16 - Canterinoandimprovvisatore: oral poetry and performance

Summary

Oral poetry in fifteenth-century Italy thrived in a dynamic environment created largely by the advent of humanism. While the fifteenth-century canterino was the successful descendant of the joculatore who had worked the public spaces and private palazzi of Italian cities. The natural habitats of the civic canterino were the republican city-states of central Italy. The recasting of solo singing to the lira da braccio as a humanist enterprise unfolded during the second half of the century in multiple center. During the fourteenth century, canterini had been active in most northern Italian courts and cities, and their pattern of ad hoc employment and itinerancy continued in the fifteenth century. Beginning with de facto Medici rule in the 1430s, a vital tradition of vernacular poetry rooted in the legacy of the tre corone, and a thriving culture of civic humanism favorable to the practice of vernacular eloquence. The improvvisatori associated with vernacular poetry in Florence overlapped to some extent with Ficino's circle.