Les préfaces d'Anthoine de Bertrand

By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century

Brown

1994

Italianism and Claude Le Jeune

His

1994

In section iii of his paper ‘Ut musica poesis’, Howard Mayer Brown remarked upon Italian musical presence in France in three main areas: music theory, techniques of composition and interpretation, and poetry. The works of Claude Le Jeune (c. 1530–1600) seem to me to illustrate his comments in a particularly striking fashion, and although my study of Italian influence on Le Jeune's work is incomplete, I think it is possible to make some preliminary observations.

Geometry and Rhetoric in Anthoine de Bertrand's Troisiesme livre de chansons

Vaccaro¹

1994

Howard Mayer Brown was correct in his understanding that a complete knowledge of the French chanson from the second half of the sixteenth century must take in the provincial activity in this genre and its rapports with Paris, for it is essential to study the ties that connected the centre with its periphery. During the 1570s in Toulouse, the Auvergne-born Anthoine de Bertrand and his ‘friends’ formed one such provincial school, which was strongly attached to the personality of Pierre de Ronsard and to the poetic ideals of the Pléiade. Complementing the praise given to the composer by Henry Expert, who believed as early as 1926 that his works merited a complete edition, Howard Brown considered Bertrand ‘one of the very best composers’ of this music.