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1 results

  • Chapter 15 - The Unknown Goddess, Opus 3, and the Art of Dissimulation

  • from Part III - Gender Ideology and the Venetian Academies
  • Edited by Beth Glixon, Wendy Heller, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Barbara Strozzi in Context
    Published online:
    19 March 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026, pp 153-166

  • Summary

    Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 3 stands apart from her other works by virtue of its mysterious dedication to the “Ignotae Deae”—a feminized version of the motto “Ignoto Deo”— that the Accademia degli Incogniti had borrowed from St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. Although seemingly affirming Strozzi’s links to the Incogniti, the enigmatic dedication also speaks to Strozzi’s ability in her music—both in this volume and elsewhere in her oeuvre—to dissimilate: to use music as means not of expressing her feelings but hiding them from her listeners. This hypothesis is born out in an overview of the volume’s organization, her choice of poems, and treatment of the poems that continually emphasize deception and deceit, where the musical setting often contradicts or even undermines the poem. In the end Strozzi herself emerges as the Unknown Goddess, who neutralizes even seemingly misogynist poems with deft humor, irony, always keeping her mask firmly in place.