Early madrigalists sometimes played with the contrasts and tensions that existed between sacred and secular musical styles in their work. The madrigal was in some ways a notable adoption of motet idioms of imitative counterpoint into a swaggeringly secular poetic song genre; this aspect of the madrigal would have certainly made some ears prick up. One of the most blatant (and even blasphemous) examples of this is possibly Bartolomeo Tromboncino's Vox clamantis in deserto. Tromboncino was more of a transitional composer, but clear traces of these tensions can still be found in some of the poems Verdelot chose to set, such as Con l'angelico riso. Con l'angelico is a translation from Latin, the language of scholarship and the church, into Italian vernacular of a poem by Giovanni Pontano, a humanist poet who died in 1503. The tension is created in the diction and in the metaphors and similes the poet consistently chooses through the first nine lines of the poem. Some examples: "...your angelic smile," "...sweet holy kisses," "...sorrowful tears," "...only you are merciful." It adds up to a carefree, slightly goofy hodgepodge of Christian and, specifically, Passion iconography, used to express a very secular amorous woe. The irony seems quite deliberate, impossible for Verdelot's audience to miss. No doubt, awareness of the tensions between the sacred and secular aspects of society/life and the European power structure were an aspect of daily existence in the Renaissance. Artists and audiences must have found some release in playfully confounding the two. Pontano was already noted in that regard for writing poems about his love for his wife and children in High Latin, an almost unheard of subject matter for schooled verse at the time. Verdelot took great care to coherently bring out the text, the words being such a crucial part of the game here. The madrigal is almost entirely in a decorated homophony. Each line of the poem is brought out separately with a clear, sensitively harmonized melodic phrase syllabically set with sweet little melismatic departures at the line ends. Con l'angelico riso is a thoroughly refined early madrigal that hints at social ramifications far beyond its obvious scope.

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