Francesco Patrizi and the ‘Weakest Echo of the Harmony of the Spheres’

Abstract

This chapter argues that Francesco Patrizi expands the traditional doctrine of world harmony by using it innovatively in the field of poetics, while simultaneously maintaining it as a mathematical model in the field of cosmology. Patrizi adopted Aristoxenus' radical solution to this problem in Della Poetica by arguing that the magnitude of an interval is constituted in the sense of hearing, not in reason, as had been argued by the Pythagoreans. The chapter discusses how Patrizi uses traditional ideas from the tradition of the harmony of the spheres as an external reference point to justify these new musical practices and to confer meaning on them. Patrizi's definition of the diatonic scale, which he presumably borrowed from Galilei, is simple and elegant, and describes approximately which scale 'modern' Italian musicians used in the second half of the sixteenth century. Patrizi addresses the issue of the musical origins of language again in his discussion of ancient Greek and modern musical practice.