![]() In the poem, the narrator/singer Giovannino 9 speaks in the first person, conjuring and impersonating a ‘Zingara indovina’ who mocks a motley crew of Turks, dwarves, and buffoons - a group that Buonaccorsi calls the ‘mal’Cristiani’ of the court, most of whom I have identified with contemporary historical figures. His sharp critique and witty wordplay place his Black body at the very center of Italian court life. In this chapter I celebrate the subtlety and sophistication of Buonaccorsi’s poetry. 8 But we need not perpetuate such assumptions. Contemporary Italian authors often made such assumptions or traded in their familiarity, representing the speech of Black characters with a thick stage dialect, discussed at some length in the central part of this chapter. But grammatical errors can only be used as evidence for Black authorship if we presume an incapacity to write and speak correctly on the part of Black humans. According to the traditional logics of musicological practice, the authorial attribution to Buonaccorsi would seem more convincing were I able to point to mistakes in the text: mistakes would prove the foreignness of the author and might illustrate a reliance on spoken dialect or foreign words. The purportedly neutral skepticism of academic practice requires a higher burden of proof for exceptions to the straight, white, male model, insisting on the foreignness of the enslaved Black man and presuming his incapacity. The more time I spent with the poem, however, the more convinced I became of Buonaccorsi’s authorial claim, and more importantly, the more deeply and uncomfortably I became aware that the strongest (perhaps only) counterargument against his authorship implicitly relies on the color of his skin. In earlier drafts of this chapter I hedged my claims of Buonaccorsi’s authorship with words like ‘presumed’, ‘possibly’, ‘potential’, and located my conclusions in the safely deferred linguistic fiction of the subjunctive: ‘if Buonaccorsi were the author, then…’. Such pitfalls are familiar (to musicologists, at least) from the history of scholarship on female musicians: the music is good for a girl we only study this because there were no other women composers this specific piece attributed to her is particularly good from which I assume her brother wrote it. ![]() ![]() 7 It is easy to presume that any interest in the work of art is motivated by the intersecting identity categories of author and scholar, and if it can be shown that the art was authored by someone else, even if sufficient doubt can be thrown on the attribution, the value of historical person, scholarly reputation, and published scholarship crumbles (and associated political ideologies devalued). The figure of a Black, enslaved, seventeenth-century (quite possibly castrated) Italian poet is difficult to extricate from the logic of exceptionalism, by which the scholarly authority of arguments, analysis, inferences, and conclusions - not to mention the historical, scholarly, and pedagogical value of the work of art - rests on the single claim of authorship. To make a further claim for Black authorship is bold, indeed. Within academia the work of documenting the historical presence of Black Africans, slaves, and other racialized minorities within early modern Europe (as Kaplan long has done) has itself been seen as a radical and often destabilizing project. Buonaccorsi was one of a considerable number of Black African and Middle-Eastern Muslim and newly Christianized court retainers who arrived in Florence under conditions of enslavement, and his very presence in Italy testifies to an endemic practice of Italian slavery with which scholars are only recently beginning to grapple. They neatly sidestep the qualifications and disavowals that typically shield such assertions from the charge of overreaching. 6 They do so with a rather pleasurable naiveté - assigning authorship to the most obvious contender as if he were not Black, or a slave as if he were an autonomous subject fully capable of artistic endeavor. 5 Both previous scholars to have mentioned the poem - the art historians Alessandro Grassi and Paul Kaplan, each of whom consider the poem in relation to the Volterrano painting shown as Figure 6.2 - also attribute authorship to Buonaccorsi. ![]() 3 Buonaccorsi is often identified in contemporary sources by the name Giovannino Moro, Giovannino il Moro, or merely il Moro 4 and thus can be associated with the poem by the title alone. 2 Throughout this chapter, I attribute authorship of the ‘Sogno’ to the enslaved Black chamber singer Giovannino Buonaccorsi, who was active at the Medici court between 1651 and his death on August 15, 1674. The poem, ‘Sogno di Giovannino Moro’, survives in a single manuscript copy, undated and unattributed, in the Medicean archives in Florence the first page is shown as Figure 6.1.
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