Perfect Beauty: Echoes of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the Poetry and Music of the Trecento

Readers of the notational and theoretical treatises of the late fourteenth century experience musical compositions that were both feasts for the eyes and the ears. These examples of Augenmusik—what Richard Taruskin calls "a phenomenal feat of calligraphy"—represent a development that Ursula Günther in 1963 labeled the ars subtilior.² Characterizing this so-called ars subtilior or "subtler art," as it was practiced by "the Avignon School" for popes and wealthy aristocratic patrons in parts of southern France and northern Italy, were the concern for the expression of the beauty of musical sound and the lure of notating more sophisticated rhythms, such as those overheard in popular music and dance. Experiments with new note shapes are described in the anonymous Tractatus de diversis figuris, one of a set of musical treatises transcribed in Pavia in 1391 and held in the library of the Visconti family of Milan (now Newberry Library, MS 54.1).³ The prologue labels the style of writing that employs more variety of rhythm as an artem [End Page S-167] magis subtiliter. In what follows, I will draw connections between some of the ideals of beauty as seen and heard in late-fourteenth-century musical ideas inspired by an ancient rhetorician whose influence warrants investigation.

As Umberto Eco wrote, "[c]on Pitagora nasce una visione esteticomatematica dell'universo: tutte le cose esistono perché riflettono un ordine; e sono ordinate perché in esse si realizzano leggi matematiche, che sono insieme condizione di esistenza e di Bellezza."⁴ Legend has it that, in hearing the music of the spheres, Pythagoras discovered that the so-called consonant intervals of music—unisons, fourths, fifths and octaves—could be expressed in simple ratios. But, as Alan Shaw notes, the

musicality of ancient Greek […] has long been an article of faith […]. And there are reasons why Greek seems a special case: the intimate relation—indeed the theoretical identity—between Greek music and poetry, and the fact that the two most basic elements of music—the duration of sounds and their pitch—form two clear and distinct systems in Greek […]. Poetic meters were based on the relative durations of syllables, which permitted a fairly direct translation into musical terms. Word accent was based solely on pitch, and hence has often been called a "musical" accent.⁵

This perceived coterminality of music and poetry influenced Plato and other philosophers and theorists before its wide dissemination in Latin. At the opening of the second book of De consolatione philosophiae, one of the most consumed texts of the Middle Ages, Boethius describes being enchanted by Philosophy's song, which is accompanied by her most beautiful "musical handmaiden."⁶ Though writing in Latin, Boethius had summarized Greek theories in his De institutione musica and refers here to the music of ancient Greek epic and lyric poetry.

In the fourteenth century, Giovanni Gherardo of Prato (circa 1360/67—before 1446) remembers Messer Dolcibene of Padua, the [End Page S-168] performer at the court of Bernabò Visconti (1323–1385) and a great friend of the poet Franco Sacchetti (1335–1400), for having "fa[tto] sue canzonette in ritimi con parole molto piacevoli e intonandole con dolcissimi canti."⁷ Gherardo's use of the adjective piacevoli presages some concepts—namely, gravità and piacevolezza—addressed by Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua (published in 1525). In that work, Bembo "proclaims the pre-eminence of a single poetic model, namely Petrarch."⁸ Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola, who debated the ancient theories of imitation with Bembo, had claimed in his De imitatione that reading Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian and rhetorician working in Augustan Rome, helped him articulate his position on "the artful blending of a variety of styles into a single, harmonious discourse."⁹ Music historians have thus identified a turning point for the marriage of refined poetry and music in Bembo's 1525 treatise on the proper imitation of Francesco Petrarca, "in particular his complex analysis, based on the phonetic theories expounded in the first century by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, of Petrarca's sound structures...