The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy (review)

With The Eloquent Body Jennifer Nevile offers an intellectual history of courtly dancing in fifteenth-century Italy, with particular attention to the treatises of Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano, and Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro. Her book represents the first sustained study of dance in the light of humanist discourse in Italy, building upon work such as Barbara Sparti's edition of Guglielmo Ebreo's De pratica seu arte tripudii: On the Practice or Art of Dancing (Oxford, 1993) and A. William Smith's edition Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza (2 vols., Stuyvesant, NY, 1995).

As Nevile explains, dancing masters appropriated humanist discourse to promote their art and endow it with scholarly authority. Cornazano's work, for instance, was written in Italian and Latin, and included a life of the Virgin Mary in terza rima, a prose treatise on the art of war, and the Sforzeide, a celebration of the Dukes of Milan modeled on Virgil's Aeneid (61-62). Yet dance has been sidelined in scholarly accounts of the humanist movement. As Nevile rightly observes, "the late arrival of dance into the network of academic discourse has meant that dance usually does not figure in histories of early modern Western societies" (4). Nevile's work demonstrates that dance can no longer be passed over as an ephemeral artistic practice of marginal interest.

Nevile explores the links between dancing masters and humanists, whose reliance upon classical authority and preference for a dialogic argument informed the composition of dance treatises. Nevile takes a fresh look at the much-cited analogy between eloquent movements and eloquent speaking. She produces compelling new evidence of the humanist esteem for dancing; thus, Mario Filelfo praised the maestro da ballo Guglielmo Ebreo as superior to Hector (12). As Nevile shows, pupils received instructions from dancing masters at one of the most famous schools in fifteenth-century Italy, Vittorino da Feltre's establishment at Mantua (20). A full chapter is devoted to the intellectual dimension of dancing: as Renaissance dancing masters pointed out, dancing was not only a physical but also an intellectual activity that required musical and mathematical skills, for dances were based upon proportion (misura). Nevile takes misura as a point of departure to investigate the ethos of Renaissance dancing; here she brings humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Leon Battista Alberti and theories of linear perspective to bear upon the idea that geometric order in dances led to moral virtue.

Nevile has a strong background in the practical reconstruction of fifteenth-century repertoire (as demonstrated in her work on the late medieval English Gresley dances), and thus manages to write with considerable clarity about a discipline that does not lend itself easily to verbalization. Graphics illustrate floor patterns of Renaissance dances, and Nevile's lucid prose enables even the uninitiated reader to follow the technical explanations. Choreographies are never abstract but are helpfully contextualized. Thus, Domenico's dances Belfiore and Belriguardo are shown to have been named after country villas of the Este family, and floor tracks of compositions such as Lauro (said to have been choreographed by Lorenzo de' Medici) are reminiscent of garden architecture (125). Elsewhere Nevile colorfully evokes the dynamic interaction between male and female dancers (a fine example is Mercantia, or "merchandise," a dance in which a woman trades, as it were, with three men). Nevile's account of both professional and upper-class female dancers and composers — and their performance in public — offers a refreshing alternative to current post-Foucauldian approaches, which tend to describe women as passive and suppressed by male instructors and patrons.

Nevile has produced one of the most vibrant accounts of fifteenth-century choreographic practice in recent literature. Her outstanding book combines practical dance experience with detailed archival work, and a new approach which links the origins...