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PANEL 17
Literary, Musical and Philological Transformations in the Renaissance
Room 9206
Frozen Movements: the Transformations of Ovid’s and Michelangelo’s Heliades
Laurie Glenn – Boston University
This paper explores two representations of the myth of Phaethon’s transgression and his
sisters’ consequent transformation into trees, found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in
Michelangelo’s drawing (Fall of Phaethon, London). Grief propels these sisters, the Heliades,
outside of the human realm. Where is this transformation located physically and temporally? Do
these women become less themselves through their metamorphosis, or somehow more themselves
(or simultaneously both)? As trees, and as poetry or image, the Heliades’ grief is immortalized, but
the cost of this immortality may be a loss of self.
In that moment of transition, when their ontological status is in question, these women only
remain “themselves” insofar as they are capable of self-expression. Ovid describes their mourning
in active, even violent terms. They first notice the metamorphosis as a limitation to their expressive
capabilities. Ironically, although self-mutilation characterizes their mourning, pain bothers them as
they become trees. The trees’ amber tears are the one remnant of the sisters’ grief, but even these
become objects of beauty, pretty trinkets or jewelry, divorced from the pain that produced them.
Ovid memorializes Phaethon by morphing his own dactylic hexameters into Phaethon’s epitaph,
transforming the language of Phaethon’s epic disaster into a funerary inscription in a virtuosic
flourish. The Heliades’ amber tears and Ovid’s poetry are attractively packaged for consumption by
the Roman elite.
In Michelangelo’s drawing, the Heliades’ transformation into trees increases, rather than
decreases, the expressive potential of the figures: their tree limbs are literally an outgrowth of their
grief. They do not struggle against their metamorphosis, instead they struggle into these new forms.
Their transformation is an excess of communication, not a loss of it. Depicting the Heliades at the
moment of metamorphosis allows Michelangelo to extend their grief beyond the limits of a human
body. Despite all the movement Michelangelo depicts, this transformation will never complete
itself. The time of transition becomes the only time that exists.
The Transcendental Transdisciplinarity of the Renaissance Musicus
Jadranka Subic – McGill University
This paper investigates the ultimate transdisciplinarity of the Renaissance music science
through the work and life of Gioseffo Zarlino, the last Renaissance Musicus. Zarlino belonged to
the category of thinkers that over a thousand years of evolution, from Boethius to Vincenzo Galilei,
engaged in studying their universe through classical perceptions of natural laws of music.
To modern historians and musicologists, Zarlino was the most important music theorist of
the late Renaissance who laid the groundwork for modern diatonic tonality. To his contemporaries,
the people of sixteenth-century Venice, Zarlino was much more than a mere music theorist. He was
revered as an erudite scientist, mathematician, astronomer, theologian, linguist, organist, cantor,
educator, composer, writer. Zarlino was the epitome of the late Renaissance genius, a thinker who
in the Platonic tradition deemed that “a true musicus must be more than just a musicus,” masterly in
both theoretical and practical knowledge of music. Remarkably, handling with authority the
theoretical aspect of music meant being equally knowledgeable in natural sciences, mathematics,
languages, rhetoric, philosophy, and history.
As an evolved humanist and self-proclaimed “musico perfecto,” through his writings,
Zarlino shaped his own interpretation of the framework established by his precursors’ long lineage.
But, nearing the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, Zarlino’s supremely elaborate and elegant
treatises, based on his interpretation of ancient wisdom and on a fragile combination of
mathematical, philosophical, religious, and cosmological concepts, became obsolete. His pupil and
most ardent opponent Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the Father of Science, brought his theory down
by setting in motion a bitter dispute detailed and preserved in their respective treatises.
Renaissance theorists like Zarlino functioned and progressed in the realm of true transdisciplinarity,
while modern ones, burdened by a half a millennium of disciplinary thinking, perceive
transdisciplinarity as an exercise in collective problem solving. The aim of this paper is to
demonstrate fundamental differences between these two approaches to transdisciplinarity, four
centuries of academic tenure apart.
Transmission and Transportability:
The Aldine Press’s 1501 and 1502 Editions of Petrarch and Dante.
Shaun Lalonde – University of Toronto
Between 1501 and 1502 the Aldine Press published editions of Petrarch's vernacular poetry
and Dante's Divine Comedy. Book histories consider these editions significant because they
combine the new editorial practice and linguistic approach to the text of these works by their editor,
Pietro Bembo, with the application to vernacular texts of certain new features of book production
developed by the publisher, Aldus Manuzio, for his series of classical texts, mainly the italic type
and the absence of commentaries, in a small, octavo format. Through this typographical aesthetic,
compact size, and their editorial practice, these books distinguished themselves from the traditional
practice of publishing Italian literature.
Most strikingly the features of these books were developed to produce an easily
transportable book containing accurate texts of these two poets' works. As such they sought out a
new kind of reader, a scholar who no longer read a large scale folio edition at a lectern, but who
wanted, in Aldus' phrase, “portable books.” What is less clear is what use these readers had for
portable vernacular texts. Various scholars of these editions have suggested other small format
books as precedents: Lowry compares them to devotional books; Clough to scholarly manuals; and
Szepé to humanist manuscript of the classics. Each of these comparisons intimates a different kind
of interaction with these vernacular texts that the Aldine editions makes possible.
In my presentation, through a discussion of the bibliographical features of these editions and
the testimonial evidence of their usage, I evaluate the validity of the paradigms of use suggested by
these comparisons. In doing so I suggest that the Aldine press editions of Petrarch and Dante direct
the reader to a particular use of these two poets wherein their transportation from one place to
another remains central. In conclusion it argues that these easily transportable editions provide a
way of interacting with Dante especially that is made impossible by the voluminous, heavy,
cramped editions that are available to today's readers.
Visions of Nationality: Machiavelli, de Sanctis, and the Quest for a United Italy
Courtney Smotherman – University of Notre Dame
In the years immediately following the unification of Italy in 1861, the most difficult
problem facing its politicians and intellectuals was, in the words of Massimo d’Azeglio, how to
“fare gli Italiani.” Many of the methods that were employed to accomplish this involved new
interpretations of old figures, interpretations that were often direct contrasts to the most established
views of these men. One of the most blatant examples of this comes in the chapter of Francesco de
Sanctis’ Storia della letteratura italiana in which the author examines the life and works of Niccolò
Machiavelli. At that time mainly seen as an immoral and inconsistent politician-author,
Machiavelli is instead viewed by de Sanctis as the Italian patriot par excellence, ready to sacrifice
anything, from his own life and health to his republican ideals, in order to protect his homeland of
Italy.
Throughout his lengthy section on Machiavelli, de Sanctis works to transform both the
common perception of Machiavelli and that of Italy, claiming that Italy-the-nation had long existed
in culture and identity, lacking only a political union. He establishes links between Machiavelli’s
acceptance of a united but monarchal Italy and the present situation under the Piedmontese Savoia,
as well as between the ecclesiastical opponents of Machiavelli and the new Italy. Through his
reading of Machiavelli, de Sanctis continually presents parallels to his contemporary situation,
intimating that they don’t need to make Italians, but make the extant Italians recognize what they
are. Instead of creating a new Italian identity from the beginning, de Sanctis uses Machiavelli to
reinterpret the history and identity of a people and a nation.