trend toward literary music, which first involved settings of Italian verse, was long viewed as a slow
evolutionary outgrowth of the frottola. More recently, however, it has been proposed that the trend was
the product of two other currents—or rather, that it was the product of their confluence, which took place
not in the main centers of frottola activity (Mantua for composition, Venice for publication), but in
Florence, during the 1520s, when the frottola craze had already begun to subside.^10
These two currents were (1) the “Petrarchan movement,” a literary revival of archaic (fourteenth-
century) poetic genres, and (2) the application to settings of Italian texts of styles and techniques
previously associated with “northern” polyphony, both sacred (Latin motets) and secular (“Franco-
Flemish” chansons).
The influence of the Petrarchan revival is already suggested by the revival of the word madrigal to
identify the new style of Italian verse setting. There is no musical connection at all between the sixteenth-
century madrigal and its trecento forebear. The latter had quite died out and been forgotten. It was
initially brought back to sixteenth-century consciousness not as a musical genre but as a literary one, a
species of pastoral verse discussed with examples in a fourteenth-century manuscript treatise on poetry,
the Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis (“Survey of the art of vernacular poetry”) by Antonio da
Tempo, published as a printed book in 1507.
The influence of “northern” musical idioms on the new genre is betokened by the simple fact that the
first sixteenth-century “madrigalists” of note were not Italians but oltremontani who like so many of their
musical contemporaries had found gainful employment in Italy. It is to the confluence of high old literary
ideals with sophisticated imported musical techniques that we owe, in the words of James Haar, the
madrigal’s leading “revisionist” historian, “the beginnings of a musical vocabulary adequate to meeting
the intellectual and emotional demands of the verse.”^11
The protagonists of the literary revolution in its earliest phases were the humanist scholar (and later
cardinal) Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), the chief instigator of the Petrarchan revival, and the composers
Philippe Verdelot (ca. 1480–ca. 1530), a Frenchman, and Jacques Arcadelt (d. 1568), a Walloon or
French-speaking Fleming. Verdelot’s first book of madrigals was published in 1533, though he was
mainly active in the 1520s and wrote five times as many madrigals as he published. Between 1539 and
1544, Arcadelt published five books of madrigals for four voices and one for three. By the mid-1540s, the
madrigal had been established as the dominant musical genre for Italian poetry and retained its supremacy
for over a century, albeit with many modifications along the way to accommodate changing styles and
social functions. By the end of the sixteenth century, moreover, madrigals were an international craze,
both in the sense that Italian madrigals were eagerly imported and performed abroad, and in the sense that
they inspired emulations in other countries and other languages, particularly English.
“MADRIGALISM” IN PRACTICE
Bembo’s revival of Petrarch was a watershed for Italian poetry and for the reestablishment of the
Florentine or Tuscan dialect as a standard literary language. Precociously erudite, the future cardinal
published an edition of Petrarch’s complete works in 1501, when he was thirty. Four years later, he
published a dialogue on courtly love that included a selection of illustrative verses of his own
composition in the style of Petrarch, demonstrating what Bembo took to be the great poet’s essential
devices and themes. The most famous part of the book was the chapter devoted to lovers in conflict, in
which the device of antithesis—the immediate confrontation of words, feelings, and ideas with their
opposites—was exploited in spectacular fashion. In a later work, Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo
drew out of Petrarch the idea of an antithesis of styles (“heavy” vs. “light”) as well. His polar categories