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

4. Dance and the Intellect

4 Dance and the Intellect In this matter [the education of the mind] we desire you to be convinced that there is nothing that men possess on earth more precious than intellect, and that other goods of human life which we pursue are truly insignificant and unworthy. Nobility is beautiful but it is a good not one’s own; riches are precious but they are the possession of fortune; glory is pleasant but it is inconstant; beauty is becoming but it is fleeting and ephemeral; health is desirable but indeed subject to change; you desire strength but it easily declines in sickness or old age. Nothing is more excellent than intellect and reason. These no attack of fortune may take away, no calumny may tear asunder. And although all the others are lessened by time, yet age increases knowledge and reason.1 These words were written by Piccolomini in his educational treatise , De liberorum educatione, but the sentiments expressed by him were widely shared by the fifteenth-century Italian humanists. These sentiments were also one of the main preoccupations of the dance masters, and the importance of intellectually understanding the dance practice is brought out very clearly in their treatises. Unless one engaged one’s intellect and reason, the art of dance would never be perfect. For these men dance was far more than physical movement. It was one way in which the truth of the cosmos and therefore the nature of God, the creator of the cosmos, was revealed to human beings and could be understood by them. As we have seen, in their treatises the dance masters argued strongly that dance was an art, an art which was closely linked to music, one of the seven liberal arts. The dance masters were so concerned to establish this link because those who understood and Dance and the Intellect 105 participated in the four mathematical arts of the quadrivium—music , arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—were engaged in the pursuit of wisdom. Practitioners of these four arts were considered to exercise true knowledge, rather than just a particular skill or ability that could be taught, as, for example, could be the skills of a stonemason or carpenter. Dance (through music) was one of the liberal arts, and therefore Domenico devotes a substantial part of the theoretical section of his treatise to explaining how dance shared the numerical basis of music and the other mathematical arts of the quadrivium. This chapter is a detailed analysis of Domenico’s argument as it is found in his treatise, as well as Cornazano’s and Guglielmo’s treatments of the subject. The argument rests heavily on fifteenthcentury Italian mensural theory, and although this material may not be familiar to every reader, its inclusion here is unavoidable, as this is the way the subject is presented in the dance treatises. The dance masters stated that dance was linked to the liberal arts through music in general, and in particular through the proportions (or ratios) that formed the basis of music at this time, and which were believed also to order the cosmos. In order to understand the importance of the theoretical basis of the dance treatises, and the reason the dance masters argued so vehemently that dance was an art, it is necessary to understand the origin and principles of these beliefs, the Pythagorean and Platonic ideas of the nature of the cosmos. The dance masters were not philosophic thinkers or innovators. Their worldview was that of the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition, which had been transmitted to the medieval West through the writings of St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and Boethius , and through the commentary and partial translation of Plato’s Timeaus by Chalcidius.2 From this tradition the dance masters inherited their belief that dance revealed the ultimate truth of the cosmos. Therefore, before beginning the detailed examination of the proportions found in the art of dance, and how they were expressed in this art, I will provide a short summary of the Pythagorean tradition inherited by the dance masters for those readers unfamiliar with these concepts, in order that they may better appreciate the importance that these proportions held for Domenico and his two pupils. 106 The Eloquent Body The Philosophical Basis of Fifteenth-Century Italian Dance: Pythagoras and Plato Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher and mystic who was born c. 570 b.c., taught that the basis of reality was number, and that...