł Łý Ł ð Ð
%
lie - ti sal - ta-no sal - ta-no sal - ta - no Ve - di
promising colleague in Rome, published a collection of four-voice

madrigals dedicated entirely to Sannazaro’s sdruccioli.3 The title in the
intellectual circles with which his patrons associated. For a basic background see James
Chater, Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577–1593 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1981), 1: 28–30. The Sannazaro settings in the 1588 book of madrigals for four,
five, and six voices are discussed in Richard Freedman, “Marenzio’s ‘Madrigali a quattro,
cinque et sei voci’ of 1588: A Newly-Revealed Madrigal Cycle and its Intellectual Con-
text,” Journal of Musicology 13 (1995): 318–54.
3 Ruggero Giovannelli, Gli sdruccioli: il primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (Rome: Gar-
dano, 1585). Modern edition in Teresa Florio, “Ruggero Giovannelli, ‘Gli sdruccioli, il
primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci’ ed ‘Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci’: Edi-
zione critica” (Diss., Università di Pavia, Scuola di Paleografia e Filologia Musicale, 1990).
frontispiece, Gli sdruccioli, was clearly meant to advertise the novelty of

this enterprise. Four years later Giovannelli decided to invest again in
this genre and published a new collection of sdruccioli drawn from the
Arcadia.4
It is clear even from these few details that it was not chance that led
Marenzio and Giovannelli to set their sights on Sannazaro’s sdruccioli.
What happened in the 1580s that prompted musicians to “rediscover” a
verse type so foreign to the madrigal repertory? In an important study
on the musical reception of Sannazaro in the 16th century, Silke Leopold
attributes this choice to the musicians themselves, suggesting that they
were attracted by the strongly accentuated rhythm of the proparoxy-
tone rhyme and the somewhat popularizing tone associated with it. In
this attraction we can recognize the early signs of a changing approach
to the relationship between text and music, one that preferred strongly
accentuated meters and periodic structures to the traditional prose-like
pace of 16th-century polyphony. In other words, the musical appropria-
tion of Sannazaro’s sdruccioli in the 1580s foreshadowed Gabriello Chia-
brera’s musical-poetic reformation that would eventually open the gates
to Baroque music.5
8 Leopold’s interpretation looks to the future of Italian music. It is
based on our exclusive knowledge of what would happen in the years
that ensued. The interpretation I would like to suggest here in a sense
reverses this process. It looks back to the past to claim that the meaning
(or the motive) of Giovannelli’s and Marenzio’s settings is to be found
in cultural and stylistic trends that preceded the revival of the 1580s. I
4 Ruggero Giovannelli, Gli sdruccioli a quattro voci con una caccia in ultimo a quattro,
cinque, sei, sette e otto . . . libro secondo (Venice: Gardano, 1589). To be sure, the caccia men-
tioned in the title page (a seven-madrigal cycle depicting a wolf hunt) is not in sdruccioli;
nor is the text drawn from Sannazaro’s Arcadia, although Uranio’s song in the sixth part
cites two lines from eclogue II. It is more than likely that Marenzio and Giovannelli were
aware of each other’s work. In 1585 they seem to have been careful to avoid setting the
same passages, with the sole exception of Marenzio’s “Vienne Montan,” which partially
overlapped with Giovannelli’s “Dimmi caprar novello.” In 1589 Giovannelli reset two of
the texts selected by Marenzio in 1582 and 1585, “La pastorella mia” and “I lieti amanti e
le fanciulle tenere.” See Chater, Luca Marenzio, 1: 29–30.
Both Giovannelli’s books of sdruccioli went through seven editions. Interesting statis-
tical data on the commercial successes of these two collections may be found in Paolo
Cecchi, “La diffusione e circolazione della produzione profana di Ruggero Giovannelli,”
in Ruggero Giovannelli: musico eccellentissimo e forse il primo del suo tempo, Atti del Convegno
Internazionale di Studi (Palestrina-Velletri, 12–14 giugno 1992), ed. Carmela Bongio-
vanni and Giancarlo Rostirolla (Palestrina: Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina,
1998), 655–59. Giovannelli turned again to Sannazaro’s sdruccioli for the publication of
his first book of three-voice madrigals (Venice: Gardano, 1605): “Dimmi caprar novello”
(second part “Ma con Uranio,” third part “Cantiamo a prova”), and “I vecchi quando el
fin.”
5 Silke Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole di Iacopo Sannazaro: struttura
poetica e forma musicale,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 14 (1979): 75–127.
gerbino
am also convinced that their interest in such a singular specimen of

Italian versification was not necessarily dictated by intrinsically musical
reasons. A significant clue is that the only sdrucciolo lines they set to mu-
sic were by Sannazaro. The author/authority behind the poetry was at
least as important as the metrical peculiarities of the poetry itself.
Giovannelli’s commitment to the Arcadia is particularly curious, for
his first book of sdruccioli was also his first printed madrigal collection.
As an editorial debut, a book entirely devoted to one poet and one met-
rical form was surely an unusual, if not bizarre, choice. The dedication
to “Ferrante Penna Barone d’Ailano,” from whom Giovannelli hoped
to obtain either employment or some sort of protection, contains a
most interesting statement: “In order to realize this thought of mine, I
set about composing some madrigals on the sdrucciolo rhymes of the
most beautiful and graceful Sannazaro, the honor of your regal Naples.” 6
The book does seem to have been conceived as a public homage to the
Neapolitan Sannazaro. Or better, Giovannelli capitalized on a distinc-
tively southern sense of cultural identity that took pride in Sannazaro’s
poetic legacy. So there may have been a rather utilitarian client-patron
relationship behind the monothematic rigor of Giovannelli’s collection.
But the fact that he could court a patron with a literary-musical homage 9
of this kind implies deeper elements. Why, in Rome in 1585, did it be-
come so important, and potentially remunerative, to reaffirm the glory
of a poet of the caliber and popularity of Sannazaro? Why did this cele-
bratory act focus on such a specific aspect of his poetic output (namely
the cultivation of sdrucciolo lines)? How are we to understand the link
between deviation from the norm and regional pride in the musical
culture of the 1580s? And above all, why did this homage take the form
of a musical offering? Given the importance I am attributing to Giovan-
nelli’s dedicatory letter to the otherwise unknown Penna, all this might
appear to be a mere detail of historical erudition. However, in the fol-
lowing pages an attempt will be made to demonstrate that study of the
musical fortunes and misfortunes of Sannazaro’s text has something
distinctive to contribute to an understanding of the rhetoric of stylistic
selection that surrounded the development of the Italian madrigal.7
6 “Per condurre dunque a fine questo mio giusto pensiero, presi a comporre alcuni
madrigali sopra le rime sdrucciole del vaghissimo et gratiosissimo Sanazaro, honore del
vostro regale Napoli . . . .” Giovannelli, Sdruccioli: il primo libro, dedication.
7 Leopold rightly pointed out that this new interest in Sannazaro’s sdruccioli appears
to have been a fundamentally Roman phenomenon. Indeed, Giovanni Battista Moscaglia,

who first published a madrigal on Sannazaro’s sdruccioli (“Che farai Meliseo” in his Il
secondo libro dei madrigali a cinque voci, 1579) frequented the same musical and social cir-
cles as Giovannelli and Marenzio. It is also true, however, that the connection with Rome
is not so strong, for example, for a Florentine composer such as Cristofano Malvezzi,
who as early as 1583 set to music “I tuoi capelli o Filli in una cistula” (Il primo libro delli
Of sdruccioli and shepherds

The sdrucciolo was established as a landmark of pastoral poetry in
the second half of the 15th century. Needless to say, Renaissance liter-
ary theorists sought to find an explanation for the unique properties of
this verse type in classical prosody. According to Vincenzo Calmeta:
. . . since it was known that Latin and Greek authors appropriately

placed certain dactyls in their bucolic lines in order to preserve the
lowliness of the bucolic verse (so as to distinguish it from the heroic
verse), the vernacular poets found a way to insert the dactyl, which is
called sdrucciolo in the vernacular, at the end of their lines in order to
distinguish the high-style tercets from the style of the eclogue.8
Calmeta offered a genealogy perfectly in line with humanistic culture

of his time. The sdrucciolo rhyme is but the equivalent in Italian of the
dactylic ending of certain Latin and Greek meters. Of course, rather than
explaining, this sanctioned the convention that linked the sdrucciolo
with the pastoral eclogue in 15th-century Italy. But that the sdrucciolo
was and continued to be perceived as somewhat reminiscent of ancient
10 prosodic rhythms is confirmed by the use that Ludovico Ariosto made
of it in his verse comedies, entirely written in sdruccioli. Long sections in
sdruccioli also punctuate Annibal Caro’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, de-
spite what Calmeta had written about the distinction between heroic
and bucolic poetry. The sdruccioli of Ariosto’s comedies were meant to
imitate the iambic trimeter employed in Latin comedies (∪-∪- ∪-∪-
∪-∪-).9 Not all 11-syllable lines of the sdrucciolo variety follow this
accentuation pattern. Those that do, however, have a very distinctive
rhythmic quality whose musical implications will be discussed below. La
madrigali a cinque voci), followed, in 1584, by a setting of “La pastorella mia spietata e
rigida” (Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci). The only direct evidence of ties with Roman
musicians is the inclusion of his madrigal “Com’è contrario” in Le gioie: madrigali a cinque
voci di diversi eccellentissimi musici della compagnia di Roma (Venice: Amadino, 1589), and
possibly his affiliation with Emilio de’ Cavalieri and Ferdinando de Medici. For this rea-
son, I should probably clarify from the outset that, while focusing on the related cases of
Marenzio and Giovannelli, this article does not make any conclusive claim as to the “epi-
center” of the sdrucciolo revival, be it a person or a city.
8 “. . . conoscendo che i Latini e ancor più i Greci ne’ versi bucolici locano certi dat-
tili a loro proprie sedi, per tenere in bassezza il bucolico verso, che dall’eroico sia differ-
ente, così fu trovato da’ volgari di mettere il dattilo nel fin del verso che volgarmente si
chiama sdrucciolo acciocché da’ grandiloqui ternari fosse lo stil dell’egloga differente.”
Vincenzo Calmeta, “Dell’antichità del bucolico verso e che circostanze all’egloga si con-
vengono,” in Prose e lettere edite ed inedite, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bologna: Commissione per i
testi di lingua, 1959), 14.
9 See Aldo Menichetti, Metrica italiana: Fondamenti metrici, prosodia, rima (Padua: An-
tenore, 1993), 116–17, and 123–24.
gerbino
pastorella mia from Sannazaro’s first eclogue can be viewed as falling in

this category: Lă pástŏréllă mía spiĕtáta ĕ rígı̆dá.10
When Calmeta talked about the lowliness of bucolic verse (and
consequently of the sdrucciolo) he referred to the well-known rhetorical
hierarchy constructed on the works of Virgil, in which pastoral poetry
occupied the lowest position as the embodiment of the stylus humilis. It
is important to stress that this division of stylistic levels does not imply
that the sdrucciolo was regarded as an inherently crude or coarse line. In
other words, it would be misleading to equate Sannazaro’s sdruccioli with
those found more than a century later in opera librettos and associated
with grotesque or comic characters: comic no longer in the rhetorical
sense of the term (the same way Dante’s poem was a “comedy”) but in
that of a degraded style.11 True, the signs of a parodistic declension of
the sdrucciolo verse were already amply visible in the 16th century, as
will become clear later in this article. It all depended on who expressed
himself in sdruccioli, whether a Virgil look-alike shepherd or a coarse-
tongued peasant.12 However, in the world of the eclogue of classical in-
spiration the sdrucciolo was meant to evoke the noble simplicity of the
inhabitants of Arcadia; it was a language ideally closer to the sound of
Latin prosody than to the deformed accents of bucolic expressionism. 11
There is some evidence of a specific musical tradition associated
with the sdrucciolo. By way of introduction, it is worth quoting in full an
episode of Serafino Aquilano’s career narrated by Vincenzo Calmeta:
Serafino was not yet content with his Burchiellesque sonnets, his bal-
late, and his strambotti and determined not only to sniff at but to taste
and digest all other styles. During one Carnival season, having decided
10 It may be useful to remember that the rhythmic structure of the hendecasyllable
is archetypically iambic (what Menichetti calls the “arcimodello”; see ibid., 394). Further-
more, although the equivalence between 11-syllable lines and the trimetro giambico may
strike us as somewhat arcane, the application of classical prosody to the rhythmic analysis
of Italian verse was not uncommon in the theoretical writings of the 16th century. Gian
Giorgio Trissino proposed to analyze the rhythms of Italian lines by dividing them into
four-syllable “measures” (misure). Measures were defined by the combination of the four
basic two-syllable feet found in classical versification (∪-; -∪; ∪∪; – –), for a total of 16
combinations. According to this system, the endecasillabo sdrucciolo (12 syllables) is a full
trimetro (three measures of four syllables); hence the final-syllable accent (theoretical, not
real) in my text. See ibid., 388.
11 On the use of sdrucciolo lines in the context of the metrical structures of early
opera see Paolo Fabbri, “Metrical and Formal Organization,” in Opera in Theory and Prac-
tice: Image and Myth (The History of Italian Opera, part II/Systems, vol. 6) ed. Lorenzo
Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), 159–66, and
the bibliography cited therein.
12 There is no comprehensive study accounting for the different rhetorical uses of
the sdrucciolo. A first attempt in this direction is Edoardo Fumagalli, “Tra metrica e reto-
rica: endecasillabi sdruccioli da Boiardo a Marino,” in The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine
Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque (Toronto: Legas, 1994), 157–77.
to leave Cardinal Ascanio [Sforza], he wrote an eclogue that begins

