| This dissertation investigates the Renaissance fascination with the Arcadian world. Although the pastoral dream pervaded the artistic and cultural life of the sixteenth century, many aspects of this phenomenon remain obscure. This is in part due to a very influential current of modern criticism which has condemned pastoral as cold, unnatural and naive. My research seeks to retrieve the cultural meaning of Renaissance pastoral imagery by examining a hitherto neglected aspect of this tradition: the interaction between poetry and music, especially as manifested in the extraordinary flourishing of musical settings of pastoral poetry in late-Renaissance Italy (1580--1600). This historiographical model abandons a purely literary/textual reading of the pastoral tradition and attempts to describe this cultural trope as a musical/literary system of symbolic representation. The conceptual framework of this re-evaluation of the interaction between language and music in the stylistic construction of social identities in sixteenth-century Italy is in part predicated on Pierre Bourdieu's cultural theory. In particular, I elaborate on his notion of symbolic isomorphism, according to which primary semantic oppositions in linguistic/artistic expressions parallel and reinforce wider cultural/social distinctions.;The dissertation is divided into five chapters. In the first, I investigate the nature of the late Quattrocento eclogue, its musical implications, and the premises of the failed transition of this flourishing literary current into the early madrigal. Chapter II analyzes the fundamental shift in literary and musical ideology that characterized the emergence of the polyphonic madrigal as well as the new significance assumed by the pastoral tradition in the context of the dominant Petrarchist movement. I here elaborate notions of dominant, hegemonic, and residual in order to provide a historical model for the seeming disappearance of a whole chapter of the Quattrocento musical and literary experience. Chapter III is dedicated to the musical components of the pastoral theater. In particular, I focus on interacting stylistic levels of representation rooted in the practice of professional theatrical companies (the Sienese academy and the actors of the commedia dell'arte) and the aesthetic program of the Ferrarese courtly pastoral first championed and theorized by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio. In chapter IV, I examine the pastoral vogue of the 1580s, with particular emphasis on the two main typologies of pastoral madrigal, the idyllic and the dramatic. The chapter also includes some remarks on the musical revival of Sannazaro's Arcadia in the 1580s. This provides the link to the epilogue, a brief set of reflections on the vexing question of the relationship between nascent opera and pastoral tragicomedy. |
