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In the Renaissance, polychoral writing had an extra-musical connotation that was able to celebrate the status of power and to create universal consent. These characteristics of polychorality were evident more than ever in the spectacular politics that accompanied the ascent of the Medici in the 16th century. Grand and formal celebrations were dotted with polychoral pieces which became spectacular when merged with monumental or ephemeral architecture; the ‘cori battenti’ singing at the city’s gates, against the Duomo’s façade and in its cupola, on the baptistery’s balconies, and especially on the astonishing theatrical machines of the ‘intermedi’. Alessandro Striggio was a central figure in this strategy, as he became an ambassador of the Medicis’ prestige among European nobility through his splendid mass for 40 or 60 voices.

The relationship between music and emotions has been recognized since ancient times. After some brief historical reference to the way in which the question was addressed up to the Modern Age, the article focuses on the contemporary debate on musical expressiveness. In particular, three theories are taken into consideration: the ‘arousal theory’, that takes up the traditional idea of musical expressiveness depending on the feelings aroused in the listener; the ‘contour theory’, that elaborates on the idea that music is able to express emotions thanks to the resemblance between music and human behaviour, and the ‘person theory’, which, by integrating aspects of the first two proposals, reworks the 18th-century ‘expressivist’ model, arguing that there is no expressivity (not even musical expressivity) without a (maybe imaginary) subject expressing itself.

Monteverdi’s musical innovations can be compared to the Copernican revolution in astronomy: in both cases, new perspectives were presented under the reassuring light of the rediscovery of ancient ideas as a way of justifying the departure from paradigms prevalent at the time. But it was a dangerous game. Despite being involved in a bitter controversy with Artusi, Monteverdi had better luck than fervent supporters of Copernicus such as Bruno and Galileo. The present study re-examines the musical controversy also in light of the debates that had engaged Zarlino, Vincenzo Galilei, Bardi, Patrizi and Bottrigari.

In ancient Greek musical theory, harmony was seen as being endowed with a natural virtue capable of altering the rational faculties of the listener’s soul. The many theological and cultural implications of this classical axiom featured in early modern debates about music, dance, comedy, and emotion. By exploring a series of Campanella’s sources, this article seeks to provide some examples of original theoretical elaborations formulated in the course of these debates. A central aim of this approach involves understanding the role of emotion in composing and performing music.

Del origin et nobiltà del ballo (c. 1620), a work by the physician and art expert Giulio Mancini, is examined here within the humanistic cultural paradigm, which includes: the education of the nobleman to a second behavioral nature, the foundation of the society of grace and good manners, and the arrangement of technical knowledge and its reduction to art. Mancini contributes to this paradigm through his ideas on medicine, art and dance. If the preservation of health is held to be a universal value, then the ideal of a healthy lifestyle, punctuated by physical exercise, is combined with the contemplation of painting. This, according to Mancini, is the prerogative of nobles, whose fortune allows them to collect precious works of art that serve to provide recreation for the body and relief to the soul.

The main expression of humanism in 16th-century music was the idea that acting on the affections meant to translate the words in sounding images, in order to bring them «before the eyes of imagination» of the listener. Oddly, few musicologists explained clearly the reasons underlying the cultural background of such techniques. One of them was a precise doctrine about the way in which imaginatio reacted to forms through the musical equivalent of rhetorical ekphrasis. Moreover, not all the sounding images were rhetorical figures. Most of the ‘episodic’ figures conceived by Franco-Flemish composers at the beginning of the century were mainly ‘symbols’, as products of Neo-Platonic metaphysics. In the last decades of the 16th century, Aristotelianism could counter the richness of Neo-Platonic symbolism only with the idea of imitation as techne, and of the figure as a conventional sign lacking its metaphysical and magic density. Musicians still translated words into music but the golden age of symbols was over, and their word painting became a rhetoric of figures inspired by mere linguistic models.

The theatrical activities of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri are scantly documented and little studied. This article presents sources referring to the dramaturgical and scenic experience of the Congregation, with particular focus on Father Francesco Gizzio as dramatist and director of theatrical performances. It was a devotional theatre, dedicated above all to the figures of the saints, and its greatest peculiarity was that it was played by children. The article considers this to be the decisive point to try to understand the uplifting effect that the Oratorians wanted to achieve on the audience through the plays. The analysis focuses primarily on the outcome of the dialectic relationship between the actor-child and character-adult, which seems to rest on the theoretical-practical apparatus, of a spiritual and moral kind, typical of the post-Tridentine period.

Why should a journal on Renaissance culture dedicate a section to music? And what is the very definition of music in the context of intellectual history during the Renaissance period? These questions are an invitation to interrogate the historical motivation of today’s separation of musicology from the other fields of the humanities. Mirroring that invitation, this essay proposes to think about the role of musical knowledge in the construction of European culture. The Renaissance period is a fertile ground for a reflection of this sort: it was precisely during the 15th and 16th centuries that European culture saw an extraordinary convergence of mind and work of art and science that established the basis of the modern musical time.