CHAPTER 15

A Perfected Art

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CHURCH MUSIC; NEW INSTRUMENTAL GENRES

In this splendid, noble art
So many have been famous in our age
They make any other time seem poor.^1

ALL IS KNOWN

The lines quoted as epigraph were penned in 1490 by Giovanni Santi, court painter to the Duke of

Urbino, when his son Raffaello Santi, known to us as Raphael, was seven years old. That boy, of course,
whose gifts were recognized early and stimulated with papal patronage, would soon make his father’s
time seem poor. The art of Raphael is now a standard of perfection in painting, “the clearest expression,”
according to one modern authority, “of the exquisite harmony and balance of High Renaissance
composition.”^2 That standard of perfection has remained in force, so to speak, whenever and wherever
“perfection,” as a standard, has been valued (see Fig. 15-1)

Something similar may be observed in the music of the sixteenth century, particularly as practiced in
Italian centers of patronage. Fifteenth century writers—Tinctoris, for one—were often as complacently
sure as Giovanni Santi was of the unprecedented richness of their age. But in the sixteenth century there
was an enormous striving after an objective standard of perfection—of surpassing “harmony and
balance”—that, once achieved, would remain good for all time.

This happy status quo, many musicians of the latter half of the sixteenth century believed, had been
reached in their time. Music, they argued, was now an ars perfecta, a “perfected art.” After floundering in
the “lowest depths” of decay during an age of barbarism (what those who believe in the Renaissance call
the Middle Ages), it had rescaled the “heights of perfection” it had known in ancient times.^3 Its technique
now admitted of no further development. What was needed was codification: the casting of the perfected
style in permanent rules so that it might never be lost again, so that its harmony and balance might be
preserved and passed along even to those who had not the genius to discover it for themselves. For no one
needed to rediscover what had already been discovered. The age of discovery was past. All was known.
An age of “classicism”—of conformity with established excellence—had dawned. It was a great age for
theorists.