Music and the representation of princely power in the fifteenth and sixteenth century* Vincenzo Borghetti Università degli studi di Verona L ondon, 1745: William Hogarth opens the series of pictures entitled Marriage A-la-mode [sic] with the sign- ing of a marriage contract sealing a mésalliance between the Squanders, impoverished aristocrats, and a wealthy bourgeois family (Fig. 1).1 Even a superficial observer can readily understand the social setting of the scene and the status of the individuals who inhabit it. The characters are placed in an aristocratic ambience, a room at the residence of the Earl, the father of the bridegroom, as numerous details indicate: the insignia on the seat, frame, and canopy, for example, or the imposing portrait of the host, rich in mythological, chivalric, and military symbolism, such as the bolt of lightning in his left hand, the armor, the (fake) Order of the Golden Fleece at his neck, and the cannon charged to fire. Hair style, dress, jewellery, gouty disposition, and gestures, all point to the man seated in the lower right as the aristocratic pater familias. The noble lineage of his family is unequivocally emphasized by one more detail that is given great prominence: the scroll of parchment displaying the genealogical tree of the Squanders begins from an armored warrior, identified in a caption as none other than William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. The rightful claims of the family to be counted among the ranks of the noblesse d’épée could not be more evident.2 * 1. 2. Parts of this article were read at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Tours, July 2005; at the conference La “capella musicale” fra corte e chiesa nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Camaiore, October 2005; and at the IMS Conference, Zürich, July 2007. An earlier and shorter version has been published in Italian in the proceedings of the Camaiore conference: Cappelle musicali fra corte, stato e chiesa nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. Franco Piperno, Gabriella Biagi Ravenni, and Andrea Chegai (Florence: Olschki, 2007), pp. 319-348. Marriage A-la-mode exists as both oil paintings and engravings. The engraving of the first picture, reproduced in Figure 1, shows the scene of the oil painting as if seen through a mirror: I have chosen it because it shows the details that I discuss more clearly. However, I describe the oil painting, where the pater familias is placed on the right, as it better suits his status. For a detailed analysis, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991-1993), 2, pp. 218-26. Acta Musicologica, LXXX/2 (2008), pp. 179-214 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power The conspicuous references that the Earl makes to his illustrious ancestry betray the precarious present conditions of the house of Squander, and confer a sense of pathetic ostentation on all the marks of nobility scattered throughout the scene, to which the armed man serves as a crucial interpretive key. In the Marriage A-la-mode his figure is the nostalgic emblem of a past dignity that contrasts with the economic and moral decline of the aristocracy of the time, for whom little remains other than to exhibit as prominently as possible the surviving symbols of a vanished prestige, originally acquired thanks to the activities of men whose pride and valor have now sadly disappeared. It is telling that Hogarth portrays the son of the Earl, the viscount of Squanderfield, as a frivolous fop who admires himself in a mirror, and places him on the left of the scene, in symbolic opposition to the warrior and the military values that he represents. Fig.1: William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-mode, engraving of first picture. 180 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power In Marriage A-la-mode Hogarth narrated a story through images with strongly satirical tones, investing objects, demeanors, and settings with clear symbolic force, above all in the first episode.3 The artist worked by selection and simplification, focusing on a few eloquent and readily recognizable details that, in his opinion, were best suited to characterize immediately the social and moral condition of the characters. While deriding the figure of the armed warrior as an empty relic, Hogarth sanctioned, albeit satirically, its continuing validity as a distinctive emblem of the aristocracy, and therefore underlined the sense of continuity that this aristocracy felt with respect to its foundational myths, crucial for defining the very concept of nobility. As personification of the ideals of medieval chivalry, the armed man was the symbol par excellence of aristocratic identity. Thanks in no small part to his satirical intent, Hogarth was particularly successful in presenting to the viewer the identity of a given social group, the aristocracy, through the specific visual symbols that this group used both to construct and to communicate such identity. In this article I am also primarily concerned with aristocratic identity and the symbols employed to construct and communicate it. Whereas Hogarth’s scene is set in the eighteenth century, I will focus instead on the European courts of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and will take as my subject the aural symbols of aristocratic identity rather than the visual ones. On the basis of a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, I will discuss the processes by which music was appropriated by the ruling class at the time of the founding of the first institutions internal to princely courts dedicated primarily to music, the chapels. At the same time, I will attempt to answer the questions of why and how, during the course of the fifteenth century, music came to be considered a characteristic element of the court, and became indispensable to the definition of the identity of the ruling class. What sort of music defined and displayed the public image of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prince, in the very manner that the armed man defined the status of the Squander family in Hogarth’s eighteenth-century painting? And why could it do so? My argument is structured in two parts. The first begins with a discussion of recent historiographical debates on musical patronage in the Renaissance, then concentrates on some characteristic features of the presence and uses of music at fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courts, and finally places the birth and growth of the musical chapel in the context of the transformations of court culture between the middle ages and the Renaissance. The second part is devoted to a few examples that illuminate, corroborate, and refine the partial conclusions reached in the first part. 3. In this sense it is relevant that the words on the marriage contract and the genealogical tree are clearly legible by the viewer. 