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

1. Dance and Society

1 Dance and Society The harmony in the sweet music of Guglielmo Ebreo is as sweet and heavenly as his fair dancing is elegant. It would make Maccabeus sheathe his sword. His dance comes not from human skill but from heavenly wit and divine knowledge. . . . Eagles on the wing are not so agile as Guglielmo, whose skills may be deemed to have been willed by Fate. Hector was never so outstanding in military prowess as this man is in his art, outstripping all others.1 The poem, part of which is quoted above, was written by a humanist in praise of a dance master: not a prince or duke, a political statesman or powerful government bureaucrat, but a dance master. In his ode in praise of Guglielmo Ebreo, Mario Filelfo favorably compares Guglielmo with heroes like Hector, and asserts that Guglielmo is so gifted in the art of dance that his skills must be divinely inspired.2 The effect of his dancing, which is beautiful in itself, is so powerful that it can influence warriors and philosophers—Maccabeus , Solomon, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato—and even goddesses such as Diana. Guglielmo indeed excels all others in the practice of his art. The claims that Filelfo makes concerning Guglielmo and the art of dance are bold ones, and echo the stance Guglielmo himself takes in his treatise. Guglielmo was more than a craftsman, a practitioner of the mechanical arts. He was worthy to be compared with respected figures of authority from the ancient world. Filelfo’s praise of Guglielmo and his association with the heroes of antiquity is testimony to the latter’s fame among the intellectual and courtly world of fifteenth-century Italy. This poem Dance and Society 13 is one of the first examples of the glorification of a living artist, and is comparable to the praise of the virtuoso lutenist and improviser Pietrobono, who was equated with the mythical figure of Orpheus .3 Filelfo claimed that Guglielmo’s dancing skill came from a source other than human talent, which could be learnt through the passing on of skills from a master to an apprentice. Guglielmo possessed ingenio, a creative power that was inborn (given by God) and through which the artist had the vision and intellectual capacity to conceive of the work, as opposed to just carrying it out. Ingenio was closely associated with the inventiveness, as opposed to the skill or workmanship (ars), of an artist or work of art. By crediting Guglielmo with the gift of ingenio, Filelfo was admitting him into an intellectual circle, and claiming that the practice of the art of dance was a way of expressing one’s intellectual qualities. The humanists praised not only each other for possessing both ars and ingenio but also painters, and so by 1450 the term had become part of the discussion of the arts in Italian writings.4 For example, Ghiberti in his Commentari states that for a work of art to be perfect it must have both ars and ingenio.5 It should not be surprising, therefore, that a humanist used the same term to praise Guglielmo, and that the term also became an important part of the theoretical writings on the art of dance. It is not clear when Guglielmo and Filelfo knew each other, and how close was the association. From the ode we learn that Guglielmo had taught dancing to Filelfo’s daughter, Theodora. “He makes many women appear noble and eminent like Diana, even though they are only human. My daughter Theodora is the most recent.”6 The lessons may have taken place while Filelfo was in Milan (from April 1458), as Guglielmo was present in Milan for many of the festivities held there during Francesco Sforza’s reign as duke from 1450 to 1466, including a visit in 1459.7 But whenever the teaching took place, it is clear that the two men knew each other, and that Filelfo saw nothing socially degrading in using his intellectual and literary abilities as a humanist to write a poem in praise of a dance master, nor in associating himself and his work with a treatise on dance. In writing this ode, Filelfo believed that dancing was an accepted part of life at the elite level of society. For it was the elite level of society that constituted the social world of the dance masters and the humanists in fifteenth-century Italy. Cornazano was born into one of the families of...