boundaries of the period in question. They are then liable to take on the appearance of “progressive”
traits (if they show up, as it were, in advance of their assigned period) or “regressive” ones (if they show
up afterward). Not only does this confusion of assigned attribute with natural essence contribute to the
teleological view of history as a directed march of styles (directed toward what, though, and by whom?);
it also reflects back upon whatever it is that we are observing the values we associate with terms like
progressive and regressive, which are borrowed from the language of politics and are never morally or
emotionally innocent.
When periods are essentialized, moreover, we may then begin seeing objects classed within them in
invidious comparative terms as more or less essentially medieval or Renaissance. We may become
burdened with considerations of purity or fidelity to a Zeitgeist (a “spirit of the time”) that never
burdened contemporaries. And that is because unless we are very cautious indeed, we can forget that the
Zeitgeist is a concept that we, not “the time,” have constructed (or abstracted). We may then value some
objects over others as being better, or even as being “the best” expressions of “the spirit of the Middle
Ages” or “the spirit of the Renaissance.” If this sort of essentialism seems innocuous enough, we might
transpose the frame of reference from the chronological to the geographical, and reflect on what happens
when people become concerned over the purity or genuineness of one’s essential Americanism or
Africanness or Croathood.
Subdivisions, in short, are necessary but also risky. Periodization, while purportedly a neutral—
which is to say a “value-free”—conceptual aid, rarely manages to live up to that purpose. Values always
seem somehow to get smuggled in. And this happens even when periodization is conducted on a smaller
scale than the totality of history. Composers’ careers are also commonly periodized. All composers, even
the ones who die in their twenties or thirties, seem to go through the same three periods—early, middle,
and late. No prizes for guessing which period always seems to contain the freshest works, the most
vigorous, the most profound.
FIG. 10-5 Giotto di Bondone, The Kiss of Judas, a wall painting from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. Giotto’s realism and
his adoption of ancient Roman models have made him, for art historians, the first “Renaissance” painter.
The reason for raising these questions now is that the fourteenth century, and in particular the trecento,
has been a period of contention with respect to musical periodization. In art history and the history of
literature, scholars have agreed that the Florentine trecento marks the beginning of the Renaissance ever
since there has been a concept of the Renaissance as a historiographical period. (That is not as long as
one might think: the first historians to use the term as it is used today, for purposes of periodization, were
Jules Michelet in 1855 and, with particular reference to art and literature, Jakob Burckhardt in 1860.) For