The private studioli—study rooms—of Italian rulers are among the most revealing interior spaces of the Renaissance. In them, ideals of sober recreation met with leisured reality in the construction ...of a private princely identity, performed before the eyes of a select public who enjoyed privileged access to these rooms and their owners. The decorative schemes installed in such rooms were carefully designed to prompt, facilitate, and validate the performances through which that identity was constituted. Characteristically comprising painted and intarsia elements, studiolo decorations often gave a prominent place to music—as activity, as symbol, as the attribute of classical personae, and as notation. This book aims to reconstruct, through the examination of decorations in various media, the role played by music, musicians, and musical symbolism in studiolo decorations and in the identities they helped make manifest. In particular, the book focuses on three studioli established and decorated by members of the Este family, rulers of Renaissance Ferrara: Leonello, Isabella, and Alfonso I d’Este. In the process of investigating the studioli of these rulers, the book offers a new perspective on works by the artists Tura, Pisanello, Mantegna, and Titian, and the musicians Pietrobono, Marchetto Cara, and Adrian Willaert.
Abstract
Modern evaluations of the relation between music and the fashion for the antique in Italy in the period before the madrigal have tended to proceed from the perspective of intellectual ...history. This article aims to offer an alternative—although certainly related—perspective, by exploring the circulation of musical classicisms in Italian visual and material culture, roughly from 1450 to 1520. This period saw the rise to prominence in Italy of both commercial text printing and other multiple-copy formats such as the art print, the medal, the bronze plaquette, and a little later historiated maiolica. These technologies offer a particularly compelling lens through which to examine musical encounters with classical antiquity that were not motivated by an expert professional interest in either music or classical texts, but rather characterized by an investment in antiquity as a fashionable source of cultural capital.
Abstract
Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue
Antonius
can be read almost as a thick description of the soundscape of a Neapolitan street in the mid‐ to late‐15th century, complete with public announcements, ...street performers, domestic arguments, workers’ banter, charms and spells, processions, errand boys, bells, clocks, cockerels, and much more.
Antonius
was first printed in 1491, and then in a 1501
Opera
edition alongside another dialogue,
Charon
, Pontano’s treatises
De fortitudine
,
De principe
and
De obedientia
, and his treatises on the “social virtues,”
De liberalitate
,
De benificentia
,
De magnificentia
,
De splendore
, and
De conviventia
. Using the street soundscape of
Antonius
as a framework, this essay interleaves both sonic reportage and reflections on the ethics and purpose of sound drawn from the other works included in the 1501 edition, to construct a rich and surprisingly detailed impression of the urban soundscape as it struck Pontano, or at least as he represented it in a literary context.
Abstract
The satires of Juvenal were immensely popular in Renaissance Italy, printed in various forms over 70 times in the period 1469‐1520, and five times in 1501 alone. The satires contain a wealth ...of references to instruments, instrumentalists, and playing practices that are frequently used in
double entendres
connoting lewd acts and infidelity, most potently in the sixth satire. The five Renaissance commentaries printed alongside the satires in 1501 editions suggest how much contemporary scholars wished to say, or indeed not say, about these saucy musical passages. This article will examine the ways in which contemporary commentators unpack and explain musical aspects of the sixth satire, their surprisingly detailed and determined efforts adding up to a distinctive strand of music‐historical study that is in evidence across numerous books of commentated classical verse from our 1501 corpus.
Abstract
A modern user of a printed encyclopedia expects to find concise entries on a wide range of subjects organised alphabetically for ease of reference. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a ...number of scholarly texts of a particularly long and wide‐ranging character were essentially ‘encyclopedized’ through the provision of compendious subject indexes, appearing before the start of the text in some printed editions, to facilitate reference use. Two such texts that enjoyed a particular spike in Italian printed editions in the decades either side of 1501 were Niccolo Perotti's Cornucopiae, and the Aristotelian (or rather pseudo‐Aristotelian) Problemata, which was sometimes packaged together with Problemata by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plutarch. Working with 1501 ‘encyclopedized’ editions of both texts, this essay asks a simple question: what would a reader learn by looking up music‐related terms in the indexes?
