Pittura e Parola. Giuseppe Salviati e la questione della lingua

In recent years, a great effort has been made to describe the cultural and educational backgrounds of the early modern artists, and to provide new evidence of their participation in the cultural life of their time. This article contributes to this scholarly trend by bringing into focus the case of Giuseppe Porta (1520–1575), also known as Giuseppe Salviati, a well-established painter Tuscan by origin and active mostly in Venice and Rome. To a large extent, Salviati embodied the ideal of the learned artist (or pictor doctus) delineated by Alberti: he was knowledgeable in astrology and mathematics, and his achievements in these fields received much praise and attention from contemporaries, including the polymath Daniele Barbaro and the philosopher Francesco Patrizi. His main work, an unfinished treatise composed in the late 1550s, investigates the connections between acoustics and astrology. Combining empirical observation with a simplistic theoretical background, this manuscript endeavored to provide a rough classification of natural and artificial sounds. This article discusses its content, shedding light in particular on its relationships with the contemporary debates on the questione della lingua, with special regard to the phonetic components of the modern Italian language.