DEVOTIONAL LITTLE SONG. - A brief lyrical composition in honor of God, the Virgin Mary and the saints, or didactic for the religious education of the people, a successor to the lauda, whose production died out at the end of the 15th century, although in the following century good reworkings of it were not lacking, as in Serafino Razzi. Different from the canzone or canzonetta, which develops a generally frivolous subject with an erotic or courtly spirit, the c. inspired by religious feeling has remained very much alive in the Italian literary tradition.
Until today, however, it has remained almost unknown to scholars. While of laude at least 200 collections are known, coming from every region of Italy, several in rigorous editions, there is not a single bibliographical survey, indeed not even an anthology of the c., which are very numerous and often not devoid of art. The lieder and the cantiques have had better fortune: for the Germans, among others, the collections of Kaspar A. von Mastiaux and of F. Schlosser are accredited; for the French, the repertory of A. Gastoué is notable, though incomplete. With folkloristic studies in decline and the journals of popular literature extinguished, the c., which has 4 dense centuries of life, still awaits its diligent explorer. The results of systematic investigations in the footsteps of G. Pitré and M. Barbi would not be inferior to those furnished by popular song, which has revealed itself marvelous in the publications of F. Liuzzi.
The c. is a descendant of the liturgical hymn, from which derived the lauda of St. Francis, the earliest spiritual poet in the vernacular. From the Ambrosian iambic dimeter it took the agility of rhythm and from the laudesi the ardor and simplicity of diction, indulging in sonorous rhymes for musical notation. It had regular stanzas with an identical order of verses, predominantly septenaries, but not the same name. Born in the Renaissance climate, it flourished in the 17th century and more in the period of Arcadia. It underwent the coarse seventeenth-century influence and the Metastasian one, without ever losing its popular character: the decline of form was supplied by clarity of thought. In this respect the c. can be considered as a precursor manifestation of healthy Romanticism.
At the beginning the title of «laudi spirituali» predominated, especially in the compilations edited in Rome and Naples by the disciples of St. Philip Neri, an industrious pioneer in this field. G. Animuccia published two volumes of polyphonic and homophonic laudi (1563 and 1570), suited to the gatherings of the Oratory and to pious outings. In 1586 Verovio brought to light the Diletto spirituale: canzonette; in 1588 Soto di Langa collected the laudi spirituali in three volumes. Later Pier Matteo Petrucci, faithful to the Filippine customs, 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 printings, propagated by rural missionaries. Patrignani or Presepio Presepi called his poems Cantici (1700) and Ventaruole (1712), F. Pantaleoni Canzoni divote, Marchese Canzoni e sonetti, Castellani Cantici scritturali. One then 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. St. Alphonsus with his ascetic books, which spread prodigiously, popularized the name of c., which he first called «devota» and from 1750 onward «spirituale», encompassing the monastic and the popular type. Various poets imitated him also in the 19th century, such as Caione, De Vivo, D'Ambrosio, Del Buono. Among these stands out Mattia del Piano, who although he had inscribed on the title page of his collection Il freno della lingua ovvero laudi spirituali composte nell'idioma toscano e napoletano per lo popolo, wrote at the head of every page Canzoncine spirituali. The title has now passed into the domain and use of the people.
A significant group is constituted by community poetry, inspired in very large part by the Teresian tradition. The mystical subject is treated with genuine poetic images, which not infrequently bring to mind the vibrant canticles of St. John of the Cross. In the colorless medley 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 form a boundless treasure, are truly popular, composed in one breath, without artistic pretensions, for an immediate need of the uncultured masses, even in dialect. Arisen among the people and for the humble people, they were composed essentially to be sung in unison with new arias of the easiest style or already in vogue, as in Sicily or on the Tyrrhenian coasts. Famous are the Sette canzonette in aria marinarresca sopra le 7 principali feste di Nostra Signora (Milan 1738) of Fr. G. Tornielli. The missionaries among the crowds, such as the Franciscans, Jesuits, Lazarists, Pii Operai, Redemptorists, availed themselves of them as of a school, making the c. serve catechization, moral exhortation and prayer. The first two elements were ordinarily fused, the third then burst forth in isolation in joyful exclamations and in supplications of an elegiac tone. Thus devout poetry, learned in church during a course of preaching, and having penetrated into families, hovered amid the streets and fields, supplanting profane canzonette. It helped the memory, through singing, to retain a mystery of Christ, a prerogative of the Madonna, and to recapitulate an entire sermon on 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), evangelizer of the Tuscan countryside, reduced the whole catechism to verse, with effective simplicity, which he had printed in 1681 at Macerata.
In the appendix of devotional and doctrinal books, distributed by missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, one discovers the Creed, the Decalogue, the Sacraments, the Pater, the Ave Maria, the mysteries of the Rosary set in little stanzas. Among the liturgical antiphons, the «Salve Regina» had various poetic paraphrases, one of which was widely diffused in the south by St. Francis de Geronimo (d. 1716): Dio ti salvi, o Regina...; another by Fr. D'Ambrosio: Salve, del ciel Regina, still repeated by the people.
The c. in Italy pre-existed Protestantism, which exercised a broad influence on the religious popular songs of the northern countries. It seems that among us it reached its apogee in the 18th century, not through the academic poets (Savioli, Vigorelli, etc.), but through the merit of zealous apostles, whose rhymes survive in modern flowering, despite the silence of literary historians. Among them the c. of St. Alphonsus M. de' Liguori stand out clearly for spontaneity, freshness and ardor of feeling, held by connoisseurs to be little masterpieces of popular poetry. O bella mia speranza, often set to music and always modulated in May, has national fame; Tu scendi dalle stelle enjoys worldwide renown. These chaste verses, disdained by G. Rossetti as metrical ejaculations, have been 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 made according to the canons of modern aesthetics, only one who is prepared to understand the religiosity and the pious sentiment can evaluate the art and the poetic content of them popular, of which they are the expression. Within this framework the c. offers fruitful material for exploring obscure corners of the history not only of literature but also of Italian Catholic spirituality.