As in other fields, the Cinquecento (sixteenth century) witnessed the codification ofa classical style in architecture and city planning. More than a century after Alberti, the most influential printed treatise was the 1570 Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio (1508-80), who had already published surveys of Roman antiquities and churches in 1554. Both Palladio’s work and the 1615 Idea of Universal Architecture by his pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616) were translated into French and English; and in England his original texts were studied by Inigo Jones (15731652), the first of the British neoclassical architects.
After the Council of Trent (1545-63), Italian missionaries were instrumental in disseminating Christian and classical ideals throughout the world. The Jesuit order excelled in ‘‘propagating’’ classical learning through the curriculum outlined in its Ratio studiorum (Plan of studies) and soon became an international brotherhood of scholars and missionaries. In 1634, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) settled in Rome, where he founded a museum of antiquities and published some 40 volumes that established him as a paragon of classical erudition. Yet over the course of time the Jesuit order had no lack of scholarly Italians, such as the historian Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750) and the philologist Angelo Mai (1782-1854), who continued the humanistic tradition of discovering unknown texts.
The diffusion of classical ideals was also promoted by the foundation of Italian academies - a name derived from Plato’s school, adjacent to a grove dedicated to the hero Academus - in which learned men gathered to discuss literary or scientific questions. During the Quattrocento, the term ‘‘academy’’ often designated an informal group of scholars united by a common interest, such as the Platonic Academy of Florence led by Marsilio Ficino. In Naples, under Alphonse of Aragon (1442-58), an erudite circle formed around the humanist Antonio Beccadelli (13941471), called Panormita after his native city of Palermo (‘‘Panormus’’ in Latin). After his death, the direction of the Accademia Antoniana was assumed by the humanist poet and diplomat Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503), who formalized the structure of the organization, which continues today as the Accademia Pontaniana.
In the sixteenth century, the formal institution of Italian academies multiplied and soon inspired the creation of analogous institutions in France and England. The seminal gatherings of the Quattrocento at first often lacked a formal name, membership lists, and rules of order. Early in the next century, the idea of an erudite sodalitas persisted and inspired Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens (1509-11) in the Vatican. By 1540, academies were proliferating in Italy’s urban centers, and by 1600 there were some 377 academies in Italy. By 1700, the number of Italian academies had grown to nearly 1250. Among the most prominent of these were the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (1603), which still meets and publishes today (website: Www. lincei. it), and the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, whose 1612 Vocabolario (Dictionary) established it as the linguistic arbiter of the Tuscan language. In addition to its critical editions of Italian texts, the academy has since 1996 posted a website (Www. accademiadellacrusca. it) that features a vast array of information about the Italian language.
Italian academies were soon imitated in other countries, and the city of Rome proved to be a powerful magnet for learned societies from various nations. Whereas academies in Italy were usually local civic organizations, their French and English imitators tended to be nationalized (Findlen 1999). In 1632, Cardinal Richelieu founded the French Academy, which affirmed the Aristotelian ‘‘unities’’ of time, space, and persons; and Pierre Corneille, inducted as a member, defended his 1636 tragedy Le Cid by citing the neo-Aristotelian rules endorsed by the Academy. By this time, the French artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorraine (160082), favored by Louis XIII, had settled in Rome; and in 1666 Louis XIV founded the French Academy in Rome that offered a ‘‘classical’’ experience to aspiring artists such as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). (In 1803, Napoleon transferred the Academy to the Villa Medici, overlooking the Spanish Steps, and instituted the prestigious prize for musical composition that would be held by composers like Berlioz and Debussy.)
