4.1 Dance and good manners
In the noble courts of the fifteenth century, a character appeared on the scene for the first time, destined to play an important role not only on a technical level, but also on a social and cultural level: the dance master.
Girls belonging to noble or upper middle class families, who were educated in the refinement of manners in view of future marital alliances, were given a musical education which included the practice of singing, some musical instruments and dance. Teaching took place at home and was entrusted to specialized teachers. Later, even for men, dance ended up becoming a skill to be exhibited in public like fencing, a virtue that the perfect courtly man cannot lack, as theorized in the Book of the courtier Baldassare Castiglione.
The phenomenon of dance masters exploded particularly in northern Italy. Dancing parties were organized in all the courts and there was no prince who did not have his trusted master. The various lords of the peninsula competed for dance masters because knowing how to dance had become a matter of custom, even before that of entertainment. In noble weddings, the presentation of the bride took place with dance steps: in some cases, the master took the place of the bride's father. The "dancing masters" were in most cases not simple technicians, but people endowed with vast culture who were interested in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and alchemy, therefore perfect Renaissance men.With the formation of the category of masters, the fashion for dance manuals that established the rules of dance spread. Gone were the times in which everyone could move as they wanted, from this moment a long process of evolution of the dance language began and the gap between the way of dancing of the people and that of the aristocratic classes became even more acute, which increasingly had to obey a set of behavioral rules, codified steps, defined styles. After all, form has its most significant development parable starting from the Renaissance. Just think of the importance that visual evidence, the organization of space and the image (with the affirmation and elaboration of perspective) assumed in the 15th and 16th centuries, passing through microscopic and telescopic observations, to reach the over the centuries to current image production techniques such as photography and cinema.
During the Renaissance, a great rediscovery of dances from all times occurred in Europe. Heterogeneous elements from various eras and different peoples were taken up, while musical fashions and dance forms were easily transmitted from one nation to another. In Italy, France, Germany and England, dozens and dozens of new dances were produced with increasingly detailed and complex programs.
In the 15th century, the first manuscript codes on the art of dance appeared. The oldest is the Manuscrit des Basses Danses, attributed to the daughter of Charles I the Bold, Mary of Burgundy. The collection includes 59 dance arias, but does not provide details either on their character or on the way to dance them, limiting itself to indicating the name of the steps and the movements.