Monday, May 28, 2012

Music and love: 2012 just like the Renaissance?


While investigating Renaissance marriages and wedding pieces, I came across studies on the connection between music, love and the erotic. This intersection, which can take various forms, has been widely explored by art historians and musicologists. Analyses have mainly taken into consideration the XVI rather than the XV century: while in the Quattrocento very few households had musical instruments listed among their possessions, by the mid sixteenth century the material presence of music in the home increased (Dennis 2010). Instruments were adorned with elaborate carved or inlaid decoration and kept in painted cases. Usual motifs involved naked bodies or mythological scenes with clear love-related references (Figure 1).  Explorations on secular vocal music has also revealed that explicit allusions to sexual practises where concealed in sung texts especially in genres such as the frottola or madrigal (Macy 1996).


In some works of the XV and XVI century, texts play on the syllables of the music scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. By pulling these sounds together authors created erotic subtexts, embedded in the musical setting: “I should like you to sing a song/while you’re playing the viol for me/and that you would say fa ma la mi so la”. The text “hides” the sentence “fammel’a mi sola” which means “do it only to me” (Dennis 2010). Also Aretino, in his Ragionamenti, linked the musical scale to the erotic. Describing the culmination of an orgy he said “[..] listening to them you would have thought they were running the scales sol fa me re do” (Dennis 2010; Prizer 1991).

I happened to be in lovely Ferrara a couple of weeks ago.  While browsing through the open market in the main square (restaurant reservation at 1 pm, had a few minutes to kill!) I stopped in front a stall that sold T-shirts. They all featured quirky prints and some had this sentence written on the front: “Mi piacciono le ragazze che cantano si la do” (Figure 2). A literal translation would sound something like “I like girls that sing yes I give it”. I laughed. Now … The musical puns used by Aretino and others in the XVI century are still used today. Have things changed much between then and now??



PS. If you are in Edinburgh area don’t miss out the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. The Renaissance pieces of the museum can be browsed online (some Italian examples too!)

REF

Dennis, Flora. 2010. “Unlocking the gates of chastity. Music and the erotic in the domestic sphere in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy”, Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy (Ashgate)

Macy, Laura. 1996. “Speaking of sex: metaphor and performance in the Italian madrigal”, The Journal of Musicology, 14: 1-34

Prizer, William. 1991. “Games of Venus: secular vocal music in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento”, The Journal of Musicology, 9: 3-56.





Friday, May 11, 2012

Weddings, aphrodisiacs and…..onions!


Piero di Cosimo’s Discovery of Honey has long been considered a marriage piece commissioned for the wedding of Giovanni Vespucci and Namiciana di Benedetto Nerli (c.1500). The presence of bees (wasps?) swirling around the hive on top of the tree was interpreted as a punning reference to the Vespucci family whose name has the same root of the modern Italian word vespa (wasp). Set in a rural landscape, the scene is populated by satyrs and fauns engaging in different activities. In the foreground Pan stares straight at the beholder holding up three onions. According to some, onions have all the rights to appear in a wedding painting due to their well-recognised aphrodisiac qualities (Geronimous 2006). Personally not aware of the onion-love association, I tried to investigate this curious aspect further.

Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey (Worcester Art Museum)

detail

Research has proven that onions - as well as garlic - were viewed as aphrodisiacs worldwide, from far China to the Mediterranean. Greeks identified onions as an erotic stimulant more than other aphrodisiac (Koerper and Kolls 1999) while in Rome it was often included in culinary recipe books. The writer Martial suggested to eat plenty of onions if “your wife is old and your member is exhausted” (for citations and other examples check the Wellness Blog). Love-related features seem to be embodied also in the round, golden object hold by Venus, goddess of love, in Bronzino’s Allegory (c.1545). Appearing like an apple, a closer looks reveal it might well be an onion. The artist’s interest in linking these two elements seems to be confirmed by the poem La Cipolla del Bronzino Pittore (On Bronzino’s Onion) where the effects of onions are compared to those of love (Cohen 2008).

Bronzino, Allegory (London, National Gallery)

As the aphrodisiac properties of onions were celebrated since ancient times, it comes with no surprise that Renaissance Florence - where classical culture was widely assimilated and reinterpreted - adopted the same attitude. Piero di Cosimo’s panel therefore present several elements that justify its nature as a wedding piece: onions; honey (again associated with sweetness and love); and the presence of Pan/the satyrs, symbols of physical love. Furthermore the tree trunk in the middle of the panel has been recently seen as the grotesque of a woman in labour (idea advanced in the Boston.com article The Discovery of Honey byBacchus revisited). Arguable point.  

Now…onion soup anyone? 

