The bacio mordace, or the biting kiss, was one of the most erotic and consequently very popular poetic tropes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, particularly through the poetry of Battista Guarini (1538–1612) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In his later books of madrigals, particularly the Seventh Book of 1619, Monteverdi was drawn to madrigals with such provocative imagery, although in a more overt way compared to his earlier kiss madrigals of the Second Book of 1590. In his later kiss madrigals, Monteverdi sought to give a musical dimension not so much to a cerebral obsession with kisses, but rather in the execution of them. The concertato medium proved ideal to render musical poets’ syntactical play on who is kissing whom, and the degree to which teeth were involved.

Kisses have an uneasy relationship with time. They are ever desired, withheld, stolen, and multiplied because they create more longing than they satiate. The kiss is both sensual and spiritual, direct and oblique, unifying and dividing – it is the embodiment of the erotic paradox. From its origins in the Song of Songs and Catullus, to the Basia of Secundus and the baci mordaci of Marino, the tradition of kiss-poetry conveys the pleasurable frustration of talking about love instead of making it: the necessity of speech acts in bringing about the physical act of kissing, and the impossibility of simultaneity between the two. Monteverdi’s engagement with the poetic conceit of kisses – mouths uttering delights by actions, words, and song – dates to his introduction to the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) during his final years in Cremona. This chapter traces the history of kiss poetry to focus on Monteverdi's earliest interactions with kiss poetry, the madrigals from his Second Book of 1590.

This chapter focuses on musical interpretations of Giambattista Marino’s (1569–1625) pastoral poetry in Monteverdi’s Sixth Book of madrigals from 1614. The pastoral mode gave Monteverdi licence to create imaginary worlds of musical shepherds and nymphs, just as it had given Marino the opportunity to create a web of poetic references reaching back to antiquity. The formal and stylistic experiments found in the pastoral madrigals, or the rime boscherecce, provided Monteverdi fertile ground from which to use musical materials in a similar way. The affinities and, in many cases, the incongruities between the pastoral images and characters in the texts and Monteverdi’s manipulation of them in music created a new kind of listening experience for the audience. It invited them to delight in the unexpected.

Is it possible to hear marvels? Despite its deep roots in Aristotelian thought, the marvellous, or meraviglia in Italian, was a highly contested subject in early modern literary circles. It is most often associated with Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), the poet who infamously declared that the aim of poetry was, above all else, to arouse wonder. The primacy of wonderment as an artistic aim did not, however, begin with Marino. Not only does the idea permeate criticism throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, particularly in the writings of Francesco Patrizi (1529–97), but it was by no means restricted to the art of poetry alone. This chapter focuses on the origins of meraviglia in the work of classical writers, its centrality to literary debates in the sixteenth century, and its reimagining in the poetry, painting, and sculpture of the early seventeenth century.