Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

Besides Florence, the other formative context for the humanist cultivation of singing to the lyre were the educational environments in which the studia humanitatis was implemented. The primary sources are the humanist educational treatises written during the first half of the fifteenth century by figures like Pier Paolo Vergerio, Leonardo Bruni, and Battista Guarini. A careful re-reading of these sources reveals their attention to the aural qualities of written texts, especially poetry, and to the promotion of singing verse to the lyre as a way to develop proper diction, as an aid to the memorization of texts, and as a form of recreation with clear ancient precedent. The fundamentally oral aspect of humanist culture proceeds from its pedagogical and practical emphasis on rhetorical eloquence, and the view of cantare ad lyram as an integral aspect of rhetoric guaranteed for it a wide dissemination through the rapidly growing apparatus of humanist schools and universities. A final section devoted to the relatively unknown correspondence of Michele Verino, a student of the University of Florence with a predilection for singing to the lyre, complements the prescriptive approach of the educational treatises with the actual practices of a student enrolled in the studia humanitatis.