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Accounts of Leonardo as a musician are to be found in the works of his earliest biographers: Paolo Giovio (Dialogi di viris et foeminis actate nostra florentibus), Anonimo Gaddiano (Book on Painting), Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (Gli sogni e raggionamenti) and Vasari (Lives of the Artists). It is nevertheless Leonardo himself who provides the most information about his relationship with music. A glance at the chronological data will help us to appreciate the connection between music and Leonardo’s artistic and scientific career. He was born at Vinci in 1452, the natural son of Ser Piero and Caterina. His father, a well-known notary in Florence, had him follow the family tradition by studying Law, but he soon encouraged his son to take up a career in commerce, which would allow the young Leonardo to act as a broker abroad for the powerful Florentine families. To pursue this profession he required a thorough training and so he took up the study of arithmetic. Vasari writes: “ he began to learn many things and then gave them up. Thus in arithmetic, during the few months that he studied it, he made such progress that he frequently confounded his master by continually raising doubts and difficulties. He also studied music and soon learned to play the lira, and, being filled with a lofty and delicate spirit, he could sing and improvise divinely with it.” Arithmetic and music, together with geometry and astronomy, constituted the Quadrivium, the four pillars on which education was founded in the Renaissance.
Music in the age of Leonardo was a reflection of the affirmation of individual personality; it was therefore more in tune with a philosophy that valued simple, expressive melody over and above the artifice of counterpoint. Italian musicians sang or recited from memory in their own native language, with or without accompaniment on the lute, the lira da braccio, the viola da gamba, the portative organ, the mandolin or the tabor. There are accounts of many poet-singers or popular composer- singers, among them Leonardo Giustiniani, a great improviser of verses who accompanied himself on the lute and whose poems were also set to music by such famous European composers as Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstable, both of whom wrote settings for his ballata “O rosa bella”. Benedetto Chariteo recited verses from Virgil and accompanied himself on the lute. Serafino d’Aquila, Panfilo Sass and Andrea Mazdue improvised verses in Latin, the language used almost exclusively by the Flemish musicians who visited and worked in Italy. Florence boasted Baccio Ugolini, Lorenzo the Magnificent’s ambassador, who had acted in Poliziano’s Orfeo, Antonio di Guido, Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Leonardo himself. In cultural circles, as well as in the society of merchants and artisans, music was both highly prized and widely cultivated. It was quite usual for singers to improvise songs on their own poems as well as the finest Italian lyric poetry.
An example of this amateur musicianship can be seen in Verrocchio, who improvised on the lyre and taught Leonardo music. Giorgione, too, was an excellent lute player, while Bramante recited poems accompanying himself on the lyre, as did Marsilio Ficino and Girolamo Savonarola. In the following account, Villari describes the feelings of Savonarola when the latter decided to enter a monastery: “on 23 April 1475, he sat down and, taking his lute in his hand, sang so sad an air to its accompaniment that his mother was inspired with a foreboding of the truth, and, turning suddenly to him, piteously exclaimed: ‘Oh, my son, this is a token of separation!’ But Girolamo, making an effort, continued to pluck the strings with trembling fingers, without once daring to raise his eyes.”
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