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Ciao Antonio, sono felice di rivederti da queste parti. Ciao Giacomo, buonanotte a tutti. Su questi temi, poi, una parola quasi definitiva la scrisse un certo Dante, ai primi del Trecento… fm. I miei auguri sinceri per il tuo libro che possa viaggiare leggero oltreoceano In attesa di riabbracciarti, saluto caramente Francesco e gli amici rita. Un saluto e un grazie anche ad Anila, Rita, Marco e Abele. Rispondi Annulla risposta Scrivi qui il tuo commento Inserisci i tuoi dati qui sotto o clicca su un'icona per effettuare l'accesso: Notificami nuovi commenti via e-mail Notificami nuovi post via e-mail.
Questo sito utilizza cookie. Sono del mare il suo segreto cielo ma dal sole ho in dote che un lampo. Da qui tutto comincia Da qui tutto comincia. Io non ho mai amato! Tende ancora la Mano Santa Iddio? Ed attendo che lo sgomento cessi quando si inerpica umile la luna. Valgono poco le parole. Neppure quel rinnovato miracolo genera giusto peso alle mie sillabe che vivide scandivano illusioni.
Intendere se entrambi siamo despoti di noi stessi o del destino le vittime. Dynamis eterna della parola! Mi affanno in una sterile ricerca del ritmo del verso chiuso del verso libero del verso malchiuso e bacio e ribacio Eugenio Montale. In one noted instance she parried a detractor by boasting an array of linguistic arms. Franco's bravura served her well in the ambivalent world that cherished the honest courtesan even as it scorned her. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones have shown, in speaking out in areas where women had been largely silenced, vaunting her proficiencies in the verbal arts and challenging her defamer in the terms of a male duel, Franco violated a gendered system of rhetorical orthodoxies.
Franco was only one of many nonpatricians who ameliorated their marginal social positions by utilizing the city's opportunities for self-promotion and social. Abdelkader Salza Bari, , no. Subverting the Master's Plan," Italica 65 Jones, "City Women and Their Audiences," p. Another, outstanding for our purposes, was Willaert's student, the organist, composer, and vernacular author Girolamo Parabosco, a Piacentine who arrived in Venice around Like her, too, he came from a bourgeois family. In the humble words he professed to Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara:.
Not his birth but his virtue makes a man worthy of honor, Parabosco claims, not rank but merit. He himself is no nobleman, not to say Tuscan — that is, linguistic aristocratic — but a mere citizen from modest Lombardy. Later in the same capitolo he alludes to his eminent position in the city as if only to thank those in Venice more highly placed than he. Parabosco's was no mean duty.
With this prestigious title, Parabosco held a trump card among literary colleagues in the city's populous salons,. For his biography see Giuseppe Bianchini, Girolamo Parabosco: The will is an ironic reminder of cinquecento disarticulations between the real and the represented: Bianchini, not surprisingly, is credulous on this score; see, for example, pp. Probably ducato is a pun "ducat" as well as "duchy". His position placed him conveniently betwixt and between — between professional musicians and literati, between nobles and commoners — a situation that made good capital in Venetian society.
Elsewhere Parabosco pressed the view that real nobility came from inner worth and not from birthright. His letter to Antonio Bargo of 18 November affected shock at Bargo's attempt to ingratiate him with an unworthy acquaintance, at his wanting him "to believe that it is a good thing to revere men who live dishonorably, so long as they come from honorable families.
Parabosco answered Bargo in the spirit of familiar vernacular invective that had recently been popularized by Pietro Aretino and followers of his like Anton-francesco Doni. In meting out satiric censure in letters, capitoli, and sonetti risposti, Parabosco engaged in complicated strategies of challenge and riposte, wielding his interlocutors' rhetoric to his own ends.
Defending his comedies against certain nameless critics in a letter to Count Alessandro Lambertino, for instance, he shot off a battery of rejoinders, the last of which protested that "some benevolence" should be shown him in the city of Venice, since with all his "study, diligence, and labor. Some years earlier, writing the literary theorist Bernardino Daniello along similar. Antonio amico carissimo, io ho ricevuto la vostra de vinisette del passato, nella qual havete vanamente speso una grandissima fatica, volendomi far credere che sia ben fatto portar riverenza a gli huomini, che dishonoratamente vivono ancora che usciti di honorevole famiglia.
