The Musical Reception of Boccaccio's Filostrato in Fourteenth-Century Italy

Scholars of secular Trecento music are often required to confront issues concerning the interpretation of verbal texts and musical settings. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the poetic texts that were set to music to uncover new evidence regarding the intentionality of intertextual allusions between musical works. At the same time, the analysis of musical intertextuality gives new meaning to the links found among poetic texts. By reconstructing the wider context of Filostrato’s musical links, this study sheds new light on its quotation in the madrigal Vidi, com’[a] Amor piacque, set to music by Nicolò del Preposto, and its relationship to another madrigal by Nicolò, It’a veder ciascun. I firstly focus on the musical references of the Filostrato, and I produce a survey of the overall presence of Boccaccio’s poem in Trecento polyphony. In the second part of this study, I focus on the analogies between the musical settings of the two madrigals by Nicolò.