181 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Music at Court: A Historiographical Question Saying that the production, consumption, and in some cases even the performance of music on the part of aristocrats became defining characteristics of European courts from around the mid fifteenth century seems a commonplace, so deeply is it rooted in music historiography. The notion of a specific relevance of music as a “natural” component of the courtly sphere derives largely from a few normative treatises on life at court, most famously Baldassar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528). A long scholarly tradition that goes back almost to the origins of musicology has considered the progressive institutionalization of music at European courts one of the foundational elements of the Renaissance. Musicologists have taken the abundant evidence of the importance of music at these courts as proof of a new paradigm in the relationship between power and this art from, and therefore as supporting the view of a decisive cultural discontinuity between the middle ages and the fifteenth century. The most renowned courts, the most famous patrons, but above all the great works produced by the most prominent composers under these patrons’ aegis have been the main objects of research on the part of musicologists primarily interested in the gradual reception of the “modern” paradigms of humanism within music. Such research has traditionally worked in two directions: on the one hand, archival and documentary investigations of primary sources both musical and contextual; on the other, analysis of the musical works. The historical context was meant to bestow meaning onto the works of the greatest composers of the time as expressions of the most advanced cultural patronage. Such bifurcated methodology has long been characteristic of the musicological study of the Renaissance, but its most representative fruits came to light in the 1980s and 1990s with the books of, among others, Iain Fenlon, Lewis Lockwood, Allan Atlas, and Warren Kirkendale, who studied four courts particularly relevant in the geography of Italian music: respectively Mantua, Ferrara, Naples, and Florence. 4 If the publication of these important books coincided with the apex of a certain way of writing music history, it also opened a far-reaching historiographical debate. Among the scholars who most directly contributed to this debate were Joseph Kerman, 4. See Iain Fenlon, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980-1982); Lewis Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara 1400-1505: The Creation of a Musical Centre in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984); Allan Atlas, Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici, with a Reconstruction of the Artistic Establishment (Florence: Olschki, 1993). 182 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Howard Mayer Brown, Richard Sherr, and Claudio Annibaldi.5 Albeit in very different ways and to very different ends, all noted how in these books the connection between music and court remained at best implicit, and at worst lost in the gap left wide open between documentary history and the analysis of individual compositions. Especially Kerman and, following him, Sherr expressed their discomfort at the shift in interest away from scores and towards “extramusical” considerations, the latter going so far as to propose abandoning the study of patronage altogether, given the apparent impossibility of reconciling history and analysis. Others, such as Brown, insisted on both the problematic nature and the intrinsic difficulty of demonstrating “the relationship between an individual piece (or a particular genre) and the society that caused it to come into being.”6 Reviewing the controversy, Annibaldi voiced the need to confront the question of patronage from a different perspective. He suggested that the aporias and consequent impasses in the study of Renaissance musical patronage derived in part from a certain insularity characteristic of Renaissance musicology, little inclined, in comparison with other disciplines, to go beyond the limits of an idealistic, Burckhardtian vision of patronage. According to Annibaldi, the authors mentioned above continued to view the patronage of important composers as exclusively determined by the tastes and inclinations of a “great” patron, seen as indicative in themselves of a humanistic “liberation” from the medieval heritage.7 As a consequence, all forms of musical promotion within the court became the result of a common “humanistic” model of patronage, a model that flattened out local circumstances and conditions, and failed to account for the multiplicity of meanings necessarily present in the multifarious uses of music within a world as complex as that of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courts. Invoking the insights provided by cultural anthropology and Marxist historiography and sociology, in particular the provocative writings of Norbert Elias, Annibaldi argued that these scholars found it difficult to recognize the socio-cultural differences between the various kinds of music produced in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courts. In particular, they failed to distinguish, on the basis of different repertories (sacred or profane, monodic or polyphonic) and the different ensembles for their performance (court chapel, chamber musicians), betweeen a flexible and personalized “humanistic” patronage, more typical of the sixteenth century, and an 5. 6. 7. See Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp. 118-19; Howard Mayer Brown, “Recent Research in the Renaissance: Criticism and Patronage,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987), pp. 1-10; Richard Sherr, review of Fenlon, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579-1597, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), and Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, Rivista italiana di musicologia 22 (1987), p 310-21; Claudio Annibaldi, “Introduzione,” La musica e il mondo: mecenatismo e committenza in Italia tra Quattro e Settecento, ed. Annibaldi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), pp. 9-43, esp. 12-22. Brown, “Recent Research in the Renaissance,” pp. 10. See Annibaldi, “Introduzione,” p. 14. The author further elaborated these ideas in his review of Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence, Il saggiatore musicale 3 (1996), pp. 361-91. 