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Beyond boundaries: translatability of cultures and visual arts in fifteenth century Florence


Most of us would agree with the description of European museums given by Mary Sheriff: sequential rooms dedicated to different national schools at different historical moments. We find the common chronological division Middle Ages/early Italian Renaissance/Baroque on one level while the Islamic, Chinese and Latin America arts located on a different floor - if not in an entirely different building (Sheriff 2010). This problematic aspect of display finds a parallel in the way the arts tend to be studied: great attention is paid to individual masters, national developments and local patronage.

Since the ‘50s cultural studies have been trying to overcome this strict classification by focusing on cultural transfer and cultural exchange. In 1949 Fernand Braudel discussed in his book Mediterranean the importance of "cultural frontiers" stressing the idea of us/them, the encountering of the other, and the symbolic boundaries that resist mapping. Later on cultural historians turned to the study of material culture – especially food, clothes, art – showing how these elements reveal cultural codes and identity (Burke 2004). The study of cultural transfer therefore moves towards a theory of cultural hybridity, sharpening awareness and sensitising people to the necessity of cultural variety (Roeck 2007. Farago 2010).

Europe is indeed rich in its cultural variety, consisting of countries different one from the other on many levels. Nevertheless Europe is also highly cosmopolitan due to its diverse countries linked through webs of political, economic, religious, and social ties (Belozerskaya 2002). Cultural encounters between these distinct identities generated cultural translation/cultural exchange that encompassed several domains from language and religion to cuisine, fashion and the arts (Burke 2004). In the past few years numerous studies have been devoted to the interaction and exchange between European countries and, in art history, this led to a reconsideration of the Renaissance in the light of the interaction occurred between Italy and – to mention some – the Netherlands, Russia, the Balkan and Asia (see contributes in Roodenburg 2007). Transfer and globalism have also constituted the topic of recent academic conferences world-wide such as Harvard’s Ornament as Portable Culture. Between globalism a locatism; Edinburgh’s From Influence to Translation: Art of the Global Middle Ages; and London forthcoming Fashioningthe Early Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

When exploring interaction between different entities it is necessary to take into account encounters on a larger scale such as those between Europe and the New World in the age of discovery. Scholarly output tried to elucidate and explore the dynamic processes that influenced European artist’s creativity and that, consequently, shaped the visual arts after 1492 (Sheriff 2010. Farago 2010). While it is easier to recognize mutual exchanges between Europe and Latin America (or Asia) from mid-sixteenth century onwards, exchange “practices” in late fifteenth century are still hazy. However some considerations can still be drawn regarding Florentine art.

Piero di Cosimo’s series of panels said to represent the “early history of man” (The Hunt; The Return from the Hunt; The Forest Fire; the stories of Vulcan) share common features, representing fights, wild men and primitive scenes (Figure 1). Speculations have been made on whether a possible connection could be established between these panels and the geographical discoveries undertook in the fifteenth century by navigators such as Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and Paolo Toscanelli (Brown 2010; Geronimous 2006). Explorers’ travel accounts and letters (of which illustrated editions appeared, Figure 2) were in fact enriched with the descriptions of alien lands, savages and barbaric episodes. Could have these written text influenced the imagination of Florentine patrons and artists? Positive answer. Bellicose, primitive scenes, monstrous animals and mythical figures such as tritons, satyrs and centaurs can be found not only in Piero di Cosimo’s panels but also elsewhere in Florence: in the frieze decorating Scala’s urban villa in Borgo Pinti; in the painted architecture of Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles; and in Giuliano da Sangallo’s decorative frieze design for a fireplace executed for Giuliano Gondi; (Geronimous 2006. Meltzoff 1987).

Figure 1. Piero di Cosimo, A Hunting Scene (NY, Met)

Figure 2. Woodcut from A.Vespucci Mundus Novus (1505)

It seems therefore plausible to link the primitive (negative?) depictions that circulated in the last decade of the century to the fights and invasions related to the geographical discoveries.  The presence of these images however makes us wonder if, and to what extent, these representations could also be connected to the unbalancing changes Florence was experiencing locally at the time: the Medici exile; Savonarola’s apocalyptic preaching (Weinstein 1970); and the descent of Charles VIII. In the last decade of the century wild men, fauns and satyrs appeared in pageants across the city (Pieri 1988) while in ad outside Florence people started to fear what was defined as mostro (beyond Florence “disturbing” images and performances took place in Venice where later on, from 1500, representations depicted hell populated by devil-like presences. See Aikema 2001). The use of this word is recorded in connection to Charles VIII, seen more as a monster than a man (Niccoli 1990), and to the birth of baby-monsters (Bec 1988). When seen in the light of Florence’s historical circumstances, these examples may help to understand why the proliferation of savages and monster-like images found some fertile ground in the Tuscan city and, more generally, in Italy. Political events, apocalyptic prophecies, geographical discoveries and encounters with the Other contributed to shape Florentines’ imaginary world and the arts. Artists assimilated new ideas and transported them in re-adopted classical modes of expression (fauns, centaurs) embodied with new social meanings based in the life of the present (Dempsey 2012).