Bargo is almost surely the same as Antonio Barges, a Netherlandish maestro di cappella at the Casa Grande of Venice between at least and when he transferred to Treviso and a close friend of Parabosco's teacher Willaert. Richard Nice Cambridge, , pt. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier Chicago, , pp. Letter dated 5 August Again his protestations were voiced in the language of Venetian panegyric as it was handed down in civic mythology — or a quasi-satiric inflation of it.
Apart from his position on the issue of love, he insisted, he "always spoke of the aged with infinite reverence, especially in this sanctified and blessed Venice, today sole defense of Italy and true dwelling of faith, justice, and clemency, in which there are an infinite number [of old people], any one of whom with his prudence could easily govern the Empire of the whole world. With these paradoxical rhetorical stances, writers like Franco and Parabosco could avail themselves of transgressive possibilities inherent in the diverse literary genres newly stimulated by Venetian print, yet still align themselves with the prevailing power structure.
They were at once iconoclasts and panderers. In both roles they seized the chance to shape their own public images, as Franco told her adversary so unequivocally. Doni, the plebeian Florentine son of a scissors maker, represented at its most venal the phenomenon of making capital of the social breach. After an unsatisfying start as a monk, he fled Florence for the life of a nomadic man of letters, arriving in Piacenza in and in Venice the following year.
But I hearten myself with having as much patience to die as they have the stupidity to live. As if to underscore his irreverent manipulation of printed words and the contradictory strategies that the two of them crafted, Doni's letter then made out as if to return Parabosco's laudatory sonnet with a matching risposta. Like Parabosco's, Doni's skill at social climbing played a role in Venetian madrigalian developments, if one more mercenary than musical.
He possessed a rudi-. Girolamo Parabosco [Venice, ], fol. The letter, undated, comes from the First Book, which was first printed in as Lettere amorose. Venier's stanza set by Donato, Chap. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, Doni's eclecticism depended on the city's flexible structures.
It leaned away from the elitist, totalizing aesthetic of Bembo toward the grittier, more syncretistic one that the city paradoxically made possible. This is evident in his most famous joining of musical and literary worlds, the Dialogo della musica, published in by Girolamo Scotto shortly after Doni's arrival in Venice, in which he playfully recreated the casual evenings of an academic assembly.
As noted by Alfred Einstein and James Haar, the first of the Dialogo' s two parts is unmistakably set in provincial Piacenza, where a circle that formed around the poet Lodovico Domenichi took on the title Accademia Ortolana. Only Arcadelt and da Milano had no strong known connection with Venice. Doni was always fascinated by this sort of academic life.
He gives an account of current academies in the last pages of his Seconda libraria Venice, In between they freely interpolate sight-readings of music — mainly madrigals. At the outset the interlocutors decide on the style of their encounters with characteristic self-consciousness. Once Doni enters the expanded world of Venice in Part 2, new personalities double his resources.
Now eight interlocutors are present: Bargo and Michele from Part 1, a woman called Selvaggia, the composers Parabosco and Perissone, Domenichi and Ottavio Landi from Piacenza, and the composer Claudio Veggio, who seems to have been connected with both cities. Pieces handed out from Michele's pouch [ carnaiolo ] now accommodate up to all eight of those present.
Once again the speakers begin with reflections on their relations to one another and remarks on their use of conventions, all the while laughing at their own bows and curtsies. Inasmuch as I am among the number of honored women and this music is made out of love for me, I thank you and I am most obliged to Parabosco and everyone. I'm just kidding, since you began with servants and such things, which aren't really used by musicians, painters, sculptors, soldiers, and poets.
So that we don't just keep multiplying words, how did you others end yesterday? Tanto ch'io son nel numero delle donne onorate e che per mio amore si fa questa musica, io vi ringrazio e v'ho tropp'obbligo e con Parabosco e con tutti. Dico appunto baie, come tu hai cominciato di servidore e di certe cose, che fra noi non s'usano alla reale da' musici, da' pittori, scultori, da' soldati e da' poeti. Dialogo della musica, p.
