IN the fifteenth century the French chanson dominated secular musical culture throughout Europe. For the first third of the sixteenth century this dominance was not seriously challenged ; but as the century went on the Italian madrigal, nonexistent in 1500, was widely cultivated throughout the peninsula, then spread to the Netherlands, parts of Germany and Scandinavia, even France. At the century's end came a remarkable development, the sudden appearance and quick flowering of the English madrigal.

The chanson did not decline ; on the contrary, French song flourished throughout the sixteenth century. But in the face of this the madrigal enjoyed a remarkable vogue, over a period of more than a century. It has been estimated that about 1,200 madrigal volumes (not counting reprints) were published between 1520 and 1630. And it is not merely in quantity that the madrigal is remarkable ; during much of its century of intense cultivation the madrigal was a genre in which experiments in rhetoric and style took place constantly, altering its musical character and influencing every sort of music, secular and sacred, across Europe.

Why all this should have been so is not an easy question to answer. It is not a matter of native Italian musicians suddenly coming to the fore ; until about 1560 most of the best-known madrigalists were French or Flemish by birth, however Italianized they may have become as adults. Nor can one say that the madrigal drew from a font of popular poetry and song. It was from its beginnings a highly artificial genre, indeed more so than the contemporary chanson. The most important factor in the madrigal's rise to prominence was the extraordinary vogue of literary Petrarchism, starting in Italy about the second decade of the sixteenth century, continuing without serious challenge for a good half-century and frequently renewed thereafter, and spreading throughout Europe in the second half of the century. Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, d. 1374) was not simply revived and his vernacular poetry closely studied ; his language was championed as the ideal for lyric verse by Florentine scholars and others, notably the poet-critic-theorist Pietro Bembo.