CANZONCINA DEVOTA. — A brief lyrical composition in honor of God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, or a didactic composition intended for the religious education of the people, succeeding the lauda, whose production came to an end at the close of the fifteenth century, although good reworkings of it continued to appear in the following century, as in Serafino Razzi. Unlike the canzone or canzonetta, which generally treats a frivolous subject in an erotic or courtly spirit, the c., inspired by religious sentiment, has remained extremely vigorous in the Italian literary tradition.
Until now, however, it has remained almost unknown to scholars. While at least 200 collections of laudi are known, originating from every region of Italy, several of them in rigorous editions, there is not a single bibliographical survey, indeed not even an anthology, of the c., which are extremely numerous and often by no means devoid of artistic merit. The lieder and cantiques have fared better: among the Germans, the collections of Kaspar A. von Mastiaux and F. Schlosser, among others, are well regarded; for the French, the repertory of A. Gastoué is noteworthy, although incomplete. With folkloric studies in decline and journals of popular literature having died out, the c., which has four centuries dense with life behind it, still awaits its diligent explorer. The results of systematic investigations along the lines of G. Pitré and M. Barbi would be no less significant than those yielded by popular song, revealed as marvelous in the publications of F. Liuzzi.
The c. is the grandchild of the liturgical hymn, from which derived the lauda of s. Francesco, the oldest spiritual poet in the vernacular. From the Ambrosian iambic dimeter it took the agility of its rhythm, and from the laudesi the ardor and simplicity of its diction, indulging in sonorous rhymes for musical notation. It had regular stanzas with an identical ordering of lines, predominantly seven-syllable lines, but not always the same name. Born in the Renaissance climate, it flourished in the seventeenth century and even more during the period of the Arcadia. It underwent the influence of the coarse seventeenth-century style and of that of Metastasio, without ever losing its popular character: the decline of form was compensated by clarity of thought. In this respect the c. may be regarded as a forerunner of healthy Romanticism.
At first the title «laudi spirituali» predominated, especially in the compilations prepared in Rome and Naples by the disciples of s. Filippo Neri, an industrious pioneer in this field. G. Animuccia published two volumes of polyphonic and homophonic laudi (1563 and 1570), suitable for the gatherings of the Oratory and for pious walks. In 1586 Verovio brought out the Diletto spirituale: canzonette; in 1588 Soto di Langa collected the laudi spirituali in three volumes. Later Pier Matteo Petrucci, faithful to the customs of the Philippians, printed the Poesie sacre e spirituali (Macerata 1675; Florence and Iesi 1680), among which Lodate Maria — o lingue fedeli has remained celebrated. Coferati entitled his verses Canzoni e laudi spirituali (Florence 1675), and the Apulian Camerota (d. 1644) Odi spirituali rustiche.
Eighteenth-century authors employed a greater variety of titles, particularly in anonymous publications disseminated by rural missionaries. Patrignani, or Presepio Presepi, called his poems Cantici (1700) and Ventaruole (1712), F. Pantaleoni Canzoni divote, Marchese Canzoni e sonetti, and Castellani Cantici scritturali. One also encounters: Scelta di alcune laudi spirituali (Rome 1718); Raccolta delle laudi ed altre orazioni (ibid. 1728); Arpa di sacre laudi e divozioni (4th ed., Naples 1749); Canzoni spirituali ad uso delle missioni (Trent 1754); Canzonette ed ariette sacre e morali (Vicenza 1786); Sacre Canzoncine (Naples 1788); Raccolta di sacre poesie italiane più usate a recitarsi ed a cantarsi (Rome 1789); etc., to limit ourselves to an informative sample. Through his ascetic books, which spread prodigiously, S. Alfonso popularized the name c., first calling it «devota» and, from 1750 onward, «spirituale», embracing both the monastic and the popular type. Various poets imitated him even in the nineteenth century, such as Caione, De Vivo, D'Ambrosio, and Del Buono. Among these Mattia del Piano stands out: although he had placed on the title page of his collection Il freno della lingua ovvero laudi spirituali
composed in the Tuscan and Neapolitan idiom for the people, at the top of every page he wrote Canzoncine spirituali. The title has now entered into the domain and usage of the people.
A significant group is constituted by the poetry of religious communities, inspired for the most part by the Teresian tradition. The mystical subject is treated with frank poetic images, which not infrequently call to mind the vibrant canticles of s. Giovanni della Croce. Amid the faded miscellany one finds ingenious and graceful passages, as in the unpublished Canzoniere of the venerable sister M. Celeste Crostarosa, where the history of divine love in the soul is sung with candid ardor. The other c., which constitute an inexhaustible treasure, are genuinely popular, written spontaneously, without artistic pretensions, to meet an immediate need of the uneducated masses, even in dialect. Born among the people and for the humble people, they were composed essentially to be sung in unison, to new tunes in an extremely simple style or to melodies already in fashion, as in Sicily or along the Tyrrhenian coasts. Famous are the Sette canzonette in aria marinarresca sopra le 7 principali feste di Nostra Signora (Milan 1738) by Fr. G. Tornielli. Missionaries among the crowds—Franciscans, Jesuits, Lazarists, Pious Workers, and Redemptorists—made use of them as a school, employing the c. for catechization, moral exhortation, and prayer. The first two elements were ordinarily fused, while the third then burst forth separately in joyful exclamations and supplications of an elegiac tone. Thus devotional poetry, learned in church during a course of preaching and carried into families, hovered through streets and fields, displacing secular songs. Through song it helped the memory retain a mystery of Christ, a prerogative of the Madonna, and an entire sermon concerning the last things. For this reason Fr. Segneri (d. 1694) synthesized the principal notions of Christian doctrine in a Laude spirituale. Fr. Innocenzi (d. 1697), the evangelizer of the Tuscan countryside, rendered the entire catechism in verse with effective simplicity and had it printed at Macerata in 1681.
In appendices to devotional and doctrinal books distributed by missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one discovers the Creed, the Decalogue, the Sacraments, the Pater, the Ave Maria, and the mysteries of the Rosary set into little stanzas. Among the liturgical antiphons, the «Salve Regina» received various poetic paraphrases, one of them widely disseminated in the south by s. Francesco de Geronimo (d. 1716): Dio ti salvi, o Regina...; another by Fr. D'Ambrosio: Salve, del ciel Regina, still repeated by the people.
In Italy the c. existed before Protestantism, which exerted a broad influence on the popular religious songs of the northern countries. It seems to have reached its apogee among us in the eighteenth century, not through academic poets (Savioli, Vigorelli, etc.), but through the efforts of zealous apostles, whose rhymes survive in the modern flowering, despite the silence of literary historians. Among them, the c. of s. Alfonso M. de' Liguori stand out distinctly for spontaneity, freshness, and ardor of feeling, and are regarded by connoisseurs as small masterpieces of popular poetry. O bella mia speranza, often set to music and always sung in May, enjoys national fame; Tu scendi dalle stelle enjoys worldwide renown. These chaste verses, disparaged by G. Rossetti as metrical ejaculations, were duly appreciated by G. Gezelle, master of Flemish poetry, and imitated by S. Di Giacomo, who in Canzoni e ariette nove (Naples 1916) echoes Alfonsian rhythms and meters.
If the criticism of these compositions is to be conducted according to the canons of modern aesthetics, only someone prepared to understand religious devotion and pious sentiment can evaluate their art and poetic content.
popular, of which they are the expression. Within this framework, the c. offers fruitful material for illuminating obscure aspects of the history not only of literature but also of Italian Catholic spirituality.