At this they move on. Doni continues to aim for the informal realism of a private academy, moving the speakers in and out of their commitment to the discourse and sustaining their self-conscious scrutinies. After the initial gallantries Parabosco announces that their company has been ordered to speak about a beautiful woman by Grullone and Oste.
Since neither Grullone nor Oste is there, they sing instead a madrigal about a donna bella set by the obscure Noleth. This prompts a trifling speech by Domenichi on what makes a woman beautiful, in the course of which Doni quotes his own epistolary eulogy of the Piacentine beauty Isabetta Guasca — probably the real-life name of the Dialogo 's Selvaggia. In this way Doni presents the salon not only as a dynamic space for arbitrating different styles and tempers but as a vehicle for self-display and self-fashioning.
The salon thus functioned like the occasional and intertextual verse of Franco and Parabosco. Salons encouraged the sort of juggling for position and exposure common to places of barter. The nobility who formed the salons' main patrons were more receptive to ambitious commoners than they had been before. And by the mid-sixteenth century the means for winning intellectual and artistic recognition within the bustling city had become more diversified and more ample than ever. Not surprisingly, ambitions proved only more fierce as a result. The ascendency of the private salon following on the heels of Venetian print culture brought quick changes of players, fast renown, rapid dissemination of ideas and artifacts, and above all pressures to excel and adapt quickly to new fashions.
The idea of the marketplace, then, is not just metaphorical, for marketplace economies held a material relevance in the city's salons. The salon was not only the concrete locus of patronage, with all that winning patronage entailed; even more crucially, the busy commercial aspect of the city — with its large mercantile patriciate, its steady influx of well-heeled and cultivated visitors, and its thriving presses — increasingly animated.
On Guasca see Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica, " p. Another Piacentine and favorite poet of early madrigalists, Luigi Cassola, addressed her in his Madrigali Venice, , verso of penultimate folio. For the extensive popular literature containing similar encomia of women see Chap. From More to Shakespeare Chicago, , pp. Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. New Haven, , pp. The heterogeneity and lack of fixity that typified these salons were interwoven threads in a single social fabric.
The very immunity of private groups to concrete description, so confounding to the modern historian, lies at the core of their identity. One of their defining characteristics, this loose organization and openness to change was essential to forming competitive groups. Private gatherings in salons, though often described in contemporary literature as accademie a term I use here , were in fact only distant predecessors of more formalized academies that proliferated later in the century.
Instead, they protected their cultural cachet in the safe seclusion of domestic spaces, where discussion, debate, and performance were private. Rather than demanding fixity from either their activities or adherents, they thrived on the easy accommodation and continual intermingling of new ideas and faces. This is true both of academies that concentrated on literary enterprises in the vernacular — poetry, letters, plays, editions, and treatises on popular theories of love and language [62] — and of those musical academies linked to the circle of Willaert. The gatherings of Venetian noblemen like Marcantonio Trivisano and Antonio Zantani or of transplanted Florentines like Neri Capponi and Ruberto Strozzi are all known only from scattered accounts and allusions.
By reducing them all for convenience to the single epithet academy, I mean to stress their historical relationship to the later groups, but not to confuse their structures with the formalized ones of those later academies. The generic names applied to academic salons during this time were as changeable as their makeups — accademia, ridotto, adunanza, or cenacolo.
Still informative if partly outdated , particularly because they incorporate less-fixed academic groups, are the older studies of Michele Battagia, Delle accademie veneziane: See also Achille Olivieri, "L'intellettuale e le accademie fra ' e ' Verona e Venezia," Archivio veneto, 5th ser. Outside this pattern are a very few public-minded and philologically oriented academies that grew up earlier in the century; in the early cinquecento this includes the Neacademia of Aldus Manutius, devoted to Greek scholarship, and at midcentury the Accademia Veneziana, also known as the Accademia della Fama, devoted to an encyclopedic agenda of learning and publication.
Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice Ithaca, , pp. In the remainder of Part 1, I try to depict the textures of vernacular patronage in Venice by focusing on the private worlds of figures such as these. Chapter 2 begins with the pair of Florentine exiles Capponi and Strozzi, apparently the main private benefactors of Willaert and Rore, respectively, from about the late s until the mids. As rich aristocrats and singers of domestic music, they represent a kind of private patronage that shunned the popularizing commodifications made by the likes of Parabosco.
They stand in sharp opposition to another foreign patron, Gottardo Occagna, who sponsored prints of vernacular music and letters in Venice from about to Fictitious printed letters to Occagna from Parabosco that feigned public displays of private diversions suggest he colluded with vernacular artists in mounting the Venetian social ladder.
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Central to my assessments of both Occagna and the other protagonist of Chapter 3, the patrician Zantani, are the ways in which social images were fashioned through the rhetoric of Petrarchan love lyrics. The juxtaposition of Occagna's and Zantani's cases shows that while those outside the Venetian patriarchy might invert this rhetoric to mobilize their positions, the local aristocracy sought out ennobling texts and images to reinforce their status claims.
Zantani probably promoted some of the many encomia of his wife that were made in the rhetoric of Petrarchan praise, and he engineered several printed volumes that could bring him renown, not least an anthology with four of the madrigals from Willaert's then still unpublished Musica nova corpus. All of these figures are maddeningly elusive to our backward gaze. It is only in Chapter 4, with the salon of another native patrician, Domenico Venier — a friend of vernacular music whose palace was the literary hub of midcentury Venice — that we come to see the full richness of exchange, the gala of personalities, the competitive forces they set in motion, and the fruitful intersection of art and ideas that the flexible social formation of Venice allowed.
Throughout much of the s and beyond Venice sheltered a colony of exiled Florentines, the fuorusciti. As a group, the fuorusciti were highly aristocratic and educated, well versed in music and letters, and eminently equipped to indulge expensive cultural habits. Before long he had established what became the most sophisticated musical academy in Venice, headed by Willaert and graced by the acclaimed soprano Polissena Pecorina. Like other private patrons, Capponi seems to have gathered his academists under his own roof, where they flourished in the early s and almost surely premiered much of Willaert's Musica nova.
Another Florentine, Ruberto Strozzi, lodged intermittently in the city during the thirties and forties in the course of far-ranging business and political errands that accelerated after his family was banished from Florence in The portion of the Frari's archive at I-Vas designated "Scuola dei fiorentini" lacks items for the years to See further on Capponi's genealogy in n.
Agee was cautious about concluding definitively that the Neri Capponi of musical fame is the same as the one appearing in many Strozzi letters, but cross-references in the letters combined with Passerini's genealogy cited in n. Canciano along the lovely Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli Plate 7. In the early to mid-forties, as he tore about Italy and France, Ruberto is known to have bought up madrigals and motets by Cipriano de Rore.
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The coincidence of the Florentine presence in Venice with the flourishing of Venetian madrigals was fateful. Florentines made their way into Venice following a long history of political strife in their own city, whose republican edifice by then had collapsed. During the years spent in Florence, these exiles had sustained a long tradition vigorously promoting Italian vocal music.
It was only natural that they should have continued it once abroad. The patronage of both Capponi and Strozzi was aggressively acquisitive, seeking sole ownership of important new settings. But their interest was not mere collection. Each was groomed in gentlemen's musical skills and moved in patrician circles that practiced part singing. In both political and artistic realms the vicissitudes and imaginative powers of Ruberto's father had played a dominant role — a role that is critical for our understanding of the next generation's construction of this heritage and its relationship to Venetian music.
31 pensieri riguardo “Other Signs, Other Circles – di Annamaria Ferramosca”
Ruberto was the son of Filippo di Filippo Strozzi, the most prominent Florentine banker of the first third of the century and, by many reckonings, for most of his life the richest man in Italy. Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, tragedia Florence, , p. Sagredo believed that the Strozzi house was "quella ora del Weber dove altre volte era la famosa Biblioteca Svajer" p.
