"Voicing the Doge's Sacred Image," Journal of Musicology 32 (2015)

Voicing the Doge’s Sacred Image

Author(s): Jamie Reuland

Source: The Journal of Musicology , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 198-245

Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2015.32.2.198

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2015.32.2.198

Voicing the Doge’s

Sacred Image

JAMIE REULAND

Doge Andrea Dandolo opens his Venetian his-tory, the Chronica per extensum descripta (c. 1350), with a scene of pro-phetic speech.1 The setting implies a genesis: a small vessel is buoyedon an inhospitable primordial soup—the marshy lagoon onto whicha group of refugees would, some four centuries later, lay the foundationsof a great city. Asleep in the vessel lies the evangelist Mark, on course toestablish a church in Aquileia, when an angel appears to him in his dream(fig. 1). The angel announces: ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, hic requiescet corpustuum’’ (Peace to you Mark, here will your body rest).2 What ensuesbetween Mark and the angel resembles the scene of Annunciation nar-rated in Luke 1:28–38 (see table 1, which compares the two texts). Inter-preting the angel’s message literally, Mark expresses alarm, but the angelassuages his worries by forecasting the great glory that awaits him among

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 2011American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco.I wish to thank Margaret Bent, Patricia Fortini Brown, KevinBrownlee, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Wendy Heller, Peter Jeffery,Alejandro Planchart, Blake Wilson, Giovanni Zanovello, AnnaZayaruznaya, and the anonymous readers for this journal for theircomments on this article. I am especially grateful to the late DavidRosand for encouraging this work in its early stage.

Manuscript sigla are as follows:

Gr Grottaferrata, Abbazia di Grottaferrata, Biblioteca, Kript. Lat. 224Eg Montefiore dell’Aso, Biblioteca—Archivio di Francesco Egidi (now lost)Q15 Bologna, Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale MS Q 15

1 Dandolo, Chronica per extensum descripta aa. 46-1280 d. C., ed. Ester Pastorello inRerum Italicarum Scriptores, Tomo XII, parte I (Bologna: Zanichelli,1938), 10. Although fourVenetian doges bore the patronymic Dandolo, I use this name throughout to refer toAndrea (1342–1354) unless otherwise specified.

2 Ibid.

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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 198–245, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2015by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights andPermissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/JM.2015.32.2.198



future generations. The evangelist accepts the divine will with a fiat thatrecalls Mary’s fiat to the angel Gabriel. By modeling Mark’s predestinationto Venice on the Annunciation, Dandolo renders Venice’s political gene-sis in the image of Christ’s incarnation, and casts the crucial episode ofMark’s Venetian vita within the framework of Christian soteriology.

Yet in fitting the narrative structure of the Annunciation to Mark’shagiography, Dandolo also amplified a nascent fourteenth-century myththat set the day of the Annunciation as the Republic’s founding date

figure 1. Angel announces Mark’s predestination to Venice asdepicted in mosaic in Cappella Zen, Basilica San Marco. Theinscription reads: CUM TRANSITUM FACERET PER MAREUBI NVNC POSITA EST ECCLESIA SCI MARCI ANGELVS EINUNCIATVIT QVOD POST ALIQVANTUM TEMPVS AMORTE IPSIVS CORPVS EIVS HIC HONORIFICELOCARETVR (While he was making his sea voyage acrossthe area where the church of San Marco now stands, theangel announced to him that at a certain point after hisdeath his body would be placed here with great honor).

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TABLE 1Comparison of Mark’s annunciation in the Chronica per extensum

descripta with the Annunciation in Luke 1:28–38.

Andrea Dandolo, Chronica perextensum descripta.i Luke 1:28–38ii

And an angel of God appeared to himin that very spot saying: Peace to youMark, here will your body rest.

To whom, hesitating as if about tosuffer a shipwreck on that very spot, theangel consoled:

Fear not, evangelist of God, for a greatroad yet remains to you; and there willbe many things for you to suffer in thename of Christ; after your martyrdomdevoted and faithful people fromaround this area, being constantlypersecuted and desiring to avoid theinfidels, will construct a magnificentcity; and they will be worthy to receiveyour body, which they will honor withthe greatest amount of veneration, andthrough their prayers and their meritsthey will obtain a great many benefits.

Then blessed Mark having woken gavethanks to the Lord, saying: Lord, letyour will be done.

And the angel, being come in, saidunto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord iswith thee; blessed art though amongwomen.

Who, having heard, was troubled at hissaying and though with herself whatmanner of salutation this should be. Andthe angel said to her:

Fear not, Mary, for thou hast foundgrace with God. Behold, thou shaltconceive in thy womb and shalt bringforth a son; and thou shalt call hisname Jesus. He shall be great and shallbe called the Son of the Most High.And the Lord God shall give unto himthe throne of David his father; and heshall reign in the house of Jacobforever. And of his kingdom there shallbe no end. And Mary said to the angel:How shall this be done, because I knownot man? And the angel, answering,said to her: The Holy Ghost shall comeupon thee and the power of the MostHigh shall overshadow thee. Andtherefore also the Holy which shall beborn of thee shall be called the Son ofGod. And behold, thy cousin Elizabeth,she also hath conceived a son in herold age; and this is the sixth monthwith her that is called barren. Becauseno word shall be impossible with God.

And Mary said: Behold the handmaidof the Lord; be it done to me accordingto thy word.And the angel departed from her.

(continued)

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TABLE 1 (continued)

Andrea Dandolo, Chronica perextensum descripta. Luke 1:28–38

aparuitque ei, in estaxi posito, angelusDei dicens: Pax tibi Marce, hicrequiescet corpus tuum.

Cui, cum se passarum illiconaufragium, hesitaret, subintulitangelus:

Ne timeas evangelista Dei, quia adhuctibi grandis restat via; multaque te, proChristi nomine, opportet pati; postvero pasionem tuam circum vicinarumregionum devoti et fideles populi,infidelium crebras persecucionesdeclinare volentes, hic mirificamurbem fabricabunt; et corpus tuumdenique habere merebuntur; quodsumma veneracione colent, tuisquemeritis et precibus plurima beneficiaconsecuturi sunt.

Tunc beatus Marcus expergefactus,gratias egit Deo, dicens: Domine fiatvoluntas tua.

28. et ingressus angelus ad eam dixithave gratia plena Dominus tecumbenedicta tu in mulieribus

29. quae cum vidisset turbata est insermone eius et cogitabat qualis essetista salutatio 30. et ait angelus ei

ne timeas Maria invenisti enim gratiamapud Deum 31. ecce concipies in uteroet paries filium et vocabis nomen eiusIesum 32. hic erit magnus et FiliusAltissimi vocabitur et dabit illiDominus Deus sedem David patris eius33. et regnabit in domo Iacob inaeternum et regni eius non erit finis34. dixit autem Maria ad angelumquomodo fiet istud quoniam virumnon cognosco 35. Et respondensangelus dixit ei Spiritus Sanctussuperveniet in te et virtus Altissimiobumbrabit tibi ideoque et quodnascetur sanctum vocabitur Filius Dei36. Et ecce Elisabeth cognata tua etipsa concepit filium in senecta sua ethic mensis est sextus illi quae vocatursterilis 37. quia non erit inpossibileapud Deum omne verbum

38. dixit autem Maria ecce ancillaDomini fiat mihi secundum verbumtuum

et discessit ab illa angelus.iii

i Ed. Ester Pastorello (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938), 10. English translation myown.

iiThe Holy Bible: Douay version, translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Cath-olic Truth Society, 1957).

iiiBiblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. B. Fischer, et. al. (Stuttgart:Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).

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(25 March 421). The narrative structure of Dandolo’s account thus gavehistoriographical authority to a myth that, over the course of the four-teenth century, had become increasingly conspicuous in the city’s mostimportant political spaces.3 Depictions of Mary and Gabriel alluded iniconographic shorthand to the state’s auspicious beginnings, while thetrope of angelic announcement—at play in Mark’s vita as much as in theAnnunciation story itself—functioned as a metonym for Venice’s status asa divinely favored Christian empire. ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus,’’the angelic utterance that encapsulated the city’s unique claims to Mark’spatronage, assumed apotropaic significance for the Republic in its newempire abroad, and a Lion of Saint Mark blazoned the divine motto inevery outpost of the Republic, signaling throughout the Mediterraneanthat providential forces stood behind Venice’s imperial dominance.4

As the legend of the angel’s salutation to Mark attests, prophetic utter-ances loomed large in the Venetian political imagination. The mythic, aswell as musical, role that voices could play in engendering the state preoc-cupied political thought during the period. Indeed music made it possibleto hear this providential vision of the Venetian state. As a heightened formof utterance, song had the potential to structure Venetian political dis-course, reconstituting the angelic voices of the city’s founding mythsthrough musical performance. Listening closely, one finds the political

3 David Rosand explores the array of political associations that Annunciation imageryaccrued in Venetian state art in his Myths of Venice: Figurations of a State (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. 12–46.

4 The phrase ‘‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus’’ is the source for the ‘‘Pax tibi Marce,hic requiescet corpus tuum’’ announcement that appeared for the first time in Dandolo’sChronica. The former phraseology derives from Christ’s announcement to Mark during hisimprisonment in Alexandria in the saint’s pre-Venetian vita (see, for instance, Jacobus deVoragine’s Legenda Aurea or Boninus Mombritius’Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum). Dandoloreworked the dialogue of the Alexandrian apparitio Dei episode into the Venetian praedes-tinatio (the term given by the Venetians to the legend of the angel’s announcement toMark) that had first been articulated by Martin da Canal in his thirteenth-century chron-icle, Les estoires de Venise. Giulio Cattin uncovers the former version of the text in anantiphon for vespers on the vigil of the feast of Saint Mark in several liturgical sourcesfrom the ducal basilica: a thirteenth-century antiphoner and a contemporary Processionale-Rituale (Venice, Museo Correr, Cicogna 1006, ff. 2v–3); a fourteenth-century antiphoner(Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratia de Supra, Reg. 113–18); and a sixteenth-century OrdoOrationalis (Venice, Museo Correr, Cicogna 1602, ff. 87v–88) where the antiphon is foundin a variety of liturgical situations. See Cattin, Musica e liturgia a San Marco: testi e melodie per laliturgia delle ore dal XII al XVII secolo: dal graduale tropato del Duecento ai graduali cinquecenteschi,4 vols. (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1990–1992), with a facsimile from Cicogna 1006 in vol. 2,499, and a transcription in vol. 3, 5*–6*. Patricia Fortini Brown offers a useful overview of theLion of Saint Mark as a symbol of state in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: HarryN. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 80–83. Debra Pincus brings the angelic legend to bear on AndreaMantegna’s use of the ‘‘Pax tibi’’ motto on an icon of Saint Mark in ‘‘Mark Gets the Message:Mantegna and the ‘Praedestinatio’ in Fifteenth-Century Venice,’’ Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35(1997): 135–46, whereas Hans R. Hahnloser and Renato Polacco discuss the appearance ofthe ‘‘Pax tibi’’ motto in a scene depicting the angel’s annunciation to Mark on a tile in thePala d’oro in La Pala d’oro (Venice: Canal and Stamperia Editrice, 1994), 36–37.


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theology of late-medieval Venice engaged by an astonishing variety ofmusical acts and works.