“Tell me, my Menander” in imitation of Jacopo Sannazaro, at that time
the leader of bucolic verse. In his eclogue Serafino criticized behind
the veil of poetic artifice the greed and other detestable vices of the
court at Rome; he recited it during Carnival with the backing of Cardi-
nal [Giovanni] Colonna and with it he aroused new admiration.13
The eclogue Dimmi Menandro mio is written in tercets of sdruccioli. Given

Serafino’s fame as a singer-improviser, one is tempted to imagine that
the poem, or parts of it, may have been sung, perhaps on an aria delib-
erately devised for sdrucciolo lines. A clue to this effect may be found
in Francesco Salinas’s De Musica Libri Septem. Unfortunately, it is a clue
whose interpretation is not as simple as might appear at first sight.
Among the musical examples transcribed in Book VI is the following
melody (Ex. 2) that Salinas uses to illustrate the rhythmic configuration
of those lines “qui ab Itali Sdruzuli, hoc est, lubrici vocantur” (that Ital-
ians call sdruccioli, i.e. slippery).14
The first thing to note is that this is a musical transliteration of the
rhythm of the iambic trimeter that Ariosto sought to reproduce in the
sdruccioli of his verse comedies. The coincidence is enough to raise
12
some suspicion. So before we rush to the conclusion that we are deal-
ing with an example of an aria for singing sdruccioli, we need to follow
the logic of Salinas’s discourse more closely.
Salinas’s theory of musical rhythm is based on the classical theory
of metrical feet. Following a practice that was by no means uncommon
in the 16th century,15 he applied the same classical theory to the analy-
sis of the rhythms of Italian prosody as well. The result was a humanisti-
cally conceived system of structural equivalences in which each meter,
from the simplest to the most complex, could be musically translated
13 “Non ben contento ancora Serafino de’ sonetti burchielleschi, ballate e stram-
botti, ma deliberando tutti gli altri stili non solo odorare ma gustare e ben digerire, es-
sendo al carnevale propinquo e già in deliberato pensiero de partirse dal cardinale, fece
una egloga che comincia Dimmi Menandro mio, imitando Jacobo Sannazaro, il quale del
bucolico verso in quelli tempi otteneva la palma, e in quella con artificioso velame l’avari-
cia e alcuni altri detestandi vizi della corte di Roma lacerava; e recitatala il carnevale col
favore de Gioanne Cardinale Colonna, tuttavia di se stesso più rendeva ammirazione.”
Vincenzo Calmeta, “Vita del facondo poeta vulgare Serafino Aquilano,” in Prose e lettere,
65. English translation from Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk (revised
edition by Leo Treitler; New York: Norton, 1998), 323. A rubric in the manuscript Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale, cod. it. 1020 transmitting the eclogue in question indicates that
Serafino played the part of Menandro: “Acta ludis Romanis: Auctor Seraphinus amiterni-
nus qui, persona Menandri indutus, tempora et servicia damnat . . .” (fol. 138r). See
Giuseppina La Face Bianconi and Antonio Rossi, Le rime di Serafino Aquilano in musica
(Florence: Olschki, 1999), 11.
14 Francesco Salinas, De Musica Libri Septem (Salamanca: M. Gastius, 1577; repr.
Documenta Musicologica 1/13, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958), 301.

15 See n10 above.
gerbino
example 2. Salinas, De Musica Libri Septem, 301

Hypothetical text underlay (Sannazaro: Arcadia, I:91–92)
ð Ð
Ýð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð
[La pa - sto - rel - la mia spie - ta - ta e ri - gi - da
Ýð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð
Che not - t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la]
as a series of long and short note values (semibreves and minims),

which in turn mirrored the accentuation patterns found in the verses of
romance languages (Spanish, French, and Italian). The melody I just
cited appears in the chapter on iambic meters as a musical example of
the iambic trimeter acatalectic, to which corresponds, as Salinas ex-
plains, the Italian line known as sdrucciolo.16 What the overlapping folds
of this methodology exemplify is first and foremost a worldview—a
mental framework that gave meaningful shape to the historical continu-
13
ity that, Salinas believed, underlay the seeming multiplicity of human
experience across a distance of several centuries. He weaved the threads
of an elegant, even fascinating reality; but to what extent the examples
put forward to illustrate and corroborate such a view of the world re-
flected actual musical practices is much more difficult to establish. In-
deed, that the melody in question cannot be regarded as an “aria” used
specifically to sing sdrucciolo lines is suggested by the fact that Salinas
avails himself of the same formula to reproduce the rhythm of the iambic
trimeter catalectic, which is to say, in Italian poetry, an 11-syllable line
with a piano ending. The only difference is that the 12th note at the
end of each of the two musical phrases is dropped (which is precisely
what made the line catalectic, in terms of Latin prosody, or piano, in
terms of Italian prosody).17 On the other hand, we cannot dismiss
16 As an example, Salinas quotes the last two lines of Sannazaro’s eclogue XII.
17 To put it another way, for Salinas the function of these two musical examples was
to illustrate the link between the iambic trimeter catalectic and the iambic trimeter
acatalectic (i.e. piano hendecasyllables and sdrucciolo hendecasyllables), not to provide a
transcription of an aria for singing sdruccioli (or piani, for that matter). A different inter-
pretation, grounded on the assumption that the melody transcribed by Salinas had its
roots in folk musical traditions, is proposed in Ferdinando Tagliavini, “Metrica e ritmica
nei ‘modi di cantare ottave,’ ” in Forme e vicende: per Giovanni Pozzi, ed. Ottavio Besomi,
Giulia Gianella, Alessandro Martini, and Guido Pedrojetta (Padua: Antenore, 1988), 257.
Tagliavini identified a similar tune in an aria for sonnets included in the collection Aeri
raccolti insieme . . . dove si cantano sonetti, stanze e terze rime (Naples: Cacchio dell’Aquila,
1577). Coincidentally, the sonnet is by Sannazaro, but is not in sdrucciolo lines.
Salinas’s testimony as an entirely theoretical fabrication. The mechani-

cally iambic rhythm here associated (albeit not exclusively) with the
sdrucciolo does seem to have had a bearing on the musical characteriza-
tion of this line type. We shall return to it in connection with the musi-
cal revival of Sannazaro’s sdruccioli in the 1580s.
Although the sdrucciolo functioned as a linguistic signifier of pas-
toral ethos, eclogues were not written exclusively in sdrucciolo lines. One
of the distinctive but also bewildering features of Quattrocento pastoral
poetry was the absence of a standardized system of metrical forms com-
parable, for example, to that of lyric poetry. The eclogue favored poly-
metrical structures in which different kinds of poetic schemes and lines
(including sdruccioli) were freely alternated. The countless formal solu-
tions devised by Quattrocento poets give the impression of an unsolved
experimentalism and, at the same time, frustrate any taxonomic effort.18
Some eclogues were written in terza rima throughout. But more typically
the terza rima acted as a neutral stylistic connector providing the narra-
tive basis onto which exuberant metrical diversions were grafted. For a
characteristic example of polymeter we may turn to the Bucoliche elegan-
tissime (1482), the most important pastoral anthology of the 15th cen-
14 tury. The structure of Francesco Arzocchi’s first eclogue, “Dimmi, Ter-
into, che hai zampogna e cetera,” is as follows:19
Lines 1–40 Tercets sdruccioli
41–48 Frottola 20
49–60 Tercets sdruccioli
61–75 Couplets rinterzati and incatenati
76–95 Quintets incatenati
96–103 Quartets frottolati
104–137 Tercets piani
How are we to interpret this structural restlessness? The norms of stylis-

tic decorum associated with the merely metrical aspects of poetic com-
18 For a rather detailed analysis of metrical schemes adopted in the eclogue from
Giusto de’ Conti to Torquato Tasso see Hayward Keniston, “Verse Forms of the Italian
Eclogue,” The Romanic Review 11 (1920): 170–86. On Giusto de’ Conti see also Italo Pan-
tani, “Il polimetro pastorale di Giusto de’ Conti,” in La poesia pastorale nel Rinascimento, ed.
Stefano Carrai (Padua: Antenore, 1998), 1–55. Still useful is also the erudite survey of
Enrico Carrara, La poesia pastorale (Milan: Vallardi, [1908]).
19 The eclogue may be read in modern edition in Francesco Arzocchi, Egloghe, ed.
Serena Fornasiero (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1995), 3–19.

20 Frottola is not to be confused with the generic term used in Ottaviano Petrucci’s
musical prints. Here it refers to the Trecento metrical form characterized by the free al-
ternation of lines of different length, often with inner rhymes. One of the most common
types features 11-syllable lines in which the fifth syllable rhymes with the last syllable of
the preceding line. See Wilhelm Theodor Elwert, Versificazione italiana dalle origini ai nostri
giorni (Florence: Le Monnier, 1973), 165–67.
gerbino
munication force us to pursue a highly formalistic analysis of this tradi-

tion whose utility may not be immediately apparent. What is important
to realize is that the Renaissance disciplinization of the relationship be-
tween form and content into a set of narrowly defined rules was more
than a stylistic pose. It had the advantage of rendering the aesthetic
claim of the content immediately recognizable through purely formal,
linguistic conventions. And when form became the tacitly universalized
testimony to the hierarchical status of the content, it appeared equally
natural to judge the content from the form.
In a penetrating essay on the metrical complexity of pastoral, from
which I draw the analysis of Arzocchi’s poem, Domenico De Robertis
characterized the eclogue as a “sign of contradiction.” 21 The contradic-
tion is visible only through the lens of Renaissance poetics, which, as I
just noted, established a precise relationship between form and content.
To every poetic intent (dramatic, lyric, comic, narrative, etc.) corre-
sponded a rhetorical register defined by codified linguistic and metrical
choices. Pastoral poetry, as Calmeta reminded us, belonged to the lowest
genus dicendi. This was the theory. In practice, the eclogue soon mani-
fested the tendency to develop a loftier, quintessentially courtly poetic
dimension, invading the stylistic sphere of lyric poetry. Divided between 15
the stylistic humility imposed on the bucolic genus and the lyric ambition
of the pastoral idyll, the eclogue dwelled in a curious poetic limbo. This
tension between the pretense of pastoral meekness and the symbolic use
of pastoral fiction as a metaphor for cultural refinement ran throughout
the 16th century. It tilted the rhetorical plane where form ought to meet
content: noble concepts in fictitiously humble garbs. Despite the best in-
tentions of literary theorists, Renaissance pastoral thrived on this rhetor-
ical misalignment, given meaning by a cultural elite that fashioned itself
into a society of shepherds through the pastoral literature it cultivated.
Sannazaro’s Arcadia represented at once the highest point of this
tradition and the fountainhead of a long-lasting fascination for pastoral
allegory. In it the shepherd Sincero narrates his pilgrimage in Arcadia.
The prose narrative is interrupted by 12 eclogues, which divide the
book in 12 sections, preceded by a short “Prologo” and followed by an
epilogue, “A la sampogna,” where the poet addresses his bagpipe, sym-
bol of pastoral poetry. The story of Sincero, who is none other than
Sannazaro himself, is neither clear nor happy. In prose VII we read that
the poet is in exile in Arcadia. He left his country, Naples, for the same
reason that had led most poets before and after Petrarch to write poetry:
unrequited love. The book is permeated with these two sentiments: the
21 Domenico De Robertis, “L’ecloga volgare come segno di contraddizione,” Metrica
2 (1981): 61–80.
memory of his love for the “piccola fanciulla” (young girl) mentioned
in prose VII, and nostalgia for his lost homeland. Sincero eventually re-
turns to Naples. Impelled by a frightening dream, he decides to aban-
don Arcadia and, accompanied by a nymph, undertakes a long journey
in the underworld. The description of this journey—loaded with sym-
bolic allusions difficult to interpret—occupies a large part of prose XII,
until the moment in which Sincero encounters Barcinio and Sum-
monzio, “shepherds widely renowned in our forest regions.” 22 Together
they remember the sad story of their friend Melibeo (the humanist
and poet Giovanni Pontano) and sing the death of his beloved Filli.
“Behold how here your travails are completed, O rustic and rural sam-
pogna,” writes Sincero in the epilogue as we learn that the “piccola
fanciulla” is also dead.
Many aspects of Sincero’s narration remain obscure, both for the
subtle allegorical plot of this pilgrimage-initiation in Arcadia and for
the circumstances that presided over the genesis of the work.23 But the
metrical schemes devised for the 12 eclogues present several points of
interest, both in the context of 15th-century pastoral poetry and in view
of their use in the madrigal repertory:
16
I 1–57: tercets sdruccioli; 58–60: tercet sdrucciolo-piano-sdrucciolo;
61–90: frottola with inner rhyme; 91–106: tercets sdruccioli
II 1–18: tercets piani; 19–38: frottola with inner rhyme; 39–56: ter-
cets sdruccioli; 57–132: section mixing eleven- and seven-syllable
lines (57–80 tercets; 81–100 quintets; 101–32 octaves); 133–
48: tercets alternating hendecasyllables piani and sdruccioli
III Canzone on the scheme of Petrarch CXXV: Se ‘l pensier che mi
strugge
IV Double Sestina on the model of Petrarch CCCXXXII: Mia be-
nigna fortuna e ‘l viver lieto
V Canzone on the scheme of Petrarch CXXVI: Chiare, fresche e dolci
acque
VI Tercets sdruccioli
VII Sestina
VIII Tercets sdruccioli
22 Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, 141.