This house stands at the Ponte di San Canciano by the so-called Traghetto di Murano and is now numbered in the sestiere of Cannaregio. See further in Giuseppe Tassini, Alcuni palazzi ed antichi edifichi di Venezia storicamente illustrati con annotazioni Venice, , pp.
Lino Moretti Venice, , p. For an English text see the trans.
ABBREVIATIONS
Gargani Florence, , who claimed that "nella ricchezza fu solo, e senza comparazione di qualsivoglia uomo d'Italia" p. Ruberto and Neri were thus first cousins, and Filippo Strozzi, Neri's uncle.
By the mid-thirties, however, owing to Strozzi clashes with the new duke, Alessandro de' Medici, Filippo's family and its immediate associates had been cast into a restless and embittered exile. In the course of this, Filippo's banking interests were managed from abroad, mostly by employees from the ranks of the fuorusciti. Venice was just one of several cities that received substantial Strozzi business, along with Rome, Naples, Lyons, and Seville. To clarify the precarious social and political situation in which Filippo, his family, and their Florentine allies found themselves in the s, it is necessary to look briefly back over the long-standing Strozzi relationship with the Medici.
In , during Florence's next-to-last republic, the headstrong Filippo became engaged to Clarice de' Medici. At that time her family was banished from the city. The engagement was a brash move on Filippo's part that drew horror and fury from his half-brother Alfonso and members of the extended Strozzi clan, who held at the time at least tentative favor with the Ottimati government.
With the Medici restoration of Filippo found himself ideally placed to exploit the financial interests and favor of Clarice's uncle Giovanni, who assumed the papacy as Leo X the following year. In the decades up to Filippo bankrolled two Medici popes in his role as papal financier, culminating in with his dowering of a Medici bride for the future king of France, Henry of Orleans, at the staggering sum of , scudi. Note, however, Agee's cautions concerning some apparent genealogical confusion in her discussion of these marriages, "Ruberto Strozzi," p. Pompeo Litta Milan, , which is variously ordered and bound in the different copies that survive.
The copy in I-Vas includes 14 vols. Luigi Passerini , in vol. Neri's grandfather is described there as a very rich banker who opened a banking house at Lyons. Our Neri, born 6 March , appears as the oldest of ten children.
For a general account of the hazard perceived by the Ottimati government in Strozzi ambitions see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, On a single occasion in , at the institution of the College of the Knights of St. Peter, Giulio de' Medici, then Pope Clement VII, awarded him eleven titles of the office of knight in return for credits totaling 9, ducats; he divided them among four of his sons, giving three to Ruberto. Until Clement VII's death in September Filippo's political position experienced only one real setback when he abandoned Rome for Florence shortly before the sack in to take the helm of popular republican leadership.
Having failed in that role, he was temporarily forced to pursue interests abroad. But by he had reforged Medici bonds in Florence and Rome and resumed principal residence in the latter city. It was only after several years of renewed papal collaboration that Filippo's seemingly unbreakable financial edifice began to crack with the death of the pope — Filippo's primary debtor and Medici supporter. Filippo still boasted a sprawling empire and had much to protect in the continued prestige of the Strozzi family.
But any goodwill toward them that remained among Medici at home was dwindling fast.
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Filippo's wealth and leverage among princes posed an immediate threat to the collateral line of the Medici headed by the dissolute Duke Alessandro, now in firm — and monarchical — command of the patria with imperial support. Alessandro grew increasingly suspicious of Filippo and his sons. At last, in December , shortly after Clement's death and after various skirmishes that took the family again out of Florence, Alessandro declared them rebels. Filippo's story merges at this juncture with that of members of the younger generation who are my main concern here.
In August , after a two-year stay in his palazzo at Rome, Filippo finally retired to Venice. Goaded on by Piero, he also began to organize troops for an assault against the Medici, only to be captured in his first major attempt in the Tuscan hills of Montemurlo on 31 July. The Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi recounted that Filippo's sons retreated the next day toward Venice, tired and defeated and with no alternative but to take stock of their situation and await a better opportunity to strike.
