Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750: From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy

By Anthony M. Cummings

A comprehensive account of music in Florence from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Medici dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. 

Florence is justly celebrated as one of the world’s most important cities. It enjoys mythic status and occupies an enviable place in the historical imagination. But its musico-historical importance is not as well understood as it should be. If Florence was the city of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, it was also the birthplace of the madrigal, opera, and the piano. Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750 recounts Florence’s principal contributions to music and the history of how music was heard and cultivated in the city, from civic and religious institutions to private patronage and the academies. This book is an invaluable complement to studies of the art, literature, and political thought of the late-medieval and early-modern eras and the quasi-legendary figures in the Florentine cultural pantheon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226822792

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Cover Page for Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750

Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750

Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750

From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy

Anthony M. Cummings

The University of Chicago Press   CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82278-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82279-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822792.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cummings, Anthony M., author.

Title: Music in golden-age Florence, 1250–1750 : from the priorate of the guilds to the end of the Medici grand duchy / Anthony M. Cummings.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022026792 | ISBN 9780226822785 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822792 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—Italy—Florence—History and criticism. | Music and state—Italy—Florence—History. | Florence (Italy)—History—To 1421. | Florence (Italy)—History—1421–1737.

Classification: LCC ML290.8.F6 C84 2023 | DDC 780.945/511—dc23/eng/20220613

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026792

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to Lewis Lockwood and Francis Oakley,

and in memory of Frank D’Accone

Contents

Preface

Book the First

Music in Late-Medieval Florence: The Duecento and Trecento

Music and the Ecclesiastical and Political Organization of the Late-Medieval City

The Duecento

1 • Church and State in Florence circa 1300

~ Santa Reparata/Santa Maria del Fiore

~ Palazzo della Signoria

~ Music at Santa Reparata/Santa Maria del Fiore

~ The Duecento Lauda

~ Instrumentalists of the Signoria

The Trecento

2 • Secular Polyphony: The Beginnings of the Florentine Tradition

~ The Social Context of Performance

~ Johannes de Florentia (fl. ca. 1351)

3 • Secular Polyphony: Francesco Landino and the Central Florentine Tradition

~ Ser Gherardellus de Florentia (†1362 or 1363)

~ Donatus de Florentia and Laurentius Masii de Florentia (†1372)

~ Francesco Landino (†1397)

4 • Secular Polyphony: The Gallicization of Florentine Musical Culture

~ Some Florentine Kleinmeistern: Magister frater Egidius, Magister Guglielmus frater, and Corradus

~ Andreas de Florentia (Andrea di Giovanni) (†1415)

~ Some Florentine Kleinmeistern Redux: Bonaiutus Corsini and Andrea Stefani

~ Paulus de Florentia (†1436)

5 • Music in Communal Worship and Civic Life

~ Liturgical Polyphony

~ The Trecento Lauda

~ The Herald of the Signoria

Book the Second

Music in Renaissance Florence I: The Quattrocento

Aristocracy Emulated: The De Facto Medici Regime

6 • The Medici Regime and the Public Ecclesiastical Institutions

~ Nicolaus Zacharie and the Professionalization of Composing and Performing

~ The Consecration of the Cathedral of Florence

~ The Musical Establishments Stabilized

~ Heinrich Isaac

7 • Tradition and Innovation in Sacred Music

~ Tradition: Music for the Liturgy

~ Tradition and Innovation: The Quattrocento Lauda

~ Innovation: The Sacra Rappresentatione

8 • Heralds, Knights, and Carnival Revelers

~ Tellers of Tales

~ Medieval Chivalric Tradition Reimagined

~ Florentine Carnival and the Canto Carnascialesco

9 • Music and Domestic Life: The House of Medici

~ Occasions for Music-Making

~ The Patrons, Their Musicians, and Their Music

~ The Musical Sources

~ Varieties of Music-Making

10 • Girolamo Savonarola and the Medici in Exile

~ Theocratic Censure

~ The Medici in Exile, 1494–1512

Book the Third

Music in Renaissance Florence II: The Cinquecento

Aristocracy Achieved: The De Jure Medici Regime, Family as Country, and Florentinism

11 • The Medici Restoration: The Florentine-Papal Tandem

~ The Restoration

~ Composers in Medici Service

~ Music in Private Medici Settings: Instrumental Music

12 • A New Institution, a New Technology, a New Genre: The Madrigal

~ Wellsprings of the Madrigal: The Chanson

~ Wellsprings of the Madrigal: The Canto Carnascialesco and Trionfo, the Lauda, and Solo Song

~ The Earliest Madrigals

~ Florentine Academies and Madrigals for the Theater at Midcentury

~ Intimate Settings: Isabella de’ Medici, Solo Song, and the Polyphonic Madrigal

~ Intimate Settings: The Florentine Madrigal after Midcentury

13 • The Church

~ The Reconstitution of the Polyphonic Chapels

~ The Reformation and Counter-Reformation

~ The Cinquecento Lauda and Sacra Rappresentatione

~ Intermedi Sacri e Morali and Music in Religious Communities for Women

14 • Medici Pageantry, 1539–1589: L’état, c’est moi

Book the Fourth

Music in Florence in the Baroque Era

Cross-Genre Influences: Monody, the Stile Recitativo, and the Stile Concertato in Florentine Music of the Seicento and Early Settecento