23 See Maria Corti, “Le tre redazioni della Pastorale di P. J. De Jennaro con un ex-
cursus sulle tre redazioni dell’Arcadia,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 131 (1954):
342–51; and Gianni Villani, Per l’edizione dell’Arcadia del Sannazaro (Rome: Salerno, 1989).
A very useful review of the issues surrounding the early history of the Arcadia as well as of
the vast literature they have generated may be found in Marina Riccucci, Il Neghittoso e il
fier connubio: Storia e filologia nell’Arcadia di Jacopo Sannazaro (Naples: Liguori, 2001), 3–34.
For a general introduction to forms, contents, and poetic styles of the 12 eclogues see
also William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover: Univ. Press of
New England, 1983), 96–148.
gerbino
IX 1–51: tercets sdruccioli; 52–54: tercet sdrucciolo -piano-sdrucciolo;

55–151: tercets piani
X 1–75: tercets sdruccioli; 76–78 tercet sdrucciolo -piano-sdrucciolo;
79–161 frottola with inner rhyme; 162–204: tercets sdruccioli
XI Tercets piani
XII Tercets sdruccioli
The first two eclogues feature polymetrical structures akin to the

examples of Sienese and Florentine poets.24 The terza rima, with both
sdruccioli and piani hendecasyllables, retains its role as a typical meter of
pastoral. Eclogue XII is a superb example of the difficult elegance of
the sdrucciolo. It is Sannazaro’s lament over the death of Ariadna (i.e.
Filli), wife of his teacher and friend Pontano: a marvelous rhetorical
tour de force in which the rusticity of the line reaches a lyric depth of ar-
chaic beauty. However, from the standpoint of the musical reception of
Sannazaro’s text, the most interesting eclogues are those cast in lyric
meters uncommon to pastoral poetry. Eclogues III, IV, and V are close
imitations of poems by Petrarch, of which they retain the metrical
structure as well as some linguistic traits. Although not directly mod-
eled on Petrarch, eclogue VII, too, displays similarities with sestina
XXII, A qualunque animale alberga in terra. It is as though Sannazaro 17
sought to “Petrarchize” the pastoral eclogue. This singular case of
generic hybridization may be read as a response to the ambiguous stylis-
tic identity of the pastoral code. As De Robertis suggested, “Sannazaro
recognized that the eclogue could follow a path other than the mere
imitation of the ancient idyll and of the pastoral dialogue: it could also
become a dimension or a variant of lyric poetry.”25 Sannazaro seems to
hint at the novelty of this stylistic choice in prose IV, where the shep-
herds, commenting on the eclogue just sung, praise the “versification,
neatly turned and not in use among rustic shepherds.”26 Perhaps this
is also the meaning of the following passage from the epilogue “A la
sampogna,” a sort of apology for pastoral poetry:
And take no heed if any, perhaps accustomed to hear more exquisite

sounds, with fastidious taste should scorn your lowness, or should call
you rude: for verily, if you well consider, this is your proper and most
principal praise, provided that you do not depart from the woods and
the places fitting for you. Yet even there I know will not be lacking
24 As Maria Corti points out, the second eclogue was probably modeled on Arzoc-
chi’s first eclogue. Maria Corti, “Rivoluzione e reazione stilistica nel Sannazaro,” in Nuovi
metodi e fantasmi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001), 312–14.
25 De Robertis, “L’ecloga volgare,” 65. On the relationship between Petrarchist
forms and pastoral contents see also Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro, 114–25.
26 Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, 48.
those that examining your words with precise judgment may say that
in some place you have not well kept the laws of the shepherds, and
that it is not well for anyone to pass further than befits his station.27
The stylistic elevation of the bucolic register had an authoritative pre-

decessor: the famous incipit of Virgil’s fourth eclogue, “Sicilides Muse
paulo maiora canamus,” with which the poet warns us that we are about
to enter a thematic—and consequently stylistic—sphere higher than that
traditionally assigned to bucolic verse. However, Sannazaro’s position
went well beyond the imitation of Virgil, arriving at the heart of a matter
intimately connected with the development of Italian poetry, in an
attempt to reconcile the humilitas of the bucolic genre with the lofty in-
spiration of lyric verse. As we shall see presently, all this did not save pas-
toral poetry from the stylistic selection championed by Pietro Bembo.
But it did leave open the possibility of carving a niche for the Arcadia in
madrigalian aesthetics.
The Arcadia and the Madrigal

Sannazaro’s pastoral book was an instant best-seller. Almost 60
18
editions appeared between 1504 and 1600.28 Among them were three
scholarly editions published with the comments of well-known authori-
ties on literary matters: Tommaso Porcacchi in 1558, Francesco Sanso-
vino in 1559, and Giovanni Battista Massarengo in 1596.29 Publications
of this kind reflected an erudite interest in the language and allegorical
contents of Sannazaro’s pastoral journey that catered to the high end
of Italian readership and its literary clubs. The academy of the Innomi-
nati in Parma, for instance, seems to have welcomed many enthusiastic
readers of Sannazaro.30 Among the works produced by its members was
Antonio Droghi’s Leucadia, a pastoral play composed in imitation of the
Arcadia. It is also interesting, but not surprising, that in the 16th cen-
tury the poetic persona of Sannazaro could be heralded as a symbol of
cultural non-conformity. Thus in 1561 the statutes of an academy with
openly anti-academic ideas such as the Rozzi in Siena established that
27 Ibid., 153.
28 See Villani, Per l’edizione dell’Arcadia, 15–18.
29 See Giovanni Antonio Volpi, Le opere volgari di m. Jacopo Sannazaro . . . cioè l’Arca-
dia, alla sua vera lezione restituita, colle annotazioni del Porcacchi, del Sansovino e del Massarengo
(Padua: G. Comino, 1723).
30 On the pastoral penchant of this academy see Ireneo Affò, Memorie degli scrittori e
letterati parmigiani (Parma: Stamperia reale, 1789–1797; repr., Bologna: Forni, 1969), 4:
i–xxiii and passim; Carlo Ossola, “Varianti del potere: Caronte e Plutone,” in Le corti farne-
siane di Parma e Piacenza, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Rome: Bulzoni, 1978), 2: 273–310; and
Marzia Pieri, La scena boschereccia nel Rinascimento (Padua: Liviana, 1980), 170.
gerbino
during their meetings “no poet other than our Jacopo Sannazaro could
be read.”31
But the Arcadia was above all one of those rare books whose popu-
larity seems to have cut across social groups (relatively speaking) and
modalities of consumption. The always colorful Tomaso Garzoni pro-
vides us with an amusing testimony to the mundane favor that San-
nazaro’s pastoral enjoyed. This time we find his Arcadia in the hands of
professional go-betweens in the business of more or less illicit love
affairs, namely the ruffiani:
Like a poet, the procurer uses fables as subjects, poetry as medium,

loves as objects, singing as instrument, and the conquest of the ladies
as the primary goal of whatever he does. He carries with him Petrarch’s
sonnets, the poems of the “blind from Adria” [Luigi Groto], San-
nazaro’s Arcadia, Parabosco’s madrigals, Furioso, Amadigi, Dolce, Tasso,
and above all Olimpo di Sassoferrato’s strambotti.32
And yet, as we scan Vogel’s indexes, the musical career of this text starts
to appear much less glamorous. Printed collections from the early 1540s
through 1579 offer a steady but modest number of madrigals on the Ar-
19
cadia. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, and as Table 1a
shows in more detail, things changed only in the 1580s, when the num-
ber of musical settings suddenly spiked, mostly thanks to Giovannelli and
Marenzio.33
31 See Curzio Mazzi, La congrega dei Rozzi di Siena nel secolo XVI (Florence: Le Mon-
nier, 1882), 1: 398. Mazzi points out that the choice of Sannazaro as compulsory reading
was already put on record in 1533 during the meeting of March 16: “. . .. e dal Pronto fu
consegliato che si dovesse seguire el Sanazaro ne le rime e ne la prosa. E lo Stechito con-
fermò el medesimo e agionse che finito quello, si dovesse ricominciare. E così si messe a
partito che nissuno S[ignor] R[ozzo] per lo avenire potesse variare altra lettura mentre
che ne le rime e in la Arcadia detto autore sarà da lèggiare” (. . . the Pronto suggested that
they should follow Sannazaro both in his poetry and prose. The Stechito seconded the mo-
tion and added that once they finished [reading the works of that author], they should
read them again. So, it was put to a vote that in the future no Rozzo could change reading
and [Sannazaro’s] poems and Arcadia were to be read). Ibid., 1: 353n1. The motion was
approved 17 to 2.
32 “Il ruffiano ha poi per soggetto le favole, come il poeta, i versi per mezzo, gli
amori per oggetto, il canto per istromento e il possesso delle dive per principal fine
d’ogni cosa. Porta seco i sonetti del Petrarca, le rime del Cieco d’Adria, l’Arcadia del San-
nazaro, i madrigali del Parabosco, il Furioso, l’Amadigi, il Tasso, e sopra tutto i strambotti
d’Olimpo da Sassoferrato.” Tomaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del
mondo, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 2: 970.
33 Except for a few corrections and additions (see notes 34 and 35 below), the data
synthesized in this chart come from Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole.” The
seven madrigals recorded for the year 1560 all belong to a cycle on eclogue III (“Sovra
una verde riva”) printed in Orlando di Lasso’s Madrigali a quattro voci, libro primo (Rome:
Dorico, 1560). Although attributed to Lasso in Leopold’s article, the cycle is indicated as
“d’incerto” in the Dorico print.
30
20
10
Madrigals on Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, 1540–1635
20 1600
TABLE 1a
90
80
70
60
50
1540
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
gerbino
35
28
21
Madrigals on Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, 1579–1635
14
Other meters
Sdruccioli
21
TABLE 1b
7
1600
93
86
79
35
30
25
20
15
10
The early encounter between the Arcadia and the polyphonic madri-
gal seems to have been an essentially Venetian affair. With the sole ex-
ception of a couple of conflicting attributions to Costanzo Festa, all the
settings known for the years 1540 and 1541 are found among the works
of Ihan Gero and Girolamo Scotto.34 Curiously enough, they are all
madrigals for two and three voices:
[1540] Gero, I a 2 (NV 1123)35 Fillida mia più che i II,101

