Tra le Parrasie vocali selve, e le rupi Menalie

In 1820 in Perugia was inaugurated the sala arcadica della Colonia Augusta painted by Giovanni Monotti and Carlo Cencioni. The room, still preserved, was used as headquarters of Arcadians’ winter meetings and is a rare example of decoration directly inspired by the themes of the Arcadian Academy. A number of significant references to Arcadian traditions and rituals handed down by custom and by the writings of the Academy are discernible in the landscapes and in the ornamentations of the cycle of paintings. These paintings are also an important step in a long process that testifies an emerging taste for stanze a boschereccia and late Neoclassic landscape in Papal States as a way to affirm a shared cultural and artistic language.

Musical Representation and Vivaldi's Concerto Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio, RV 544/572

Vivaldi's concerto titles draw ambivalent reactions from historians, who see them as commercial hooks, rarely reflecting musical substance. But titles condition a work's reception, connecting it to a cultural context by which to steer a listener's reactions, both intellectual and affective. Eighteenth-century writers on aesthetics recognized the role of textual “ideas” in the reception of music. Vivaldi's Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio is regarded as a “trick piece” in which the solo violin and cello parts are “reversed,” each being written in the other's clef. The concerto, however, invokes a deeper conception of the mundus inversus metaphor, in that it constitutes a remarkably sophisticated exploration of upside-down compositional practices. While the opening movement challenges notions of “correct” musical syntax, evoking the Carnival celebrations of the “world upside down,” the last presents a well-ordered example of Vivaldian ritornello form. Vivaldi included Il Proteo as the first concerto in a large group sold to Pietro Ottoboni in the mid-1720s, twelve of which bear titles. Some are as concrete as “The Four Seasons,” but others are more abstract, deriving from affective or intellectual subjects such as“Il riposo.” Il Proteo, in this context, seems especially sophisticated, cleverly satirizing some of the composer's own trademark compositional techniques. Its self-conscious treatment of style appears to address contemporary debates regarding music's ability to carry “meaning,” an ability that members of Ottoboni's Arcadian Academy seemed to deny but that others, such as the philosopher Antonio Conti, endorsed. Might Vivaldi have fueled these debates with a provocative set of concertos headed by Il Proteo?

THE MOCK HEROIC, AN INTRUDER IN ARCADIA: GIROLAMO GIGLI, ANTONIO CALDARA AND L'ANAGILDA (ROME, 1711)

ABSTRACTIn 1711 the opera L'Anagilda was performed in the private theatre of Francesco Maria Ruspoli, an important Roman patron of the Arcadian Academy. L'Anagilda's librettist (Girolamo Gigli) and composer (Antonio Caldara) were both associated with this society, but the opera contrasts with the basic goal of Arcadian aesthetics – namely, to reform literature and opera by imitating the structure of ancient Greek tragedy and the stylistic purity of Italian renaissance poets. Rather, Gigli and Caldara created an opera infused with comedy, interspersed with fantastic intermezzos and formulated according to a genre not endorsed by Arcadian literary critics, the mock heroic. This article explores topics related to one central question: why would Gigli and Caldara openly flout the literary precepts of Arcadia? Gigli was a career satirist whose works eventually caused him to be exiled from his native Siena, all of Tuscany and the Papal States, and to be expelled from three major literary academies, the Intronati, the Cruscanti and the Arcadians. Since he continually criticized the organizations to which he belonged for their narrow-mindedness, prejudice and hypocrisy, I contend that L'Anagilda represents a critique of Arcadia. Yet in the process, Gigli also shows the Arcadians that there is more than one path to verisimilitude and the imitation of classical models. Despite the mock-heroic characteristics of the libretto, Gigli adheres to some Arcadian structural requirements, and Caldara's score heightens the characterizations and the overall verisimilitude of the opera.