ABSTRACT
The literary polemics about the performance of epic poetry, the genre of Dante’s Comedy, and the question of the phonetic aspects of Italian versification could not have passed Vincenzo Galilei by. In the light of the heated debates on epic poetry and differing attitudes to the genre of Dante’s Comedy, the innovation and audacity of Galilei’s experimental presentation of an excerpt from the Comedy becomes evident. However, Galilei himself was not a theorist of poetics and in his treatise he refers to common practice rather than theory. For the true experts in poetry, as the Camerata members certainly were, a musical presentation of Dante’s Comedy would hardly be thinkable, were the norms of poetic recitation and the beauty of the ‘sound of words’ to be violated, or to use Capriano’s words, ‘broken in cantilena’. The important aspect of Girolamo Mei/Galilei’s theory was the affects assigned to one or another mode and the feelings the modes could evoke in the listener.