Sung ceremonies and musical compositions addressed to the dogedramatized the idea that the voice could, through the act of announce-ment, bring about real political or spiritual change in the state and itsleaders. The heavenly voices that ushered in Dandolo’s political historyare important in this regard. Both the angelic utterance to Mark and thestory of the Annunciation found provocative analogies in the ceremonialacclamation (laudes) of the doge by which the Venetian vox populi legit-imized his office. Throughout the year, the doge was acclaimed in a num-ber of ritual contexts that underscored the imagined kinship betweenthe laudes—the populace’s sung proclamation of consent to their lea-der’s election—and the city’s founding acts of angelic announcement.Ritual and state myth worked in tandem to forge a symbolic resemblancebetween ducal acclamation and angelic annunciation in order to positionthe doge within Venice’s sacred and civic hierarchies.5

Contemporary political discourse emphasized the dual nature of thedoge’s power. Understood to be the personification of the Republic andthe earthly representative of the city’s patron saint Mark, the doge stoodat the intersection of Venice’s civic and celestial structures. His partici-pation in the practical affairs of state gave embodied presence to thegovernment’s jointly popular and divine bases.6 Functioning much likea devotional icon or relic, the doge channeled the presence of SaintMark, on whose guidance the government depended, and at the sametime represented the entire Venetian populace and its values. A 1447decision made by the Council of Ten, for instance, required Doge Fran-cesco Foscari’s attendance at council votes, reasoning that although Fos-cari himself could not partake in the decision-making, his status as ‘‘thatImago which represents the government of the Venetians’’ lent him a ‘‘sym-bolic function [representationem]’’ within the workings of the government.7

5 Debra Pincus has shown how the doge’s role as an instrument of the divine andmediator between Mark and the state found articulation in the visual sphere of late-medievalVenice in chapter 8 of her The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), 121–49, and in idem, ‘‘Hard Times and Ducal Radiance: Andrea Dandolo andthe Construction of the Ruler in Fourteenth-Century Venice,’’ in Venice Reconsidered: TheHistory and Civilization of an Italian City-State, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 89–136. For a broad discussion of the doge as a symbolfor the ideals of government, see chapter 2 of Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Ageof Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986), esp. 179.

6 Frederic C. Lane elucidates a central paradox in the Venetian government, whereinthe ducal office was administered through popular assembly, but the doge’s powers werevested by Saint Mark in Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1973), 87–101, and esp. 89–90.

7 Translated by Dennis Romano, who brought the relevant document to light, in hisThe Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari 1373–1457 (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2007), xxi. Romano interprets the document within fifteenth-century

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A repertory of occasional motets develops the notion that the voice,imagined in musical terms, could activate the political and spiritual ideals ofthe state, with the doge at its center.8 The two motets examined in this essayelaborate different facets of this idea. The anonymous Marce, Marcum imi-taris (c. 1365)9 makes a sonic analogy to the concept of the doge as Mark’simage by figuring the likeness between Venice’s holy and secular rulers interms of musical imitation, whereas Johannes Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splen-dor/Michael qui Stena domus (c. 1406)10 elides a text dedicated to the Annun-ciate Virgin with one addressed to the doge, creating musical echoes andsimultaneities in its praises to Venice’s celestial and temporal leaders.

The confluence of available musical styles with political thoughtduring the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries yielded a singular-

political discourse on ducal power. Romano notes that not only did the term imago, hereapplied to the doge, also denote devotional images, but that ‘‘the doge [was] like an icon,transmitting the power of Saint Mark to his people,’’ ibid., xxi.

8 Julie Cumming situates the corpus of extant motets dedicated to doges within thebroader repertory of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century occasional motets, and shows howtheir engagement with contemporary political thought pointed toward the musical andrhetorical hallmarks of the fifteenth-century Italian motet. See Julie Cumming, ‘‘Concordout of Discord: Occasional Motets of the Early Quattrocento’’ (Ph.D. diss., University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1987). Chapters 6, 8, and 9 deal expressly with the surviving motetsdedicated to doges. These include Ave corpus sanctum (anonymous) for Francesco Dandolo(1329–39); Marce, Marcum imitaris (anonymous) for Marco Corner (1365–68); Principum no-bilissime (anonymous, possibly Landini) for Andrea Contarini (1368–81) and for which onlya single voice survives; Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus (Johannes Ciconia) forMichele Steno (1400–13); and Ducalis sedes/Stirps Mocinico (Antonio Romano) for TommasoMocenigo (1414–23). In addition three motets survive for Francesco Foscari (1423–57):Plaude decus mundi (Cristoforus de Monte); Carminibus/O requies (Antonio Romano); andChristus vincit (Hugo de Lantins). Cumming understands the motets for Francesco Foscarias indicative of a growing interest on the part of the Venetian state in cultivating polyphony forstate functions in Julie Cumming, ‘‘Music for the Doge in Early Renaissance Venice,’’ Speculum67 (1992): 324–64.

9 Edited by Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo in their Italian Sacred and CeremonialMusic. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XIII (Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987),197–201, no. 44. Cantus II was first published in Francesco Egidi, ‘‘Un frammento di codicemusicale del secolo XIV,’’ Nozze Bonmartini-Tracagni XIX novembre MCMXXV (Rome: La Sper-anza, 1925). This fragment is now thought to be lost. All voices are preserved in Grottaferrata,Biblioteca lat. 224, first published by Ursula Gunther, who also provides a transcription in her‘‘Quelques remarques sur des feuillets recemment decouverts a Grottaferrata,’’ in L’ars novaitaliana del trecento III: Secondo Convegno Internazionale 17–22 luglio 1969 sotto il patrocinio dellaSocieta Internazionale di Musicologia (Certaldo: Centro di Studi sull’Ars nova italiana del Tre-cento, 1970), 329, 335, 369–75. A facsimile of the Egidi fragment is also reproduced, withouta transcription, in Giuliano di Bacco and John Nadas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels and ItalianSources of Polyphony during the Great Schism,’’ in Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medievaland Renaissance Rome, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 44–92.

10 Venecie/Michael is a unicum found on Arabic fol. 287v–288 in Bologna, CivicoMuseo Bibliografico Musicale, MS Q 15. For a facsimile edition see Margaret Bent, BolognaQ 15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Mansucript II (Lucca: LIM Editrice, 2008), no. 257.The work is edited by Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark in The Works of Johannes Ciconia.Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XXIV (Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985), 77–80, no. 14. A transcription of the motet can also be found in Suzanne Clercx, Un musicienliegeois et son temps (Vers 1335–1411) II (Brussels: Palais des academies, 1960), 183–86.


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moment within Venice’s musical history. Already by the second half ofthe fifteenth century the increasingly limited powers of both the dogeand the Venetian people had divested acclamations of their politicalefficacy.11 Metaphors of musical harmony used to describe in idealizedterms the Republic’s newly crystallized system of governance graduallyeclipsed the medieval function of musical performance as the ritualenactment of Venetian political theology. The prestige of the chapelof San Marco as a musical institution, virtually non-existent before thefifteenth century, became the dominant mode of the state’s musical self-fashioning. Yet in this lesser acknowledged and little understood periodof musical life in the late-medieval city, ceremonial song served as a vitalmechanism of government, attested as much in state literature and ico-nography as in musical composition and ritual practice.

The Voice of the People and the Image of Mark

The fulfillment of the angelic prophecy to Mark—the translation of theevangelist’s body from Alexandria to Venice in 828—is portrayed ina thirteenth-century mosaic above the Porta Sant’Alipio of the BasilicaSan Marco (fig. 2).12 Read against the background of contemporarypolitical thought and ceremonial life, the mosaic’s depiction of a sceneof announcement becomes the means by which it explores the natureand origins of the doge’s authority. The mosaic’s allusion to a laudesperformance encourages the viewer to identify the doge with the relicsof Mark, thus clarifying the spiritual attributes of the doge (vis-a-vis hisrelationship to Mark) by reference to a musical ceremony that conferredhis political authority.

Until the late twelfth century the entire populace had acclaimed thenew doge and conducted him to San Marco while they sang the Te Deum,the Kyrie eleison, and the so-called laudes, or ducal acclamations.13 This

11 A clear indication of the Republic’s increasingly aristocratic tendency is the GreatCouncil’s 1423 decision to validate its own decrees without the populace’s ceremonialendorsement, and also to abolish the people’s ritual agreement to the doge’s election. Bythe second half of the fifteenth century, the term Commune Veneciarum was removed fromthe doge’s official oath, and was replaced in common usage by the designation La Seren-issima. See Lane, A Maritime Republic, 252.

12 The Porta Sant’Alipio mosaic, which faces the Piazza San Marco, is one of the mostconspicuous images in all of Venice. For an analysis of this image in the context of thebroader cycle to which it once belonged see Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), II/1, 201–206.

13 Domenico Tino’s eyewitness account of the ceremonial events of the election andinvestiture of Domenico Selvo in 1071 is reproduced in Agostino Pertusi ‘‘‘Quedam regaliainsignia’: ricerche sulle insigne del potere ducale a Venezia durante il Medioevo,’’ StudiVeneziani 7 (1965): 67–68. For the evolution of the investiture ceremony from the ninththrough fifteenth centuries, see also Gina Fasoli, ‘‘Liturgia e cerimoniale ducale,’’ in

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voiced consent of the populace, expressed through the laudes, legiti-mized the doge’s election, and without it the doge had no legal claim.By the thirteenth century the chaplains of San Marco had assumedresponsibility for the performance. Yet even then, the singing of laudescontinued to connote the populace’s original right to authorize theirleader.14 The laudes’ connotations of popularly-granted authority couldbe extended, moreover, to include the spiritual basis for the doge’s power:his proximity, indeed his very likeness, to Mark.

This idea finds unique expression in the Sant’Alipio mosaic. Theimage portrays the ninth-century reception of Saint Mark’s relics againstthe backdrop of the city’s contemporary architectural refurbishments (of

figure 2. Mark’s Translation to Venice as depicted in the PortaSant’Alipio mosaic, Basilica San Marco (Photo by MichaelHuneke)

-Venezia e il Levante fino al secolo XV, ed. Agostino Pertusi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore,1973). Iain Fenlon provides a useful gloss of Tino’s account in his The Ceremonial City:History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),143–44.

14 Investiture ceremonies retained the constitutive role of the vox populi until 1423 byallowing the populace to respond to the announcement ‘‘Questo e vostro Doge se vi piace’’with ‘‘sia, sia!’’ as is described in Andrea da Mosto, I dogi di Venezia nella vita pubblica e privata(Milan: A. Martello, 1960), xxii. Yet the original constitutive charge of the vox populi re-mained in the political memory of the city far longer, for instance, in Francesco Sansovino’ssixteenth-century Venetia Citta Nobilissima: ‘‘in the beginning [the doge] was created by thepopulace by voice or, created by others, was confirmed by the populace’’ (nel principio fucreato dal popolo a voce, overo fatto da altri, fu dal popolo confermato). Francesco Sanso-vino and Giustiniano Martinioni, Venetia Citta Nobilissima (Venice: S. Curti, 1663), 473.


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which the mosaic itself was part), couched in the visual language ofthirteenth-century ducal ceremony. Both Otto Demus and Agostino Per-tusi highlight what appears as a secondary topic within the mosaic: thedepiction of the moment when the newly invested doge—oath of officein hand—first encounters the populace, who symbolically legitimize hisauthority by means of sung acclamations, or laudes.15 Although Demusand Pertusi argue persuasively for this secondary reading, it is just asuseful to understand the image not as depicting any single ceremonialoccasion, but as relying on the visual language of ducal ceremony, andacclamation in particular, to interpret the mythic-historical event of SaintMark’s translation.

Musical topoi carry a special rhetorical charge within the image’sdesign. On the left-hand side of the composition, the congregants leav-ing the church make a gesture of speech or song—indicated by armsraised at the elbow—toward the right, apparently motioning towardMark’s body being borne into the church at the central axis of the com-position. The doge’s bent arm and pointing finger extend this gesturalmotif so that it culminates in the scroll—interpreted by Demus and Pertusias the doge’s promissione, or oath of office—that he holds in his otherhand.16 By this interpretation, the viewer’s eye is drawn not merely to thedoge, but more specifically to the legal document that defines the scope ofhis political jurisdiction. The result is that the doge, the city’s politicalleader, forms an auxiliary focal point to Mark, the city’s spiritual leader.

An accompanying inscription helps the viewer interpret the gestureof the populace on the left as directing song toward the right. At thesame time, it reinforces the thematic duality of the composition by merg-ing devotional and political song:

COLLOCAT HUNC DIGNIS PLEBS LAUDIBUS ET COLIT HYMNIS/UT VENETOS SERVET TERRAQUE MARIQUE GUBERNET.17

(The people establish him with worthy laudes and honor him with hymns/So that he may preserve the Venetians and govern by land and sea.)

