FIG. 15-1 Raphael (Raffaelo Santi or Sanzio, 1483–1520), Alba Madonna, ca. 1510.
The outstanding codifier of the ars perfecta was Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90), from whose great
treatise Le Istitutioni harmoniche, first published in 1558 and reissued twice thereafter, the historical
judgments in the preceding paragraph were taken. The title of Zarlino’s four-volume manual was itself a
sign of the times. Often translated as “Elements” or “Principles of Harmony,” or something equally
neutral, it really means “The Established Rules of Harmony.” And harmony, both in the narrow musical
sense and in the wider esthetic sense, was what it purported to impart by methods tried and true. “If we
follow the rules given up to now,” Zarlino promised at the conclusion of his third volume, on
counterpoint, “our compositions will be free of reprehensible elements, purged of every error and
polished, and our harmonies will be good and pleasant.”^4 Harmony and balance are matters of proportion,
and proportion is a matter of quantities. Therefore it will not surprise us to find Zarlino writing that
“music is a science subordinate to arithmetic.”^5 He even appended one final chapter to the last volume
that carried the cautionary heading, “The Senses are Fallible, and Judgments Should Not Be Made Solely
by Their Means, but Should Be Accompanied by Reason.”^6 That begins to smack of Boethius. If we are
hasty to invoke the dueling Zeitgeists, we may be tempted to slap the label “medieval” on the
quintessential “Renaissance” theorist.
But like most paradoxes, this one is only seeming. Zarlino was merely trying to lend authority to his
rules and discourage whimsical experimentation on the part of his students. New ideas, to say nothing of
thrill-seeking, could degrade a perfected art. Elsewhere he invokes something that would never have
occurred to Boethius to invoke, namely “natural philosophy.” That is what we would call science, in the
modern empirical (or “Galilean”) sense that is thought to have arisen during the “Renaissance” as a by-
product of its secularism. Those who think of the sixteenth century as the cradle of modern science tend to
call it the “early modern” period. Zarlino was the first “early modern” theorist.