Pietro Stromboli Florence, , pp. See Table 1 below. Florence, , 2: Varchi's account largely agrees with those of Strozzi, Vite, pp. Both of the last two include the story that Filippo, once he made up his mind to believe Lorenzo, proclaimed him the Florentine Brutus — just one detail whose repetition suggests a strong narrative filiation among the various versions.
I have synthesized events highlighted in Florentine letters and histories in order to emphasize the intrigues and narrowly factional politics that brought elite Florentine patrons into Venice. Far from epitomizing the republicanism idealized in Venice and attached to Filippo in various romanticized representations that appeared after the events of , he and his kin differed little in kind from the Medici themselves. In a very real sense, an entrepreneurial merchant-banker on the rare order of Filippo Strozzi — not unlike Jacob Fugger, imperial banker to Charles V — was at once invention and inventor of the princely sponsors who required him to stage their grand schemes.
His identity depended on an exchange of mutually productive powers. Born into such a dynasty in the world of early modern power politics, a young man like Ruberto cannot have thought himself much less a prince's son than if his father had been a duke or an emperor, a difference he might have attributed to the winds of fate or to a slight disparity in style or ambitions. For the Strozzi, empire and culture formed an indivisible alliance. As Pier Paolo Vergerio had put it, not only was "the ability to speak and write with elegance" — and, we might add, to sing — "no slight advantage.
Filippo's passions for high finance and Florentine politics extended almost by necessity to arts and literature, in which he developed considerable abilities. His brother Lorenzo wrote that on all those days that Filippo was free to plan as he liked, his time was divided equally between "the study of letters, private business, and private pleasures and delights. See also Gelli's commentary in Nardi, Istorie 2: Filippo was the dedicatee of Pisano's edition of Apuleis, on which see Frank A. D'Accone hesitated to link too securely the identity of this Pisano with that of the musician, but his doubts are certainly cleared up by Varchi's reference to Pisano as an "eccellente musico in que' tempi, che grande e giudizioso letterato" as noted by Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p.
The madrigal was included in the first layer of B-Bc, MS Only a few settings of Filippo's poetry are known today, but given the exclusive patterns of patronage that obtained with Florentine patrons it seems likely that others ones for which he commissioned settings, for example simply are not extant. The findings of Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," suggest that literary patrons wrote many more verses for commissioned settings than now survive; see also Thomas W.
Apropos, it might be of interest that while in Lyons Capponi wrote Filippo, then in Venice, to send thanks for a capitolo Filippo had composed for him — for singing to music? The pains Filippo took to reinforce his cultural hegemony naturally included his immediate family. He attended to the humanistic education of his sons by hiring noted tutors and later sending his sons to the Studio in Padua.
Girolamo Parabosco's description of Ruberto as having "rare judgment in all sciences" may therefore reveal more than the usual hyperbole, [28] for Ruberto's education not only included the Paduan stint but tutoring in Greek letters and law with Varchi. Ruberto and his brothers sang part music like their father and uncle, as shown by a letter of 19 November first noted by Agee that Ruberto's Lyons-based relative Lionardo Strozzi wrote him in Rome.
Similmente fece per carnevale in maschera per le case le canzoni. Tillman Merritt by Sundry Hands, ed. Laurence Berman Cambridge, Mass.
Massimo Rossi
Jan LaRue et al. New York, ; repr. New York, , pp. Two Florentine Composers of the Renaissance," Analecta musicologica 4 Gaetano Milanesi, 3 vols. Florence, , 1: Among the most striking aspects of Florentine epistolary exchange are the elitist postures adopted time and again in patrimonial ploys and in the Florentines' observations of outsiders.
Florentines pursue what is rare and new, unknown, and decidedly private. In the first and best known of their letters, from Ruberto, in Venice, to Varchi of 27 March , Ruberto described his attempt to have an epigram of Varchi's set by Willaert and asked Varchi in return to compose a madrigal in honor of "Madonna Pulissena" undoubtedly Pecorina. Ruberto's assumption that he would wield influence with the chapelmaster is remarkable in itself. But even more so is the clandestine, cocky way he went about the whole venture.