15 Otto Demus argues that the investiture ceremony depicted was that of LorenzoTiepolo (Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice II/1, 202–206). Significantly, this is thesame investiture ceremony recounted in detail in Martin da Canal, Les estoires de Venise:Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence:L.S. Olschki, 1972), 279–83. The full iconographic cycle, of which the Sant’Alipio mosaic isthe only remaining original, is visible in Gentile Bellini’s Processione in piazza San Marco.

16 Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco II/1, 202–206; Pertusi, ‘‘Quedam Regalia Insig-nia,’’ 45–46.

17 The second line of the inscription above the Sant’Alipio mosaic currently reads:‘‘Ut Venetos semper sepit ab hoste suos,’’ which frustrates the hexameter set up in the firstline. This modification is the result of restoration to the mosaic likely undertaken sometimein the nineteenth century (see Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice II/1, 201).

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In the sense that the mosaic conflates two separate events—the deposi-tion of Mark’s relics in the basilica and a ducal ceremony—we can under-stand the ‘‘laudibus’’ in this inscription to refer not only to the people’ssung petitions to their patron saint, but also to the singing of laudes thatvalidated the doge as the Republic’s elected figurehead.18 The ‘‘laudi-bus’’ and ‘‘hymnis,’’ in other words, could refer equally well to the TeDeum, Kyrie eleison, and laudes with which the populace historicallygreeted the doge’s election as it could to the people’s sung venerationof Saint Mark’s relics. The overtly civic language with which the inscrip-tion concludes (‘‘terraque marique gubernet’’) makes the subject ofboth text and image all the more ambiguous, or perhaps extends it toencompass the doge as Mark’s earthly representative.

Through its pictorial and textual punning, the Sant’Alipio mosaicencourages the viewer to identify the doge with the source of his author-ity. The populace’s posture of acclamation literally gestures throughsong at the doge’s spiritual proximity to Mark, a proximity that predi-cated his place at the head of the Republic.19 The mosaic thus evokes thepolitical prerogative of the vox populi by way of analogy to the spiritualfoundation for the doge’s authority: the presence of Mark’s relics withinthe ducal basilica.20 Moreover, the image pictures the intercessory circuitestablished in this spiritual economy. Whether the populace lauds therelics or the ruler, the effect is the same. What is addressed to the imageis transferred to the prototype, and in acclaiming the doge they acclaimMark.

Sounding Unanimity

When Dandolo was composing his Chronica per extensum descripta in the1350s, the Sant’Alipio mosaic was one of the highlights of the newly

18 Hans Hubach recognizes the viability of this reading in ‘‘Pontifices, Clerus –Populus, Dux: Osservazioni sul piu antico esempio di autorappresentazione politica dellasocieta veneziana,’’ in San Marco: aspetti storici e agiografici: atti del convegno internazionale distudi, Venezia, 26–29 April 1994, ed. Antonio Niero (Venice: Marsilio, 1996): ‘‘Lo strettonesso con l’investitura dogale si riflette chiaramente nell’inscrizione originaria del mosaicosituato al di sopra della porta di Sant’Alipio, la quale faceva riferimento all’usanza dell’ac-clamazione del doge neoeletto da parte del popolo,’’ 396, n78.

19 On the complex spiritual relationship the doge was understood to share with St.Mark see Staale Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall: Studies in the Religious Iconography ofthe Venetian Republic, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 5 (Rome:L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1974).

20 Thomas E. A. Dale details the development of a mosaic program in San Marco thatincreasingly stressed the doge’s role as part of a soteriological chain that extended fromChrist and reached the doge by way of Mark in his ‘‘Inventing a Sacred Past: PictorialNarratives of St. Mark the Evangelist in Aquileia and Venice, ca. 1000–1300,’’ DumbartonOaks Papers 48 (1994): 53–104.


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renovated basilica.21 Indeed the image may have loomed in Dandolo’smind when he described the election of Domenico Selvo.

Domenico Selvo was elected doge in the year of our Lord 1071. So, withhis predecessor not yet buried, the entire populace [cunctus populus]unanimously acclaimed [unanimiter aclamavit] that doge in the churchof San Nicolo [al Lido] and led him with hymns and praises [hymnis etlaudibus] to the not-yet-complete church of San Marco, [where] hereceived his investment with the standard of Saint Mark.22

Here ‘‘hymnis et laudibus’’ recalls the mosaic inscription (‘‘LAUDIBUSET . . . HYMNIS’’), and Selvo’s reception at the yet incomplete San Marcobrings to mind the mosaic’s depiction of a ducal reception in front of thepartially refurbished basilica. Yet it is precisely what the mosaic offered byway of suggestion that this passage makes explicit: the legitimizing role ofthe Venetian people in establishing their leader’s authority.

In its attention to the vocal participation of the populace, Dandolo’saccount of Selvo’s election is paradigmatic of a broader rhetorical strat-egy in the Chronica. Each chapter of the Chronica begins with an accountof a new doge’s election, and Dandolo renders these openings in stock,formulaic language. Verbs of speech in particular describe the mode bywhich the doge’s power has been established. Dandolo frequently locatesthe source of this constitutive voice with the populace: ‘‘Vitalis MichaelII . . . was acclaimed [laudatus] by public opinion, as was customary’’;23

‘‘Iacopo Tiepolo . . . was acclaimed [laudatur] by the public opinion . . .onMarch 6 he was acclaimed doge [dux laudatus]’’;24 ‘‘Lorenzo Tiepolo wasannounced doge [annunciatur] . . . and with the praise of the populace[colaudacione populi] . . . they confirmed the form of election of the newdoge.’’25

21 On the creation of the Chronica within the milieu of early humanism, its rela-tionship to earlier chronicles, and its subsequent influence, see Girolamo Arnaldi, ‘‘AndreaDandolo doge-cronista,’’ in La storiografia veneziana fino al secolo XVI. Aspetti e problemi, ed.Agostino Pertusi (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1970), 127–268.

22 Dandolo, Chronica per extensum descripta aa, 46–1280 d. C., 214: ‘‘Dominicus Silvodux censetur anno Domini millesimo LXXI. Nam, predecessore nedum sepulto, cunctuspopulus hunc ducem, in sancti Nicholai templo, unanimiter aclamavit: et ipsum, cumymnis et laudibus, in sancti Marci ecclesia nondum conplecta duxit, qui ibi investicionemcum vexilo suscepit, ad quam perficiendam crebo operam dedit.’’

23 Ibid., 246: ‘‘Vitalis Michael II dux . . . Hic a concione, more solito, laudatus . . . ’’24 Ibid., 291–92: ‘‘ Iacobus Theupulo dux . . . a concione laudatur . . . hic, die VI marcii

dux laudatus . . . ’’25 Ibid., 315: ‘‘Laurencius Theupolo dux anunciatur . . . et colaudacione populi, for-

mam electionis futuris ducis . . . sanxerunt.’’ The frequent use of the noun laus and the verblaudatur throughout the Chronica to describe ducal elections aligns the laudes performancewith the doge’s legitimate election.

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The sound of the populace’s sung accord to their leader thus rever-berates throughout the Chronica, framing the civic and world-historicalevents that unfold in each chapter. In this way, the scene of angelicannouncement with which the Chronica begins finds structural echoesthroughout the political history that ensues. Indeed, the trope of theacclaiming vox populi that punctuates Dandolo’s narrative can be seen asan extension—albeit on a political level—of the angelic voice that, inpredestining Venice’s future, engenders all that follows. The angel’sannunciation grounds the inception of the state in divine will, while thevoice of a unanimous body politic regularly reaffirms Venice’s governingstructure by sounding accord to its leader. Dandolo would continue todraw analogies between the laudes performance and angelic announce-ment throughout his career as procurator of San Marco and, later, as doge.As we shall see, his imaginative reconfigurations of the laudes in stateceremony, iconography, and architectural design bolstered their abilityto point to both the popular and divine sources for the doge’s authority.

While the performance of the laudes invoked the electoral voice ofthe people, its text gestured toward the divine reaches of the city’s rulingstructure. A concise articulation of the doge’s place within the Republic’ssacro-political hierarchy, the laudes text pictures a chain of sovereigntythat originates in Christ and, through the intercession of Mark, extendsto the doge:

Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Domino nostro [N.N.], Dei gracia, inclito duci Venecie, Dalmacie atqueCroacie, et dominatori quarte partis et dimidie tocius imperii Romanie,salus, honor, vita, et victoria:

Sancte Marce, Tu illum adiuva.26

26 The Venetian laudes clearly derive from the Frankish laudes regiae. Identical versionsof the Venetian laudes are used both by Martin da Canal in Les estoires de Venise and in Hugode Lantin’s polyphonic setting of the text for the election of Francesco Foscari in 1423. Fortwo different perspectives on de Lantin’s motet, see Cumming, ‘‘Music for the Doge,’’ 346–53, and J. Michael Allsen, ‘‘Intertextuality and Compositional Process in Two CantilenaMotets by Hugo de Lantins,’’ Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 174–202. Fenlon presents thevarious ritual contexts in which the laudes were performed throughout the Venetian ritualyear and traces the historical development of these rituals in his The Ceremonial City, 130–31.For an in-depth study of the laudes regiae from their antique origins into the twentiethcentury, see Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations andMediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946).Although Kantorowicz devotes a full chapter to ‘‘Dalmatian and Venetian Laudes,’’ hisinvestigation focuses almost exclusively on their constitutive significance in Venice’s colo-nial empire, whereas on the performance of laudes in the city of Venice itself he concludesthat ‘‘a few notes, not very specific, suggest that the doge on some occasions, for example athis investiture, would be greeted with acclamations. But no text of the laudes seems to havebeen preserved from San Marco,’’ ibid., 153. Kantorowicz appears not to have been familiarwith da Canal’s Les estoires or de Lantin’s setting of the laudes text. For a study on the place


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(Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands. To our lord [N.N.]by the favor of God, the renowned doge of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croa-tia, and ruler over quarter and a half of the entire Roman empire,health, honor, life, and victory: Saint Mark, help him!)

Beneath the Christological tricolon that acclaims Christ’s military andimperial attributes—‘‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imper-at’’—the doge is hailed as ruler of his own territory—a territory thatincluded the newly acquired regions of the Byzantine Empire thatsecured Venice’s undisputed dominance over the Mediterranean. Herein the laudes, Christ’s spiritual triumphs, stated in the language ofempire, are mirrored in the acclaims to the doge as figurehead of thisgreat new maritime power. Mark is called upon to guide the doge,through his relationship to whom he mediates between Christ’s kingdomand its political image, the Republic of Venice.

The imperial tone conveyed in this text is echoed in one of the mostimportant spaces for the performance of acclamations: the south tran-sept of San Marco, where the doge was first presented following hiselection, and the populace’s approval formally solicited. The space isunified through an iconographic program based on the theme of theadventus Domini, which presents Christ in the language of imperial tri-umph. Staale Sinding-Larsen has suggested that the adventus theme beinterpreted in light of the investiture ceremony enacted below it.27 Hepoints to the two inscriptions that adorn the pergolo (the platform fromwhich the doge was presented and acclaimed by the people), and that, inkeeping with the spirit of the adventus topos, invoke a term associatedwith political ceremony (laus, pl. laudes) to describe the praise renderedto Christ:

EX ORE INFANTIUM ET LACTENTIUM PERFECISTI LAUDEM.

(Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have perfected praise.)(Ps. 8:3)

LAUS DECET ISTA DEUM, QUI SUMPSIT IN HOSTE TROPHEUM.

(This praise befits God, who takes triumph toward the enemy.)

Sinding-Larsen asks, ‘‘Could it be stated more clearly that the acclama-tion of a new doge was in the last instance a praise of God, on whom thewell-being of the State depended?’’28 Yet meaning cuts both ways here. If-

of the laudes regiae in Normandy and England see Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, ‘‘TheAnglo-Norman Laudes Regiae,’’ Viator 12 (1981): 37–78.

27 Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall, 202.28 Ibid., 203.

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the sentiment expressed in the inscriptions redirects the ducal acclama-tions toward a higher power, it simultaneously casts a heavenly aura backdown onto the sung ceremony below, conferring on the doge the mili-tant, victorious attributes of Christ and underscoring the congruencebetween the state and Christ’s heavenly kingdom.

