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Updated: May 13, 2025
He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" might have well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in the white dawn. For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote, perverted, archaic loveliness of certain figures on the walls of Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the saints.
After mutual explanations as to their meeting, Dante requested his friend, if no ordinance opposed it, to refresh his spirit awhile with one of the tender airs that used to charm away all his troubles on earth. Casella immediately began one of his friend's own productions, commencing with the words, "Love, that delights to talk unto my soul Of all the wonders of my lady's nature."
The instruments used to support song, that of the troubadour or that of a Casella, or later still that of a Galilei, being of the same lineage, the only novelty was the adaptation to them of the lutenist's method of arranging polyphonic music for one voice with accompaniment. That this offered no large difficulties is proved by the account of Prætorius.
Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire, That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story. Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, Met in the milder shades of Purgatory."
He remembered that Casella, the musician, had asked him a week ago for the text of a canzone which he had repeated to him one day. He had promised to let him have it. The promise had entirely gone out of his mind. Then he reflected that because the ship of his hopes and dreams had been wrecked there was no reason why he should neglect his obligations to his fellow-travellers on the uncertain sea.
We find ourselves, then, equipped with these significant facts: first, that the composition of secular music in polyphonic forms was at least as old as the thirteenth century; that part singing was practised in Italy as far back as the fourteenth century; that songs for one voice were made with Italian texts at least as early as the time of Dante and Boccaccio; that the art of arranging polyphonic compositions as vocal solos by giving the secondary parts to the accompanying instrument was known in the time of Minuccio and Casella; that at the time of Poliziano's "Orfeo" the frottola was the reigning form of part song, and that then and for years afterward it was customary to arrange frottole as solos by giving the polyphony to the lute or other accompanying instrument.
At eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shown such a genius for poetry as to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a young noble of a philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, who has retained a reputation with posterity: and it was probably at the same time he became acquainted with Giotto, who drew his likeness, and with Casella, the musician, whom he greets with so much tenderness in the other world.
It was so common that we are driven to something more substantial than a mere suspicion that Casella and Minuccio employed a similar method and that the domination of polyphonic thought in music had spread from the regions occupied by the church compositions of Dufay and his contemporaries downward into the secular fancies of people whose daily thought was influenced by the authority of the church.
Doubtless Casella, who was born in 1300 and set to music Dante's sonnet "Amor che nella mente," was one of the cantori a liuto. Minuccio d'Arezzo, mentioned by Boccaccio, was another. Here again we must recur to the observations of Burney and the examinations of Ambros. The former records that in the Vatican there is a poem by Lemmo of Pistoja, with the note "Casella diede il suono."
The shadow, smiling at the astonishment in the other's face, drew back; and Dante hastened as much forward to shew his zeal in the greeting, when the spirit in a sweet voice recommended him to desist. The Florentine then knew who it was, Casella, a musician, to whom he had been much attached.
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