15 • Opera in Florence, Act 1: The Florentine Aristocratic Phase

~ Academic Theories Applied

~ The Beginnings of Opera

~ Widening Applications of the Innovations

~ The Meaning of Baroque

16 • Intermedio I: Music in Religious and Dynastic Ritual

~ Religious Ritual: A Cappella and Concerted Vocal Music

~ Religious Ritual: Music for Organ

~ Dynastic Ritual (L’état, c’est moi): The Equestrian Ballet

17 • Opera in Florence, Act 2: The Pan-Italian Phase

~ A New Institution: The Opera House

~ Beginnings of the Pan-Italian Phase: La finta pazza

~ A Native Attempt at a Venetian-Style Opera: Celio

~ Venetian Imports: Ipermestra

~ A Distinctively Florentine Tradition of Comic Opera: Il potestà di Colognole

~ Venetian Imports: Ipermestra, Redux

~ The Baroque Aesthetic on Full Display: Ercole in Tebe, L’Orontea, La Dori

18 • Intermedio II: Devotional and Convivial Uses of Music

~ Devotional: The Lauda Reimagined: Canzonette Spirituali

~ Devotional: The Oratorio

~ Convivial: Ballet Entertainments

~ Convivial: The Seicento Madrigal

~ Convivial: The Seicento Cantata

~ Convivial: Instrumental Genres

~ Convivial: The Invention of the Piano

19 • Opera in Florence, Act 3: The Pan-European Phase

~ Opera in Arcadia? The Halting Adoption of Reform Principles—Griselda

~ Grand Prince Ferdinando and a Restitution of Aristocratic Opera

~ The Reopening of Teatro della Pergola

~ Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria, or Rodrigo

~ Opera in Arcadia: The Fuller Adoption of Reform Principles—Catone in Utica

~ The Settecento Cantata 340

Conclusion

Color illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Florence is the city of Galileo, Dante, Ficino, and Machiavelli, of Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio, of Michelangelo and Leonardo, whose achievements in science, literature, Neoplatonic philosophy, political thought, and the visual arts have perhaps obscured those of comparable figures in the history of music. Yet Florence also deserves one’s most respectful attention because it is identified with some of the most important developments in the history of European music. It was the birthplace of the sixteenth-century madrigal, preeminent secular genre of the European musical Renaissance and the creation of composers active in Florence around 1520. It was the birthplace of opera, that quintessentially Italian art form, Italy’s great contribution to world musical culture, the creation of Florentine poets and composers at the end of the Cinquecento and the beginning of the Seicento. And it was a Medici employee—Bartolomeo Cristofori—who effectively invented the piano. The musico-historical importance of Florence rests on numerous other developments described in the book, some significant and interesting in their own right, some significant and interesting especially as the wellsprings of the consequential developments identified here.

I thought it important to attempt to contribute to an accurate understanding of the place of Florence in music history.¹ I therefore thought it worthwhile to undertake a general survey of the history of music in this great city when its cultural achievements were their greatest, to recover its sounds so that they can be heard—imaginatively—as they might have been heard in the Trecento or Seicento. The chronological limits were set by the appearance of the earliest substantial written record of a distinctively Florentine musical tradition (ca. 1250) and the end of the Medici regime, which supported much of Florentine cultural activity during this period.

A Definition of Terms

This is a history of Florentine music and music in Florence. I make the terminological distinction to differentiate between music heard in Florence between 1250 and 1750 and music that was Florentine in origin. Much of it was Florentine, of course, and many genres (the carnival song; the sacra rappresentatione) are quintessentially Florentine. In other cases, the music was non-Florentine in origin and was composed and often performed by non-Florentines and even non-Italians. If it was vocal music, it was often in a language other than Tuscan. Nevertheless, such music was cultivated, preserved, performed, and treasured in Florence by those responsible for the city’s musical culture.

My book is organized in good part, though not exclusively, by established infrastructures of patronage, although the public spaces that witnessed less formal performances of music and the musical traditions exemplified by those performances are also considered in detail. In the medieval and early-modern eras—long before the technologies that permit us to hear many kinds of music, at any time—the experience of music was of live performances, except for anyone who was musically literate and could imaginatively perform music from notation. Before the concert tradition of the nineteenth century, music figured in larger events and contexts. The services of ecclesiastical institutions, devotions of lay confraternities, theatrical performances, festive banqueting and daily dining, and public festivals often featured musical performances as a complement to the events’ other elements. Such occasions were often associated in turn with private patrons and private or public institutions of patronage, whether religious (ecclesiastical establishments, lay confraternities) or secular (aristocratic courts, civic municipalities, informal academies). Such institutions often had dedicated spaces, and in the belief that music was an indispensable element in their activities they employed or hosted musicians, continuously or intermittently.

To a considerable extent, though not exclusively, musical experience in late-medieval and early-modern Florence was framed by these institutions of patronage, the rites and celebrations associated with them, and the spaces they maintained or appropriated. We recover that world more successfully and revealingly when we foreground the ritual and material contexts for musical performances. More important, the musical style is the expression of those contexts. Music for an ecclesiastical setting had characteristics that suited it to that context. Music for an aristocratic court had contrasting characteristics suited to its context. If we resituate the music within its framing occasions and spaces, we more accurately understand why it has the features it has.

The fundamental questions I have attempted to answer are the following: On what occasions and in what venues was music heard in late-medieval and early-modern Florence? What were the music’s defining characteristics, and what distinguished the Florentine sound world at that extraordinary moment? And why are late-medieval and early-modern Florentine musical accomplishments so important?

Where possible, I have reconstructed musical performances for which there is either a surviving composition or extant music of the type that would have been performed on such occasions, so that one can know with some certainty what the stylistic properties of the music were. Such music is not invariably privileged per se. It furnishes the principal means available to us of recovering the actual sounds of the Florentine acoustical landscape of the late-medieval and early-modern eras. With few exceptions, music that represented oral practices, by definition, is rarely echoed in written practices, or if it is, only faintly. If we wish to access the actual musical sounds of that world—what has been called the life of sounds²—written practices provide the amplest evidence we have as to how that world assembled pitches, rhythms, and other foundational materials of music to create its music. From such extant music, we can offer conjectural hypotheses about the sonic profile of music in the oral tradition.