Academies and courts were essential in the development of‘‘classical’’ theater and in that quintessentially Italian invention, the opera. During the Middle Ages, the ancient Roman comedies by Plautus and Terence were often read but seldom imitated. In the ‘‘heroic’’ age of manuscript discoveries during the early Quattrocento, Nicholas of Cusa discovered 12 unknown comedies by Plautus (1429) and Giovanni Aurispa found Donatus’ commentary on Terence (1433). Such discoveries inspired Neo-Latin dramatists like Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-64), later Pope Pius II, whose Chrysis of 1444 is a cento (composite pastiche) of Plautus and Terence (Grund 2005). In the next century, Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) adapted these Roman models in five Italian comedies that exercised an influence far beyond the court of Ferrara. His comedy Suppositi (1509) was the model for the English Supposes (1582), written by George Gascoigne (ca. 1525-77), which in turn influenced Shakespeare’s early comedies, The Comedy of Errors and Taming of the Shrew (ca. 1589-94). Gascoigne also translated Ludovico Dolce’s Giocasta, an Italian tragedy based on Euripides’ Phoenissae.
The Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics, which expounded the principles of classical drama, was first printed in the 1508 Aldine edition of Rhetores Graeci (Greek rhetoricians) ; but it was only 40 years later that Italian theorists turned their attention to ancient Greek tragedy, producing a vast series of treatises in Latin and Italian on poetics. After the appearance in 1548 of the Explicationes by Francesco Robortello (1516-67), the next decades saw the publication of Latin and Italian translations and commentaries on Aristotle’s treatise by Bernardo Segni (1549), Bartolomeo Lombardi and Vincenzo Maggi (1550), Piero Vettori (1560), Lodovico Castelvetro (1570), Alessandro Piccolomini (1575), Antonio Riccoboni (1585), and
Lionardo Salviati (1586). Mediated by works like Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Latin Poetices libri septem (Seven books on poetics) (1561) and Jean Vauquelin de La Fresnaye’s versified Art poetique (1605), neo-Aristotelian standards shaped the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine (Weinberg 1961; Schmitt 1983).
From the outset, Italian opera not only sought to reinvent Greek musical drama, but was also a vehicle for the celebration of Greek mythology and ancient history. As the Greek name suggests, the notion of melodrama (in Italian dramma per musica) arose in a learned society - namely, the Florentine Camerata dei Bardi, whose members sought to discover the principles of the musical drama in antiquity. In the first generation of Italian opera, the three extant operas of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) dramatize Greek myth (Orfeo), Roman history (L’incoronazione di Poppea [Coronation of Poppaea]), and episodes from Homer’s Odyssey (Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria [Ulysses’ return to his homeland]). A century later, the erudite librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) drew upon the classical historians Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Livy for his opera libretti. His successor as Imperial Poet in Vienna was Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), whose 27 libretti on classical themes shaped the course of opera seria (serious opera) in theaters from Vienna to London. His Clemenza di Tito, for example, was set by more than 50 composers, including Mozart (Smith 1970).
Like Italian artists, Italian opera composers were conspicuously itinerant; and the eighteenth century witnessed an unparalleled diffusion of Italy’s musical culture. For example, the Venetian Baldassare Galuppi, who set several of Metastasio’s works, spent 1738-43 in London, and 1765-70 in St. Petersburg, where he premiered his setting of Marco Coltellini’s libretto Ifigenia in Aulide (Iphigenia in Aulis). Later in the century, Gluck effected his opera reforms in collaboration with the Tuscan poet Raineri de’ Calzabigi (1714-95), who wrote mythological libretti for Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice), Alceste (Alcestis), and Paride ed Elena (Paris and Helen).
Throughout the Baroque, Italy likewise supplied Europe with classicizing standards in painting and architecture. In his pastel apotheoses of saints and Olympian gods, Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) celebrated the iconic supremacy of the ancien regime (traditional monarchies) in palaces from Wurzburg to Madrid. Meanwhile, Italian architects created the monuments of sovereign states from Madrid (the Royal Palace by Giovanni Battista Sacchetti, 1740) to St. Petersburg (the second Winter Palace by Domenico Tressini, 1716; and the General Staff Building and Winter Palace by Carlo di Giovanni Rossi, 1819).
World History