Moreover, the demonstrative ‘‘laus . . . ista’’ (italics mine) of the sec-ond inscription had the potential to refer not only to the ‘‘laudem’’mentioned in the psalm verse above it, but also to the acclamationsoccasionally performed beneath it. The latter valence of the inscriptionfixes the memory of a civic performance within liturgical space. Thelaudes themselves did not belong to the liturgy at San Marco, and sourcesdescribe the chaplains of San Marco singing them in extra-liturgicalprocessions, as was the case on Easter morning and on the feast of theTranslation of Saint Mark.29 It would appear, in fact, that the popularacclamation of the doge from the pergolo occurred only during theinvestiture ceremony itself. Yet the south transcript inscriptions flirt withthe boundaries of the civic and the liturgical by projecting a mute accla-mation into the space the doge normally occupied while attending massat the basilica.30

Notably, the textual formula of the laudes first appears in a literarywork written contemporaneously with the creation of the Sant’Alipiomosaic. Martin da Canal’s Les estoires de Venise furnishes vivid and reliableinformation about civic events in the years 1267–1275. The chronicle thuscomplements and clarifies aspects of the thirteenth-century ceremony thatthe mosaic depicts.31 Performances of laudes to the doge emerge from thepages of da Canal’s history as one of the most salient sonic features ofthirteenth-century state ceremony.32 Among the occasions for laudes that

29 Giulio Cattin’s monumental Musica e liturgia a San Marco has vastly improved ourunderstanding of the rito patriarchino in use at San Marco. Its four volumes describe andinventory the liturgical books currently known to have furnished the ducal liturgy. Cattinalso provides a selective edition of texts and music from the Mass and Office, and tran-scriptions of related sources, such as a portion of Bartolomeo Bonifacio’s 1564 Cerimoniale.Giordana Mariani Canova contributes an essay on miniatures found in the liturgical books,and Susy Marcon a codicological study of the manuscripts.

30 In the Middle Ages, versions of the so-called laudes regiae either formed part of theepiscopal mass or occasioned the coronation of kings (see Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae,65–146). For that reason the inclusion of the ducal laudes within the liturgy at San Marcowould have grossly overstated the power of what was, in the end, an elected official.

31 Martin da Canal, Les estoires de Venise: Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle originial 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1972).

32 Da Canal describes laudes performed in extra-liturgical ceremonies on Easter Sun-day and the feast of the Translation of Saint Mark, as well as those performed for theelection ceremonies of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo. He informs readers that the Easter perfor-mance was repeated every Sunday of the Paschal season until Pentecost. It is beyond thescope of this article to discuss the significance of each of these occasions. Susan Rankin hasconsidered the symbolism behind the singing of laudes within the thirteenth-century Eastermorning celebration that took place in the Piazza San Marco in her ‘‘From Liturgical


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da Canal describes is the election of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo in 1268, and itis significant that the grosso coin minted during Tiepolo’s rule reproducesthe laudes text in visual terms.33 On the obverse of the coin, the patronsaint invests Tiepolo with the standard of Saint Mark—the emblem ofMark’s endorsement of the ducal office—while on the reverse, Christ sitsenthroned (fig. 3). The grosso thus serves as a visual iteration of thepolitical theology expressed in the laudes.34 Both verbal and visual tokensimagine Christ’s heavenly empire reflected in the Republic through thedoge’s spiritual relationship to Mark.35 Like the contemporary grosso, thelaudes encapsulate a political cosmology in which the doge—as Mark’srepresentative—stands at the center of mirrored heavenly and humanbranches. As a sonic performance, the laudes voice the unanimity of a pop-ulace that sees the doge as its perfect embodiment. As a sung text, thelaudes articulate the doge’s place in a hierarchy that, through him, placesthe entire state under divine management.

If we return to the Sant’Alipio mosaic, we notice that the image nodstoward the laudes as both text and act. Christ Pantokrator—a mosaicwithin a mosaic, indeed, at its exact center—frames the resemblancebetween the saint and doge constructed beneath it. We might recognizein this configuration yet another echo of the laudes text that imagines animperial Christ, beneath whom Mark (through the presence of his relicsat the basilica) assists the doge in governing the Republic. Yet as we haveseen, the performance of laudes is also mutely suggested within thescene’s diegesis. If the connections among Christ, Mark, and the doge

-Ceremony to Public Ritual: ‘Quem queritis’ at St. Mark’s, Venice,’’ in Da Bisanzio a SanMarco. Musica e Liturgia, ed. Giulio Cattin (Venice: Il Mulino, 1997), esp. 150–56. Fenlonoffers an expert synthesis of the sources that describe the performance of laudes, includinga consideration of Les estoires, in his The Ceremonial City, 130–31. Da Canal’s recognition ofthe laudes as a potent symbol of state is suggested by the personal prayer with which theauthor begins the second half of Les estoires (the half that describes contemporary cere-mony, and thus recounts the laudes performances): ‘‘Ge pri Jesu Crist et monseignor saintMarc, qui done sauvement, henor, vie et victoire a monseignor li dus et a tos les Veneciens,et comencerai mon conte tot en tel maniere,’’ ibid., 156. The prayer is modeled on thestructure of the laudes and invokes Christ and Mark to grant the doge imperial attributes.

33 Alan M. Stahl, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press; New York: in association with the American Numismatic Society, 2000),16–18, 302–308. It seems significant that Enrico Dandolo (doge 1192-1205) introduced thegrosso, along with its characteristic imagery, into Venice’s monetary system: he was the firstdoge to gain the epithet ‘‘renowned doge of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and ruler overquarter and a half of the entire Roman empire,’’ with which subsequent doges were ac-claimed thereafter.

34 For the relationship these coin programs bear to the ducal investiture ceremony,see Sinding-Larsen, Christ in the Council Hall, 166.

35 The gold ducat introduced into the monetary system in 1284 by Doge GiovanniDandolo reinforces this iconographic symbolism. As is the case for the grosso, the obversedepicts the transaction of the vexillum between Mark and the doge. The reverse of the ducatshows Christ Resurrected in a starry mandorla. See Stahl, Zecca, 28–32.

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are established along the composition’s vertical axis, then the acclaimingpopulace, commanding the entire bottom register, forms a horizontalaxis that also includes saint and doge. This visual organization picturesthe full extent of the Republic’s reaches. Mirrored in one another, Markand doge fall at the hinge of this structure, which the acclaiming bodypolitic both joins and generates through its sung accord.

How might the political freight borne by such vocal acts—real, leg-endary, or imagined—have found expression in contemporary musicalcompositions? Among ceremonies that featured laudes, the doge’s inves-titure would certainly have included the performance of polyphoniccompositions. We might see many of these works as reproducing ideol-ogies underpinning the occasions for which they were composed. Motetshonoring the doge are particularly well represented within thefourteenth-century Italian repertory.36 Several of these motets—which

figure 3. Grosso minted under Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo depicting(obverse) Mark investing doge with standard (vexillum S.Marci) and (reverse) Christ enthroned

36 Cumming investigates the motets composed for Doge Francesco Foscari in her‘‘Music for the Doge in Early-Renaissance Venice,’’ 341–59. For a discussion of several otherducal motets, see also Cumming’s dissertation, ‘‘Concord out of Discord.’’ For the place ofthese works within the broader trecento repertory see Margaret Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,’’ in L’ars nova italiana del trecento VI. Atti del Congresso internazio-nale ‘‘L’Europa e la musica del Trecento,’’ Certaldo, 19-21 July 1984 (Certaldo: Centro diStudi sull’Ars nova italiana del Trecento, 1992). In addition to the motet repertory, ananonymous and fragmentary ballade from the first half of the fifteenth century sets the firstvespers antiphon for the feast of Saint Mark that recounts the dialogue between Christ andMark that provided the textual model for the Venetian praedestinatio (see note 4 above).Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder, A Veneto Liber cantus (c. 1440): Fragments in the Bayer-ische Staatsbibliothek Munich and the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Wiesbaden:Reichert Verlag, 2012), 85–86, 116–17. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to


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we can imagine occupied their own type of privileged vocal status asrepresentatives of a high-art polyphonic genre—bear evidence of imag-inative play with the notion that the voice could activate the political andspiritual ideals of the state through the figure of the doge.37 An investi-gation of one such motet, the anonymous Marce, Marcum imitaris, revealsmany of the same sonic themes explored in contemporary ceremony, art,and historiography to be freshly imagined, amplified, and elaborated inpurely musical terms.

Echo as Image in Marce, Marcum imitaris

The rhetorical doubling between Mark and doge at work in the Sant’Alipiomosaic finds a musical counterpart in Marce, Marcum imitaris (ex. 1).38

The motet was composed in honor of Doge Marco Corner (1365–1368)and was likely intended for performance at one of the ceremonies cele-brating his inauguration.39 Grounded in a political theology that, on the-

consider the work here, its existence testifies to the use of polyphony well into the fifteenthcentury to relate the angelic exchanges so central to Venetian political identity, and ina genre other than the ceremonial motet.

37 Gina Fasoli was perhaps the first to anticipate the repertory’s potential to illuminatethe laudes in her ‘‘Liturgia e cerimoniale ducale.’’ Commenting on Antonio Romano’s Du-calis sedes inclita/Stirps Mocinico and the anonymous Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani, Fasolinotes that ‘‘l’uno e l’altro di questi motetti presentano interessanti risonanze delle accla-mazioni imperiali: quello a Francesco Foscari [sic: Francesco Dandolo] si rivolge ad un certopunto al doge dicendogli: ‘esto tu nobis [dux], via et vita’, mentre quello al Mocenigo for-mula l’augurio che il doge ‘diu consistat solio, longo vivat imperio,’’’ ibid., 278.

38 Example 1 modified from Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, ed., Italian Sacredand Ceremonial Music. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century XIII (Monaco: Editions del’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987), 197–201, no. 44. For the purposes of the present discussion I haveredacted several of Fischer and Gallo’s reconstructions in order to clarify source lacunae.

39 Although Ursula Gunther refutes Kurt von Fischer’s attribution of the motet toLandini, Marce, Marcum in fact shares many of the features she highlights—generichybridity in particular—with Landini’s madrigal Si dolce non sono. See note 46 in this articlefor comments on the motet’s relationship to the Italian caccia. As Gunther has noted, theshift from octonaria to senaria perfecta in the Amen section of Marce, Marcum is characteristicof the trecento madrigal, and the isorhythmic tenor of Si dolce non sono would haveunmistakably evoked the motet genre. The madrigal’s staggering of the upper voice entrieswith respect to the tenor isorhythm is a procedure that aligns it all the more closely to thedesign of Marce, Marcum outlined here. Although no motets can be securely tied toLandini, he received payment ‘‘pro quinque motectis’’ in 1379, and there are grounds forattributing the motet Principum nobilissime, another ducal motet dedicated to AndreaContarini (doge 1368–1382) and for which only one voice survives, to the Florentinecomposer. Dragan Plamenac has pointed out that the mention of ‘‘Franciscus peregrecanentem’’ in the text of Principum nobilissime may refer to the composer’s stay abroad inNorthern Italy in this period. Ursula Gunther, ‘‘Quelques remarques sur des feuilletsrecemment decouverts a Grottaferrata,’’ 336–37; Kurt von Fischer, ‘‘Neue Quellen zurMusik des 13., 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts,’’ Acta Musicologica 36 (1964): 92; and DraganPlamenac, ‘‘Another Paduan Fragment of Trecento Music,’’ Journal of the American Musi-cological Society 8 (1955): 173–74.

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one hand, recognized the voice’s ability to bring about real change in itsleaders and, on the other, saw the doge as Mark’s spiritual image, Marce,Marcum forges a novel musical metaphor by conflating sonic with spiri-tual similitude. Its composer seizes upon the coincidence in namebetween doge and saint, and Corner’s spiritual likeness to Mark, madeexplicit in the first line of the motet, becomes its musical subject. Draw-ing on the political concepts that cast the doge as Mark’s spiritual imago,Marce, Marcum performs the musical joining of the evangelist and doge.