I also describe practices for which there is little or no surviving music because they, too, formed an important part of the period soundscape. As I wrote in another context, Were there a reliance solely on the evidence of notated musical sources, the importance . . . of particular musical idioms would not be fully appreciated,

which illustrates the fallacy of relying too heavily on extant notated works . . . as exclusive witness to . . . a musical culture. The historical sources, as distinct from the musical sources, . . . convey a more ramified sense of the contemporary musical culture than can be gained solely from an analysis of the extant notated repertory.³

The sounds I reconstruct here are musical sounds, the conscious product of the human imagination and creative will, as contrasted with more random elements of the sonic landscape: ambient noise, the shouting of Florentines in the streets, the neighing of horses. Such sounds were an important part of the acoustical terrain and are increasingly the subject of a fascinating scholarly literature.⁴ In this book, however, I use the terms sound and soundscape in the more restricted sense.

We musicologists are often guilty of using our professional vocabulary too liberally. Readers from other disciplines and the general reader cannot always understand our discourse. To increase the possibility that the book will be read by colleagues from other disciplines, or an avocational audience, I have used several means of presenting the music. For those who can read musical notation, it is largely self-sufficient. I have restricted myself to musical examples that are either not readily available or are so important to the accompanying narrative that one could not easily do without them. In most cases I have not given the entirety of the composition but only an excerpt, to convey something of the music’s fundamental defining characteristics. For those who cannot read music but command something of the vocabulary of musical analysis, I have sought, where appropriate, to describe the music in terms that make the presentation intelligible. Finally, for those who neither read music nor understand analytical terms, I have sought to relocate the music imaginatively in those venues and occasions for its performance and describe its importance in Florentine society. The mode of presentation is narrative. For me, the most effective, atmospheric, and informative presentation was one that microscopically narrated actual historical events. In the context of a discussion of the occasions for musical performances and the infrastructures of patronage supporting them, I typically proceed in a straightforward chronological manner, with granular analysis offered whenever it seemed important to understanding the presentation.

This book is an exercise in what Ernest Boyer called the synthesizing tradition of academic life.⁵ Some of the scholarship on which it is based is my own. But most of the findings were produced by colleagues in several disciplines. I delighted in the opportunity to read (or reread) their contributions to the scholarly conversation, and I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to those whose publications are cited and whose presentation is liberally quoted. The book attempts to synthesize their findings into a whole. It is a stock-taking at this moment in the history of the discipline, after decades of specialized research on music in Florence from the mid-Duecento to the mid-Settecento. A challenge in writing such a book is to maintain a balance between the macro- and microscopic. The material is so rich that one can easily lose oneself in detail and fail to profile clearly the main themes of the narrative. I hope to have avoided doing so.

A compensating virtue of a synthesis is the contextualization of particular moments in the entire narrative. The significance of any of them is truly understood only when considered in context. To give just one example, I devote special attention to the secular polyphonic tradition of fourteenth-century Florence, the music of Gherardellus, Donatus, and Laurentius, of Landino, Andreas, and Paulus. But that tradition is accurately understood only when viewed against the backdrop of the larger musical culture of the time and what came before and after. Rather than being "the music of fourteenth-century Italy"⁶—as an edition of the polyphonic repertory, sadly incomplete, labeled it—that tradition is only one facet of the music of fourteenth-century Italy, and one could argue that it is not the most important one.⁷ Moreover, many Florentine musical traditions exemplify change throughout the decades, even centuries. The individual moments in their history acquire a logic when resituated in the context of what came before and after.

Because the book is an exercise in this species of scholarship, scholars knowledgeable about any one of the topics covered in it will find the material familiar. Of course, basing the presentation upon existing scholarship means that my synthesis depends upon the data and interpretations currently available. Gaps in my coverage result from gaps in the scholarship on which the synthesis is based.

A further virtue of a synthesis is that it isolates matters worthy of further investigation. What kinds of music-making in late-medieval and early-modern Florence still elude our understanding? What scholarly activity might we devote to illuminating matters that are not now so well understood? To give just one example, our understandable attention to the beginnings of opera in Florence may have caused us inadvertently to overlook the vitality of the Florentine operatic tradition in the post-aristocratic phase, of which I myself was not fully aware before writing this book. Florence continued to be a venue for operatic performances of considerable importance. A 1702 performance of Il Flavio Cuniberto with music by Alessandro Scarlatti occasioned the composition of new music, some of which is extant but has never been published. And there are arias surviving for a 1696 performance in Florence of Giovanni Bononcini’s Mutio Scevola, which, once more, have never been published. A Lafayette colleague, Lewis Baratz, and I have drafted articles on these developments, with complete editions of the surviving music.

A Note on Secondary Sources Consulted and Cited

I ask my readers to trust that I have consulted the secondary literature more extensively than my citations suggest. If I have not cited a particular title, it does not mean that I am unaware of it, or that I find it unworthy. Although ambitious, my objectives in writing this book were limited, and some titles proved more useful than others. My selection from among the titles in the literature results from the approach I favored, which is dependent upon the primary data cited in those secondary works, the usefulness of the interpretations, and their relevance to my objectives.

I identify another rationale for choosing among titles in the literature. In Lost Horizon, James Hilton’s novel about the Tibetan lamasery Shangri-La, one reads the following exchange about the lamasery’s library between one of the lamas, Chang, and the novel’s protagonist, Hugh Conway.

Other books published up to about the middle of 1930 . . . would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; . . . We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date . . . , [Chang] commented. There are people who would hardly agree with you, replied Conway. . . . Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year. . . . Nothing of importance . . . that will not be better understood in 1940.⁸

So, too, with musicological scholarship. Prudence dictates that we not rush to accept the most recent interpretations uncritically, however stimulating they may be. Upon further reflection, their true importance will . . . be better understood.