ligustri bianca
Tirrena mia, il cui II,109
colore agguaglia
1541 Gero/[Festa], I a 3 di Madonna sua mercé VII,25
C. Festa (NV 971)
Or pensate al mio mal II,86
Scotto, Madrigali a 3 Itene all’ombra degli II,1
(NV 2602) ameni faggi
Chi vuol udire i miei IV,1
sospiri in rime
Alma beata e bella V,1
Poi che’l soave stile XI,1
Scotto, I a 2 (NV 2595) Sovra una verde riva III,1
22 Fuggite omai, pensier VII,31
noiosi
The attribution of “Madonna sua mercé” and “Or pensate al mio mal”
to Festa is weak indeed. Only one of the 42 madrigals in Gardano’s Di
Costantio Festa il primo libro . . . a tre voci, con la giunta de quaranta madri-
34 I have expunged Costanzo Festa’s madrigal “Sovra una verde e delettosa riva”
(Delli madrigali a tre voci, 1537) from Leopold’s list (“Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,”
106), for the text is not by Sannazaro. The first two lines closely recall the beginning of
eclogue III, but the rest of the poem is different. We may surely take this type of literary
paraphrasing to be a sign of Sannazaro’s popularity. The practice was anything but infre-
quent in the 16th century. For example, the first and last lines of the madrigal that closes
Marenzio’s first book for five voices quote lines 13 and 15 from eclogue XI. The piece—
an eight-voice composition written in the form of echo—was clearly conceived as a sort
of musical dramatization of Sannazaro’s original tercet, which indeed addressed Eco in
line 14.
35 For the date of Gero’s collection I rely on Jane Bernstein, according to whom
“typographical evidence reveals that Scotto could only have printed the tenor partbook in
1540” ( Jane Bernstein, Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539–1572)
[Oxford-New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998], 114). The tenor partbook to which she
refers and of which only two copies survive (in Munich and Palermo) contains no imprint
data. The earliest extant complete edition of Gero’s duos is Gardano’s 1541 print. Differ-
ent hypotheses were formulated as to whether the edition of the Palermo partbook (the
Munich copy was not known prior to the publication of Bernstein’s catalogue) preceded
or followed Gardano’s print. See Lorenzo Bianconi “Weitere Ergänzungen zu Emil Vogels
‘Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens aus den Jahren 1500–1700’
aus italianischen Bibliotheken,” Analecta Musicologica 9 (1970): 162n22; and the preface
to Ihan Gero, Il primo libro de’ madrigali italiani et canzoni francesi a due voci, ed. Lawrence
Bernstein and James Haar (New York: Broude Brothers, 1980), xxiv–xxvi.
gerbino
gali di Ihan Gero can be assigned to Festa.36 On the contrary, there are
enough elements to suspect that Girolamo Scotto, who was also the edi-
tor of Gero’s collection of two-voice madrigals, was largely responsible,
in the double capacity of publisher and composer, for this early Vene-
tian concentration of musical settings from the Arcadia.37 That the his-
tory of the musical reception of this text ought to begin in Venice may
not be a coincidence. Sannazaro’s pastoral book enjoyed an immediate
and lasting popularity in the Veneto region, as witnessed by the extraor-
dinary number of manuscript copies that circulated in Venice at the
turn of the century and that ultimately led to the first unauthorized edi-
tion of 1502.38 Thus the incidence of Sannazaro in Scotto’s musical edi-
tions might have reflected a specifically Venetian taste.39
Scotto and Gero set the tone for the musical reception of the Arca-
dia in the 16th century. The excerpts featured in their collections also
became the excerpts most frequently set to music in the ensuing years.
But a more peculiar pattern conditioned the musical appropriation of
this text. Musicians dissected, as it were, the twelve eclogues according
to a rigorously selective criterion. They only drew from eclogues or por-
tions of eclogues cast in lyric meters, carefully avoiding sdrucciolo lines,
from which—as a matter of fact—Sannazaro’s book derived much of 23
its popularity and reputation.40 Table 2 lists the sections set to music
36 See Iain Fenlon and James Haar, The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century:
Sources and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 231. Furthermore,
“Madonna sua mercé” is attributed to Gero in Petreius’s anthology Trium vocum canzones
centum a prestissimis diversarum nationum ac linguarum musicis compositae (Nuremberg:
J. Petreius, 1541; repr. Renaissance Music in Facsimile 26, New York: Garland, 1986), no.
100.
37 In the dedicatory letter to Cesare Visconti, Scotto claimed to have commissioned
the music from Gero. The circumstances of Scotto’s edition are thoroughly investigated
in the preface to Bernstein’s and Haar’s edition of Gero’s book mentioned in n35.
38 See Villani, Per l’edizione dell’Arcadia; and Augusta Charis Marconi, La nascita di
una vulgata: L’Arcadia del 1504 (Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1997). On the penetration of pas-
toral taste in early 16th-century Venetian culture see also Maria Antonietta Grignani, “Ba-
doer, Filenio, Pizio: un trio bucolico a Venezia,” in Studi di filologia e di letteratura italiana
offerti a Carlo Dionisotti (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1973), 77–115.
39 If we are to believe Gaetano Moroni, among the paintings that decorated the
Hall of the Great Council in the Ducal Palace was a portrait of Sannazaro executed by
Titian. The portrait was destroyed in the fire of 1577. See Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario di
erudizione storico-ecclesiastica da S. Pietro sino ai nostri giorni (Venice: Tipografia Emiliana,
1840–61), 30: 210. Moroni might have derived this information from Volpi, Le opere
volgari di m. Jacopo Sannazaro, lxiv. A painting by Titian known as “Jacopo Sannazaro” is
housed in the Royal Collection of the Hampton Court Palace. However, the identification
of the sitter with the Neapolitan poet is definitively rejected in Harold Wethey, The Paint-
ings of Titian (London: Phaidon, 1969–75), 2: 138.
40 Sannazaro’s reputation in this matter was such that some commentators regarded
him as the inventor of the sdrucciolo, if not on the basis of historical evidence at least
honoris causa. Among the theorists who around mid-century began to show an increasing
interest along this line was Girolamo Ruscelli. His 1559 treatise on Italian versification,
TABLE 2
Musical settings from Sannazaro’s Arcadia, 1540–1579
Eclogue II Eclogue III Eclogue IV Eclogue V Eclogue VII Eclogue XI
II, 1 (3) III, 1 (9) IV,1 (1) V, 1 (1) VII, 1 (2) XI, 1 (1)
II, 4 (1) III, 14 (4) IV, 13 (3) V, 40 (1) VII, 7 (1) XI, 4 (1)
II, 7 (1) III, 17 (1) IV, 19 (3) VII, 25 (5) XI, 10 (1)
II, 81 (6) III, 27 (7) IV, 25 (1) VII, 31 (3) XI, 16 (1)
II, 86 (9) III, 40 (5) IV, 31 (2) VII, 37 (1)
II, 91 (4) III, 53 (5) IV, 37 (1)
II, 96 (4) III, 66 (5)
II, 101 (3) III, 79 (2)
II, 109 (4)
between the years 1540–1579 (the number of settings is indicated in

parenthesis).41 It only contains excerpts from eclogues II, III, IV, V,
VII, and XI. As we saw, eclogues III (canzone), IV (double sestina),
24 V (canzone), and VII (sestina) are cast in lyric meters of Petrarchan in-
spiration. Eclogue XI is in tercets of piano lines. Eclogue II is an even
more interesting case, for it does contain sdrucciolo lines, but musicians
systematically disregarded them.
It could be said that the musical reception of Sannazaro’s Arcadia
posited a hierarchical order of forms. To comprehend Marenzio’s and
Giovannelli’s stylistic gesture means to comprehend the disinclination
that the previous generations of madrigalists showed towards sdrucciolo
lines. It is not easy to isolate the men and ideas that produced this seem-
ing incompatibility between musical madrigal and sdrucciolo. But one
obvious process of linguistic selection can be suggested: the alliance that
in which forms and uses of the sdrucciolo are amply discussed, included a “rimario” of
sdrucciolo words. It is more than likely that Ruscelli’s commitment to the sdrucciolo directly
descended from Sannazaro, especially since in the course of the treatise he mentioned
that he had been working on a new edition of the Arcadia. See Girolamo Ruscelli, Del
modo di comporsi in versi della lingua italiana (Venice: Appresso Gio. Battista et Melchior
Sessa Fratelli, 1559).
41 For simplicity’s sake, madrigals are listed as individual compositions and are
arranged by first line regardless of the number of lines selected by each composer. How-
ever, I should specify that eclogue III was prevalently set to music in extensive madrigal
cycles: by Giovanni Animuccia in 1547, anonymous in 1560 (see n33 above), Francesco
Menta in 1564, and Vincenzo Bellavere and Giovanni Antonio di Mayo in 1567. Eclogue
II circulated in a less compact fashion. But there are a few madrigal cycles as well: by
Eliseo Ghibel in 1551, Giuseppe Fiesco in 1554, Vincenzo Ruffo in 1554, and Ippolito
Baccusi in 1571. For full bibliographical references and settings published after 1579 see
the appendix in Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,” 103–14.
gerbino
the madrigal established with Cinquecento Petrarchism, especially in

the form codified by Pietro Bembo. Despite the several revisions con-
ducted by Sannazaro on the text of the 1504 edition, his Arcadia still car-
ried the signs of that error of history that Petrarchism sought to correct.
Such signs included the quixotic prosody of the humanistic eclogue.
Norm and Marginalization

It is a well-known fact that one of the immediate consequences of
petrarchismo was the rapid decline of all forms of lyric poetry excluded
from the Petrarchan canon. What remained was the classical limpidity
and regularity of Petrarch’s model. The poetry book gradually dropped
strambotti, capitoli, barzellette, epistole and eclogues and embraced the deco-
rum of the Petrarchan sonnet and canzone. Bembo turned the quotid-
ian enjoyment of poetry into a professional endeavor. Poetry became a
highly professionalized institution, in a broad sense, when apprentice-
ship at Petrarch’s school began to be regarded as a prerequisite for the
practice of a stylistically and linguistically acceptable poetry. The results
of this disciplining effort were not very different, in my opinion, from
those described by Hayden White for a much later and broader form 25
of regulation of knowledge, that of historiography: “The ‘politics’ of
this disciplinization, conceived, as all disciplinization must be, as a set
of negations, consists of what marks out for repression for those who
wish to claim the authority of discipline itself for their learning.”42
The eclogue was a most predictable victim of the stylistic repression
of the early 16th century. As Carlo Dionisotti wrote, “the great popular-
ity of the Arcadia did not manage to guarantee, in the new literature,
the survival of certain fundamental linguistic and stylistic elements of
that work. The eclogue, for example—and specifically the sdrucciolo and
polymetric eclogue (which indissolubly ties the Arcadia to the poetry of
its age)—clearly separates [Arcadia] from the poetry of the subsequent
epoch, in which, despite the distinguished precedent, such a genre
found itself pushed to the limits of extravagance.”43
To many, by the third decade of the 16th century the forms of the
eclogue (its polymeters, the agrestic vocabulary, the Latinisms, and the
42 Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-
sublimation,” in The Content of the Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990),
62.
43 “Il grande successo dell’Arcadia non valse ad assicurare la sopravvivenza, nella
nuova letteratura, di taluni elementi linguistici e stilistici fondamentali di essa opera. L’e-
gloga ad esempio, in ispecie l’egloga sdrucciola e polimetrica, che indissolubilmente lega
l’Arcadia alla poesia dell’età sua, nettamente la distingue dalla poesia dell’età successiva
in cui un tal genere, nonostante il precedente illustre, si trovò respinto ai margini della
stravaganza.” Carlo Dionisotti, “Appunti sulle rime del Sannazaro,” Giornale Storico della
Letteratura Italiana 140 (1963): 184–85.
sdrucciolo words) must have looked like outdated signs of anti-petrarchismo.

In his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Bembo attributed to sdrucciolo
words the quality of lightness (leggerezza). He went so far as to tolerate
the occasional use of proparoxytone endings. But this remained a theo-
retical possibility, above all because his taxonomy of Italian verse estab-
lished a hierarchy in which sdrucciolo lines (as well as tronco lines) repre-
sented a hazardous deviation from the normative regularity of piano
endings.44 In practice the sdrucciolo disappeared from books of love po-
etry. Benedetto Varchi’s L’Hercolano, one of the most important treatises
on Italian language after the Prose della volgar lingua, provided a much
more vivid image of Bembo’s position on this matter:
Conte: As I told you before, I heard some people inappropriately despis-

