City culture and the madrigal at Venice
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
City culture and the madrigal at Venice
University of California Press, c1995
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Note
Bibliography: p. 435-464
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This exploration of 16th-century Venetian madrigals centres on the importance to the Venetians of Ciceronian rhetorical norms, which emphasized decorum through adherence to distinct stylistic levels. It shows that Venice easily adapted these norms to its long-standing mythologies of equilibrium, justice, peace and good judgment. It explains how Venetian literary theorists conceived variety as a device for tempering linguistic extremes and thereby maintaining moderation. It further shows how the complexity of sacred polyphony was adapted by Venetian music theorists and composers to achieve similar ends. At the same time, Feldman unsettles the kinds of simplistic alignments between the collectivity of the state and its artistic production that have marked many historical studies of the arts. Her social history enables a more intricate dialectic among socio-political formations: the roles of individual printers, academists, merchants and others; and the works of composers and poets.
This book offers a model for situating aesthetic products in a specific time and place, one that sees expressive objects not simply against a cultural backdrop but within an integrated complex of cultural forms and discursive practices.
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