Two final matters: I trust my readers to know that the terms Middle Ages/medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque are contested; they are used here with that understanding in mind. And I happily acknowledge that my title was adapted from Gene Brucker’s Florence: The Golden Age, 1138–1737.⁹

Book the First

Music in Late-Medieval Florence: The Duecento and Trecento

Music and the Ecclesiastical and Political Organization of the Late-Medieval City

The Duecento

1

Church and State in Florence circa 1300

At either end of Via dei Calzaiuoli in Florence are two of the city’s storied public spaces, Piazza del Duomo at the north end and Piazza della Signoria at the south. Each is dominated by an architectural monument of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Piazza del Duomo by the Cathedral (or Duomo) of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, or St. Mary of the Flower, a fitting name for the cathedral in a city known at various times in its history as Florentia, or Fiorenza, or Firenze;¹ and Piazza della Signoria by Palazzo della Signoria (later Palazzo Vecchio), where the offices of the municipal government are still located, seven centuries after the palace was built.

Construction on the two buildings began almost simultaneously, in the last few years of the thirteenth century, which witnessed unprecedented public building activity in Florence, the result of extraordinary growth in the city’s population. Between 1100 and 1300, it had quadrupled,² and by 1300, it had reached 105,000.³ At that time, Florence was one of the largest cities in Europe.

Figure 1.1 The earliest known representation of medieval Florence, fourteenth century. The octagonal building in the center is the Baptistery, named for St. John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence. To its right is the Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, then under construction. The building with the battlemented tower, behind and slightly to the right of the Baptistery, is Palazzo della Signoria. Florence, Museo del Bigallo, Madonna della Misericordia. Scala / Art Resource, NY. See plate 1 for a color image.

The foundation stone of Santa Maria del Fiore was laid in 1296. Palazzo della Signoria was begun in 1299.⁴ Construction of the conventual churches Santa Maria Novella (Dominican) and Santa Croce (Franciscan) began in 1283 and 1295.⁵ My narrative thus begins around the middle of the Duecento.

Piazza del Duomo and Piazza della Signoria and the buildings located therein are material symbols of the principal macroscopic public worlds inhabited by Florentines of the late-medieval and early-modern eras, the religious world symbolized by Santa Maria del Fiore, the civic world by Palazzo della Signoria. But it was not yet a society where there was a sharp distinction between the religious and the political, as one would later understand those terms. Florence was a Christian community, and any other understanding at that moment in history would have been almost unimaginable. In the pages that follow, we shall see, time and again, that the political was suffused with a religious quality and the religious with a political one.

Complementing the macroscopic public worlds were microscopic communities that similarly exemplify a coalescence of spiritual and civic sensibilities: the local districts or gonfaloni, political entities whose local lay religious institutions, confraternities, contributed indispensably to neighborhood life and identity.⁶

In the current context, the important matter is that both realms, the spiritual and the civic, unquestioningly assumed a vital role for music. The vast bulk of the extant music from late-medieval and early-modern Florence, certainly art music, was music for the church and music for state. The two communities featured music in their rituals and activities as an indispensable element of their practices. Both communities maintained venues for musical performances and organized the occasions when they took place. The city’s religious and political institutions and its private patrons had musicians in their employ who were responsible for the formal musical soundscape of late-medieval and early-modern Florence.

Santa Reparata/Santa Maria del Fiore

Santa Maria del Fiore succeeds an earlier establishment, dedicated to a saint important in Florentine religious experience, Santa Reparata.⁷ The Cathedral of Santa Reparata was constructed in the early-Christian era and partially modified and consecrated in the late ninth century. It was entirely reconstructed around the middle of the eleventh century and altered again around 1230.

Toward the end of the Duecento it was decided that Santa Reparata should once more be restored. But within less than a year, in March 1294, the Commune resolved that the building not merely be renovated, but replaced, and at the end of the century demolition was begun to make room for the successor institution. On 8 September 1296, the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, the cornerstone of the new building was laid and the Cathedral of Florence rededicated to St. Mary of the Flower.⁸ By 1375, the new cathedral had more or less enclosed Santa Reparata, which was then almost completely demolished.⁹ In 1436, when construction on the Cathedral had progressed to the point where a consecration ceremony could be held, it took place, with lavish music, on the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Florentine new year began. The cathedral of the city of flowers, the city whose symbol was the fleur-de-lis and whose coin of the realm was the florin, was consecrated as St. Mary of the Flower on New Year’s Day.¹⁰

With the beginning of construction on Santa Maria del Fiore, the city established the Opera del Duomo, a secular institution responsible for the Cathedral’s construction, maintenance, and administration. In 1331, responsibility for the Opera was delegated to the Arte della Lana, the Wool Guild, one of medieval Florence’s most important mercantile corporations.¹¹ Delegating responsibility in this way for the administration of the city’s public ecclesiastical institutions was a Florentine practice, documented as early as the twelfth century, when responsibility for the Baptistery (named for San Giovanni, patron saint of Florence) was delegated to the Arte dei Mercatanti di Calimala, the Merchants’ Guild. The construction, maintenance, and administration of the Cathedral were thus financed through a system that reflected the economic and political organization of Trecento Florence and the importance of the guilds to the Florentine economy and Florentine politics.¹² In a population of some 105,000 around 1300, the guilds counted more than a third of the city’s adult males among their members.¹³

Such an arrangement was only one of many ways in which the ecclesiastical and civic orders overlapped and the distinction between them was blurred. There were moments in the city’s history when this was truer still, as in the early sixteenth century, when three of the Medici, then the wealthiest, most prominent, most powerful of Florentine families, were cardinals, two of whom became pope: Giovanni di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Leo X) and Giulio di Giuliano di Piero (Clement VII).¹⁴

An identification of church and state was expressed in innumerable ways. In the early sixteenth century, newly commissioned Cathedral manuscripts that celebrated the Medici by means of the use of the family’s heraldic devices and mottos were publicly displayed.¹⁵ The reach of religious experience was extended by methods that sacralized the entire city.¹⁶ Religious processions featuring the singing of the participants followed routes through all quarters of Florence. More revealing still, on the days before the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the processional routes delineated the central axis of the ancient Roman city and symbolically evoked Florence’s Roman origins. Such practices made tangible the otherwise intangible theme of Florence as . . . daughter of Rome. Although religious in nature, the practices located the city in secular history.¹⁷ Such were the principal venues and occasions for the public expression of Florentines’ spirituality and the accompanying musical performances.

