Music Patronage And Printing In Late Renaissance Florence

This collection of reprinted essays starts from the author's doctoral research on Jacopo Peri and the rise of opera and solo song in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florence. It extends to broader issues concerning music and patronage in the city as they affected individual composers, patrons and institutions, and thence to the commerce of music printing and the book trade. It concludes with an attempt to suggest a broader view of these various issues as they impact upon musical life in the 'provinces' in Tuscany. There is a great deal of new documentary and other information here, but the aim is also to expand methodological horizons so as to prompt new ways of thinking about music in its contexts.

This collection of reprinted essays starts from the author's doctoral research on Jacopo Peri and the rise of opera and solo song in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florence. It extends to broader issues concerning music and patronage in the city as they affected individual composers, patrons and institutions, and thence to the commerce of music printing and the book trade. It concludes with an attempt to suggest a broader view of these various issues as they impact upon musical life in the 'provinces' in Tuscany. There is a great deal of new documentary and other information here, but the aim is also to expand methodological horizons so as to prompt new ways of thinking about music in its contexts.

The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. The recent discovery of a large number of private account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and opens a new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. They also allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de? Medici?s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman?s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family?s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi?s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi?s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de? Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women?s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

Relatively little is known about musical and religious life in Renaissance Florence and the aspirations of its average citizens. This book documents and interprets the corporate patronage of a significant Florentine musical repertory over a period of some 200 years.

Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be studied in the abstract rather than as something to be performed in a specific time and place. Staging “Euridice” explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti. By also taking into account what the singers and instrumentalists did, what the audience saw and heard, and how things changed from creation through rehearsals to performance, this book brings new aspects of Euridice to light in startling ways.

Based primarily on previously unpublished documents, the studies assembled here in this first selection by Frank D'Accone set the background for the musical efflorescence that occurred in Florence in the later 15th century and for the emergence in the early 16th century of a new Florentine school of composers. He traces the origins and development of musical chapels at the Cathedral and Baptistery, and the growth of musical establishments at several other churches such as the Santissima Annunziata, Santa Trinita and San Lorenzo.

In sixteenth-century Italy, Rome ranked second only to Venice as an important center for music book production. Throughout the century, printers in the Eternal City experimented more readily and more consistently with the materiality of the book than their Venetian counterparts, who, by standardizing their printing methods, came to dominate the international marketplace. The Romans' ingenuity and willingness to meet individual clients' needs resulted in music editions in a broader array of shapes and sizes, employing a wider range of printing techniques. They became "boutique" printers, eschewing the run-of-the-mill in favor of tailoring production to varied market demands. Accommodating the diverse requirements of their clientele, they supplied customized volumes, which Venetian presses either could not--or would not--produce. In Printing Music in Renaissance Rome, author Jane A. Bernstein offers a panoramic view of the cultures of music and the book in Rome from the beginning of printing in 1476 through the early seventeenth century. Emphasizing the exceptionalism of Roman music publishing, she highlights the innovative printing technologies and book forms devised by Roman bookmen. She also analyzes the Church's predominant influence on the book industry and, in turn, the Roman press's impact on such important composers as Palestrina, Marenzio, Victoria, and Cavalieri. Drawing on innovative publications, Bernstein reveals a synergistic relationship between music repertories and the materiality of the book. In particular, she focuses on the post-Tridentine period, when musical idioms, both new and old, challenged printers to employ alternative printing methods and modes of book presentation in the creation of their music editions. Of interest to musicologists, art historians, and book historians alike, this book builds on Bernstein's previous work as she continues to chart the course of music and the book in Renaissance Italy.

Venetian music print culture of the mid-sixteenth century is presented here through a study of the Scotto press, one of the foremost dynastic music publishers of the Renaissance. For over a century, the house of Scotto played a pivotal role in the international book trade, publishing in a variety of fields including philosophy, medicine, religion, and music. This book examines the mercantile activities of the firm through both a historical study, which illuminates the wide world of the Venetian music printing industry, and a catalog, which details the music editions brought out by the firm during its most productive period. A valuable reference work, this book not only enhances our understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural history of Renaissance Venice, it also helps to preserve our knowledge of a vast musical repertory.

This book tells the story of the Del Riccio family in Florence in the early modern period, investigating the cultural mediations fostered by the family between Florence, Rome, and Naples, as well as shedding light on the intellectual and social exchanges between different regions of Italy and on the creation of foreign nations within the main Italian cities. These social and cultural dimensions are further explored through the study of the obsessive persistence of the family’s relationship with Michelangelo Buonarroti, exhibited both publicly, in the Florentine and Neapolitan family chapels, and privately in their homes. The main achievement of this study is to move the focus from the ruling power, the Medici family and the immediate members of their court, to a Florentine middle-class family and its social mobility: this shift from the conventional narrative to a distributed microhistory is fundamental to better assess the use of images and artworks in early modern Florence and abroad. The aesthetic and stylistic choices in the use of art and art display made by the Del Riccio reveal a deep awareness of the substantial differences in taste and meaning between different cities of the Italian peninsula. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and Renaissance studies.