Quattro diagnosi sul florario di Francesco Buti per le villanelle di Girolamo Kapsperger

The sixth book “Li Fiori” of Girolamo Kapsperger, printed in 1632 for one, two, three and four voices with continuo and Spanish guitar, is the unique collection dedicated to flowers in 17th-century Italy. The German maestro, as a protégé of Pope Urbano VIII, performed this music a year before in an unspecified Roman academy within the context of the Barberini’s family – it must be noted that the ambiguous term academy could be translated as private concert. However, verses and music do not belong to the villanella genre, because the structure of polyphony and poems is more refined than that used by other composers of authentic villanella and, for its characteristics, this work could be enclosed in the repertoire of canzonetta. The choice of the title must be explained in relation to cardinal Francesco Barberini’s patronage, who created a big garden in Rome full of plants imported from all parts of the world, and the term “villanelle” (from the Italian “villa”) is probably an allusion to the nature loved by the cardinal. The poems, written in a very complicated way, contain a mixture of different meters based on the ancient Greek mythology, whose subjects are the flowers born by metamorphosis from pagan Gods’ blood and milk. As Giovan Battista Marino’s “Lira” (1614), “Sampogna” (1620) and “Adone” (1623), Buti resumed the legends of the jasmine, violet, pink, purple anemone, hyacinth, narcissus and iris aiming at transforming them in a means to enhance the catholic ethic. In some cases, for example in reference to the jasmine, Buti was inspired by the contemporaneous iconography, in particular Guido Reni’s, Guercino’s and Cartari’s pictures (cf. the “Aurora” at the Rospigliosi-Pallavicini Palace, another “Aurora” at the Ludovisi Casino, the treatise of Vincenzo Cartari “Le imagini dei dei degli antichi”, 1626). The core meaning of “Li Fiori” metaphors, which establish close ties with the Counter-reformation mentality, is the slogan “talking/painting” drawn from Horace’s “Ars poetica” and Marino’s “Dicerie sacre” (1614). To this regard it can be mentioned the extraordinary case of the “Granadiglia” poem. At the time, this Latin-American flower, known as maracock or maracuja, was renamed granadilla by the Spanish conquistadores, and then transformed by the Jesuits into Flos passionis/passionflower, whose components were forced to represent Christ crucifixion. From 1608 to the 1660s, priests and poets, like Giovanni Battista Botero and Marino, wrote poems on the passionflower on the basis of some unreal images spread by the Jesuits. Aiming at experiencing a new way of ancient ékfrasis, they had described the passionflower without any reference to the authentic exotic flower. These poets and intellectuals dealt with different paradigms employing metaphors to give the flower a distorted meaning, presenting it either as the book of nature, or as the symbol of a mysterious gift given by God, in which are embodied both the “officium occultandi” and the “ratio docendi”. These strategies had the final goal to consider the flower as a natural means to reveal the secrets of Christ’s Passion after his death. However, in the 1630s the comparison among poems and botanical treatises showed a diminished interest about this kind of “ut pictura poësis”, especially when the descriptions and the drawings of the true passionflower began to be widespread without any religious implication. It is not a mere accident the presence of granadiglia close to the “red cardinal flower” in the mentioned Barberini’s garden, as emphasized by the botanist Giovan Battista Ferrari in his book “Flora, cultura de’ fiori” (1638), a treatise dedicated to the same cardinal.

Il messaggio etico dei testi di Francesco Buti per i "Fiori" di Girolamo Kapsperger (villanelle a 1,2,3,4 voci e Bc. del 1632) e la ricercata semplicità della musica giustificano la scelta anacronistica e stilisticamente inappropriata della titolazione di genere scelta da Kapsperger o dall’editore Masotti. Il termine villanella allude in questo caso a un giardino in cui i fiori formano un mazzetto di allegorie per il buon cristiano. Più specificamente i soggetti riguardano i miti classici collegati ai vegetali, ai quali si ispira l’autore per riprendere le leggende sull’origine dal sangue o dal latte degli dei, da cui nacquero per metamorfosi il gelsomino, la viola, la rosa, l’amaranto, l’anemone, il giacinto, il narciso e l’iris. Qualche sospetto di incongruenza può destare la vicinanza delle liriche sui fiori a quelle più astratte sui vizi e le passioni. Tuttavia, il trattamento riservato ai temi floreali, che divengono sotto la penna di Buti espressione del pensiero cattolico, elimina qualsiasi iato concettuale tra le une e le altre. Sensibile al fascino delle digressioni botaniche di Giovambattista Marino, il giovane Buti conferisce ai fiori un ruolo metaforico per trarre dai relativi mitologemi altrettanti insegnamenti morali. In virtù della loro forza evocativa i testi si inseriscono nel più ampio panorama della poesia per immagini, sulla base di un ideale estetico che tramuta l’atto verbale in ‘pittura parlante’, giusta la definizione oraziana ripresa dal napoletano nelle "Dicerie sacre" (1614). L'ispirazione a comporre i "Fiori" nasce nell'ambito della civiltà dei giardini romani e si colloca nel contesto del mecenatismo del cardinale Francesco Barberini, nipote di papa Urbano VIII. Inoltre, la raccolta di Buti-Kapsperger è la sola opera basata sul tema floreale di tutta la polifonia rinascimentale e barocca.