Acts of Compassion: Consoling Grief in the Art, Literature, and Music of Early Humanist Padua

Against the backdrop of the regulated restraint of the public displays of extreme emotion by civic authorities in late medieval Italian society, early Paduan humanists Giovanni Conversini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Francesco Zabarella cultivated compassion for the suffering of friends through acts of consolation. By sharing signs of suffering within a framework of classicized literary conventions, this bid for compassion signals an intervention in an older emotional regime by a community of early humanists in Padua in league with a pan-Italian network of prominent literary, social, and political figures. This new emotional regime also extends to the music of Johannes Ciconia and Antonio Zacara da Teramo. Both composers invite compassion from their listeners through analogous signs of suffering in their settings of consolatory texts. In the decades after Ciconia's death, a community of humanists and musicians transformed this emotional legacy into a collection of musical commemorations for some of Padua's greatest sons and the singers of their songs.