183 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power “institutional” patronage “based upon the age-old function of music as the audible symbol of a human group and its leaders,” more characteristic of the fifteenth.8 Such criticism has had important consequences, among them the gradual separation between two kinds of research. On the one hand, those interested in linking music and court explicitly have focussed on the sixteenth century, where they find varieties of musical patronage more identifiably “humanistic.” On the other hand, scholars of fifteenth-century music rarely if ever ask questions about the functions and meanings of music within princely courts. Linking the “great tradition” of Franco-Flemish polyphony to a purely institutional patronage has resulted in a diminished interest towards the cultural and ideological dimensions of the presence of this music at court. Since fifteenth-century music can be explicitly connected to the personal inclinations of a “strong” individuality only rarely, it seems to show no novelty with respect to the past: its presence at court remains a fact to be scrupulously registered, but this is it. Consequently, some of the most recent studies of music at fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courts, while bringing to life a striking richness of data, have reproduced historiographical models that were already questioned twenty years ago.9 On the one hand, it is widely acknowledged by Renaissance musicologists that in the fifteenth century the court became a—if not the—primary place for the production and consumption of music, to such a degree that a history of music that did not take this fact into account would be unthinkable. On the other, however, the institutionalization of music at court remains in the background: while its relevance cannot be denied, it has been rarely confronted thus far. Against a long tradition of studies focused on finding documents or analyzing compositional techniques, few scholars have tried to interrogate music’s possible cultural, social, political, and ideological meanings and, more generally, its uses as a constitutive element of the identity of political elites at the crucial moment of the Europe-wide explosion of production and consumption of polyphony.10 8. 9. 10. See Annibaldi, “Introduzione,” p. 10, 27-28. See, for example, Paul A. and Lora L. M. Merkley, Music and Patronage in the Sforza Court (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); and Honey Meconi, Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg-Burgundian Court (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). A few significant exceptions are Sabine Žak, Musik als Ehr und Zier (Neuss: Päffgen, 1979)—which, however, does not go beyond the late fourteenth century, the very time when the period examined in this article begins; Laurenz Lütteken, Dufay und die isorythmische Motette: Gattungstradition und Werkcharakter an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit (Hamburg: Wagner 1993); and Idem, “Motette” IV, 1-3, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994-, hereafter MGG II), vol. 6, pp. 513-21, reprinted with revisions in Messe und Motette, ed. Lütteken (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002), pp. 128-41. For a brief summary in English that takes into account wider contextual issues, see Iain Fenlon, “Music and Society,” in The Renaissance: From the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century, ed. Fenlon, Man and Music, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1-62, esp. 16-35. This volume contains interesting chapters on north Italian courts (Ferrara, Mantua, Milan), and Naples, by William Prizer and Allan Atlas respectively. Interesting contributions are now found in The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs: Music and Court Ceremony in Early Modern Europe, ed. Juan José Carreras and Bernardo García García (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005). 184 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Scholarship has more frequently concentrated on individual works or composers, taking into consideration the relationship between music and the representation of a social group only in the case of select compositions, where the celebratory occasion was sufficiently evident to allow the piece to be placed in direct relation with an individual patron. Even in such cases, however, analysis has been confined to specific details, for example the date of composition and the circumstances of performance, as in the famous cases of the Mass Hercules Dux Ferrarie by Josquin Desprez, or of a number of celebratory motets dating from the mid fifteenth century, such as the occasional, so-called “isorhythmic” motets by Guillaume Dufay. The attention of musicologists has remained mostly centered on the “great” work, the “great” composer, or the “great” patron, as if in a fundamentally celebratory attitude of praise perhaps inherited from the humanists themselves. Works have either been linked to a meta-historical concept of “celebration,” whose definition and whose values are rarely discussed, or, if they can be connected to the “enlightened” input of a given individual, they have been studied primarily as perfectible manifestations of “humanistic” patronage.11 Among the greatest conceptual problems faced by the study of the princely patronage of music in the fifteenth century is the difficulty to find alternatives to the Burckhardtian model, avoiding on the one hand the classification of any form of patronage as ipso facto “humanistic,” and on the other the interpretation of the “institutional” forms of patronage as a simple continuation of inherited customs. One of the consequences of the distinction between “humanistic” and “institutional” patronage—no matter how necessary this distinction actually is—is an interpretation of fifteenth-century patronage, especially of the “institutional” kind, and of the repretories closely tied to it as a mere prolongation of medieval practices, without specific cultural or ideological significance. The result is an implicit but nonetheless strong validation of the stereotypical image of a “long middle ages,” cohesive and generically “archaic,” opposed to that of a fully “modern” Renaissance.12 11. 12. Allan Atlas, for example, has attempted to overcome the critical impasse between a study that he defines as purely “documentary-sociological” and one that concentrates on the musical works, trying to establish a connection between the Mass Aggio visto lo mappamondo by Joan Cornago and Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Naples. Since he still considers rather generic “tastes of a given mecenate” as the primary cause of artistic patronage, however, this premise prevents him from answering the questions he asks about Cornago’s Mass. See Allan Atlas, “Courtly Patronage in the Fifteenth Century: Some Questions,” in Atti del XIV Congresso della Società Internazionale di Musicologia, ed. Angelo Pompilio, Donatella Restani, Lorenzo Bianconi, and F. Alberto Gallo, 3 vols. (Turin: EDT, 1990), vol. 3, pp. 123-30, esp. 123; see also Annibaldi, “Introduzione,” pp. 25-30. The difficulty of defining the period that extends from the early fifteenth to the early sixteenth century is significant precisely in regard to these questions: if the term “Renaissance” has become problematic for the Franco-Flemish repertories of this period, substituting it with “Late Middle Ages” implies a demotion that does not help to understand the cultural specificity of either the period or the repertories. 