Linking sexual and cultural conquest in a single identity that placed stealth at the strategic node of a sacred bond, Ruberto expressed his hopes through the conjuncture of culture and combat: Lionardo's letter of 19 November evinces the same Florentine attitude toward sharing music. Ruberto's request was specifically meant to procure new and unknown music from the Lyonnaise contingent. Lionardo hopes that a canzone that arrived from Florence some eight days earlier will serve; if it's already known in Rome, he'll get some other new pieces for them — not hard for him to do since, as he boasts, a friend in Florence always sends along Arcadelt's latest things.
The entire letter turns on this issue of having the latest pieces on hand — and only for restrictive, private use. I quote from Agee's transcription, which reconciles the printed version with that of a manuscript copy: Strozzi's outrageousness doesn't stop there; witness the salutation that he juxtaposes immediately afterward: See Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," pp. This was the same tight vise that gripped the new Venetian-styled madrigals of Willaert and Rore.
In Ruberto's employee Pallazzo da Fano angled to have Strozzi send him a new madrigal of Rore's written for Capponi, should he be able to get hold of it. And truly not a man will have your madrigal that you sent me, for I know the one to whom I sent it to be of messer Nerio's kind" emphasis mine. Capponi's tightfistedness was the very quality that so astonished the low-born Antonfrancesco Doni.
When his exiled compatriot Francesco Corboli took him to Capponi's salon, Doni was already beginning to fashion a career out of the new livelihood to be earned from the Venetian printing industry and was squirreling away musical works for his forthcoming Dialogo della musica. He claimed to be agog on his first encounter with Venetian music making there — not only at the dazzling musical scene but at the total inaccessibility of the music. One evening I heard a concert of violoni and voices in which she played and sang together with other excellent spirits. The perfect master of that music was Adrian Willaert, whose studious style, never before practiced by musicians, is so tightly knit, so sweet, so right, so miraculously suited to the words that I confess to never having known what harmony was in all my days, save that evening.
The devotee of this music and lover of such divine composition is a gentleman, a most excellent spirit, Florentine as well, called Messer Neri Caponi, to whom I was introduced by Messer Francesco Corboli [another Florentine] and thanks to whom I listened, saw, and heard such divine things.
This Messer Neri spends hundreds of ducats every year on such talent, and keeps it to himself; not even if it were his own father would he let go one song. My investigations of Strozzi's whereabouts as summarized in Table 1 below indicate that the date must be On this issue see Jane A. Francesco Malipiero and Virginio Fagotto, Collana di musiche veneziane inedite e rare, no.
Many have assumed, with good reason, that the music Doni heard at Capponi's house included works printed only fifteen years later in the Musica nova. Francesco dalla Viola's dedication of the printed volume maintained that the pieces in the Musica nova had been "hidden and buried" so that no one could use them and that consequently "the world came to be deprived" of its contents. This repertorial link gives a very good idea about one aspect of the musical fare at ca' Capponi — or, more precisely, about its compositional substance. Doni offers his Piacentine dedicatee little in the way of concrete information about the.
Walter Gerstenberg and Hermann Zenck, vol. The documents surrounding this exchange are now reprinted together with numerous new ones in Richard J. See also David S. Doni fashioned for his Dialogo a sonnet of his own in homage to Pecorina, A la bella concordia unica e rara p.
In a passage in Chapter 19 of his Germani de musica verbali ca. Together, however, Doni and Ganassi corroborate at least two aspects of the academy's structural makeup: Doni's account also confirms various contemporaneous representations of Pecornia that identify her as a central interpreter of Willaert's music. As we saw, Ruberto Strozzi in requested his teacher Varchi to compose a madrigal text in her honor most likely Quando col dolce suono, later set by Arcadelt, as Agee believes. Indeed Pecorina was so directly identified with the collection that it came to be nicknamed after her.
Willaert himself set another madrigal lauding Pecorina, the still-anonymous text Qual dolcezza giamai. In treble-dominated pieces we would expect that viols often accompanied voices, but Doni leaves us maddeningly uninformed as to whether instruments played some parts alone, without doubling voices — a signal point in madrigals so textually conceived as those in the Musica nova. Con un discorso in materia de satira Venice, , fol.