The voice of prophecy: Orlando di Lasso's Sibyls and Italian humanism

This study of the Prophetiae Sibyllarum employs a topic-oriented methodology for investigating the connections that exist between Lasso's chromatic motet cycle and the culture of sixteenth-century Italian humanism. Following an introductory summary of past scholarship on the Prophetiae Sibyllarum, Part I summarizes the sources and content of the long and complex Sibylline tradition that influenced art, literature, drama, and theology during the Renaissance. Lasso's Latin Sibylline poems, first printed c. 1500--1525, are traced to an earlier source and shown to be derived from a set of late fifteenth-century Italian theatrical verses (c. 1470). Part II outlines the ways in which Sibylline tradition intersected with spiritual and intellectual trends in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, including religious reform, the salvation of the individual, and alchemical experimentation. Part III connects the harmonic language of the Prophetiae Sibyllarum to a Platonically-inspired "poetics of transformation," explaining why chromaticism is an especially apt harmonic language for setting the message and meaning of Sibylline Prophecy to music. The unique fusion of prophecy and chromaticism then serves as a springboard for speculation on Italian patrons and performance contexts for Lasso's Sibyl cycle. An analytical approach to the Prologue based on the monophonic Tone for the Prophecy is offered, and the possibility that the legendary Prophet Hermes Trismegistus may be the unidentified Prologue narrator is proposed.