Métaphores littéraires et stratégies de composition: un autre regard sur les rapports entre musique et architecture au Moyen Âge

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This research, which is preceded with a historiographical and methodological account of the different ways — symbolical, proportional, semantic — in which the analogy between music and architecture was investigated during the Middle Ages, tries to define a further possible approach: a compositional one. The article, based on Edward Lowinsky’s idea of differentiating the medieval polyphonic conception, in his view a ‘consecutive’ one, from the ‘simultaneous’ Renaissance conception, explores the possibility of drawing a parallel between two different medieval compositional practices: the musical one, based on the repetition of predetermined melodic formulas (the cantus firmus technique) and the architectural one, based on the repetition of predetermined geometrical figures (ad quadratum or ad triangulum). Even though the source analysis can only be an inductive one, yet a late fifteenth century text, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, Aldo Manuzio, 1499) offers evidence of a well-aware comparison between the two compositional methods, the architectural one and the musical one, and it also testifies to the overcoming of medieval techne: the compositional process is no longer based on the multiplication of a pattern, either geometrical or musical, whose aim it is to establish the shape and the length of the object (the so-called additional principle) but rather on a unitary principle which rests upon the object’s entirety and which, through calculation and evaluation, succeeds in extracting a proportional model according to which all structural elements of the piece are arranged. Further factors — such as the layout of sheet music, the mnemonic function of geometrical figures and rhetorical devices — strengthen this hypothesis and broaden the research field, thus opening it up to the history of mental attitudes and to cultural changes which characterized the transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance.