ANIMUCCIA, GIOVANNI

ANIMUCCIA, GIOVANNI. — A musician of pure religious inspiration who, Festa (v.), opened the golden tradition of the Roman polyphonic school. Born in Florence in 1514, he died in Rome on 25 March 1571. Coming to Rome while still young, he entered the circle of artists who frequented Cardinal Giulio Ascanio Sforza di Santa Fiora and, in 1540, formed a deep friendship with his fellow citizen St Philip Neri, who called him to collaborate at the Oratory, where he enrolled in 1555. In the same year he was appointed maestro of the Cappella Giulia in St Peter’s, where, upon his death, he was succeeded by Palestrina. He married “Madonna Lucrezia Gioia sanse,” also a penitent of St Philip.

The two principal fields of A.’s activity, the Cappella Giulia and the Oratory, are also those in which the highest values of 16th-century musicality unfold, namely liturgical music (masses, Magnificats, motets) and extra-liturgical religious music with popular intonation and vernacular texts (laudi spirituali). In the former, A. draws thematic inspiration from the traditional Gregorian repertoire, clothing it in the clearest and most fluent polyphony, which, though it may sometimes lack the grand architectural lines of Palestrina’s style, always conveys a collected and profound religiosity. Moreover, he brings the expressive adherence between music and the liturgical text to such a level of clarity that he may rightly be called the musician of the Council of Trent, whose spirit he expresses, especially in the masses known as “secundum formam Concilii.” One might say that every mass — we cite the great collection of six masses for 4, 5, and 6 voices printed in Rome in 1567 under the title Missarum liber primus — is like a polyphonic apotheosis of the Gregorian thematic content of the hymn (Ad coenam Agni pro-

ANIMISM — Offering chest for spirits. Rome, Museo Missionario Etnologico Lateranense.

Tylor regarding the origin of the idea of the soul, and it is held instead that primitive man may have derived this notion both from the concept of the person, which was well known to him, and from the immediate experience of his inner life. The evolutionary theory has also run its course and has been superseded by two different viewpoints, namely, the emergence of a trend asserting the existence of a pre-eminently magical faith, and, on the other hand, the emergence of deeper knowledge about the most ancient peoples. In this regard, we can now say that such knowledge excludes animism as the earliest form of religion, because the most ancient peoples, ethnologically speaking, do not know the cult of the dead, or practice it only to a very limited extent. Instead, they venerate a personal Supreme Being, rarely composed of soul and body, but usually conceived as a wholly special and homogeneous person.

Thus falls the historical scale of religions formulated by Tylor, because monotheism is by no means the final product of an evolution, but reveals itself at the very dawn of humanity. Tylor nevertheless retains the merit of having illuminated the actual value of animism with regard to the history of human thought, of having perceived that even in natural man there is the philosopher capable of investigating the causes of things and forming a conception of the world; and of having understood that the worldview of animists is not purely materialistic in its background, but also rises to spiritual motives of the kind associated with the soul.

2. MEDICINE

In medicine, animism, no less than theurgy (v.), constituted the first and most ancient form of etiological interpretation of diseases, which it explained by attributing their cause to the action of invisible animated beings, such as demons or evil spirits or even the souls of the dead. The animistic interpretation is almost always connected with the magical one.

Animistic appears the medical conception of the most ancient ages and of civilizations such as Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, Indian, Iranian, etc., and it Talmud (v.). It is normally widespread among all existing primitive peoples, even when they possess the concept of natural causes of disease. The cure is predominantly exorcistic, based on the principle of frightening the evil spirit that has caused the illness, or of luring it elsewhere with blandishments, deceiving it, and sometimes even causing it to suffer so that it will depart.