ing [Sannazaro’s] Arcadia and therefore I did not care to read it . . . .
Varchi: Those who inappropriately despise Sannazaro’s sdrucciolo rhymes
ought to praise appropriately Serafino’s. As for myself, I always read
them with great marvel and pleasure.
C.: I also heard that your Bembo did not like them.
V. It is not that Bembo did not like Sannazaro’s [sdruccioli ]; but in gen-
eral he did not like sdrucciolo rhymes, or sdrucciolose, as he sometimes
26 used to call them.
C.: And do you know why?
V. No, I certainly do not; but I think that above all he was influenced
by the fact that Petrarch had never used them; and apparently he in-
tended to imitate Petrarch in every single detail.45
Considering that Varchi wrote L’Hercolano in the 1550s, this last remark
on the imitation of Petrarch seems unnecessarily sarcastic. Its amusing
tartness cannot disguise the typically Florentine skepticism with which
the author seems to look at Bembo’s linguistic enterprise.46 But as far
44 To make his point clearer, Bembo compared the use of such “irregular” lines to
the medical handling of drugs which, although poisonous in themselves, may have a posi-
tive effect when administered in miniscule doses and under special circumstances. See
Pietro Bembo, “Prose della volgar lingua,” in Prose e Rime di Pietro Bembo, ed. Carlo Dion-
isotti (Turin: UTET, 1960), 160–62.
45 “Conte: Io havea sentito, come di sopra vi dissi, biasimare sconciamente l’Arcadia,
e perciò non mi curava di leggerla. . . . Varchi: Chi biasima sconciamente le rime a sdruc-
ciolo del Sannazzaro, debbe acconciamente lodare quelle del Serafino. Io per me non
le leggo mai senza somma maraviglia e dilettazione. C.: Io ho pure inteso che elle non
piacevano al Bembo vostro. V.: Al Bembo mio signore non dispiacevano quelle del
Sannazzaro, ma non gli piacevano le rime sdrucciole, o (come dice egli alcuna volta)
sdrucciolose. C.: Sapetene voi la cagione? V.: No certo; ma io credo che lo movesse piú
d’altro il non essere state usate dal Petrarca, lo quale pareva che egli intendesse di volere
imitare in tutto e per tutto.” Benedetto Varchi, L’Hercolano, ed. Antonio Sorella (Pescara:
Libreria dell’Università Editrice, 1995), 2:787–88. L’Hercolano, completed in 1560, was
published posthumously in 1570.
46 Varchi’s close relationship with Bembo, both on an intellectual and personal level,
did not prevent him from expressing ambiguous sentiments towards his spiritual master,
gerbino
as the sdrucciolo line is concerned, Varchi was probably right. Even Gian
Giorgio Trissino, who as a theorist advocated an eclectic use of the liter-
ary language, open to a wider range of linguistic experiences, raised
the same doubts: “Those lines that [Sannazaro] so frequently uses and
that some call sdruccioli are not much praised by the most careful [crit-
ics] of our time, for they are not often used by Petrarch and Dante.”47
Viewed in the context of the norms of stylistic propriety that came
to regulate the specialized language of poetry after the publication of
Bembo’s Prose, the Cinquecento musical madrigal cut an orthodox path
through the irregular Quattrocento forms of the Arcadia. Only the sec-
tions conforming to the metrical model of the new poetry found a legit-
imate space in the expressive field of the madrigal. The rest was musi-
cally censored, as it were. The case of Arcadia is a distinctively telling
example of the logic of selection that governed the degree of symbolic
constraint ingrained in the early 16th-century polyphonic madrigal. Pre-
and post-Petrarchist forms coexisted side by side in the narrative plot of
Arcadia (the latter being the fruit of Sannazaro’s effort to “Petrarchize”
the stylistic register of the pastoral eclogue). This same coexistence was
no longer possible in a system of musical/poetic communication that,
while it domesticated all those expressions of Italian poetry that had 27
grown outside the limits defined by the Petrarchist canon, gave priority
to form over substance. And it was on this priority that a large segment
of the Cinquecento madrigal founded the almost mannerist sophistica-
tion of its polyphonic language.
What Giovannelli’s and Marenzio’s settings of Sannazaro’s sdruccioli
seem to have accomplished, then, was the recovery of a musically re-
jected past, the reappropriation of a poetic and linguistic legacy that
had been marginalized through the stylistic mediation of the musical
madrigal. It would be inaccurate, however, to say that there existed no
examples of musical compositions couched in sdrucciolo lines prior to
the revival of Sannazaro in the 1580s. The difference is that such com-
positions belonged to the lighter genre of the villanella/canzonetta,
especially during the last years of his life, when he seems to have attempted to reconcile
Bembist classicism with Florentine linguistic theory. On this somewhat ambiguous phase
of his thought and on the softened version of bembismo underlying the dialogue L’Her-
colano see Umberto Pirotti, Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo (Florence: Olschki,
1971), 109–47. For a more recent assessment of Varchi’s ideas see also Vanni Bramanti,
“Viatico per la storia fiorentina di Benedetto Varchi,” Rivista Storica Italiana 114 (2002):
880–928; and Sorella’s introduction to his edition of L’Hercolano quoted in the previous
note.
47 “Et ancora quelli suoi versi, che alcuni dicono sdruccioli, li quali esso frequente-
mente usa, non sono dai scrupolosi di questa nostra età molto laudati per non essere nè
da Petrarca, nè da Dante molto usati.” Gian Giorgio Trissino, “La poetica,” in Trattati di
poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, Scrittori d’Italia 248, ed. Bernard Weinberg (Bari: Laterza,
1970), 88. See also Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,” 78–79.
where sdrucciolo lines (for the most part unrelated to Sannazaro’s Arca-
dia) were employed for comical (when not grotesque) purposes. Such a
distinction is necessary to understand fully the gist of Giovannelli’s and
Marenzio’s operation. We need to recall here what was said about the
double personality that the sdrucciolo line had developed since its first
appearance in Italian pastoral poetry. Some regarded it as the vernacu-
lar equivalent of various classical meters; others used it for its purely hu-
morous qualities. So, its rhetorical status could swing from the stars of
pseudo-classical prosody to the barns of peasants and buffoons. This
ambivalence was reflected in the division between the madrigalian
treatment of the sdrucciolo by composers such as Giovannelli and its
adoption in the villanella repertory, a division that at this point deserves
a closer look.
The parodistic use of the sdrucciolo is amply documented in Vene-
tian and Paduan areas, especially in texts written in dialect. Some of
these linguistic experiments found their way into musical collections, as
in the first book of three-voice Iustiniane published by Scotto in 1570.
Here, four pieces by Andrea Gabrieli and Vincenzo Bellavere (the col-
lection’s editor) are settings of canzonette in a sort of Paduan/Venetian
28 dialect that plays on the comical effect of sdrucciolo rhymes such as
“Franceschinetta béula” or “Tutto il dì di te spampoli.”48 From the same
linguistic region we can also mention Filippo Azzaiolo’s villotta “Sen-
tomi la formicula.”49 The most spectacular example of a mocking de-
clension of the sdrucciolo came from another Venetian, Andrea Calmo,
well known to musical circles both for his voice and his poetry. In 1553
Calmo published a collection of six eclogues written entirely in sdrucci-
oli. The title is in itself a stylistic manifesto: “Playful, modern and most
waggish pastoral eclogues . . . in a new sdrucciolo line.”50 The dedicatory
48 Primo libro delle Iustiniane a tre voci di diversi eccellentissimi musici (Venice: Scotto,
1570; modern ed. by Marco Materassi [Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985]). The other two
pieces with sdrucciolo rhymes are “Dionorea vien te prego alla fenestrea,” and “Abbi pietà
fia bellea.” On the metrical structure of these Iustiniane see also Paolo Fabbri, “Andrea
Gabrieli e la composizione su diversi linguaggi: la giustiniana,” in Andrea Gabrieli e il suo
tempo. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Venezia, 16–17 settembre 1985), ed. Francesco
Degrada (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 249–72.
49 Filippo Azzaiolo, Il primo libro de villotte alla padoana con alcune napolitane a quattro
voci (Venice: Scotto, 1557), no. 14.

50 Andrea Calmo, Le giocose moderne et facetissime egloghe pastorali, sotto bellissimi con-
cetti, in nuovo sdrucciolo, in lingua materna (Venice: Bertacagno, 1553). A sdrucciolo madri-
gal (“Amor m’ha bastonat cum la so mescola”) from Calmo’s Le bizzarre, faconde et inge-
gnose rime pescatorie (Venice: Bertacagno, 1553; modern ed. by Gino Belloni [Venice:
Marsilio, 2003]) was set to music and published by Lodovico Agostini in his Musica sopra
le rime bizzarre di m. Andrea Calmo et altri autori (Milan: Cesare Pozzo, 1567), on which see
also Andrea Bombi, “ ‘Una satisfation de mezo saor’: La ‘Musica sopra le Rime bizzarre di
Messer Andrea Calmo’,” Quaderni Veneti 22 (1995): 31–70.
gerbino
letter contains a most appropriate reference to Petrarch and San-

nazaro, whose school, Calmo writes, he was never able to attend.
Not all the examples available in the variegated poetic domain of
canzonette, villanelle, and napolitane belong to the farcical strand of di-
alectical mould cultivated by Gabrieli and Bellavere. Sdruccioli may
also be found occasionally in the more genteel type of canzone for four
voices. Eliseo Bonizzoni, a musician in the household of Sforza Pallavi-
cino, general of the Venetian Republic, included three poems in sdruc-
cioli among his canzoni for four voices.51 Two more examples, the first of
which is in the vein of the pastoral eclogue, may be found in Giovanni
Leonardo Primavera’s first book of four-voice napolitane.52 Sdruccioli also
appeared among the works of Massimo Troiano, a Neapolitan émigré
who worked in Munich and Venice. And it is not altogether impossible
that Troiano, who was also the author of many of the texts he set to mu-
sic, would have regarded this peculiar specimen of Italian prosody as
part of his Neapolitan heritage.53 The reason for quoting all these ex-
amples is to point out that certain practices and styles that would seem
to disappear in the 16th century, under the normative pressure of the
standard of taste defined by the madrigal, survived in the less regular-
ized forms of light and pseudo-popular genres. In the case of the musi- 29
cal revival of Sannazaro, we need to approach this phenomenon not in
terms of an incorporation into the madrigal of the 1580s of a verse type
that until then had had no musical currency, but rather in terms of an
acceptance into the stylistic sphere of the madrigal of a practice that
mostly survived at the lower levels of secular music.
As mentioned earlier, this strand of sdruccioli in the villanella reper-
tory had little bearing on the musical reception of Sannazaro. There is,
however, an interesting exception: “La pastorella mia spietata e rigida”
(from Arcadia I, 91) in Giuseppe Policreti’s Boscareccie for three voices
and Giacomo Celano’s Napolitane, again for three voices.54 Policreti and
51 Eliseo Bonizzoni, Primo libro delle canzoni a quattro voci (Venice: Scotto, 1569), no.
9 (“Mia buona sorte un giorno veder fecemi”), no. 18 (“Misero me che mi convien hor
pascere”), and no. 25 (“Chi vide mai tal caso o tal miracolo”).
52 Giovanni Leonardo Primavera, Primo libro de le napolitane a quattro voci (Venice:
Scotto, 1569), no. 2 (“Tirsi pastor assiso a un tronco d’acera”), and no. 17 (“Al mio infe-
lice stato alcun non trovasi”).
53 Massimo Troiano, Terzo libro delle sue rime et canzoni a 3 (Venice: Scotto, 1567), no.
28 (“O saporita più che ne lo ravano”); and idem, Quarto libro delle rime e canzoni napoli-
tane a tre (Venice: Scotto, 1569), no. 20 (“Voglio pigliar sto cor’et abrusarelo”). Alfred
Einstein pointed out that the rhymes of “O saporita più che ne lo ravano” derive from
Sannazaro’s Arcadia. See Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1949), 2: 581.
54 Giuseppe Policreti, Boscareccie, terzo libro delle canzoni . . . a tre voci con una a sei nel
fine (Venice: Eredi di Girolamo Scotto, 1580); Giacomo Celano, Il primo libro delle Napoli-
tane a tre voci (Venice: Scotto, 1582).
Celano are the only two non-Roman musicians who as early as 1580
and 1582 set Sannazaro’s sdruccioli to music.55
Policreti’s and Celano’s inclusion of Sannazaro’s “La pastorella
mia” among their three-voice canzonette might very well have been in-
spired by the stylistic bond that the sdrucciolo had established with the
lighter musical genres. But “La pastorella mia” is a special case, for it
seems to have circulated, at least in Northern Italy, as a popular can-
zonetta with a musical life of its own.56 Its popularity lasted well into the
17th century. In 1615 a three-voice setting was painted by Guercino on
a wall of the music chamber that count Bartolomeo Pannini had built
in his villa in Cento.57 Policreti’s setting takes us back to Salinas’s dis-
cussion of the rhythmic properties of the sdrucciolo. The first phrase
exhibits the same insistent iambic pulse (see Ex. 3).
An even more eloquent testimony to the survival of a distinctive
rhythmic gesture associated with the musical use of sdrucciolo lines is
Claudio Monteverdi’s version of “La pastorella mia” published in his
Scherzi musicali of 1607.58 The piece is indeed something of an oddity in
Monteverdi’s collection, but much less so when viewed in light of the
stylistic code evoked by Salinas and Policreti (see Ex. 4). It should be
30 clear that this rhythmic formula can only work if applied to lines with
a regular iambic accentuation pattern such as “La pastorella mia.” A
melody explicitly labeled “aria per sdruzoli” appeared in a book of
three-voice villanelle published by Aurelio Bonelli in 1596, of which
55 Policreti was active in Northern Italy. Nothing is known about Celano other than
the fact that he described himself as “anconitano” (that is from Ancona, in the central re-
gion of Le Marche) in the dedication to his Napolitane.
56 Perhaps it is no coincidence that this is also the only text in sdruccioli that Maren-
zio included in a madrigal collection associated with a patron from Northern Italy,
namely the third book for five voices dedicated to the members of the Accademia Filar-
monica in Verona.
57 See Anna Valentini and Stefano Melloni, “Il Guercino e la Camera della Musica
di casa Pannini a Cento,” Studi Musicali 21 (1992): 35–60. The musical frescos had al-
ready faded away by the 19th century. A copy of the music made by Francesco Algarotti in
1760 and donated to Padre Martini is still preserved in the Civico Museo Bibliografico
Musicale in Bologna. Valentini and Melloni mention 15 musical settings of “La pastorella
mia” published between 1580 and 1635. The list, however, is not very accurate (Maren-
zio’s setting, for example, is absent, while the setting attributed to Jacques Arcadelt is in
reality a popular song whose incipit reads “La pastorella mia/ senz’altra compagnia”; see
Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,” 81n13).
58 Monteverdi set to music only three more poems in sdrucciolo verse: “Perché t’en
fuggi o Fillide?” (published in his eighth book of madrigals of 1638); “Prima vedrò ch’in
questi prati nascano” (in Amante Franzoni, I nuovi fioretti musicali a tre voci [Venice:
Amadino, 1607]); and “Voglio di vita uscir voglio che cadano” (in Naples, Biblioteca Ora-
toriana dei Filippini, MS 473.2). “Prima vedrò” and “Voglio di vita uscir” are included in
Claudio Monteverdi, Dodici composizioni vocali profane e sacre (inedite) con e senza basso con-
tinuo, ed. Wolfgang Osthoff (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 6–9, and 18–23. Several rhymes and
turns of phrases in “Perché t’en fuggi o Fillide?” are reminiscent of Sannazaro’s Arcadia.
gerbino
example 3. Policreti, “La pastorella mia”

$
Š/½ ½ ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ðý
La pa - sto - rel - la mia spie - ta - ta e ri - gi - da,
Š/½ ½ ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ðý
La pa - sto - rel - la mia spie - ta - ta e ri - gi - da,
Ý ½ ½ ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ð ð Ðý
% / La pa - sto - rel - la mia spie - ta - ta e ri - gi - da,