Though Marce, Marcum is sometimes held up as an important earlywitness to the Italian motet tradition, only cursory notice has been givento this motet as a vehicle for musical signification.40 In the view of JulieCumming, who first considered the work’s political rhetoric, Marce, Mar-cum ‘‘fail[ed] to take advantage of the symbolic possibilities of themotet,’’ and for that reason did ‘‘not constitute a native Venetian musicaltradition of full-blown laudatory motets.’’41 In particular, she points tothe use of a single text for both cantus voices as curious among trecentomotets. This leads her to conclude that the work ‘‘does not exploit thesymbolic and expressive possibilities [of] the polytextual motet.’’42

Indeed, Marce, Marcum is unique in this regard; it is the only extantsingle-texted motet of the Italian trecento.43 Yet if it fails to anticipatethe defining polytextuality of the late-trecento and early-quattrocentoItalian motet, this breach of generic norms begs to be read as part ofthe work’s broader rhetorical operations.

It is possible to argue that the work signifies precisely through itsconstructions of one-to-one correspondences between the two equal-range cantus voices. Viewed against the backdrop of the political theol-ogy that posited likeness between doge and saint, the use of a single textfor the two cantus voices appears as one of several musical devices thatcreate aural analogies to the notion of the doge as Mark’s imago. It is thustelling that the first stanza of the motet dwells explicitly on the concept ofsimilitude between the two Marks. In fact the first few words of thepoem—‘‘Marce, Marcum imitaris’’ (Mark you imitate Mark)—invite the

40 For the place of Marce, Marcum within the tradition of the Italian trecento motet seeBent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet.’’ Also chapter 6 of Cumming, ‘‘Concord out ofDiscord’’; Di Bacco and Nadas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels and Italian Sources of Polyphony duringthe Great Schism’’; and Gunther, ‘‘Quelques remarques,’’ 334–37.

41 Cumming, ‘‘Concord out of Discord,’’ 262. Cumming understands this ‘‘full-blownphase’’ to be best represented by Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus(discussed below), and by the group of motets related to the 1423 election of Doge FrancescoFoscari by Hugo de Lantins, Christeforus de Monte, and Antonio Romano.

42 Ibid., 259.43 For a table that illustrates adherence to generic norms among extant Italian motets

c. 1300–1410, see Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,’’ 122–25. Four of themotets Bent lists have missing voices, and it is therefore not possible to determine thenumber of texts they use.


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listener to interpret musical imitation—instances of which the composerpresents textually, texturally, and motivically—in terms of the relation-ship between the motet’s two subjects.

In this respect, the echoed interactions between the two textedvoices are perhaps the most innovative aspect of the motet’s design, andprove central to the large-scale planning of the work. Example 1 indi-cates these moments of textual echoing as letters A through E, begin-ning on measures 1, 27, 62, 73, and 84, respectively. These sections ofstructural misalignment between the cantus parts provide the majormoments of contrast in a texture otherwise characterized by simulta-neous declamation in the two voices; a section of hocket also offerstextural contrast. Closer examination of the work reveals that this call-and-response-style interaction between the cantus parts unfolds asa musical process over the course of the motet, where the distance atwhich the two voices echo text shortens progressively with each subse-quent imitative section. The systematic compression of the intervalbetween vocal entries results in a musical mirror-imaging that brings thetwo voices into alignment. Since the most likely occasion for the motet’sperformance (Marco Corner’s 1365 investiture) was fundamentally pro-cessual, where during the inaugural ceremony the doge assumed therole of the saint’s earthly image, this compositional strategy of organiz-ing vocal entries performs a programmatic relationship to the event itaccompanied.

An imitative introitus setting the first syllable, Mar- of Marce, puts thismusical process in motion. Virginia Newes suggests that Marce, Marcum isthe earliest known example of a dedicatory motet with an extended echoimitation introitus in an Italian source.44 As Newes’s statement implies,such lengthy introductory imitations would become a hallmark of thegenre. Here in this early usage, however, the introitus works to establishthe symbolic horizons of the composition. Though both sources for themotet—Grottaferrata 224 (Gr) and the Egidi fragment (Eg)—transmitcantus II, only Gr transmits cantus I and tenor, and regrettably there isa lacuna for cantus I in measures 7–15. Given that cantus II and tenor forma grammatically complete, self-standing unit in this section, however, itseems reasonable to conclude that the motet opens with two exact solorepetitions of the Mar- melisma, successively declaimed by each cantusvoice over the tenor.

Suggestively, both manuscripts propose a text underlay for the in-troitus that complements the musical image it creates. The first two

44 Virginia Newes, ‘‘The Relationship of Text to Imitative Techniques in 14th-centuryPolyphony,’’ in Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. UrsulaGunther and Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, Basel, and London: Barenreiter, 1984), 151. For theuse of imitative techniques in the fourteenth-century repertory, see ibid., 121–54.

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example 1. Marce, Marcum imitaris (Anonymous)Gr., fol. 5v-6; Eg., fol. 2r (CII only) (fragment now lost)


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example 1. (Continued)

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Marce, Marcum imitaris text and translation

Marce, Marcum imitarisprobitatis radio,nec ab ipso disgregarisequitatis madio.

Miles dignus approbarisvirtutum efficacia.Princeps iustus sublimariskarismatum gratia.

Tu ducatus generosimundi pariferiamcircumducis virtuosiad prolem Corneriam.


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words of the motet—‘‘Marce, Marcum’’—are the only instances in whichthe shared proper name of the twin subjects appears, and their starkjuxtaposition at the very outset of the motet produces an immediategraphic and auditory symmetry between the two. Only the vocative andaccusative endings (-e and -um) distinguish the two instantiations of thename, pointing grammatically to the political and celestial referents,respectively. Despite the length of the opening melisma, both Gr andEg suggest that the change of syllable from Mar- to -ce be deferred untilafter the cadence of the introitus. While the scribes of Gr and Eg indicatethis differently (this is partly related to a musical discrepancy between thetwo sources in this section), both clearly withhold the grammatical res-olution of the name Marcus until beyond the introitus.45 The delay in

example 1. (continued)

Tu michi benignitatismanum porrexisti.Tu Venetie dignitatisgradum addidisti.

Sic celestis claritatiscui te commisisti,Deus augeat largitatisliliumque majestatis,quod pie meruisti.

Amen.

Mark, you imitate Mark with a rod of uprightness, nor are you divided fromhim; you are steeped in equity. Worthy soldier, you are confirmed by theefficacy of your strength. Just prince, you are exalted by divine grace. You ofgenerous dogeship bear a feast to the world. You lead the virtuous to theoffspring of the Corner family. You offered me a hand of kindness. Youadded to the degree of Venice’s worth. Thus by the heavenly splendor withwhich you are united, may God augment the lily of largess and of majesty whichyou piously earned. Amen.

45 It is significant in this regard that the two manuscript sources that transmit CantusII and Tenor of Marce, Marcum—Grottaferrata lat. 224 (Gr) and the Egidi fragment (Eg)—contain only one substantive scribal disagreement, and that this disagreement is in parta matter of text underlay: Gr and Eg transmit a different underlay for cantus II in measures14–15. Yet this very disparity perhaps helps to establish the interpretive horizons of thework. If we adopt the underlay of Eg, the potential simultaneous declamation of Marce andMarcum in measure 14 would be the only moment in which different words coincide in themotet—a vivid musical accentuation of the equivalence between human and heavenlyMarks. Whether we adopt the underlay from Eg or from Gr, the availability of both possibleapproaches to the text only underscores the semantic interchangeability of the two Marksin the context of the motet’s subject.

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grammatical discrimination between the two Marks thus preserves theunity of subject reflected in the echo imitation of the introitus. It is onlyon the heels of this initial musical image that the two Marks are un-coupled. What ensues throughout the remainder of the work is thegradual restoration of the two subjects to this original state of unity.46

Reinforcing the sense that the text’s theme of similitude governs themusical scheme, the next imitative exchange between cantus voices(m. 27, passage B) sets the continuation of the first stanza that under-lines the similarity between the two Marks: ‘‘Nor are you divided fromhim [Mark], you are steeped in equity.’’47 Yet whereas in the introitus(passage A) the repetition of the second cantus had followed the first bya distance of twenty semibreves, here in passage B the second cantusfollows at a distance of only eight semibreves. With each subsequentechoed section, the distance at which the voices echo the text is system-atically shortened by two semibreves. In passage C the distance betweenvocal entries contracts to six semibreves, in passage D to four, and inpassage E to two semibreves. Thus gradually, and at regular intervals, thelag between vocal entries diminishes until the texted section of the motetcadences with cantus I and II in perfect unison (m. 88). The Amensection that follows, moreover, begins with the two voices sustaininga unison long on G (mm. 90–91), and they continue in minims at theunison until the end of the following measure (m. 92). Bridging the twosections, the solo tenor (m. 89) heralds not only the new perfect men-suration, but likewise the transformation that has occurred in the rela-tionship between cantus voices.

While homorhythmic parallel motion between the cantus voicesabounds in Marce, Marcum, possibly related to the broader theme of the

46 Bent has stressed the generic commonalities between the Italian motet and thecaccia in her ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,’’ 104. Although the musical operationat work in Marce, Marcum does not adhere to the caccia’s strict canonic technique, itsopening imitation, nodding toward the caccia, might be read as a metaphorical pursuitin which cantus II catches up to cantus I over the course of the motet. Thus the physicalproximity of Marce, Marcum to Antonio Zacara’s caccia, Cacciando per gustar/Ay cinci ay toppiwithin Eg is perhaps not coincidental, as observed by di Bacco and Nadas, ‘‘The PapalChapels and Italian Sources of Polyphony during the Great Schism,’’ 65–69. Di Bacco andNadas raise the possibility that ‘‘the outstanding musical artifice of [Zacara’s] caccia’sopening canon between the top voices would have suggested its similarity to the openingof Marce, Marcum in particular, sparking its inclusion in this collection,’’ ibid., 68ff. If we areto read a metaphorical pursuit into Marce, Marcum, Michael Alan Anderson’s study of thesymbolic use of imitative introductory techniques in a later repertory of fifteenth-centurymotets dedicated to John the Baptist proves instructive. See Michael Alan Anderson, ‘‘TheOne Who Comes After Me: John the Baptist, Christian Time, and Symbolic Musical Tech-niques,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 639–708, as well as his dis-sertation, ‘‘Symbols of Saints: Theology, Ritual, and Kinship in Music for John the Baptistand St. Anne (1175–1563)’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008).

47 Nec ab ipso disgregaris/Equitatis madio.


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work, this passage of unison that elides the texted and Amen sectionsof the motet is especially striking. If the texted section had introducedthe cantus parts as juxtaposed images in the introitus, the Amen revealsthe voices in superimposition. The shift from imperfect (octonaria) toperfect (senaria perfecta) meter only underscores the sense of a completedtransformation.

Moreover, if we are to see hocket as the ultimate form of vocal en-twinement, the brief section of hocket that concludes the work (passageF) puts a peculiar spin on the idea, for it is nothing but the literalrepetition of single pitches in a hocket texture. Thus the entire motetends with echo imitations at the interval of a semibreve before the finalcadence. The musical process that the echo introitus had set into motioncomes to its full realization in creating aural images at the level of theindividual pitch. The tenor, too, joins at the octave below in this finalmirroring of pitches, reinforcing the notion of sonic sameness withwhich the work concludes.48

With the musical echo functioning here as an aural imago, Marce,Marcum makes a musical analogy to a political concept that equated thedual subjects of the motet’s text—human and heavenly Marks. If the firstpoetic line, ‘‘Mark you imitate Mark,’’ establishes an interpretive frame-work by which to understand its musical imitations, then the musicalprocess of aligning—even superimposing—the voices influences ourunderstanding of the poem. Not only does Corner imitate the spiritualvirtues of his patron, but he is completely identifiable with him. Since themotet likely accompanied the Cappella San Marco’s sung affirmation ofthe doge as Mark’s political representative, this musical operation per-haps voices the real image-making function of laudes in the context of theducal investiture.

Two Annunciations

The final line of Marce, Marcum voices an obscure wish for the new doge:‘‘May a bountiful God augment the lily of majesty, which you piouslyearned.’’ To what might this politicized lily refer? We might arrive at a viableinterpretation by considering two images, both ubiquitous in Venetian stateimagery, juxtaposed: Saint Mark investing the doge with the vexillum S.Marci at his investiture and Gabriel extending a lily to Mary at the sceneof Annunciation (figs. 4a and 4b). Might the poet and/or composer haveunited these two images in the closing line of Marce, Marcum?

