Humanists and musicals preceptives in the sixteenth century's treatises: a study of rhetorical representations of musical exercise in the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

The humanist debate of artistic practices in the Italian Renaissance fostered especially in the sixteenth century one of the most complex and fruitful textual elaboration of music treatises. The theoretical contextualization of that musical practice as well as the investigation of the role of their professionals and dilettantes musicians, objectives of this research, aims to situate analytically from 16th century publications printed in Italian and Latin languages the epistemic formation of the renaissance's musician. Essential tool for understanding the treaties in question, the Rhetoric is appropriated paradigm and common knowledge to those authors, as presented in its publications, for the the exposition of musical subjects. Confronting the disciplines and skills fomented by the study of Italian musica prattica and the studia humanitatis between courtiers and musicians during the Renaissance, we intend to demonstrate bibliographically the high degree of importance of extrinsic knowledge to pure action of the instrumentalist or singer, explaining the rhetorical, poetic and scientific elements contained in those Italian musical editions. Since the own music understanding and musician is diverse and broad intricately in that context, is consistent recover such horizon of meaning - concepts and ideas - through the artistic and inartistics musical documents that outline, beyond the philosophical sede argumentorum, amendments and topics visited in those treaties. Literary, the humanist musician, also referred to, at the time, as a perfetto musico, acts as a gentleman who transits discursively between the noble courtiers of his time, developing and amplifying the technical discourse with views to the decorum of its readers and their craft. For this reason, it is appropriate to consider the practical disciplines of Renaissance musician exercise as part of a complex network of knowledge, which is outstanding and their poetic speech, making the recovery of current and of the 16th century artistic exercise that reasoning. (AU)