$ Ðý = Ð

Š¼ Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł ð
Che not - t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la,
8
Š¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Łý
Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð
Che not - t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la, 31
Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł ð
Ý
% ¼ Che not - t’e

gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la,
$ Ł Ł
Š ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð
Si sta su - per - ba e più che ghiac - cio fri - gi - da.
Š ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð

Si sta su - per - ba e più che ghiac - cio fri - gi - da.
Ý ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð
% Si sta su - per - ba e più che ghiac - cio fri - gi - da.
only the canto and alto partbooks survive.59 The music, a strophic set-
ting of sdrucciolo tercets opening Sannazaro’s eclogue IX, features an
59 Aurelio Bonelli, Il primo libro delle villanelle a tre voci (Venice: Gardano, 1596). I
thank Ruth DeFord for bringing Bonelli’s book to my attention. Of course, it is impossi-
ble to say whether Bonelli meant to provide an arrangement of a formula in use at his
time, or sell an aria that he himself invented. The second hypothesis seems to me to be
the more plausible one.
example 4. Monteverdi, “La pastorella mia” (voices only)

$ Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł
Š − 02 ¼ ¼ Ł ð Ł ð
La pa - sto - rel - la mia spie - ta - ta e ri - gi - da Che
Š − 02 ¼ ¼ Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł
Ý 2 Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł
% −0 ¼ ¼ Ł ð
$ ð Ł Ł
Š−ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð
not - t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la Si
Š−ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł
32 not - t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la Si
Ý ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł ð
% − not ð Ł Ł
- t’e gior - no al mio soc - cor - so chia - mo - la Si
$ ðý ð Ł ð
Š−ð Ł ð Ł Ł ¦ð Ł ðý
sta su - per - ba e più che ghiac - cio fri - gi - da.
Š−ð Ł ²ð Ł ¦ð ý ð ²Ł ð Ł ð ²Ł ðý
Ý Ł ð Ł ¦ð ý ð Ł ð Ł ð Ł
% −ð ðý
entirely different kind of rhythmic inertia: an even succession of quar-

ter notes interrupted only by the conventional dotted rhythm of the
sdrucciolo ending. It is not a coincidence that these are not pure iambic
hendecasyllables. More important to us, Bonelli’s publication confirms
the existence of a musical dissemination of the sdrucciolo line associated
with the villanella repertory (see Ex. 5).
gerbino
example 5. Bonelli, “Aria per sdruzoli” (bass not extant)

$ Ł Ł Łý Ł ð
Š− ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł
Dim - mi ca - prar no - vel - lo e non t’i - ra - sce - re Que - sta tua greg - ge
8
−
%Š ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Łý Ł ð ð Ł Ł Ł Ł
Dim - mi ca - prar no - vel - lo e non t’i - ra - sce - re Que - sta tua greg - ge
$
Š−Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł ð ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ð
ch’è co - tan - ta stra - ni - a, Chi te la die’ si fol - le - men -te a pa - sce - re?
− ð
% Š Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Łý Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Łý Ł Ð
ch’è co - tan - ta stra - ni - a, Chi te la die’ si fol - le - men -te a pa - sce - re?
In this context it is also worth mentioning a reference to the practice

33
of singing sdruccioli found in the writings of the famous actor Francesco
Andreini (1548–1629). In the following passage, Trappola describes the
repertory of Graziano of the Gelosi company, who is but Andreini himself:
Moreover, in the pastorals he splendidly [recited the part] of a shep-

herd named Corinto, playing various wind instruments, which in-
cluded many flutes, as well as singing bucolic verse and sdruccioli in
imitation of Sannazaro, alias the Neapolitan shepherd Azio Sincero.60
Like the canzonetta/villanella, the commedia dell’arte absorbed, perpetu-

ated, and transformed practices marginalized by the process of normal-
ization that in the early Cinquecento had invested theater as well as
lyric poetry. Significantly enough, it is again in this segment of the 16th-
century literary and musical experience that we find traces of the cul-
tural endurance of the sdrucciolo rhythms of the old eclogue.
60 “E meravigliosamente poi [recitava la parte] d’un pastore nominato Corinto
nelle pastorali, suonando varii e diversi stromenti da fiato, composti di molti flauti,
cantandovi sopra versi boscarecci e sdruccioli ad imitatione del Sannazaro, detto Azio
Sincero, Pastor Napolitano.” See Francesco Andreini, Le bravure del capitano Spavento, ed.
Roberto Tessari (Pisa: Giardini, 1987), 70. This passage from Andreini’s dialogues was
kindly related to me by Anne MacNeil. Corinto was the name Andreini adopted for his
pastoral persona. As Corinto, he wrote a pastoral epitaph for the death of his wife Isabella/
Fillide. Andreini was also the author of a capitolo in sdrucciolo rhymes entitled Il felicissimo
arrivo del Serenissimo Don Vittorio Principe di Savoia . . . nella famosa città di Torino, descritto in
verso sdrucciolo (n.p., n.d.).
The revival
With this scenario in mind, we can return to the question concern-
ing the meaning of the re-integration of the sdrucciolo in the madrigal of
the 1580s. The dotted rhythms running through Marenzio’s “Vedi le
valli” might be re-interpreted as a stylized allusion to an oral tradition of
singing sdruccioli of which very little can still be observed firsthand. The
refraction of stylistic codes across different genres is a common feature
of the type of madrigal cultivated by Marenzio and Giovannelli in the
1580s. But I do not think that this is the point of their musical settings.
Rather, the sense is that against this stylistic foil proper to the can-
zonetta repertory they chose to publish sdruccioli in the form of madri-
gals. In other words, the symbolic end of such a stylistic gesture was not
to lower the madrigal to the level of the canzonetta so as to allow secu-
lar polyphony to rummage in the sdrucciolo’s popularizing substratum,
but to raise Sannazaro’s sdruccioli to the musical dignity of the madrigal.
It is unnecessary to insist here on the differences in style between
full-fledged madrigals attesting to a socially cultivated approach to San-
nazaro’s poetry and the textual and singing practices of the canzonetta/
villanella. It is sufficient to browse through Giovannelli’s two books to
34
appreciate the full range of his rhetorical approach to Sannazaro’s po-
etry. Ruth DeFord rightly observed that “the musical style of these
works is not derived from the style of the canzonetta. The poetry is too
subtle and lyrical for a musical treatment in the style of [the first or sec-
ond book for five voices] to be appropriate. There is a much greater
proportion of sad texts in these books than in [Giovannelli’s] five-voice
ones.”61 To be sure, there are instances of straightforward chordal tex-
tures and sharp rhythmic declamation reminiscent of lighter genres.
But a madrigal such as “Itene pecorelle” (Ex. 6a) is by no means repre-
sentative of the stylistic spectrum of these works, which on the contrary
ranges from double-subject imitative expositions to dramatic chromatic
excursions (compare Exs. 6a and 6b).62 In Rome, Sannazaro’s sdruccioli
61 Ruth DeFord, “Ruggiero Giovannelli and the Madrigal in Rome, 1572–1599”
(Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1979), 83.

62 Leopold used Giovannelli’s “Itene pecorelle” to illustrate what she regarded as
typical features of these compositions on sdruccioli lines: chordal and syllabic declama-
tion, short and sharp rhythmic phrases, dance-like stylistic gestures, and a treatment of
the text that “showed no real adherence to its semantic contents” (Leopold, “Madrigali
sulle egloghe sdrucciole,” 93–94). The reason why I have chosen to juxtapose “Itene
pecorelle” and “La terra che dal fondo” in Exs. 6a and 6b is, at least in part, to correct
Leopold’s characterization of this repertory, which on the contrary incorporated differ-
ent stylistic levels (at least in Giovannelli’s hands) according to the affective nature of the
text. It seems to me that Leopold’s argument put too much faith in the assumption that
musicians turned to the sdrucciolo for its alleged canzonetta-like rhythmic properties. To
put it another way, since she argued that the main impulse towards a subordination of the
flexibility of Italian prosody to a proto-baroque musical formalism came from the model
gerbino
example 6a. Giovannelli, “Itene Pecorelle,” mm. 1–10

$ Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Ł Ł Ł Ł
I - te - ne pe - co - rel - le in-quel - la pra - to - ra Ac - ciò che quan-do i bo -schi e i mon-ti im -
ŠŁ ŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

I - te - ne pe - co - rel - le in-quel - la pra - to - ra Ac - ciò che quan-do i bo -schi e i mon-ti im -
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š
+ I - te - ne pe - co - rel - le in-quel - la pra - to - ra Ac - ciò che quan-do i bo -schi e i mon-ti im -
Ý ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ
%
$6 ý Łý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł ý Ł Ð
Š Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

bru - na -no Cia - scu - n’a ca - sa ne ri - tor - ni sa - to - ra

Š ²Ł ý Ł ð ¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł Ł ý Ł Ð 35

Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ð
bru - na -no Cia - scu - n’a ca - sa ne ri - tor - ni sa - to - ra
Łý Ł ð
Š ¼
+ bru - na -no Cia - scu - n’a ca - sa ne ri - tor - ni sa - to - ra
Ý ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ
%
were surely taken seriously, as Giovannelli’s textual selections and musi-

cal responses made clear.
In sum, one may argue that it was the choice to set to music San-
nazaro’s sdruccioli as madrigals that conferred on this poetic tradition a
new aura of cultural legitimacy. And this is the sense, in my opinion, of
the dedication to Ferrante Penna. The musical marginalization of San-
nazaro’s sdruccioli that took place in the wake of the Florentine linguis-
tic project formulated by the Venetian Bembo may also help us under-
stand one last but important detail of this phenomenon: the link between
the cultural validation sought through the madrigal’s musical style and
the reclaiming of a Neapolitan poetic identity.
of the canzonetta/villanella, she tended to push the sdrucciolo madrigals of the 1580s
(which she saw as early manifestations of a proto-baroque taste for strongly accentuated
patterns) towards the stylistic orbit of the light genres.
example 6b. Giovannelli, “La terra che dal fondo,” mm. 1–29
$ ÿ Ð Ð
Š− Ł Ł Łý Ł
Ð Ð Ł Ł Ł Ł
La ter - ra che dal fon - do par che pu - lu -
Š− ÿ ÿ
Ð Ð Ð Ð ð ð
La ter - ra La ter - ra
Š− ÿ ²Ð Ð Ð Ð
+
Ð Ð
La ter - ra La ter - ra
Ý Ð Ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ý Ł
% − Ð Ð Ð
La ter - ra che dal fon - do par che pu - lu -
$8 ð ð
Š−ð ð ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Ł Łý Ł
le La ter - ra che dal fon - do par che pu - lu -
½
36
Š− Ł Ł Łý Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Łý Ł
Ł Ł Ł Ł
che dal fon - do par che pu - lu - le che dal fon - do par che pu - lu -
Š−Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ý Ł Ð ÿ ½ ð

+ che dal fon - do par che pu - lu - le A -
Ý ð ð ð ð ðý −Ł ðý Ł
% − Ł Ł Ł Ł
le La ter - ra che dal fon - do par che pu - lu -
$13 ðý Ł Ð ½ ð ð ð
Š − ¦ð ð ð ð
le A - tri a - co - ni - ti e pian - t’a -
Š− ð ð ð ð ðý Ł ð ð Ł Ł Ł Ł
Łý Ł ð
le A - tri a - co - ni - ti e pian - t’a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re,
Š− ð ð ðý Ł Ð
½ ð ð ð ð ¦ð
+ - tri a - co - ni - ti e pian - t’a - spr’e mor -
Ý ½ ð ð ð ðý Ł ½ ð
% − Ð Ð
le A - tri a - co - ni - ti e
gerbino
example 6b. (continued )
$19 ÿ ½ ð
Š− ð ð ðý Ł Ð Ð ð ð
spr’e mor - ti - fe - re e pian - t’a -
Š− ÿ ÿ ð ²ð ðý Ł Ð
Ð −ð ¦ ð
e pian - t’a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re
Š − ðý Ł ð ð ð ¦ð ð ð ðý Ł Ð ½ ð
+ ti - fe - re e pian - t’a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re e
Ý −ð ¦ ð ð ²ð ðý Ł Ð ½ ð −ð ¦ ð ð ²ð
% −
pian - t’a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re e pian - t’a - spr’e mor -
$26
Š − ð ¦ð ð ð ð ¦ð ð
spr’e mor - ti - fe - re,
37
Š−½ ð ð ð ðý Ł ð
a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re,
ð −ð ðý
Š−ð ð Ł ð
+ pian - t’a - spr’e mor - ti - fe - re,
Ý ðý Ł Ð Ð ÿ
% − ti - fe - re,
Rome was geographically, and above all culturally, much closer to