Palazzo della Signoria

Palazzo della Signoria is a symbol of the complex, sometimes violent political history of Duecento Florence. Political life had been marked by feuding between the two principal factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, adherents respectively of the pope and the emperor. When efforts at a reconciliation proved unsuccessful, a new government magistracy was formed, the Fourteen (Quattordici Buonomini),¹⁸ which comprised eight Guelphs and six Ghibellines.

But the Quattordici were increasingly obliged to rely on the seven greater guilds, foremost among them the international merchants and cloth finishers guild (the Calimala), the jurists and notaries guild (the Giudici e Notai), the manufacturers of woolen cloth guild (the Lana), and the manufacturers of silk cloth and retail cloth merchants’ guild (the Seta),¹⁹ which were represented in the Quattordici first by three and then by six of the Priori delle Arti (Priors of the Guilds). By the end of 1282, the Priorate of the Guilds had wrested control of the government from the Quattordici and emerged as the supreme executive authority in a new popular regime.

Legislation to contain the historic feuding was enacted, and a new magistrate, the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia (Standard Bearer of Justice), was appointed and given command of a thousand-man militia.²⁰ Ordinances of 1293 excluded the magnate nobility, the historic Florentine knightly class, from the government. But the lingering, smoldering resentments of the magnates emboldened them to challenge the authority of the new republican magistracies. The need for a permanent, fortress-like residence for the seven Signori or Lords—the six Priori delle arti and the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia—was debated, and at the end of 1298 the Signori were directed to identify a location for their palace. Funds were appropriated for its construction.²¹

Like the landed nobility of northern Europe, the magnates were nominally a military class. Noble status resulted from knightly status. But knighthood in Florence was less a vocation than a kind of stylized, cultivated comportment. Most titled Florentines were merchants or bankers who appropriated chivalric motifs, indulged a taste for chivalric names such as Roland and a courtly literature that celebrated elegant manners, and favored lavish display and elaborate ceremonial. In Carol Lansing’s words, Knighthood was a means of self-definition.

As a distinguishable class, the magnates were increasingly indiscernible throughout the Trecento.²² The city’s aristocratic past nonetheless continued to be a source of traditions and imagery. Long before the Medici were formally ennobled (1532), vestigial aristocratic sensibilities were reflected in many Florentine institutions and practices: in the position of the Herald of the Florentine Signoria, who was often given a knightly title and name such as Sir Percival and whose singing for the Signori was a kind of courtly attainment and activity (indeed, the very fact that he was in the service of the Lords suggests that his position was understood as the expression of knightly values); in the use of senhal, a literary device associated with the poetry of the seigneurial classes of northern Europe, and a receptivity to other elements of the International Gothic.

These developments document the actualization of noble aspirations and the aristocratizing of Florentine political culture. They were remote noble practices that the Medici could invoke as sources of aristocratic values and models of aristocratic behavior. They satisfied a persisting Florentine fascination with aristocratic tradition and slowly conditioned the Florentines to the prospect of the decisive ennoblement of the Medici. The merchant Giovanni Morelli urged his sons to frequent the schools of instrumental playing, singing or dancing, and fencing, and in this you will become expert: You will make yourself known to noble youths. . . . And you’ll do so in order to make friends . . . and will be reputed to be noble and well-bred and fashionable.²³ The weakness of centralized civic institutions had permitted the magnates to indulge their private interests at the expense of the common good. The emergence of the republican institutions of the late Duecento and the 1293 Ordinances of Justice signaled a radical change in Florentine political culture. There was no ambiguity as to the Ordinances’ aim. Candidates for the Signoria were to be "guild members of the city . . . who are not knights [emphasis added]." The guilds were regarded as acting for the common good, and the 1293 Ordinances enshrined the victory of the mercantile corporations.²⁴ But a fascination with the aristocratic past remained.

By March 1302, it was reported that the Signori were residing in their palazzo, in pallatio novo, which served as their temporary residence during their term of office (two months).²⁵ The palazzo also housed civil servants in the employ of the Signori. The essential architectural configuration of the city that still exists, with its public and institutional buildings dating from the Middle Ages, the Cathedral and conventual churches, headquarters of the guilds and the palace of their priors, and headquarters of the Guelph Party, had already emerged by the late thirteenth century. Gone was the old city enclosed within the ancient walls. Gone, or reduced in height, were many of the magnate families’ defensive towers. The new public squares and streets paved in stone were the architectural expression of the strengthening of the centralized republican civic institutions that had successfully challenged the authority of the magnates.²⁶

Music at Santa Reparata/Santa Maria del Fiore

In late-medieval Florence, religious sentiment was formally and publicly expressed, first and foremost, through the services of the public ecclesiastical institutions, the Cathedral preeminent among them. Such institutions displayed works of art that stimulated and intensified congregants’ spiritual experience, engaged personnel (ecclesiastical authorities, administrative officers, and the clergymen who officiated at services, clothed in magnificent vestments), and featured ritual action: the liturgy, a system comprising ceremonial action, texts of great doctrinal significance, and their musical settings.²⁷ In the words of one historian, Ecclesiastical institutions were the leading patrons of the arts.²⁸

Administrative appointments pertaining specifically to the music were first made in the mid-eleventh century, when a member of the choir was named proposto, responsible for selecting the music sung at services.²⁹ Fundamental to the liturgy was the calendar of the church year, a cycle of feast days (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost), each of which was provided with some texts common to it and all other feasts in the calendar, some that were unique—or proper—to that particular feast. Many such texts were set to music.