185 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Such indecision in defining the cultural profile of the Franco-Flemish fifteenth century reveals Renaissance musicology’s familiarity with critical approaches better suited to the study of discontinuities and explicit changes than to the examination of long-term continuities typical of so-called traditional societies. However, the so-called “new court history”—a recent historiographical orientation common to different disciplines such as social history, cultural anthropology, literary history, and the history of art—has demonstrated that the long-term persistence of cultural practices and rituals within a centuriesold society such as the feudal one does not necessarily imply the passive inheritance of fixed behavioural codes.13 The morphological stability of each element of “tradition” through cultural changes in time and space by no means prevents an evolution of their meanings. What is more, each of these elements can be consciously charged with strong identitary values on the part of a social group at moments when this very group becomes aware of the danger of its dissolution, or even simply its transformation.14 I believe that an approach to the world of the court capable of discovering and interpreting changes of meaning within preservation of values and resistance to change can be especially productive for musicologists interested in the production and consumption of music in fifteenth-century courts. This point of view opens up space for a new understanding of the “institutional” type of patronage, which otherwise, while correctly recognized, in the words of Annibaldi, as “the archaic expression of a human group and of its leaders,” risks being passed over as an uninteresting remnant of the past. The signs of continuity between fifteenth-century music and that of earlier times are obvious. Most musical forms did not change significantly (just think of the formes fixes), nor did compositional techniques (for example isorhythm), nor did the presence of groups of musicians around the most prominent members of the ruling class. The elements specific to this period are to be found elsewhere. The growth and consolidation of music within the princely court are signs of a change that, over the course of the 13. 14. The phrase “new court history” has been coined by the historian John Adamson to define the renewed historiographical interest in the court as a social and cultural setting over the last two decades; see John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court, 1500-1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500-1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999), pp. 7-41, esp. 41. See Trevor Dean, “Le corti: un problema storiografico,” in Origini dello Stato: processi di formazione statale in Italia fra Medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Mohlo, and Pierangelo Schiera (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), pp. 425-48; Marcello Fantoni, “Corte e Stato nell’Italia dei secoli XIV-XVI,” in Origini dello Stato, pp. 449-66; Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court;” Maria Antonietta Visceglia, “Corti italiane e storiografia europea: linee di lettura,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2 (2004), pp. 7-49; Amedeo Quondam, Cavallo e cavaliere: l’armatura come seconda pelle del gentiluomo moderno (Rome: Donzelli, 2003); Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002). For a musicological application of this historiographical approach, see Laurenz Lütteken, “Ritual und Krise: Die neapolitanischen L’homme armé-Zyklen und die Semantik der Cantus firmus-Messe,” in Musik als Text: Bericht über den internationalen Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993, 2 vols., ed. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 1, pp. 207-18. 186 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power fifteenth century, turned music into a distinctive and indeed necessary characteristic of the court itself. Even if music had always existed within centers of power, the emergence and stabilization of the production of courtly music in the fifteenth century cannot be interpreted purely as the somehow “organic” growth of “primordial” and metahistorical practices. On the contrary, this process testifies to a new kind of relationship between the ruling class and music.15 The effects of this increased presence of music in fifteenth-century courts are well documented by many studies of individual institutions, several of which have been cited above. Musicologists have paid less sustained attention, however, to the possible causes of this phenomenon.16 I believe that, in order to address such causes, it is useful to consider the institutionalization of music at court in two related contexts: on the one hand, the transformations of the court in connection with the long-term change from the medieval feudal society to the ancien régime, and, on the other, the process of definition and rationalization of rituals that characterized court culture between the middle ages and the modern era. The “new court history” has focussed on these fundamental aspects of court life between the mid fifteenth century and the diffusion of new models of courtliness in the early sixteenth century with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier across several disciplines, but the results of these investigations have not been taken into full account by musicology. In the next section of this article I will first concentrate on such aspects, and will then discuss how the growth and consolidation of music in the princely court can be understood in the context of the transformations of the court and the redefinition of the characteristic rituals of the feudal world. The Transformations of the Court in the Late Middle Ages The production and consumption of music at court began to stabilize at a time of profound changes within court society, connected to the long-term transition from the medieval to the modern model of court. Historians consider the late fourteenth and especially the fifteenth century as a crucial laboratory for the definition of a few crucial aspects of regal and princely rule and its attending discourses that will be eventually codified in the ancien régime.17 Such new forms and discourses of power and authority found their origin in the growing emphasis on the figure of the sovereign, who was increasingly defined 15. 16. 17. See Franco Piperno, “ ‘Suoni della sovranità’: Le cappelle musicali fra storiografia generale e storia della musica,” in Cappelle musicali, pp. 11-37. I am grateful to the author for supplying me with a copy of his conference paper prior to publication. Particularly interesting in this regard are Lütteken, Dufay und die isorythmische Motette; and Idem, “Come nasce una ‘cappella’? L’istituzionalizzazione della musica nel Quattrocento,” in Corti rinascimentali a confronto: letteratura, musica, istituzioni, ed. Barbara Marx, Tino Matarrese, and Paolo Trovato (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2003), pp. 13-25. See Visceglia, “Corti italiane,” p. 15. 