Naples than to Venice. And in Naples Sannazaro indeed represented the
pride of the cultural past of the city. Ezio Raimondi’s and Pasquale Sab-
batino’s studies on Petrarchism in Southern Italy have set in relief the
specifically literary qualities, at times polemically shrewd, of this pride.
An important segment of 16th-century Neapolitan intelligentsia re-
constructed the genealogy of the new lyric poetry from a southern per-
spective, in which Sannazaro assumed a role analogous to that of Bembo.63
63 Ezio Raimondi, “Il petrarchismo nell’Italia meridionale,” in Rinascimento inquieto
(Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 267–306; and Pasquale Sabbatino, Il modello bembiano a Napoli nel
Cinquecento (Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1984), especially pp. 11–42.
Sannazaro, especially the Sannazaro of the Rime, emerged from the pre-
vious century as the long-awaited model of a new poetic language, a
language that had its founding fathers not only in Venice, with Bembo,
but also in Naples, with Sannazaro. Thus, in his Vocabulario di cinquemila
vocabuli toschi (1536), Fabrizio Luna could declare Sannazaro to be the
restorer of Italian language after the three great masters, Dante, Petrarca,
and Boccaccio. Similarly, in his Grammatica volgar (1533) Marco Antonio
Ateneo Carlino paired Bembo’s Asolani and Sannazaro’s Arcadia as the
brightest stars of the “tersa volgar lingua.”64
Although the intricacies of such a debate probably concerned a re-
stricted intellectual elite, Giovannelli’s dedicatory letter in his first book
of sdruccioli suggestively points to this sense of a specifically southern lit-
erary identity. Unfortunately, nothing is known about Ferrante Penna,
barone of Ailano, a small fief approximately 50 miles north of Naples that
was sold and bought, together with the title attached to it, innumerable
times throughout the 16th century.65 We are certainly dealing with small
local nobility whose connections with Rome are difficult to trace.66
In addressing Ferrante Penna with the hope of establishing a
durable professional relationship, Giovannelli informs us that he had
38
64 See Raimondi, “Il petrarchismo,” 273–74, and Sabbatino, Il modello bembiano,
28–31. On Ateneo’s grammar see also Maria Corti, “Un grammatico e il sistema classifica-
torio nel Cinquecento,” in Nuovi metodi e fantasmi, 217–49.
65 In Scipione Mazzella’s Descrittione del Regno di Napoli (Naples: Giovanni Battista
Cappelli, 1586) Ailano is described as a town of 82 “fuochi” (households), which is to say

approximately 369 inhabitants (using 4.5 as statistical coefficient). The number matches
the data collected by Lorenzo Giustiniani in his Dizionario geografico-ragionato del Regno di
Napoli (Naples: Vincenzo Manfredi, 1797–1816; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969–1971), 1: 83
(82 “fuochi” in 1595). According to Giustiniani, in 1568 Brianta Carafa, Marchioness of
Pugliana, sold the fief of Ailano to Luigi della Marra, who in turn sold it to Francesco de
Penna in 1577 for 9,500 ducats. Cesare Penna succeeded Francesco in 1578. There is
no mention of Ferrante in Giustiniani’s work, although the fief would seem to have re-
mained in the hands of the Penna family until 1671, when Giovanni Ferrante sold it to
Marcaurelio Mattei (see ibid., 1: 85). I was not able to determine whether the Pennas of
Ailano were related to the Penna families of Ragusa and Ferrara, on which see Vittorio
Spreti, Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana (Milan: Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana,
1928–1936; repr., [Bologna]: Forni, 1981), 237–38. The coat of arms adorning Giovan-
nelli’s print (two crossing feathers) is a heraldic pun on the name Penna. It does not
match, however, either the coat of arms of the Pennas of Ragusa (a golden eagle holding
a silver feather), or that of the Pennas of Ferrara (a silver armored arm with a gauntlet
glove holding three oyster feathers, one green, one white, and one red).
66 Luca Cavalcanti, to whom Giovannelli dedicated his second book of sdruccioli,
had no connection, as far as we know, with Naples (he might have been related to the
Florentine family of bankers). Giovannelli probably intended to capitalize on the success
of the first collection. The dedication no longer made reference to Naples, but praised
the musical competence and taste of the dedicatee. It was a good investment since Caval-
canti would become “maestro di camera” of Pietro Aldobrandini, Clement VIII’s power-
ful cardinal nephew. Nothing is known of Marcantonio Serlupi either, the dedicatee of
Marenzio’s book for four voices. The only hypothesis I can advance is that he might have
been the son of Gregorio Serlupi (d. 1551), whose family owned the chapel of the Im-
maculate Conception in the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Marcantonio (d. 1599)
gerbino
never met him in person. He trusted his “intercessori” to deliver the mu-
sic together with his plea. We may take our cue from Giovanelli’s words
and try to fill the gaps left by the dedicatory letter by taking a broader
look at the community of patrons surrounding Giovannelli and Maren-
zio in the early 1580s. Records of liaisons between musicians and spe-
cific segments of the multivocal cultural scene of late Renaissance Rome
are sketchy at best. But if I were to venture a name among those who in
Rome might have pushed for a revival of the sdrucciolo, I would probably
mention Cristoforo Castelletti, a lawyer with a keen passion for theater.
In 1580 he made his debut as a playwright with the pastoral L’Amarilli.67
Both Marenzio and Giovannelli knew Castelletti very well. In 1585, they
provided the music for two of the intermedi that accompanied the stag-
ing of his comedy Le stravaganze d’amore.68 Furthermore, Castelletti’s ac-
tivity gravitated around the same patrons who in the 1580s sponsored
Marenzio’s music: Girolamo Ruis (to whom Castelletti dedicated his
Rime spirituali and the comedy Il furbo, and Marenzio his fourth book of
five-voice madrigals); Giacomo Boncompagni (in whose palace Le stra-
vaganze d’amore was premiered in 1585); and the beautiful Cleria Cesarini
(the niece of Pope Paul III) to whom Castelletti dedicated L’Amarilli,
and the comedy I torti amorosi. Marenzio’s Primo libro de’ madrigali a sei 39
voci (1581) opened with a pastoral madrigal in honor of Cleria.69
Castelletti’s L’Amarilli presents some remarkable features. The over-
all content and form of the play was clearly influenced by the Ferrarese
model of pastoral, chiefly by its most distinguished representative,
Torquato Tasso. The meter adopted by Castelletti had by then become
standard for pastoral theater: a free alternation of seven- and eleven-
syllable lines without rhyme. But some important diversions interrupted
this scheme, including two strikingly long monologues cast in sdrucciolo
was a prelate of the Apostolic Chamber. See Casimiro Romano, Memorie istoriche della
chiesa e convento di S. Maria in Aracoeli (Rome: Rocco Bernabò, 1786), 231; and Johanna
Elfriede Louise Heideman, The Cinquecento Chapel Decorations in S. Maria in Aracoeli in
Rome (Amsterdam: Academische Pers, 1982), 21–24. The Serlupi chapel is the first on
the north aisle. Marcantonio Serlupi was also the dedicatee of Felice Anerio’s Madrigali a
cinque voci, secondo libro (Rome: Gardano, 1585).
67 Cristoforo Castelletti, L’Amarilli Egloga Pastorale (Ascoli: Giuseppe de gl’Angeli,
1580).
68 See James Chater, “Castelletti’s ‘Stravaganze d’amore’ (1585): A Comedy with In-
terludes,” Studi Musicali 8 (1979): 85–148; and Marco Bizzarini, Luca Marenzio: The Career
of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2003), 85–98. Marenzio also set to music the first stanza of the canzone “Il dì che di pal-
lor la faccia tinse” from Castelletti’s Rime Spirituali. See James Chater, “Fonti poetiche per
i madrigali di Luca Marenzio,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 13 (1978): 88.
69 On the Roman circles frequented by Castelletti, besides the works by Chater and
Bizzarini quoted in the previous note, see Pasquale Stoppelli, “Tra ‘Stravaganze’ e ‘In-
trichi’: il teatro di Cristoforo Castelletti,” in Il teatro italiano del Rinascimento, ed. Maristella
de Panizza Lorch (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1980), 291–92, and n19.
lines. In the two editions that followed in 1582 and 1587, Castelletti re-
vised the play in the direction of a style closer and closer to the stan-
dard defined by the Ferrarese example.70 He eliminated the first mono-
logue but retained the second one, significantly assigned to the main
character of the play, Credulo (itself a sdrucciolo word). Moreover, in the
first edition, Credulo’s speech was given a special position in the play, at
the beginning of the last act. It is a typical pastoral lament in the tradi-
tion of the humanistic eclogue.
In order to understand the sense of this metrical operation, we
need to remember that at this time pastoral theater was undergoing an
animated critical debate, of which the famous controversy between Gia-
son Denores and Giovanni Battista Guarini represented the last chap-
ter. It is not surprising, therefore, that Castelletti opened his dedication
to Cleria Cesarini with a programmatic declaration on the forms and
contents of pastoral theater. With the insertion of that monologue in
sdrucciolo lines, it seems that Castelletti wanted to propose a local alter-
native to the dominant vogue of Ferrarese pastoral—an alternative of
Neapolitan flavor inspired by the unmatched pastoral model of San-
nazaro’s Arcadia. And if Castelletti was indeed from Naples, as Maria Ci-
40 cala has convincingly suggested, his stylistic choices would confirm the
importance of the cultural axis Naples-Rome.71 Was Castelletti, for whom
Marenzio and Giovannelli composed music around these very years,
among the patrons who, along with Ferrante Penna, drew the two musi-
cians’ attention to the archaic beauty of sdrucciolo lines? We will proba-
bly never know. But I believe that this was the cultural milieu that early
in the 1580s instigated Roman musicians to open the style of the
madrigal to Sannazaro’s sdruccioli.
70 On Castelletti’s revisions of L’Amarilli see Gabriella E. Romani, “Le tre Amarilli di
Cristoforo Castelletti,” Annali dell’Istituto di Filologia Moderna dell’Università di Roma 1

(1979): 115–43.
71 Maria Cicala, “Cristoforo Castelletti e la sua opera teatrale: tracce napoletane,”
Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, Sezione Romanza 30 (1988): 143–72. It is

not my intention, however, to overestimate the originality of Castelletti’s play to the point
of making it appear an isolated case in the vast panorama of pastoral theater of the 1580s.
Castelletti was not the only one to cultivate the erudite art of the sdrucciolo verse (although
this was indeed a rather restricted “club”). An interesting example, albeit somewhat ex-
treme, is Bernardino Percivalle, the author of a pastoral play, L’Orsilia, entirely composed
of sdrucciolo lines (Bologna: Giovanni Rossi, 1589). Dedicated to Cesare d’Este (who in
1586 had married Virginia de’ Medici), L’Orsilia was “esposta” (read, presented?) on the
occasion of the famous 1589 wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lor-
raine. In this context, it may also be worth mentioning Titone’s lament in sdrucciolo lines
in Gabriello Chiabrera’s Il rapimento di Cefalo, set to music by Giulio Caccini as part of the
entertainments celebrating the wedding of Henry IV of France and Maria de’ Medici
(October, 1600). Caccini included Titone’s lament in the first edition of Le nuove musiche
(Florence: Marescotti, 1602). Chiabrera’s libretto is edited in Angelo Solerti, Gli albori del
melodramma (Milan: Sandron, 1904; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1976), 3:29–58.
gerbino
The musical revival of the Arcadia took shape at the intersection of

converging cultural trends: the gradual rejection of the formal selec-
tion imposed by the Petrarchist canon; the sense of cultural identity of
the Neapolitan literary tradition; and the contemporary pastoral fash-
ion to which Sannazaro provided a somewhat uneasy, albeit extremely
popular, model of classicism. A link between these phenomena may
plausibly be found in the collective cultural baggage of those years. But
I prefer to think of it as a more localized event whose intermediaries
can be historically identified (Ferrante Penna) or conjectured (“inter-
cessori” or go-betweens of Neapolitan culture such as, perhaps, Castel-
letti). The manner in which the practice of vocal polyphony filtered the
formal heterogeneity of Sannazaro’s text brings to the fore the role that
the madrigal played in the dissemination and preservation of the ideal
of stylistic purity theorized by Bembo. It shows the extent to which the
seeming stylistic homogeneity of the madrigal was the result of a selec-
tion process, which, however, did not utterly erase alternative poetic
and musical practices—practices that, on the contrary, continued to in-
teract with the new standard of high culture. The space of this interac-
tion was delimited by the symbolically subaltern domain of genres such
as the villanella and canzonetta. 41
If Giovannelli’s and Marenzio’s sdrucciolo madrigals can indeed be
interpreted as early signs of a weakening of the Petrarchist front (and
the chronology would surely fit this interpretation), one might argue
that the seed of the musical revival of this verse type was sown at the
same time that Bembo’s purist option was beginning to take root. For
in the different cultural climate of the 1580s, the disregarded sdruccioli
of Sannazaro’s Arcadia could be viewed as a repository of alternative but
historically legitimate stylistic choices. The trend did not fail to influ-
ence the aesthetic boundaries of secular music. If we turn again to the
chart in Table 1b, we will notice that as the century came to a close
sdruccioli became the lines most frequently set to music. The situation is
completely reversed. What was carefully avoided in the early and mid-
century madrigal is, at the beginning of the 17th century, the only as-
pect of Sannazaro’s Arcadia that seemed to interest musicians. It is easy
to recognize in this reversal the typically Baroque spirit of metrical poly-
morphism, a polymorphism that not only took pleasure in the purely
linguistic marvels of a poetic lexicon willing to explore the most remote
and reserved corners of the Italian language, but that also re-discovered
the beauty of those “anarchic” forms that Bembo and his followers
strove to cancel.
Given the importance of this metrical polymorphism for the future
of Italian poetry and music in the 17th century, I would like to offer a
few concluding remarks on the destiny of the sdrucciolo in the years that
immediately followed its early appearance in the works of Marenzio

