concluding oneor two-line “ritornello” in a contrasting rhyme scheme or meter. (The familiar sonnet form
associated with Petrarch, and later of course with Shakespeare, is a related form that substitutes quatrains
for tercets.)
The use of the word ritornello, seemingly a diminutive form of the word ritorno (“return”), to denote
the one part of the song that does not repeat seems paradoxical on its face. The word is more likely
derived not from ritorno, but from the Provençal tornada (“turnaround” or flourish), the “sendoff” verse
that ended a stanzaic troubadour poem—for example, the sestina, a particularly dazzling trobar clus
genre that had been invented by the twelfth-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, for Dante the model of
models (as he tells us in his Purgatorio.)
A striking confirmation of Dante’s view of Arnaut Daniel as the supreme forerunner or progenitor of
Italian mother-tongue literature is an illustration, discovered by the musicologist Kurt von Fischer, from a
Bolognese legal treatise (Fig. 10-1).^2 It shows the three main practitioners of the early madrigal—
Giovanni de Cascia, a certain “Maestro Piero,” and in the middle, standing on a pedestal and with arm
raised triumphantly, Jacopo of Bologna, the greatest musician of his generation. The three madrigalists are
flanked, on the right, by a group of chanting monks, evidently representing music at its highest and best; on
the left, they are flanked by Arnaut Daniel.
FIG. 10-1 The troubadour Arnaut Daniel and his madrigalist offspring, Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna, and Master
Piero, depicted in a fourteenth-century Bolognese legal treatise now in the Hessian Provincial Library at Fulda, Germany.
The three madrigalists, Piero, Giovanni, and Jacopo (to put them in order of apparent descending
age), served side by side during the 1340 s and early 1350 s at the two richest north Italian courts, that of
the Viscontis in Milan and that of the Scalas in Verona. Giovanni is shown holding a vielle or fiddle,
which indicates that these poets may have performed their own songs as entertainers. The fact that they
sometimes set the same texts suggests that they competed, as the troubadours had done, for prizes and
favors. Their songs often address the same putative patrons—particularly a certain ANNA, whose name,
though often concealed within other words like a troubadour senhal or code-name, is always written in
the manuscripts in majuscules that proclaim her high birth and importance.
And sure enough, the Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani, in his Liber de civitatis Florentiae
famosis civibus (“Book of famous citizens of the city of Florence”), tells us that Giovanni da Cascia, who
came from the environs of Florence, “when visiting the halls of Mastino della Scala, lord of Verona, in
search of a position, and competing in artistic excellence with Master Jacopo of Bologna, who was most
expert in the art of music, intoned (while the lord spurred them on with gifts) many madrigals [and other
songs] of remarkable sweetness and of most artistic melody.” The sources of trecento polyphony often
look like the big presentation chansonniers in which the music of the troubadours was retrospectively
preserved. In particular this is true of the so-called Squarcialupi Codex (named after a famous organist
who was one of its early owners), a magnificent compendium that was put together around 1415 as a
memorial to the art of the trecento when that art was moribund or, possibly, already dead. Its expensive
materials and lavish illuminations make it literally priceless; but it is priceless in another sense as well: it
preserves dozens of compositions that would otherwise have been lost. Its contents are organized, like
troubadour chansonniers, by authors, each section being introduced by a (no doubt fanciful) portrait of the