187 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power as the fulcrum of the court, and therefore of the state. This centrality was manifested through the continuous growth of the entourage and household of the prince: beginning from the mid fifteenth century, we witness an increase in the number of courtiers directly connected to the person of the prince, responsible for either the care of his person or the administration of the state.18 The private space of the prince coincided ever more with a political space, and the court became a microcosm, of which the prince was the symbolic center. From the place where power resided, the court became a place that made the representation of power possible: as Lorenzo Ornaghi has written, in this period the court “stood for—and thus rendered visible—a whole complex of political power.”19 The transition of the princely court from feudal paradigms to those that will characterize the ancien régime occured in the context of, and was caused by, the specific political and cultural conditions of late-fourteenth-century Europe. In short, the profound religious crisis connected to the so-called “Avignon Captivity” and the Great Schism (1378-1417) resulted in a weakening of papal power and, consequently, an almost compensatory growth of the sacrality of the figure of the king. This tendency distinguished above all the French monarchs, whose consecration by means of anointment traditionally conferred upon them miraculous powers and the status of “most Christian kings” (reges christianissimi).20 As Marc Bloch famously argued, it was precisely in the late fourteenth century that the sacerdotal, and hence sacred, nature of royal power was forcefully underlined. A prime example of this progressive assimilation of rex and sacerdos is the coronation ceremony of Charles V (1338-1380), which appropriated the symbols and gestures of the consecration of bishops in ways that reveal a powerful desire to establish a sort of equivalence between royal and sacerdotal anointments.21 18. 19. 20. 21. One example among many: the holders of offices with a stipend at the court of the dukes of Burgundy expanded from 234 in 1426 to 1030 in 1474, while those physically present at court grew from 308 members in 1450 to 590 (plus 294 men of the guard) in 1475; see Werner Paravicini, “Structure et fonctionnement de la cour bourguignonne au XV e siècle,” in Milano e Borgogna: due stati principeschi tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Jean-Marie Cauchies and Giorgio Chittolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), pp. 67-74, esp. 70. See also Idem, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy: A Model for Europe?,” in Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 69-102. Lorenzo Ornaghi, “La ‘bottega delle maschere’ e le origini della politica moderna,” in “Familia” del principe e famiglia aristocratica, 2 vols., ed. Cesare Mozzarelli (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), 1, pp. 9-23, esp. 13. See also Bernard Guenée, “Corte,” in Dizionario dell’Occidente medievale, 2 vols., ed. Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 1, pp. 268-82 (Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident mediéval [Paris: Fayard, 1999]); Gregory Lubkin, “Strutture, funzioni e funzionamento della corte milanese nel Quattrocento,” in Milano e Borgogna, pp. 75-83. See Jacques Le Goff, “Re,” in Dizionario dell’Occidente medievale, 2, pp. 944-63, esp. 944-46. See Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 114 (Les Rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre [Paris: Istra 1924]). Bloch points to the forceful promotion that such position received during the reign of Charles V, especially in the Traité du sacre by Jean Golein. 188 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Far from remaining a prerogative of the French monarchs, the reinforcement of the sacred and even eucharistic dimensions of royal power characterizes the idea of monarchy in the later middle ages in the whole of western Europe. Bloch mentioned, for example, the request on the part of the kings of Navarre, Scotland, and Aragon to be anointed.22 He also noted that, from around the mid fourteenth century, emperors tended to emphasize their ecclesiastical privileges by attending the Christmas celebrations wearing the crown and carrying the sword.23 More recently, John Adamson has argued that during the transition to the ancien régime “the court located itself as part of a hierarchy of power that was not merely secular, but also divine,” and the sacralization of the figure of the prince acquired “an intensity rarely matched either before or since, in the period between the mid fifteenth century and at least the end of the seventeenth.”24 Significantly, it was in the fifteenth century that the custom of placing canopies above the throne and the dining table of the king began, on the example of altars and tabernacles.25 The Rationalization of Feudal Rituals The redefinition of court paradigms and the consolidation of a permanent musical establishment as an attribute and instrument of princely power occurred at the time when the most important rituals of medieval aristocratic culture started to be codified, especially the imperial election and the tournament. As Olaf Mörke has noted, the 1356 Golden Bull of Charles IV established once and for all the ceremonial rites for the imperial election, an act “which was crucial for the medieval constitutional system of the Empire and the idea of imperial universalism.”26 Through the fixation of roles, hierarchies, gestures, and objects, the Golden Bull transformed the rites of imperial election into a regulated system of symbolic communication devised to enact theatrically “the political order of the Empire and the functionality of his [the emperor’s] feudal hierarchy.”27 From the second half of the fourteenth century, another constitutive ritual of feudal identity, the tournament, underwent a process of ceremonial codification. Even if jousting has often been considered one of the most characteristic expressions of medieval culture, the most complete and detailed treatise that codified the “archaic” art of the 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. See ibid., p. 337, n. 17. See ibid., p. 118; the author refers specifically to the emperors Charles IV (1316-1378) and Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368-1437). See also Flynn Warmington, “The Ceremony of the Armed Man: The Sword, the Altar, and the L’homme armé Mass,” in Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music, ed. Paula Higgins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 89-130, esp. 97-104. Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court,” pp. 7-41, esp. 24 and 28 respectively. See ibid., pp. 27-33. Olaf Mörke, “The Symbolism of Rulership,” in Princes and Princely Culture 1450-1650, ed. Martin Gosman, Alasdair Macdonald, and Ario Vanderjagd, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 1, pp. 3149, esp. 47. Ibid., p. 47. 