48 I infer the tenor pitch D in measure 109 based on the hocket pattern established inthe previous two measures.

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Both Mark’s and Mary’s annunciations had, by the fourteenth cen-tury, become powerful symbols for the divine origins of the state.49 Dan-dolo’s Chronica, as we have seen, foregrounded angelic announcement asthe heavenly spark to Venice’s imperial progress. The iconographic useof the Annunciation motif in political spaces, furthermore, served asa concise expression of the angelic words that gave Venice its genesis.50

figure 4a. Mark invests the doge with the vexillum S. Marci (PrincetonNumismatics Collection, 2457)

49 Venetian humanist Bernardo Giustiniani wrote: ‘‘The sacrosanct day was chosen onwhich the divine message was brought by the Archangel to the most glorious Virgin with theindescribable bending of the celestial highness to the abyss of humility. It was then that thehighest and eternal wisdom, the Word of God, descended into the womb of the most chasteVirgin so that man, lying in the depths of pitiable darkness, might be raised to the most joyfulsociety of celestial spirits. But indeed, there is no measure to the divine wisdom. For He Who,on that day, in choosing the Virgin for the redemption of the whole human race, lookedespecially towards her humility, as she herself confessed, wished also that on the same day, ina most humble place and from most humble men, a start should be made toward the raising ofthis present Empire, a beginning of so great a work.’’ Bernardo Giustiniani, De origine urbisVenetiarum (published posthumously in 1493), trans. in Patricia H. Labalme, Bernardo Giusti-niani: A Venetian of the Quattrocento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1969), 267.

50 Apart from the prominent use of the Annunciation in the decoration of theBasilica San Marco, the placement of Mary and Gabriel on either side of the Rialto Bridge


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As both a political and a liturgical site, the Basilica San Marco provideda canvas against which to develop the Annunciation’s political resonancefor Venice. Reliefs of the Virgin Orant and of Gabriel, originally separatepieces, were paired to form an Annunciation group on the western facadeof the church, and Mary and Gabriel’s dialogue was placed above thebasilica’s southern ceremonial portal.51 During Dandolo’s dogeship,

figure 4b. Giovanni Bellini, Annunciazione (Galleria dell’Accademia,Venice)

-in the sixteenth century would have recalled the government’s founding location on theRialto on 25 March 421.

51 For a discussion of the many appearances of the Annunciation theme in Venetianstate art and of its symbolic resonances see chapter 1, ‘‘Miraculous Birth’’ of Rosand, Mythsof Venice, 6–46.

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statues of Gabriel and Mary were positioned on either side of the high altarof San Marco, fixing the theme to the very spiritual core of the state. In theearly fifteenth century the corner aediculae of San Marco’s facadereceived figures of Gabriel and Mary that staged what David Rosanddescribed as a ‘‘holy dialogue across the upper reaches of the basilica’’that ‘‘reverberated’’ into the Piazza below.52 Common to each of theseconfigurations of the Annunciation motif is its use to enclose a politicallysymbolic space—the high altar, a ceremonial entryway, the ducal chapelitself—within a sacred framework.

In this sense, the Annunciation figures that bookend the tombs ofDoges Bartolomeo Gradenigo (1339–1342) and Andrea Dandolo envi-sion the doge himself as a sacro-political locus (figs. 5a and 5b).53 Gabrieland the Virgin stand on either corner of both tomb chests. In each case,the person of the doge—representing the Republic—is cast as a semi-sacred figure through the holy dialogue that extends across his body.Given Dandolo’s involvement in the decoration of both tombs, it is per-haps useful to recall the analogy his Chronica draws between Mary’s andMark’s angelic annunciations and the ceremonial acclamations to thedoge.

Moreover, in his will Dandolo requests his tomb be placed beneatha dome mosaic in the basilica bearing the inscription ‘‘XPC VINCIT,XPC REGNAT, XPC IMPERAT.’’54 In other words, beneath an inscrip-tion of the ‘‘Christus vincit’’ tricolon with which the ducal laudes begin.Dandolo’s request was not granted; nevertheless, in this unrealizedvision, political and angelic announcement provocatively intersect withinthe architectural space of the basilica. The will locates the doge’s bodybeneath the inscription, a position that in a sense visually restates thelaudes text, in which the Christological tricolon heralds the acclaim to thedoge (see text and translation on pp. 210–11). Thus while the Annunci-ation extends laterally across the tomb, ducal acclamation is suggestedthrough the vertical alignment of the doge beneath an excerpt of thelaudes text. Giving spatial dimension to vocal acts, in other words, Dan-dolo made the Annunciation and the laudes simultaneities.

State ceremony played with the slippage between the Annunciationand the ducal laudes in a tradition that predated Dandolo’s tomb project:the sung drama performed on the feast of the Translation of Saint Mark’s

52 Ibid., 16.53 The inscription is located in the cupola of San Giovanni Evangelista in the north

transept of the basilica. Pincus, The Tombs, 128ff.54 Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘‘Il testamento del Doge Andrea Dandolo,’’ Nuovo archivio veneto

7 (1904): 139–48. Dandolo’s specification survives in a will dated to 3 September 1354. Theinscription forms part of the dome’s twelfth-century mosaic work. See also Pincus, TheTombs, 134–35.


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figure 5a. Tomb of Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo (Basilica San Marco,Atrium) (Photo by Jamie Reuland)

figure 5b. Tomb of Andrea Dandolo (Basilica San Marco, Baptistery)

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relics to Venice, celebrated on 31 January.55 The event of Mark’s Transla-tion, as depicted in the Sant’Alipio mosaic, was of crucial political impor-tance to the state, since the presence of the evangelist’s relics at the ducalchapel justified the city’s apostolic status and its unique claim to Mark’spatronage. Celebrations for this feast day therefore centered on the per-son of the doge, who was not only custodian to the relics, but their veryliving embodiment.56 It is perhaps mere calendric happenstance, how-ever, that the 31 January feast accrued Marian connotations, since it fellwithin the week-long Festival of the Twelve Marys, a city-wide event relatedto the Feast of the Purification.57 The procession that took place on 31January thus amalgamates ducal and Marian elements, fusing a laudesperformance with the sacra rappresentazione of the Annunciation.

Da Canal’s Les estoires de Venise provides an account of the processionas it occurred in 1275, which I have reproduced in appendix 1. Hereports that the procession was ‘‘doble,’’ since two separate groups pro-cessed from the Piazza San Marco to the church of Santa Maria Formosa.A priest apareilles de dras de dame (dressed in the clothes of a woman)playing the part of the Virgin marched in the first procession, whileanother representing Gabriel, aparilles a la guise d’un angle (dressed inthe guise of an angel), formed part of the second. Both men were carriedin procession on decorative thrones. When the first procession passedbeneath the ducal palace, three priests from the group stepped ontoa raised platform, where they sang the laudes to the doge (in this caseRanieri Zeno) a haute vois (in a loud voice). The priest dressed as Marythen approached the platform to salute the doge, who returned thegesture, after which the entire group continued on to Santa Maria For-mosa. The second procession followed the same sequence of events:three priests repeated the laudes to Zeno, while the priest dressed asGabriel and the doge saluted one another in turn. Once both groupshad arrived at Santa Maria Formosa, the priests costumed as the Virgin

55 For comparison with the sacra rappresentazione of the Annunciation performed innearby Padua see Giuseppe Vecchi, Uffici drammatici padovani (Florence: L.S. Olschki,1954).

56 State interest in promoting this event is further suggested by a now missing doc-ument (Venice, Archivio di Stato, Ufficiali allo Estraordinario, cod. 131, last document) datedto 16 September 1342, in which the procurators of San Marco specify the terms of thecommission to Paolo Veneziano, who was to provide the decorations for the sacra rappre-sentazione. See Michelangelo Muraro, Paolo da Venezia (University Park, PA: The Pennsyl-vania State University Press, 1970), 83.

57 For an overview of the weeklong events see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in RenaissanceVenice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 135–56. Giovanni Musolino situatesthe Festa delle Marie within the city’s broader Marian devotions in his ‘‘Culto Mariano,’’ inCulto dei santi a Venezia, ed. Silvio Tramontin (Venice: Edizioni Studium Cattolico Vene-ziano, 1965), 256–60. Thomas Devaney offers a fresh perspective on the Festa delle Marie inhis ‘‘Competing Spectacles in the Venetian Festa delle Marie,’’ Viator 39 (2008): 107–25.


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and Gabriel entered the church, where they enacted the sacred drama ofthe Annunciation—the culminating event of the day’s ceremonies (seeXCV in appendix 1).

Thus the singing of the laudes on the one hand, and the enactmentof the Annunciation on the other, underscored the respectively civic(ducal palace) and religious (Santa Maria Formosa) spaces conjoinedthrough the procession. Both topographically and symbolically, the pro-cession mapped a connection between the performance of laudes andthe act (or enactment) of Annunciation, thus literalizing the analogybetween angelic and political announcement through the processionalroute. Gabriel’s and Mary’s roles not only as actors of the Annunciation,but also as participants in the laudes performance in the Piazza, furtherblurred the boundaries between the ceremony’s state and sacred ele-ments. The salute (here an ambivalent term applicable to both perfor-mances) to the doge assigned a political function to the voices of heavenlyagents.

A tradition of disruptive neighborhood feuding that accompaniedthe Festival of the Twelve Marys led the government to abolish the cel-ebration in 1379. It is likely that the 31 January procession ceased alongwith it. The ceremony, however, remained alive in Republican historiog-raphy. Boccaccio’s ribald account of the sacra rappresentazione in his taleof Frate Alberto (Decameron 4.2) likewise contributed to its legacy.

Venice’s alliance with Padua in 1339 redoubled the political signif-icance of the Annunciation to the Venetian state. Paduan proto-humanists in the early fourteenth century had scripted their city intothe history of the Veneto by claiming Paduan founders for Venice in theyear 421, on the feast of the Annunciation.58 Following the 1339 alliance,Venice eagerly assimilated the glorious cultural inheritance of Padua’sCarrara dynasty and seized on the potential of the Annunciation myththat the Paduans had exploited in their own state art.59 (It was, for

58 For the Annunciation legend in Paduan historiography and its absorption intoVenetian history in the 1330s see Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The VenetianSense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 38; and Pincus, The Tombs, 129.

59 Marchetto da Padova’s early fourteenth-century motet Ave regina/Mater innocenciesuggests that music was, for the Paduans, yet another outlet for their devotion to theAnnunciate Virgin. Both triplum and duplum texts are encomic poems to the Virgin ofthe Annunciation that contain acrostics; the triplum embeds the Annunciation antiphon‘‘Ave Maria gratia plena’’ and the duplum contains the name of the composer. AnneWalters Robertson locates the Joseph Ite melody from the Annunciation liturgy in themotet’s tenor voice in her ‘‘Remembering the Annunciation in Medieval Polyphony,’’Speculum 70 (1995): 275–304. Both Robertson and F. Alberto Gallo connect the motet tothe 1305 consecration of the Scrovegni chapel dedicated to Mary of the Annunciation inPadua. F. Alberto Gallo, ‘‘Marchetus in Padua und die ‘franco-venetische’ Musik des fruhenTrecento,’’ Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 31 (1974): 42–44. This dating has been challengedon stylistic grounds by Kurt von Fischer, ‘‘Philippe de Vitry in Italy and an homage ofLandini to Philippe,’’ in L’Ars nova italiana del trecento IV. Atti del 3. Congresso

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instance, the use of the Annunciation figures on the tomb of Marsilio daCarrara, Lord of Padua that provided a model for those of Gradenigoand Dandolo).60 Following the Carrara model, the Annunciation originmyth—fully articulated for the first time in Dandolo’s Chronica—becamepart of the official history of the lagoon city.