The distinction between common and proper texts and their music is a feature of the two principal services of the church, the Mass and Divine Offices. The Mass, the central rite of Roman Catholicism, features some texts—known as the Ordinary—that are spoken or sung whenever Mass is celebrated. Other texts—known as the Proper—refer to the events commemorated on a particular day: Jesus’s birth on Christmas; his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

The Divine Offices are observances that take place throughout the church day, celebrated in Duecento Florence not only at public ecclesiastical institutions such as the Cathedral but also in the privacy of the monasteries attached to the city’s conventual churches: Matins (celebrated at midnight), Lauds (sunrise), Prime (the first hour, approximately 6:00 a.m.), Terce (the third hour, approximately 9:00 a.m.), Sext (the sixth hour, approximately 12:00 noon), Nones (the ninth hour, approximately 3:00 p.m.), Vespers (sunset), and Compline (immediately after Vespers).

Many feasts in the calendar of the Cathedral of Florence were celebrated at all ecclesiastical institutions in Western Christendom, including other Florentine institutions in addition to the Cathedral. They were fixtures in universal ritual calendars. Other feasts unique to Florence honored saints with specifically Florentine associations: the titular saints of the Cathedral (Santa Reparata; the Virgin Mary) or figures important in Florentine ecclesiastical history (St. Zenobius, celebrated as the first bishop of Florence; Zenobius’s deacon, St. Eugene, and subdeacon, St. Crescentius). A contemporary manual describing the Cathedral’s rites, the Ritus in ecclesia servandi, defines the uniquely Florentine feasts as either those that honored saints whose relics we have and venerate or featured rites in which we process to other churches. Contemporary music manuscripts from the Cathedral often reserve the most lavish liturgical, musical, and visual material (illuminated miniatures) for these distinctively Florentine feasts.

The principal musical adornment to the liturgy were the settings in the monophony of the Gregorian chant of the Latin liturgical texts for a particular feast, sung by the choir while the congregation attended respectfully. But characteristic of thirteenth-century practice was an effort to engage the populace more actively. On Sundays, the Major Mass was celebrated in the Baptistery after the Office of Terce, but the Mass of the People was celebrated in Santa Reparata so that more of the faithful could attend.

One of the primary means of involving the populace was the processions, an element of any number of observances, which followed established routes into all quarters of the city and featured singing by the participants.³⁰ Public processions engendered a sense of community, not only in the vicinity of the Cathedral, but also in the city at large. The construction of the urban soundscape facilitated by such practices was reinforced by the ringing of bells, which regulated ceremonial action and elicited public involvement. On the Monday after Easter, states another contemporary manual, the Mores et consuetudines canonice florentine,

we ring . . . all the bells at length. After this, and with the clergy and populace together, the cantor intones the antiphon Stetit angelus, at the beginning of which we begin our walk, heading toward the church of San Pier Maggiore, and here we celebrate Terce, the High Mass, and Sext. In these processions . . . and in the litanies when we sing throughout the streets, the bells of each church by which we transit must be rung.³¹

Participants in the processions would carry relics of the saint whose feast was being celebrated or the saint’s sacred image, displayed for the edification of the observers. Such practices formed part of Florentine religious experience for many centuries, and music was almost invariably featured. In the fifteenth century, on 23 June [the vigil of the Feast of St. John, patron saint of Florence] . . . they go in procession with statues and relics of the saints, images, and venerable crosses; trumpets and other musical instruments always march first.³²

The Mores et consuetudines canonice florentine mandates that

for Sant’Agata ring . . . all the bells . . . toward the middle of Terce so that the clergy and populace convene in the mother church. . . . We celebrate Terce, after which we go in procession around the city while the cantor begins the responsory Quis es tu qui venisti ad me, and we sing for those saints next to whose relics we transit, preceded in our path by the cross and . . . the panel with the image of Sant’Agata. In this procession the Four Gospels are sung.

An early-Trecento processional standard with the image of Sant’Agata, preserved to this day in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, is attributed to Jacopo del Casentino, father of the great fourteenth-century Italian organist and composer Francesco Landino, of whom we shall hear more. It is a powerful stimulus to the imagination. One envisions the processions slowly wending their way through the congested urban spaces depicted imaginatively in figure 1.1, the processional standard borne aloft (fig. 1.2).

Music for the liturgy was drawn principally from the existing, universal monophonic chant repertory, the corpus of texts and melodies codified much earlier in the Middle Ages and disseminated throughout the Christian West. But in those cases where the feast was specific to Florence, texts and their musical settings could be composed expressly for such a feast. The formal acoustical landscape of late-medieval Florence was rich in sounds unique to it. A late-Trecento manuscript for the Cathedral preserves an Office of St. Eugene, Bishop Zenobius’s deacon. One of the texts for Vespers is the Magnificat (My soul magnifies the Lord), Mary’s ecstatic response to the understanding that she was with child. Preceding and following the Magnificat is an antiphon, a kind of refrain. The antiphon to the Magnificat in the Office of St. Eugene—both text and music—is unique to Florence and refers specifically to Eugene (ex. 1.1).

O levita nobilis Eugeni sanctissime nostris fave iubilis de celorum culmine iram placa iudicis ne draconis aulicis se iungamur celicis. In secula seculorum, Amen.

Although newly composed rather than derived from the universal liturgy, O levita nobilis Eugeni is in the monophony of the historic chant. It features unmeasured, rhythmically undifferentiated pitches, a single melodic line sung in unison by members of the choir, the absence of a concurrent pitch or pitches, which would have produced harmony, and the absence of instrumental accompaniment (a cappella performance).