189 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power combat on horseback, the Livre des Tournois of René of Anjou, titular king of Naples, was written only in the mid fifteenth century.28 What is more, during the fifteenth century tournaments became increasingly sumptuous affairs, crystallizing as quintessential manifestations of the aristocracy, the exclusive and characteristic domain of the ruling elite.29 As access to the top of the feudal order was disciplined through fixed and easily repeatable formulas, the display of the virtues of the warrior, a prerogative of the exercise of power at every level of the hierarchy, became organized as a ceremony. In a manner analogous to the imperial election, in this period tournaments were meant to reaffirm the validity of the socio-political order through a magnificent and highly formalized ritual. It is not coincidental that the organization of rituals so important for defining feudal identity happened late and in a critical period, when the elasticity of previous protocols could compromise the very existence of the imperial institution, and when new techniques and practices of combat had removed the horseman from the center of the battlefield, and therefore questioned the role of the sovereign as the most effective leader of his own armies, to the advantage of professional mercenaries.30 At the very moment when the supremacy of feudal aristocracy on the battlefield was threatened, the spectacularization of its rituals became a necessity, since it conferred visibility to its dominant position, and underlined its function and status in ways that safeguarded the legitimacy of that class’s claims to social and political power (see below). The transformation of the court between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, characterized by an increasing emphasis on the figure of the sovereign and his sacred dimension, and the theatricalization of his identity-building rituals, was accomplished with particular efficacy and timeliness by the house of Burgundy. This dynasty developed a model of court that became paradigmatic in Europe, for two separate sets of reasons. Firstly, as princes of royal blood and cousins of the kings of France, the dukes of Burgundy were at the head of a composite state, constituted by several territories, each different in its character and history, and, above all, not geographically connected.31 The duke, therefore, was the only element able to unify symbolically a heterogeneous realm. It was precisely because they knew that they were the only true “center” of their possessions that the dukes created, if not the first, certainly the most conspicuous example of a late 28. 29. 30. 31. See Franco Cardini, “Il guerriero e il cavaliere,” in L’uomo medievale, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1987), pp. 83-123, esp. 114-15. Regarding the aestheticization of the tournament and the consequent growth of costs for the required apparel between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, see Jean Flori, Cavalieri e cavalleria nel Medioevo (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), pp. 83-88 and 280-286 (Chevaliers et chevalerie au Moyen-Âge [Paris: Hachette 1998]); Duccio Balestracci, La festa in armi: Giostre, tornei e giochi nel Medioevo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001), pp. 17-41. See Balestracci, La festa in armi, p. 99. See Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Lands: The Low Countries Under Burgundian Rule, 1369-1530 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. xi-xiii. 190 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power medieval court described above. They increased dramatically the princely household, which during the fifteenth century came to include not only the noblesse d’épée, but also representatives of other elites, such as urban patricians, jurists, and men of the cloth.32 Thanks to the ties that bound these different social classes to the house of the sovereign, the dukes of Burgundy succeeded in realizing a paradigmatic model of the court as socio-political microcosm. In this microcosm the power of the prince was expressed and rendered visible through a process of synthesis: the centrality of the prince represented the ideal unifying factor not only for the court, but for the whole state. The exaltation of the primacy of the duke’s role as a sovereign expressed other aspirations as well. The luxury and splendor that distinguished the Burgundian court constituted an attempt to counterbalance a deficit of royalty in comparison with the house of France, from which that of Burgundy originally derived.33 The dukes not ony appropriated the rituals of royal authority, but, carrying them to a higher, awe-inspiring level, surpassed the court of France in the display of royal magnificence.34 This magnificence sought to conceal the Burgundians’ subordination to the French crown, and to compensate for the lack of a royal status with the public exhibition of its attributes. A precious testimony of the confusion surrounding the social rank of the dukes of Burgundy is found in the chronicles of Ducas and Laonicus Calcondila, fifteenth-century byzantine historians: describing western princes with considerable precision regarding the different levels of their powers, they incorrectly identify the duke of Burgundy as “the King of Flanders.”35 The Burgundian court insistently practiced the magnificent cult of chivalric ideals, as testified by the creation of the Order of the Golden Fleece and by a systematic militarization that reached unprecedented levels under Charles the Bold.36 What is more, the dukes worked hard to create an aura of sacred legitimacy for a power that did not derive from anointment, like that of their French royal cousins. Therefore their protocol was uniquely ceremonial: if, for example, in the mid fifteenth century it was sufficient to keep one’s eyes lowered when addressing the king of England, when it came to the duke 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. See Paravicini, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy,” pp. 77-85; Idem, “Structure et fonctionnement de la cour bourguignonne,” p. 69. See Visceglia, “Corti italiane,” p. 11; Otto Cartellieri, La Cour des ducs de Bourgogne (Paris: Payot 1946), pp. 72-74. The Burgundian cult of pomp far exceeded that of the French Valois, who, especially during the last years of the reign of Charles VII and those of Louis XI’s, went through a rather rough patch; see Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans, The Burgundian Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 282-332 (Les Pays Bas bourguignons [Paris: A. Michel, 1983]). See Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier, “Bisanzio e l’Occidente,” in Dizionario dell’Occidente medievale, 1, pp. 99-108, esp. 103. See Paravicini, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy,” pp. 73-75; Idem, “Structure et fonctionnement de la cour bourguignonne,” p. 69. 