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3 results

  • Excursus 2 - Filippino Lippi’s Portrait of a Canterino

  • from Part II - Cantare ad Lyram: The Humanist Tradition
  • Blake Wilson, Dickinson College, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
    Published online:
    31 October 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019, pp 236-244

  • Summary

    This little-known work of the great Florentine artist has only recently been re-identified (by me) as the portrait of a professional canterino. It is of great interest both for the status accorded to the sitter, a well-dressed individual in the preoccupied act of tuning his lira da braccio, as if about to perform, and for the Petrarch inscription etched into the back of the instrument which faces the viewer. It dates from the early 1480s, and so dates from a period when both civic and humanist practices of singing to the lyre were in full flood in Florence. The sitter could be a practitioner of either, or perhaps the distinction did not matter at the time. This short essay explores this ambiguity.

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
  • Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry
  • Blake Wilson
  • Published online:
    31 October 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.