It is against this backdrop of cultural and territorial appropriationthat Ciconia composed the motet Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stenadomus (ex. 2).61 Written during the period in which he enjoyed thepatronage of Paduan canonist and ambassador Francesco Zabarella, thework reflects the shared myth of the Annunciation as common to bothconquered and conquering cities.62 Bent identifies the 3 January 1406ceremony in which Zabarella, in a formal gesture of submission, con-signed the emblems of the city to Doge Michele Steno (1400–1413) infront of the Basilica San Marco as the most probable occasion for thework’s performance.63 Virgin Venice and Doge Steno form the twindedicatees of this bi-textual motet, which depicts Steno as the victor whoreigns over his domain together with the personified female Venetia.

As Cumming notes, the first cantus of Venecie/Michael alludes toVenice in several of her common figurations, including Justice, Dea Romaand the Virgin Mary.64 Yet while the text allows multiple personificationsof the state to coexist, the work’s poetic and musical structures hinge on

-internazionale sul tema ‘‘La musica al tempo del Boccaccio e i suoi rapporti con la letter-atura,’’ Siena-Certaldo 19–22 July 1975 (Certaldo: Centro di studi sull’Ars nova italiana delTrecento, 1978), 227. It was also questioned by Margaret Bent, ‘‘The Fourteenth-CenturyItalian Motet,’’ 97; and by Virginia Newes, ‘‘Early Fourteenth-Century Motets with Middle-Voice Tenors: Interconnections, Modal Identity, and Tonal Coherence,’’ in Modality in theMusic of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Ursula Gunther, Ludwig Finscher, andJeffrey Dean (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, Hanssler-Verlag1996), 43. Given the ardent politicization of the cult of the Annunciation by the Carraresein the visual arts and in civic historiography, it is possible to imagine the motet’s abidingrelevance outside of any single occasion.

60 Pincus, The Tombs, 129–32.61 Example 2 reproduces the Bent and Hallmark edition in Polyphonic Music of the

Fourteenth Century XXIV, no. 14.62 For Zabarella’s patronage of Ciconia see Anne Hallmark, ‘‘Protector, imo versus

pater: Francesco Zabarella’s Patronage of Johannes Ciconia,’’ in Music in Renaissance Citiesand Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M.Cummings (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 153–68. See also Margaret Bent,‘‘Music and the Early Veneto Humanists,’’ in Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999), 101–130.

63 On the textual resonances between the motet and Zabarella’s oration for thisoccasion see Hallmark, ‘‘Protector, imo versus pater,’’ 163; and Bent and Hallmark, TheWorks of Johannes Ciconia, xii.

64 Cumming, ‘‘Concord out of Discord,’’ 274. For the various traditions of the per-sonification of the state, and from which Cumming draws these categories in her analysis ofVenecie/Michael, see David Rosand, ‘‘Venetia Figurata: The Iconography of a Myth,’’ inInterpretazione Veneziane. Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. DavidRosand (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1984), 177–96.


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example 2. Venecie, mundi splendor – Michael, qui Stena domus

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Venecie mundi splendor/Michael qui Stena domus text and translation

Cantus I Venecie, mundi splendor,

Italie cum sis decor,

in te viget omnis livor

regulis mundicie.

Gaude, mater maris, salus,

qua purgatur quisque malus.

Terre ponti tu es palus,

miserorum baiula.

Gaude late, virgo digna,

principatus portas signa

(tibi soli sunt condigna)

ducalis dominii.

Gaude, victrix exterorum,

nam potestas Venetorum

nulli cedit perversorum,

domans terram, maria;

Venice, splendor of the world

and ornament of Italy,

in you all desire

for the standards of elegance flourishes.

Rejoice, mother of the sea, saving force

by which each evildoer is cleansed.

You are a mainstay to land and sea,

a support for the wretched.

Rejoice greatly, worthy virgin

You bear the signs

of ducal dominion

to you alone are they befitting.

Rejoice, conqueress of heathens,

for the power of Venice,

that tames the land and seas,

yields to none of the depraved;

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example 2. (continued)

[Nam] tu vincis manus fortis,

pacem reddis tuis portis,

et disrumpis fauce[s] mo[r]tis,

tuorum fidelium.

Pro te canit voce pia

(tui statum in hac via

El conservet et Maria)

Johannes Ciconia.

For you conquer the forces of the mighty,

you restore peace to the gates of

your faithful ones

and you shatter the jaws of death.

For you, with pious voice, sings

(that God and Mary may in this way

preserve your rank)

Johannes Ciconia.

Cantus II Michael, qui Stena domus

tu ducatus portas onus,

honor tibi, quia bonus

vitam duces celibem.

Phebo compar, princeps alme,

tibi mundus promit ‘salve’;

spargis tuis fructum palme,

victor semper [nobilis].

Clemens, justus approbaris,

decus morum appellaris,

tu defensor estimaris

fidei catholice.

Bon[i]s pandis m[u]nus dignum,

malis fundis pene signum

leges suas ad condignum

gladio justitie.

Sagax, prudens, mitis pater,

(lex divina, cum sis mater)

mentis virtus tibi frater,

zelator reipublice.

Sedem precor tibi dari,

Deo celi famulari,

ejus throno copulari

per eterna secula.

Amen.

Michael of the house of Steno

you bear the burden of leadership,

honor to you, for you, a good man

lead a celibate life.

Kindly prince, equal to Phoebus,

the world renders you ‘salve’;

you scatter the fruit of victory to your

people, ever-noble victor.

You are acclaimed as merciful and fair,

you are called a paragon of virtue,

you are esteemed the defender

of the catholic faith.

You bestow proper reward on the good,

while on the evil you

impose your laws as a proper token

with the sword of justice.

Keen, prudent, humble father

(while you, divine law, are the mother)

facility of mind is your brother,

O guardian of the state.

I pray that a place be given to you,

that you may serve God in heaven,

that you be united to his throne

through eternal ages.

Amen.


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the personification of Venice as the Virgin Mary, and more particularly asthe Virgin of the Annunciation.65 Slippage between Marian salute andducal acclamation becomes the structural focal point of the work, withkey musical events occurring around textual allusions to the Annuncia-tion. Ciconia commingles language from the laudes with that of MarianAnnunciation to create a musical analogy between these two potent verbalacts, with both cantus parts drawing interchangeably on the language ofthe laudes and on the Annunciation script. Thus capitalizing on the inter-textual possibilities of the bi-textual motet, Venecie/Michael elides images ofthe Annunciate Virgin with those of the doge acclaimed, and mergesVenice’s ceremonial and sacred landscapes in the act of salutation.66

If the feast of the Translation of St. Mark joins the ducal laudes and theAnnunciation through processional space and performance, Ciconiauses polyphonic means to give them synchronous expression in Venecie/Michael.

One of the ways Ciconia invites listeners to hear commonalitiesbetween political and angelic announcement is by calling attention to thework’s own vocal status as a form of apostrophe. Beyond the vocativeopenings, ‘‘Venecie’’ and ‘‘Michael’’ (which is conventional in dedicatorymotets), the imperative ‘‘gaude’’ that begins stanzas two, three, and four ofcantus I self-reflexively highlights the vocal nature of the musical andpoetic address. So, too, does the final stanza, in which the composer callsattention to his own singing voice (‘‘pro te canit voce pia . . . JohannesCiconia’’/‘‘for you, with pious voice, sings . . . Johannes Ciconia’’)—hisown vocal participation, in other words, in the imagined musical eventof the work’s performance.

Significant in this respect, too, is the double entendre created by theword ‘‘maria’’ (line 16/mm. 59–60) with which the exhortatory portionof the poem (quatrains 1–4) ends. One can interpret ‘‘maria’’ not only asa second direct object after ‘‘terram’’ (yielding ‘‘conquering land andseas’’), but likewise as the vocative form of Maria. The latter readinghas the rhetorical effect of retrospectively naming Mary as the addresseeof the entire exhortation. It also yields a poetic symmetry wherein the

65 Significant contributions to the topic of the Annunciation in medieval polyphonyinclude Robertson, ‘‘Remembering the Annunciation’’; David Rothenberg, ‘‘Marian Feasts,Seasons, and Songs in Medieval Polyphony: Studies in Musical Symbolism’’ (Ph.D. diss.,Yale University, 2004); Jessie Ann Owens, ‘‘‘And the angel said . . . ’: Conversations withAngels in Early Modern Music,’’ in Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History ofSpiritual Communication, 1100–1700, ed. Joad Raymond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,2011), 230–49; and Robert Nosow, Ritual Meanings in the Fifteenth-Century Motet (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2012), 79–83.

66 Jane Alden explores modes of intertextuality in Ciconia’s ceremonial motets in her‘‘Text/Music Design in Ciconia’s Ceremonial Motets,’’ in Johannes Ciconia, musicien de latransition, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 39–64.

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exhortation both begins and ends with an invocation to its dedicatee. Thissymmetry fosters the semantic equivalence of ‘‘Venecie’’ with ‘‘Maria.’’67

The operative anaphoric ‘‘gaude,’’ moreover, recalls Gabriel’s ‘‘Ave’’to Mary at the scene of the Annunciation. ‘‘Gaude’’ in this motet servesnot only as a poetic device, but also as a powerful principle in the work’smusical organization. Key motivic, structural, and semantic events coa-lesce around occurrences of the word. Appearances of ‘‘gaude’’ in cantusI begin with a fanfare-like descent through the voice’s upper tessitura(mm. 18, 36, and 49). This descending gesture’s heraldic quality high-lights the word’s hortatory charge. Thus not only does the motive artic-ulate the underlying stanzaic structure; it also bears a programmaticrelationship to the text it sets by musically accentuating the associationbetween ‘‘gaude’’ and the ‘‘Ave’’ salute of the Annunciation.68

It is fitting that the ‘‘gaude’’ motif should belong to cantus I, sincethat voice addresses Venice in her personification as the Virgin Mary. Butcantus II shares in the preoccupation with announcement. This is par-ticularly apparent when in measures 25–27, shortly after cantus I’s first‘‘gaude’’ statement, cantus II declaims, ‘‘Tibi mundus promit ‘salve’’’(The world renders you [Michele Steno] ‘‘salve’’). We might recall herethe historiographic trope of the acclaiming populace, the unanimousvoice of the people that grants validity to the doge’s authority. Use ofdirect speech (‘‘salve’’) furthermore dramatizes the textual moment,interpolating an imaginary acclaiming populace into the work’s diegesis.But ‘‘salve’’ also points in two directions: toward ducal ceremony andtoward the Annunciation. It is instructive in this respect to return to daCanal’s description of the Annunciation-themed procession on 31 Jan-uary, in which the priests portraying Gabriel and Mary, ‘‘coming beforethe doge, saluted him (si le salue), who [in return] rendered his salute’’(quant il est tres parmi monsignor li dus, si le salue et il li rent son salus).The performance of this political gesture by priests costumed as Gabriel

67 The epithets that follow each of the ‘‘gaude’’ statements can be read to referambiguously to the personified Virgin Venice and the Virgin Mary. ‘‘Gaude mater maris’’(stanza 2) perhaps most closely points to Virgin Venice as the Virgin Mary, calling to mindthe Marian hymn ‘‘Ave maris stella.’’

68 Versions of this motive occur in other contexts in the motet as well, for instance inthe chain of imitative exchanges between the cantus parts initiated in measure 23, whichculminates in the second ‘‘gaude’’ section (m. 36). In fact, Ciconia generates the entiremelodic fabric of the motet through the (often imitative) exchange of a handful of suchrhythmic and melodic gestures between the two cantus voices. Yet comparison of themusical design of the ‘‘gaude’’ openings with the opening of stanza five (m. 62) supportsthis motive’s special association with acts of speech. Notably, this is the only quatrain in thefirst cantus that does not begin by framing itself as a vocal utterance. Indeed not only doesCiconia set the first line of the fifth stanza (‘‘[nam] tu vincis manus fortis’’) in an entirelydifferent fashion; the stanza as a whole makes almost no reference to this otherwise pro-minent motive whatsoever.


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and Mary must have lent a Christian significance to the salute. So, too, inthis motet the proximity of ‘‘gaude’’ and ‘‘salve’’ complicates the rela-tionship between their respective Christian and secular referents.