191 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power of Burgundy courtiers had to go down on their knees.37 Moreover, the dukes tried to compensate for a lack of “authentic” miraculous qualities through the appropriation of relics and the fabrication of reliquaries and other sacred apparels, and through the exceptional importance given to the devotional practices of the ruler.38 I want to suggest that the institution of a particularly prestigious group of musicians charged with the task of performing polyphonic music during liturgical functions celebrated at court constituted one of the most effective instruments of this cultural project of self-legitimization. The polyphonic music of the chapel was another resource that intensified “the aura of extraordinary resplendence” about the duke, and therefore reinforced and completed the construction of his sacred identity.39 Besides tournaments and reliquaries, the rationalization of feudal rituals that characterized the princely court in the later middle ages also invested music in crucial ways, since polyphony represented an indispensable instrument in the definition of the “new” identity of the sovereign. At this point it is necessary to examine how music participated in the transformation of the court, and why the patronage of music became a characteristic element of that institution on a European level. Origins and Functions of the Chapel What happened exactly to music in fifteenth-century courts? In short, between the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth century court music went through a process of institutionalization that left little room for those ad-hoc musical manifestations present at various courts in earlier periods: it was at this time that the chapels were founded as structures conceived essentially for the production of music. I am certainly not claiming that the court chapel as a religious institution was an invention of the decades between the fourteenth and fifteenth century: it is rather its transformation into an essentially musical organism that is specific to this period. 40 With this transformation the composition and performance of music were grafted onto a structure endowed with a precise organi37. 38. 39. 40. See Guenée, “Corte,” p. 278. See also Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Arnold, 1924), p. 31 (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden [Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1919]); Paravicini, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy,” pp. 88-89. On the importance of liturgical apparatuses (reliquaries and sacred garments) for the court of Burgundy and their diffusion in European courts of the fifteenth century, see Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance, pp. 76-135; on the growth of the symbolic value of the cult of sacred art at court, see also Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court,” pp. 27-29 and 37-39. Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance, p. 133. The ambivalence of the chapel as a religious institution and a center of musical performance continued for some time, and as late as the sixteenth century the maestro di cappella who led the ensemble need not be a musician; see Martin Ruhnke, “Kapelle,” in MGG II, 4, pp. 1788-97. See also Juan José Carreras, “The Court Chapel: A Musical Profile and the Historiographical Context of an Institution”, in The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs, pp. 8-20. 192 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power zation that regulated hierarchies, privileges, obligations, and retributions. On account of both its origins and its close ties to the devotional practice of the sovereign, the chapel is not comparable in terms of its structure, status, image, and cultural and ideological ends to any group of musicians employed in princely quarters. What is more, as promoters of values that were shared by most European rulers, chapels were by and large not adapted to the needs of each individual court; notwithstanding some differences, they emerged already in the early part of the fifteenth century as international institutions, whose very stability facilitated the circulation of musicians and their repertories at a European level. Thanks to fundamental similarities in structure, function, and system of retribution, in the second half of the fifteenth century it was possible to listen broadly to the same music, often preserved in very similar manuscripts, and even to encounter the same performers in geographically distant court chapels, from Burgundy to Naples and from the Iberian peninsula to Poland. In the fifteenth century the possession of a chapel belonged to that “lexicon of pre-eminence” common to the largest European courts. 41 Just like other courtly rituals such as the imperial election and the tournament, with the foundation of chapels music changed from a customary practice to an instrument for the representation of power, charged with a precise ideological role, that of defending, preserving, and above all exhibiting the identitary values of the ruling class. The transformation of the chapel from a religious institution to a primarily musical one during the fifteenth century is evident in the growth of production and consumption of polyphonic music. The most important chapels were increasingly responsible for the performance of a kind of polyphony that required a technical and professional competence far beyond those of the average cleric. Earlier, polyphony could be performed only in exceptional circumstances and for specific events, and depending on the availability of singers able to deal with mensural notation. It was between the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth century that this repertory became institutionally defining for the court chapel, thanks to the recruitment of singers possessing the required musical education. The predilection for polyphony, meant as res facta, to the detriment of the practice of plainsong, gave a profoundly different meaning to music in the princely chapel. The “artificial” nature of polyphony, in the etymological sense of the term, added magnificence to the “ordinary” liturgical monody. I believe that the possibility of displaying and articulating the pietas of the prince in the excellence of the polyphonic elaboration was a fundamental reason for the preference granted to such a repertory by the princes themselves. Thanks to this privileging of polyphony, music at court chapels took on an essentially ideological role. Just like the prince’s armor at the moment of the ritualization of the tournament, polyphonic music ceased to be simply music for a liturgical service, 41. Piperno, “ ‘Suoni della sovranità’ .” pp. 17-19. 193 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power and became a luxury good, a display object. In the words used by Amedeo Quondam to describe the prince’s armor, polyphonic music was “a powerful representational machine,” an instrument in the hands of princes meant to define and communicate above all else the sense of the “public” and sacral dignity of those who possessed it.42 Particularly valuable evidence of the use of polyphonic music at princely courts for ideological ends emerges in a series of documents recently called to musicologists’ attention by Rob Wegman. In discussing the “veritable culture war” that emerged in the late fifteenth century in much of Europe on the suitability of polyphony for liturgical functions, Wegman cites the polemic that exploded in a German city in 1486. The city elders of Görlitz requested one Johannes Behem, parish priest of the church of St. Nicholas, that liturgical music be performed in plainchant. According to them, monophony would have stimulated authentic feelings of devotion among the faithful, whereas polyphony could have turned the sacred