Nuovi canti carnascialeschi di Firenze: Le "canzone" e mascherate di Alfonso de' Pazzi (review)

This excellent edition of the carnival songs of Alfonso de' Pazzi (1509–55) has been long in the making. The texts of the carnival songs edited here were available as a free download from at least 2002 to 2006 (www.nuovorinascimento.org). They are now published with a comprehensive introduction and apparatus, and the resulting volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the genre of the carnival song of sixteenth-century Florence. Editions by Charles S. Singleton (1936 and 1940) and Riccardo Bruscagli (1986), and studies by Michel Plaisance (1973 and 1974), of which some will shortly be published in Nicole Carew-Reid's English translation, have ensured that the genre has continued to enjoy a wide audience, while explorations of the lexicography of erotic double meaning by Giovanni Aquilecchia (1969) and Jean Toscan (1981) mean that we can begin to experience the transgressive erotics of these texts. Two important works have appeared too recently to be reflected in the present edition: the important diary of "Antonio da San Gallo," which contains detailed descriptions of several ducal mascherate, has now been published without his name as Cronaca fiorentina, 1537–1555, ed. Enrico Coppi (2000); while Domenico Zanrè included a chapter on Alfonso de' Pazzi in his Cultural Non-Conformity in Early Modern Florence (2004).

Castellani's edition begins with a careful consideration of the relationship between the carnival "trade" songs in Florence, the May songs (maggi and bruscelli) of the Tuscan countryside, and the Neapolitan serenata, examined against the claims by Antonfrancesco Grazzini, called il Lasca (in his anthology of 1559), followed by Vasari (in the second edition of his life of Francesco Granacci), that the genre was invented by Lorenzo de' Medici. It continues with an attentive examination of Alfonso's poetic oeuvre and his role in the complex cultural politics of the Accademia Fiorentina, both before and after the reform of 1547. These two introductory chapters provide a social and political context for the songs, and for Castellani's extraordinary explication du texte.

The songs are for the most part contained in an autograph volume in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Banco Rari 71 (formerly Palatino 447), copied in a bizarre and almost illegible hand, that was perhaps intended to defeat prying eyes. Sections of the text and transcriptions are reproduced, the reader is glad that the orthography of the original has been normalized in accordance with standard Italian philological practice. There are forty-four songs or fragments, some with a very brief indication of how they might be performed, and they have been assembled in a single volume for submission to the Censors of the Academy. A price-list for performance rights is included: fifty florins for each private mascherata; 100 florins for a canto; and 300 florins for a trionfo with float, horses, and attendants. Alfonso then distinguishes curiously between the three kinds of delivery: a mascherata moved around town only during the day and on foot, singing various songs anywhere and everywhere; a canto was a daytime or nighttime recital of a number of songs, without musical interludes, in the house of a gentleman or prince; and a trionfo sang only a few songs on street corners. The songs themselves could be performed in any of these contexts.

And what songs! Jewelers, salad-sellers, jousters, melon-pickers, paladins, necromancers: all sell their wares with virtuoso performances that at a surface level are absolutely explicative, setting out goods and services for sale, while at the subtext is a riot of transgressive sexual metaphors, promising genital and anal and artificial penetration and praising the beauty of each: "We have precious stones, as big as broad beans, firm and shiny, but we keep them under key. Ladies, the jewelers have caves of rubies. / We do good solid settings in silver...