and Giovannelli.
The acceptance (though not unanimous) of the sdrucciolo among
the meters of lyric poetry became possible only with the contribution
that Gabriello Chiabrera made to the dissolution of the restrictive
norms that regulated 16th-century poetic language. The battle fought
by Chiabrera was again one of metrical forms; or at least it was orches-
trated as such. Without lingering any longer on the intrinsic value that
this culture attributed to the purely formal conditions of authorized po-
etic languages, or on the analytic formalism underlying contemporary
discourses of artistic emancipation, we may naturally ask ourselves if the
musical revival of the sdrucciolo in 1580s Rome should be viewed as
heralding Chiabrera’s ideas on the unjustified strictures imposed on
Italian poetry. I do not think it is possible to demonstrate a direct con-
nection, either in the sense of a linear ordering of events that interprets
Giovannelli’s music as an antecedent of Chiabrera’s rhythmic project, or
in the sense of a specific link between the development of Chiabrera’s
ideas and his contacts with Roman musical circles.72 One might also ob-
ject that Chiabrera molded the sdrucciolo to fit his own classicizing fancy
42 in a way that was substantially different, both in technique and theory,
from Sannazaro’s use of it. For us it is more important to read what
Chiabrera wrote in defense of the sdrucciolo in the dialogue L’Orzalesi,
ovvero della tessitura delle canzoni.
Jacopo Cicognoni laments with his interlocutors about having heard
musicians and other people use “maniere di versi” that do not seem to
follow any of the rules of good versification. Within the limit of 12
syllables, anything seems to have become fair game: polymeters, iso-
lated rhymes, no rhymes, tronco rhymes, and sdrucciolo rhymes. None of
this can be found in the ancient masters. What are these novelties? To
our surprise, Giuseppe Orzalesi turns the table on the subject. His argu-
ment is that there is nothing new about these lines. The ancient poets,
including Petrarch and Dante, had already explored this path, al-
though they never pursued it throughout their work.73
Was Bembo wrong? Did Petrarch use sdruccioli in his canzoni? No,
but Chiabrera found them anyway in words such as gloria and memoria,
which, although in line of principle could be classified as semisdruccioli,
72 The first hypothesis is advanced in Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,”
100. The second appears in Paolo Russo, “Chiabrera e l’ambiente musicale romano,” in
La scelta della misura: Gabriello Chiabrera, l’altro fuoco del barocco italiano, Atti del Convegno
di studi su Gabriello Chiabrera nel 350° anniversario della morte, Savona, 3–6 novembre
1988, ed. Fulvio Bianchi and Paolo Russo (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1993), 370–76.
73 “L’Orzalesi, ovvero della tessitura delle canzoni,” in Opere di Gabriello Chiabrera e i
lirici del classicismo barocco, ed. Marcello Turchi (Turin: UTET, 1974), 550–51, and 560–61.
gerbino
are to all intents and purposes piano words, and were as such treated by
Petrarch.74 What was involved in the logic of this rather bizarre claim
was the desire to establish authoritative precedents that could justify the
use of “new” poetic meters in the canzone. Chiabrera played the game ac-
cording to the rules of contemporary literary criticism. But it was ironic
that the same principle of imitation that had been invoked to impose a
restrictive metrical canon on lyric poetry was now employed to make
the canon implode. There is indeed a fathomable tinge of irony in
Chiabrera’s argument. It is difficult to understand to what extent we are
expected to take his method of demonstration by example seriously.
His search for models seems to want to expose, through the rhetorical
lenses of caricature, the fundamentally subjective and interpretive na-
ture of the method itself. Evaluative authorities are created, not found.75
As noted above, the interest here is not the evidence of any direct influ-
ence or derivation linking Marenzio and Giovannelli with Chiabrera,
but the mental horizon that lay behind the gambit of Chiabrera’s argu-
ment; a gambit that in a way illuminates from a slightly different angle
one of the concepts to which I have repeatedly returned in the course
of this study, i.e. the interplay between the musical rehabilitation of as-
pects of the recent past marginalized by the Petrarchist movement (or 43
construed as such, in the case of Chiabrera’s Orzalesi ) and the growing
skepticism toward the normative principles on which the standards of
musical and poetic taste had been grounded.
Thus new genealogies were written, and new auctoritates were pro-
claimed. In the second half of the 17th century, Federico Meninni could
trace a literary genealogy that connected (again from a southern per-
spective) the most innovative aspects of Giovanni Battista Marino’s po-
etry not with Petrarch but with Serafino Aquilano, and through him
with Sannazaro: “[Serafino] was imitated by Sannazaro in his eclogues
as well as by Giovan Battista Marino in some subjects, conceits, and
above all in the ottave in sdrucciolo that he introduced in his Adone.”76
74 On the semisdrucciolo see Menichetti, Metrica italiana, 281–82, and 557–59.

75 Chiabrera does not invoke Sannazaro’s authority, but this is hardly a surprising
fact. As the title of the dialogue announces, his point is to justify the use of unorthodox
meters in the canzone; that is, in one of the highest forms of lyric poetry. Arguing that San-
nazaro employed sdruccioli in his pastoral eclogues (the humblest poetic genus) would
have been utterly useless. To overcome the idiosyncrasies of L’Orzalesi, it may be useful to
read Lorenzo Fabri’s well known exposition of Chiabrera’s poetic manifesto (grounded
on the rhythmic feet of classical prosody) in the preface to Le maniere de versi toscani (in
Opere, 1974, 213–16).
76 “[Serafino] imitato nell’ecloghe dal Sannazaro e da Giovan Battista Marino in
qualche soggetto e pensiero e parimente nell’ottave sdrucciole che pose nell’Adone.” Fe-
derico Meninni, Il ritratto del sonetto e della canzone, discorsi (Venice: Bertani, 1678). Quoted
in Raimondi, Rinascimento inquieto, 268. Meninni refers to the famous hymn to Bacchus in
canto VII of Marino’s Adone, a virtuoso piece consisting of five ottave (118–122) in which
For a last example of the musical characterization of Sannazaro’s histor-

ical persona in the 17th century, we may turn to the 1614 production
of the opera Amor pudico, sponsored by Cardinal Montalto for the wed-
ding of Michele Peretti and Anna Maria Cesi. In act IV, the audience
encountered the great poets of the past: Dante, Petrarca, Ariosto,
Tasso, and also Sannazaro and Ovid (the latter in the person of Gio-
vanni Andrea Dall’Anguillara, the translator of the Metamorphoses).
Each sang an aria whose text paraphrased their most famous verses. A
supplement to the libretto thus described Sannazaro’s performance:
Sannazaro, showing that noble simplicity with which he formerly sang

his Arcadia, made himself heard with the capitolo whose verses were
sdruccioli, to the sound of his instrument, and he finished with applause.77
Columbia University
ABSTRACT
In the 1580s Ruggero Giovannelli and Luca Marenzio published a
44 series of madrigals drawn from the pastoral book Arcadia (1504) by the
Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro. There was something unusual
about this choice. The texts featured sdrucciolo lines, a verse type that
was traditionally excluded from the Petrarchist canon and, conse-
quently, from the repertory of the musical madrigal. In the dedication
of his first book for four voices to Ferrante Penna, Giovannelli justified
his decision to publish an entire collection of sdruccioli as an homage to
Sannazaro, to whom he referred as the pride of the kingdom of Naples.
He clearly meant to capitalize on a distinctively southern sense of cul-
tural identity that took pride in Sannazaro’s poetic legacy.
Why, in Rome in the 1580s, did it become so important, and poten-
tially remunerative, to reaffirm the glory of a Neapolitan poet of the
caliber and popularity of Sannazaro? Why did this celebratory act focus
on such a specific aspect of his poetic output (namely the cultivation of
each line features, in addition to the sdrucciolo rhymes, two more proparoxytone words
(i.e. the line is composed of three sdrucciolo segments according to the scheme ∪-∪∪).
This rare type of hendecasyllable (also known as “endecasillabo ad ictus bloccati”) was in-
deed a landmark of Serafino’s sdruccioli (see Menichetti, Metrica italiana, 390).
77 “Ma il Sannazaro, mostrando quella nobil semplicità, con la quale già cantò l’al-
tro la sua Arcadia, con un capitolo, i cui versi erano sdruccioli, al suono del suo strumento
fece sentirsi: e terminò con applauso.” Quoted and translated in John Walter Hill, Roman
Monody, Cantata and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997), 1: 296. The music for Sannazaro’s aria (performed by Pellegrino Mutij) is
included in the second volume of Hill’s book (pp. 13–15).
gerbino
sdrucciolo lines)? And above all, why did it take the form of a musical of-
fering? By tracing the musical reception of Sannazaro’s Arcadia in the
16th century, this article investigates the relationship between deviation
from the norm and regional pride in the musical culture of the 1580s.
Concomitantly, it aims at demonstrating that the study of the musical
fortunes and misfortunes of Sannazaro’s text has something distinctive
to contribute to an understanding of the rhetoric of stylistic selection
that surrounded the development of the Italian madrigal.
45

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The Madrigal and its Outcasts: Marenzio, Giovannelli, and the Revival of Sannazaro's

An earlier version of this article was read at the 1999 meeting of

Clonico is a love-struck shepherd who is ready to die. The cruel woman

example 1. Marenzio, “Vedi le valli,” mm. 15–43

promising colleague in Rome, published a collection of four-voice

frontispiece, Gli sdruccioli, was clearly meant to advertise the novelty of

poetica e forma musicale,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 14 (1979): 75–127.

am also convinced that their interest in such a singular specimen of

to have been a fundamentally Roman phenomenon. Indeed, Giovanni Battista Moscaglia,

Of sdruccioli and shepherds

. . . since it was known that Latin and Greek authors appropriately

Calmeta offered a genealogy perfectly in line with humanistic culture

tenore, 1993), 116–17, and 123–24.

pastorella mia from Sannazaro’s first eclogue can be viewed as falling in

10 It may be useful to remember that the rhythmic structure of the hendecasyllable

to leave Cardinal Ascanio [Sforza], he wrote an eclogue that begins

The eclogue Dimmi Menandro mio is written in tercets of sdruccioli. Given

Documenta Musicologica 1/13, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958), 301.

example 2. Salinas, De Musica Libri Septem, 301

as a series of long and short note values (semibreves and minims),

Salinas’s testimony as an entirely theoretical fabrication. The mechani-

How are we to interpret this structural restlessness? The norms of stylis-

Serena Fornasiero (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1995), 3–19.

munication force us to pursue a highly formalistic analysis of this tradi-

21 Domenico De Robertis, “L’ecloga volgare come segno di contraddizione,” Metrica

22 Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, 141.

IX 1–51: tercets sdruccioli; 52–54: tercet sdrucciolo -piano-sdrucciolo;

The first two eclogues feature polymetrical structures akin to the

And take no heed if any, perhaps accustomed to hear more exquisite

The stylistic elevation of the bucolic register had an authoritative pre-

The Arcadia and the Madrigal

Like a poet, the procurer uses fables as subjects, poetry as medium,

[1540] Gero, I a 2 (NV 1123)35 Fillida mia più che i II,101

between the years 1540–1579 (the number of settings is indicated in

the madrigal established with Cinquecento Petrarchism, especially in

Norm and Marginalization

sdrucciolo words) must have looked like outdated signs of anti-petrarchismo.

Conte: As I told you before, I heard some people inappropriately despis-

voci (Venice: Scotto, 1557), no. 14.

letter contains a most appropriate reference to Petrarch and San-

example 3. Policreti, “La pastorella mia”

example 4. Monteverdi, “La pastorella mia” (voices only)

entirely different kind of rhythmic inertia: an even succession of quar-

example 5. Bonelli, “Aria per sdruzoli” (bass not extant)

In this context it is also worth mentioning a reference to the practice

Moreover, in the pastorals he splendidly [recited the part] of a shep-

Like the canzonetta/villanella, the commedia dell’arte absorbed, perpetu-

60 “E meravigliosamente poi [recitava la parte] d’un pastore nominato Corinto

(Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1979), 83.

example 6a. Giovannelli, “Itene Pecorelle,” mm. 1–10

were surely taken seriously, as Giovannelli’s textual selections and musi-

example 6b. (continued )

Rome was geographically, and above all culturally, much closer to

Cappelli, 1586) Ailano is described as a town of 82 “fuochi” (households), which is to say

70 On Castelletti’s revisions of L’Amarilli see Gabriella E. Romani, “Le tre Amarilli di

Cristoforo Castelletti,” Annali dell’Istituto di Filologia Moderna dell’Università di Roma 1

Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, Sezione Romanza 30 (1988): 143–72. It is

The musical revival of the Arcadia took shape at the intersection of

immediately followed its early appearance in the works of Marenzio

72 The first hypothesis is advanced in Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole,”

74 On the semisdrucciolo see Menichetti, Metrica italiana, 281–82, and 557–59.

For a last example of the musical characterization of Sannazaro’s histor-

Sannazaro, showing that noble simplicity with which he formerly sang

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