Figure 1.2 Jacopo del Casentino, early fourteenth-century processional standard with the image of Sant’Agata. Florence, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

The Cathedral’s services featured other recent additions to the liturgy: newly composed snippets of texted melody inserted horizontally into preexistent chant melodies (tropes); the vertical elaboration of monophonic melodies (polyphony). Both genres of accretion to the Gregorian liturgy satisfied the desire of musicians of the High Middle Ages to compose new music, which nonetheless respected—in a literal sense was grounded in—the existing Gregorian melodies. But unlike the music for the Office of St. Eugene, other newly composed music for the Cathedral liturgy appears to have originated largely in liturgical practice from outside of Florence.

Example 1.1 O levita nobilis Eugeni

Understandably—though perhaps inordinately—musicologists are keenly interested in polyphonic practice. Creating pleasing vertical simultaneities of pitch (chords) and sequencing them so that they succeeded one another in a permissible manner, according to the musical doctrines of the time, could be a rewarding activity for a musician. Such an exacting practice reasonably commands our attention.

Though sometimes indirect and open to conflicting interpretation, there is evidence of polyphonic performance of Latin liturgical texts in Duecento Florence. The Ritus in ecclesia servandi specifies four occasions when polyphony was prohibited. This suggests that the occasions when polyphony was permitted were so numerous that the Ritus found it more efficient simply to identify those when it was not. But this is conjecture. There is less conjectural evidence of polyphonic practice. In 1244, the bishop of Florence ordered "that the singers [of the monastery of San Pancrazio] . . . who sing cantus ruptus [a common period term for polyphony] . . . no longer have melodies on that day [of San Pancrazio], except for those . . . for one voice [emphasis added]."³³ And Cathedral manuscripts of the chant preserve the familiar monophonic melodies, accompanied in a few instances by a second, newly composed melody, simple in design, which lay above the chant melody and was sung in counterpoint to it.³⁴

Very little direct musical evidence of polyphonic performance at Santa Reparata is known to us, therefore, but this should not be surprising. In Florence as elsewhere, polyphony was likely extemporized in real time and rarely committed to notation, a practice that normally produces a simpler result. A twelfth-century composition from elsewhere in Tuscany illustrates. It is the polyphonic elaboration of a trope. In the polyphonic elaboration, each pitch in the preexistent monophonic melody is matched to another above it.

[trope text] Regi regum glorioso Petrus et Paulus sedulo Assistunt in palatio Superni regis jubilo [Mass Ordinary text] Benedicamus Domino

The pitches are rhythmically unmeasured, and the setting of the text is syllabic; each syllable of text is matched with one musical pitch and usually one only. The matching of each pitch in the lower voice to one in the upper produces a note-against-note (punctus contra punctum) effect. And the two voices typically move in opposite directions—one ascending while the other descends—which produces variety in the contours of the two melodies.³⁵ Such practices constitute the prehistory of the rich secular polyphonic tradition of Trecento Florence.

The Duecento Lauda

Religious sentiment was not expressed solely through the formal ritual services of ecclesiastical institutions. The expression could be a more personal reflection of one’s private spirituality.³⁶ Complementing the musical practices of the Cathedral of Florence was the tradition of the lauda, a monophonic setting of a sacred text, though devotional rather than liturgical, usually Italian rather than Latin, and usually in verse rather than prose.³⁷

The lauda was central to Florentine musico-devotional experience. Some of the most celebrated Florentine composers of the early-modern period were singers of laude.³⁸ Although it figured in a number of performance contexts throughout its history,³⁹ the lauda was originally performed either at the services of lay confraternities devoted to the Virgin Mary or during the public processions of flagellants, who—dressed in robes bearing the insignia of their confraternity, wearing cowls to conceal their identity, and chanting prayers of supplication—practiced ritual self-scourging.⁴⁰ The religious sentiment underlying each kind of confraternity was different, reflecting a similar difference in the practices of the mendicant orders. The sensibilities of the flagellants were world-renouncing. The practices of the Marian confraternities were reverential rather than penitential.⁴¹

The confraternities of flagellants arose in response to the ecstatic preaching of members of religious orders (the Dominicans, the Franciscans), the effects of war and plague, and the resulting spiritual atmosphere, charged with late-medieval apocalyptic fervor.⁴² The Marian confraternities—informal organizations of laypeople established so that their members might receive religious instruction, assist at Mass, and honor the Virgin Mary⁴³—arose in the wake of the preaching of the Dominican prelate Peter Martyr, sent to Florence in 1244.⁴⁴

The chronicler Giovanni Villani gave a vivid account of the kind of event that first inspired the observances of the confraternities of laudesi.

In that year [1292], . . . there began to be manifested great and obvious miracles in . . . Florence by a figure of the Virgin Mary painted on a pilaster of the loggia of Orto San Michele, where the grain is sold. . . . Out of custom and devotion, a number of laity sang laude before this figure, and the fame of these miracles, for the merits of Our Lady, so increased that people came from all over Tuscany in pilgrimage, . . . bringing various wax images.⁴⁵

Such spontaneous, ecstatic behavior was soon codified and standardized in ritual activity.

