Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France (review)

The earliest surviving European musical instruments date from the sixteenth century, a period when humanists considered music a means to perfection of character and manners. In Sounding Objects Carla Zecher focuses on interpretations of instruments by French Renaissance poets and artists, persuasively contending that as a material object, an instrument may serve as autobiographical narrator or historical artifact, its literary and pictorial images arising from its physical traits, acoustic properties, and social convention. Drawing on a variety of treatises, poems, engravings, paintings, and part-books, this valuable study explores instruments as the nexus of graphic entity and auditory imagination at court, in salons, and in the civic arena.

Zecher points out that the Renaissance poetic soundscape consisted mainly of plucked-string instruments, whose ur-string, the lute, was believed to be descended from the classical lyre. She further observes that the flexibility of the sometimes generic terms luth and lyre enabled poets to conflate the classical and the contemporary, as the metapoetic function of Ronsard's odes to the lute and lyre reveals his ambition to endow France with a renovated vernacular poetry in the image of antiquity. Whereas court poet Ronsard chooses the lute for his Pindaric classicizing agenda and the guitar for his Horatian amatory voice, he refers to his Franciade as his "trumpet" (50), a work whose limited success is announced by the disobedient lyre's refusal to play of epic matters in his 1550 "A sa Lire."

Zecher views contrasting styles of poets and musical rivalries between mythological personages as a stringed/wind dichotomy in considering Pléiade poetry and Fontainebleau visuals. Although Renaissance poets and painters often followed Platonic thought in depicting wind instruments as folly and bawdiness associated with popular tradition, Zecher cautions that literary debates in the 1550s and '60s were problematic, destabilizing the aesthetic values commonly accorded strings and winds. In close readings of Ronsard and Du Bellay, she examines such debate especially in portrayals of Marsyas's musical challenge to Apollo. The satyr's embodiment of either the old orality of French poetry or the printed French language's challenge to Greek and Latin recalls the "uneasy co-existence" (90) of Apollonian and Dionysian music making in pictorial arts at Fontainebleau. Aptly analyzing visual scenes expressing reconciliation between challenger and victor, Zecher characterizes them as "emblematic of the difficulties entailed in maintaining musical ideology in the face of acoustic reality" (93).

Instruments function as didactic entities, rather than as objets d' art in urban emblem books, whose meditations on the necessity for prudence in governance in the courtly and civic arenas accord legendary musicians a place of prominence. While midcentury emblematists Coustau, Aneau, and La Perrière endow the lutenist with civilizing eloquence, Alciato equates the difficulty of tuning many strings with that of governance, a challenge further reflected in the topos of the broken lute string in Holbein's 1533 painting, The Ambassadors. In epigrams, Zecher appropriately notes the linguistic connections between nonstringed instruments and the dishonest rhetoric of court advisers, citing the verb flageoler, to play the flute or to engage in flattery, a synonym of the medieval verbs piper and tromper.

In lute-poems of the salon, the anthropomorphic instrument may serve as part of the lutenist's body or substitute for the absent lady, fulfilling multiple auto-referential functions, especially related to sexuality and gender. Analyzing the complex interaction and interdependence of player and instrument, notably among Lyonnese poets and non-French painters, Zecher convincingly demonstrates that "the body-centred language of these poems" (139) reminds us of the blurring of social and sexual boundaries in women's lute playing. While paintings often document the "slippage between the lute as voluptas and as the vita voluptuosa" (140), female poets achieve different kinds of "voluptuousness" (146), in displaying personal gratification found in lute performance, enabling the "survival of a female poetic self" (151).

Zecher offers a...