Ciconia presents the second ‘‘gaude’’ statement in an arrestingmoment of synchrony between the upper voices (mm. 36–37). Thismoment of rhythmic coordination between cantus parts initiates anextended passage of referential ambivalence between the voices andtheir texts, where Steno partakes of the salutations rendered to the Vir-gin (mm. 36–46). Homophonic superimposition of ‘‘gaude’’ in cantusI and ‘‘approbaris’’ (‘‘you are confirmed’’) in cantus II (mm. 36–37)musically aligns the act of salutation (here addressed to the Virgin) withthe political effect of ducal acclamation—that is, the endorsement ofducal authority. Following this, cantus I declaims: ‘‘you bear the signs(or emblems) of ducal dominion, to you alone are they befitting’’ (mm.38–46). Technically this text is addressed to the Virgin. Yet Ciconia likelycomposed Venecie/Michael for a ceremony whose central event wasZabarella’s consignment of real emblems of dominion—those grantedas a sign of the Paduan Signoria’s submission—to Michele Steno. More-over, while the language of cantus I takes a patently political turn, cantusII simultaneously adopts a Christian tone (‘‘decus morum’’/‘‘paragon ofvirtue and ‘‘defensor . . . fidei catholice’’/‘‘defender of the Catholicfaith’’). Voice crossings between cantus parts throughout this passageonly further ambiguate the two subjects.

In measures 47–49 ‘‘gaude mater late digna’’ (rejoice greatly, worthymother) is announced by the tenor in a striking solo statement. The factthat this is the tenor’s first solo appearance increases the dramatic effectof this passage in which the voices seem to reenact the real ceremony ofacclamation.69 The tenor’s ‘‘gaude’’ and its immediate redoubling bycantus I (m. 49) create the musical illusion of a response to the grantingof ‘‘emblems of ducal dominion’’ (signa . . . ducalis domini). The auralimpression is that the announcement of the doge’s authority is con-firmed by a new and unexpected voice, which we might imagine to bethe voice of the Paduan and Venetian people.

Notably this tenor announcement bisects the texted section of themotet. Indeed, if the motet’s three-breve introitus is not included in ourreckoning, it falls exactly at the halfway point of the texted section. Theunusual transfer of this ‘‘gaude’’ announcement to the tenor—one of onlytwo places in which texted tenor stands alone in the work—as well as theinversion of the melodic profile of the ‘‘announcing’’ motive intensify the

69 The only other passage of texted solo tenor (mm. 73–75) also points to the vocalstatus of the work, even locating the source of the musical utterance with the composerhimself.

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musical markedness of the halfway arrival. The clear structural function ofthis ‘‘gaude’’ in a motet honoring the doge assumes the same framingeffect that we have seen in ducal imagery, in which the Annunciationtheme inflects a political topic with a sacred framework. Here, this spiri-tual inflection is amplified through the analogy, indeed the ambiguity,between Marian Annunciation and ducal acclamation.

What would Ciconia’s interest have been in this musical near deifi-cation of the doge? The infelicity of the motet’s occasion for Ciconia’sPaduan patron makes it difficult to read the tone of this work. Yet it ispossible that Ciconia subtly nods here toward Venice’s Paduan roots.The motet’s reference to the Annunciation, after all, alludes to a facetof Venetian history particularly favorable to Padua, one in which Padualays the foundation of the Republic.70 Perhaps it is a subtle reminder that‘‘Victrix’’ Venice, after all, bears the cultural impress of her new territory.

Ciconia would likely have been acquainted with Marce, Marcum, forthe motet circulated within the papal chapels during the composer’sresidency in Rome.71 Giovanni Di Bacco and John Nadas have demon-strated that the anonymous motet and the northern composer wouldhave crossed paths in the papal courts in the 1390s.72 While the politicalclimate of the Veneto during Ciconia’s Paduan years certainly wouldhave left him fluent in the political rhetoric of the Republic, it is note-worthy that his exposure to this rhetoric indeed predated his arrivalin the Veneto. It is hardly possible to imagine Ciconia so readily assim-ilating the Italian style he encountered in Marce, Marcum without appre-hending the Venetian state mythology it heralded.

It may also be that Ciconia’s combination of dialogic elements fromVenetian civic ceremony and the Annunciation narrative in Venecie/Michael served in turn as a model for Pietro Rosso’s motet Missus estGabriel angelus, composed for the Annunciation celebrations in Treviso,and performed there each year from 1434 until 1447.73 David Rothen-berg has shown how alternating sections of narration and dialogue that

70 For the Annunciation legend in Paduan historiography and its afterlife in the Ve-netian historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries see Brown, Venice andAntiquity, 38; and Pincus The Tombs, 129. For Padua’s legendary role in the founding of Venicemore generally see Antonio Carile and Giorgio Fedalto, Le origini di Venezia (Bologna: PatronEditore, 1978), 55–108.

71 Di Bacco and Nadas argue that both sources for Marce, Marcum (Gr and Eg) are ofcentral Italian provenance with papal connections, and that Ciconia would likely havecome in contact with these sources while resident in Rome in the 1390s. Di Bacco andNadas, ‘‘The Papal Chapels,’’ 61–77.

72 Ibid., 69–70.73 Treviso was, at that time, Venice’s oldest and most loyal subject city on the terra

ferma. Nosow recovers the importance of Missus est for the confraternity of Santa Maria deiBattuti in Treviso and the tradition of the motet’s performance in that city’s annual pro-cession on the feast of the Annunciation. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 79–83.


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result from Rosso’s novel disposition of textures yield a quasi-dramaticrendering of the Annunciation text.74 Annual reenactments of theAnnunciation at the Treviso cathedral may have motivated the dramaticstructure of the motet, similar to the way in which Venice’s uniquelypoliticized sacra rappresentazione left its mark on Venecie/Michael. JessieAnn Owens views Missus est as the earliest in a growing corpus of poly-phonic works that enacted ‘‘conversations with angels’’ in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries.75

Yet Venecie/Michael, which predates Missus est by a quarter century,uses the motet as a vehicle to mingle angelic conversations with the dinof political ceremony. Its polyphonic framework allows for the musicalliteralization of an analogy that related angelic voices to ceremonialsong—an analogy that coursed through late-medieval Venetian society,finding expression in visual and material culture, structuring politicaltexts, and informing ritual space. Indeed the motets composed for Ve-netian ceremony represent only one medium for the expression of polit-ical thought through musical performance. The ritual occasion toreaffirm the relationship between Venice’s leader and its people or reen-act the city’s providential history through song ensured a state in har-mony with its heavenly guides.

Appendix 1. Description of Procession from the Piazza San Marco toSanta Maria Formosa on 31 January from Martin da Canal in Les estoires de

Venise; Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed.A. Limentani (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1972), 254–56

Or vos ai conte de la vegile, et apres vos conterai dou jors de monsignor saintMarc.

[XCIII] Saches, signors, que le derain jor de jener est la feste et la processiondoble, que l’unde de ces .ij contrees dont je vos ai fait mencion s’en vienent lidamosiaus et li homes d’aage en aive au pales de monsignor li dus et desendenten seche terre et donent plus de.d. banieres as petis enfans et les envoient a .ij.a .ij tres devant l’iglise de monsignor saint Marc. Et apres vont greignors enfans etportent en lor mains plus de.c. cruis d’arjant. Et apres vient la clergie, trestosvestus de pluvials et de samit a or, et les tronbes et les chinbes; et vient un clerc enla rote apareilles de dras de dame, trestuit a or. Et siet celui clerc desour unechaere mult richement aparillee et le portent .iiij. homes desor lor espaules, etdevant et encoste les confanons a or; et li clers vont chantant la procession.Endementiers que il vont ensi, issent .iij. clers de la procession et la ou il voient

74 See Rothenberg, ‘‘Marian Feasts, Seasons, and Songs in Medieval Polyphony,’’ 115ff.75 Owens, ‘‘‘And the angel said . . . ’: Conversations with Angels in Early Modern Music,’’

230–33.

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monsignor li dus as fenestres de son pales, en la conpagnie des nobles veneciens,il montent desor un dois et chantent a haute vois et dient tuit ensi:

—Criste vince, Criste regne, Criste inpere: nostre signor Ranier Gen, Des graceinclit dus de Venise, Dalmace et Groace, et dominator quarte part et demi de totl’enpire de Romanie, sauvement, honor, vie et victoire: saint Marc, tu le aıe !—

Et quant les loenges sunt finees, il desendent desor li dois et monsignor li dus lorfait geter a val de ses mehailles a plante, et il s’en retornent en la procession aveucles autres, que totesvoies les atendoient. Et lors vient avant li clerc que portecorone d’or et est aparilles si richement con je vos ai conte; et quant il est tresparmi monsignor li dus, si le salue et il li rent son salus. Et lors s’en vont avantciaus que le portent desor les espaules et sivent la procession, et s’en vont enl’iglise de nostre dame sainte Marie et atendent tant illeuc, que ciaus de l’autrecontree vienent tot en tel maniere, que de banieres que de cruis que de prestres,et funt chante .iij. clers autretel loenges tres devant monsignor li dus, con firentles autres; et monsignor li dus lor fait geter de ses mehailles. Et saches quemonsignor li dus est vestus a or, et a corone d’or en son chief. Et a veoir cesteprocession que se fait a henor de Nostre Dame, sont li gentis homes de Venise ettos li peuple et grant plante de dames et de damoselles, et entrevoies et desor liPales en sunt a plante.

[XCIV] Quant il trois clers ont chante les loenges de monsignor li dus tot en telmaniere con ont fait les autres que s’en alerent devant, il se mistrent en laprocesion; et lors vient avant un autre clerc, que seoit desor une chaere, multrichement aparilles a la guise d’une angle, et le portent desor les espaules .iiij.homes. Et quant il fu parmi ou monsignor li dus estoit, il le salue et monsignor lidus li rent son salus. Et apres se, il s’en vont en la procession que les clers vontchantant; en saches que andeus les processions ont bons destrenceors, et clers etlais. Et tant s’en vont, que il entrent en l’iglise de nostre dame sainte Marie; etquant celui clers qu’est aparilles en senefiance de angle est entres dedens l’igliseet il voit l’autre qu’est aparilles en senefiance de la virge Marie, il se lieve enestant et dit tot ensi:

[XCV] —Ave Marie, ploine de grace, le Signor est aveuc toi, beneoite entre lesfemes et beneoit li fruit de ton ventre: ce dit nostre Sire.—

Et celui que en senefiance de Nostre Dame est aparilles respont et dist:—Coment peut ce estre, angle Dei, en parce que je ne conois home, por

avoir enfant?—Et li angles li redit:—Spirit Saint desent en toi, Marie: n’aies paor, auras dedens ton ventre le

fils Dieu—Et cele li respont et dist:—Et je sui ancelle dou Signor: viegne a moi selonc ta parole—


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ABSTRACT

During the fourteenth century, Venetian chronicles, art, and cere-mony fostered provocative analogies between angelic annunciation andthe political voice of the Venetian populace. Such analogies imagineda city whose civic and heavenly members were united through the soundof unanimity. At the intersection of the state’s civic and celestial bodiesstood the doge, considered to be the image of the Republic and of itspatron, Saint Mark. A complex of sung ceremonies and musical com-positions addressed to the doge dramatized the notion that the voice, asa ritual instrument, could engender real political or spiritual change inthe state and its leaders. Performances of acclamations to the dogepositioned him within Venice’s sacred and civic hierarchies, while stateart and ceremony forged symbolic resemblances between ducal accla-mation and angelic annunciation. A repertory of occasional motets evi-dences polyphonic play with the notion that vocal rituals centered on thedoge could activate the spiritual ideals of the state: the anonymous Marce,Marcum imitaris (c. 1365) draws a sonic analogy between spiritual likenessand musical imitation in order to dramatize the concept of the doge asMark’s image, whereas Johannes Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splendor/Michaelqui Stena domus elides a text dedicated to the Annunciate Virgin with oneaddressed to the doge, creating musical echoes and simultaneities in itspraises of Venice’s temporal and celestial leaders.

Keywords: acclamation, Johannes Ciconia, civic ritual, historiography,motet, Venice

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"Voicing the Doge's Sacred Image," Journal of Musicology 32 (2015)

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