Once established, lay brotherhoods contributed to Florentine spiritual life for centuries. Most of the confraternities of laudesi in Florence emerged in the last few decades of the Duecento and the first few of the Trecento. They were either existing Marian confraternities that were reorganized or were newly established institutions.⁴⁶ The paraliturgical services of the confraternities were now the principal context for the singing of laude. By the early fourteenth century, there were a dozen such companies, most associated with a church with a monastic community attached to it: the Company of San Piero Martire, associated with the Church of Santa Maria Novella (the Dominicans); Santa Maria delle Laudi, detta di Sant’Agnese, associated with Santa Maria del Carmine (the Carmelites); Santo Spirito, with the Church of Santo Spirito (the Augustinians); Santa Croce, with the Church of Santa Croce (the Franciscans).⁴⁷ The earliest documented was the company associated with the Church of the Santissima Annunziata (the Servites), which was founded in 1264 and by 1273 had established a practice of lauda singing.⁴⁸ By the 1520s, the number of confraternities had increased from a handful to 106 and the number of members to more than 20,000. It is believed that every Florentine who could afford the subscription fee was enrolled in a confraternity.⁴⁹

The parish churches with which the confraternities were associated were critical to the identity of the roughly coterminous neighborhood civic institution, the gonfalone: the Gonfalone of the Red Lion (Lione Rosso); the Gonfalone of the Green Dragon (Drago Verde).⁵⁰ The interests of the gonfalone and the parish rather naturally coincided.⁵¹ By around 1450, the Lione Rosso’s primordial neighborhood community, which had had its nucleus intact for almost two hundred years, was effectively that of San Pancrazio parish; the gonfalone’s church was the parish church.

Many features of the confraternities’ organizational structure were shared with the mercantile guilds. Indeed, we may assume substantial overlap in membership between the two kinds of institution. Such institutions maintained a regular schedule of meetings, were financed by members’ dues, elected officers to fixed terms, provided social security for members and their families, arranged for the burial of deceased members, and engaged in charitable activity, the most important of the confraternal activities.⁵²

Like the practices of the ecclesiastical institutions, those of the confraternities were governed by the calendar of the church year and church day. Some services occurred once annually (on particular feast days in the church year), some monthly (on a designated Sunday), some daily. Observances were also held on ad hoc occasions, such as funeral services for its members.⁵³ These latter became more important as the confraternities received bequests for commemorative services.⁵⁴

Of the services held once annually, those for the feast of the company’s patron saint were the most lavish and public. A banditore (town crier) would announce the festivities in the city squares, sounding a trumpet decorated with the company’s standard. The company would sponsor a communal meal, which among the larger companies was later to feature instrumental music, often performed by musicians in the city’s employ. Once more, there was a merging of the prerogatives and a pooling of the resources of the municipal government, the city’s ecclesiastical institutions, and less formal associations like the confraternities of laudesi.

The monthly service occurred during the celebration of the Mass. The principal element was a procession during the Offertory by confraternity members, who processed two by two through the church and cloister, singing laude and carrying lighted candles, which were then placed on an altar.⁵⁵

Daily services took place at Compline. They featured lauda singing by the members of the company amid other ritual activity: readings, prayer, a candle procession and offering, a sermon, confession.⁵⁶ The more static phases of the services were conducted before an altar in the host church, which displayed a devotional image to which the singing was directed. Company members were seated on benches. Candles, altar cloths, lecterns, and other accoutrements of worship enhanced the solemnity.⁵⁷ During Lent, the services assumed a penitential tone. The texts drew upon a vivid Passion literature.⁵⁸

The companies commissioned works of art from accomplished artists, the devotional images displayed on the altar during services, some of which survive to this day. Among such works is the exquisite Rucellai Madonna in the Galleria degli Uffizi, painted in 1286 by the Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna for the Company of San Piero Martire (fig. 1.3).⁵⁹

Figure 1.3 Duccio di Buoninsegna, Rucellai Madonna, 1286. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

Among the varied elements of confraternal observances, music thus had a prominent place. Before the service, the company sacristan would set out a lectern and manuscript anthology containing lauda texts (and occasionally their music) and identify the laude to be sung during the service. The texts served a didactic purpose and were expressed in affective language intended to evoke praise or—as appropriate to the calendar—penance.⁶⁰ The following lauda in honor of the Holy Cross is representative (ex. 1.2).

ripresa

strophe 1

return of the ripresa

strophe 2

return of the ripresa

Laude are often in the contemporary poetic fixed form of the ballata,⁶¹ which also served for Italian secular poetry. The croce of the final line of the strophes rhymes with the croce and boce of the ripresa (refrain) and anticipates its return. This is conventional poetic practice.

Example 1.2 The lauda Ogne homo

Musical procedures paralleled poetic form. The ripresa performed at the outset, after each of the strophes, and at the very end was probably sung by the entire membership, to the same music each time, while the strophes—which had different music from the refrain—were likely sung soloistically by more skilled, though initially nonprofessional members of the company, some of whom also became professionals in effect, contracted to sing by multiple companies.⁶² Companies of laudesi offered weekly instruction with the likely purpose of teaching the music of the refrains to less skilled members of the company.⁶³

During the initial phase of the development,⁶⁴ laude were in a simpler musical style, although we may also assume a developing tradition, for the moment unwritten, of an improvised elaboration of the melody of the strophes by the more skilled solo singers responsible for them.⁶⁵ The simplicity of the genre lay in the music’s compositional design: the conjunct melodic motion, where each pitch is usually only one step higher or lower than the preceding or following one, and the syllabic text setting, where each syllable of text is matched to one musical pitch.⁶⁶

Lauda melodies were in the rhythmically unmeasured monophony of the chant, but their melodic style was different. The chant melodies, which are on Latin texts, were sung by appointees to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Singing was one of their professional obligations. Laude, which are on Italian texts, were sung by attendees at the companies’ devotional services. Relocating responsibility to the confraternities’ members for the musical element of their services—settings of religious texts in the vernacular, notably—deepened their personal religious experience and made it more immediate in a way denied them as congregants who silently attended the ritual services of an ecclesiastical institution.⁶⁷

Instrumentalists of the Signoria

The following is the earliest known reference (1292) to an instrumental corps in the city’s employ.

In . . . council, . . . all matters . . . were . . . authorized