celebration into “hofereyen.”43 Behem’s negative response ignited a controversy that travelled from Görlitz all the way to Rome. Without entering into the details of this controversy, it is extremely interesting to note that the citizens of Görlitz used a term such as “hoferey” to denounce polyphony as inappropriate for religious functions. Translated by Wegman as “pride, vanity, vainglory,” the term “hoferey” is etymologically linked with Hof, “court.”44 It seems significant that the term chosen to express the supposedly excessive worldliness of polyphonic music was intimately tied to the discursive space of the court. Recourse to this specific term by the citizens of Görlitz reveals the degree to which, in the late fifteenth century, polyphony was perceived as a distinctive attribute of princely pomp, the display of a glory all too secular to be accepted by proto-Reformation religious movements. And this is not just a German matter: from the Florence of Girolamo Savonarola to the France of Jean Le Munerat, polyphonic music was the target of repeated critical attacks as inappropriate for liturgical functions, as Wegman has demonstrated. 45 It is surely no coincidence that such polemics grew in the second half of the fifteenth century, the time of the likes of Obrecht, Isaac, Agricola, and Josquin, and of the quick take-off of the greatest and most expensive Italian chapels: the investment in polyphony as an instrument of the theatricalization of princely power had begun to produce its fruits. A series of changes that can be traced to the earliest period of the court chapel is symptomatic of the increasing importance of polyphony. In a few chapels the members with primarily musical duties, who were hence capable of performing polyphonic 42. 43. 44. 45. Quondam, Cavallo e cavaliere, p. 7. Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe 1470-1530 (New York: Routledge 2005), p. 6; the original text reads “… danne so man houereyen [hofereyen] doraws machte.” Ibid., p. 1. See ibid., especially the chapter “Polyphony and Its Enemies: Before and After the 1470s,” pp. 1748. 194 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power music, soon began to differentiate themselves from the other members. Around the mid fourteenth century, for example, the chapel of Peter III of Aragon included six chaplains in charge of regular religious functions, plus a group of singers of international provenance for the performance of polyphony. Analogous situations are found at the French, Burgundian, and papal courts: the latter saw the formation of a group of chaplains with primarily musical functions during the Avignon pontificate of Benedict XII. 46 During the years following the Council of Constance and the return of the popes to Rome, the organizational model of the papal chapel spread to other European courts. It is not surprising that, at a time when princes were keen to emphasize the sacred nature of their power, the usage of the papal court would be especially attractive. It was above all with the dukes of Burgundy, however, that the court chapel took center stage as a means of displaying rank and as an important source of legitimization. Although, as numerous historians have emphasized, the house of Burgundy did not elaborate original court rituals, it constituted a model for other European states regarding the institutional patronage of music. 47 For the reasons mentioned above, the Burgundian state was among the first where the rituals of court life progressively took the place of genuine power. Such conditions clearly favored a conception of princely power emphatically centered on magnificentia, in which music played a crucial role. Around the time of the death of Philip the Bold (1404), for example, the chapel was exceptionally large for the period: with 28 members, it was bigger than those of the king of France and the pope, two monarchs among the very few able to claim an “authentic” sacred origin. 48 What is more, their interest for the political uses of music encouraged the dukes, especially Philip the Good (1396-1467), to promote the foundation of maîtrises in several cathedrals and collegiate churches: as centers of excellence for musical education, they guaranteed for over a century the pre-eminence of Franco-Burgundian singers and music—and therefore, by proxy, of the duke of Burgundy himself—throughout Europe. 49 Affirming the charismatic figure of the sovereign through a politics of magnificence would become a dominant characteristic of Italian courts. Their frequent territorial 46. 47. 48. 49. See Ruhnke, “Kapelle,” pp. 1788-89; Lütteken, “Come nasce una ‘cappella’?,” pp. 13-25. See Paravicini, “The Court of the Dukes of Burgundy;” Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court,” p. 28; Visceglia, “Corti italiane,” pp. 17-18; Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance. It is worth noting that, with the exception of Belozerskaya, these scholars do not occupy themselves directly with the production and consumption of arts among the dukes of Burgundy, but concentrate rather on the function of the court, its personnel, and its etiquette. See Ludwig Finscher, “Burgund,” in MGG II, 2, pp. 267-76, esp. 271; see also Jeanne Marix, Les musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne au XVe siècle (Paris: Droz, 1937). See Laurenz Lütteken, “Maîtrise,” in MGG II, 5, pp. 1597-1602; Idem, “Die maîtrise im 15. Jahrhundert: Zum institutionsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Vorrangstellung franco-flämischer Musiker,” in Professionalismus in der Musik. Arbeitstagung in Verbindung mit dem Heinrich-Schütz-Haus Bad Köstritz vom 22. bis 25. August 1996, ed. Christian Kaden and Viktor Kalisch (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1999), pp. 132-44. 195 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power fragmentation, as well as their lack of a significant lineage and often also of a formal investiture, meant that the young Italian dynasties found themselves in conditions analogous to those of the dukes of Burgundy, and therefore played the same cards, so to speak.50 Political instability was compensated for with the cult of display: in the period following the peace of Lodi (1454), which signalled the start of a gradual weakening of the Italian states, Italian court chapels became the most competitive and remunerative. Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444-1476), who aspired to the title of king of Lombardy without having obtained from the Emperor even that of duke of Milan, sought to affirm an image of his supposedly legitimate “Maiestà Divina” by founding one of the most impressive chapels ever seen in Europe with respect to size, quality, and fame of its members.51 Similarly, in one of the darkest moments for the house of Savoy, the Duke Charles II (1486-1553), cornered in the city of Vercelli after the invasion of most of his possessions by the French, entrusted his prestige to the visibility of a virtually non-existent power, insisting even in such dire conditions on remarking his princely identity through the symbols of chivalric tradition (chivalric orders and tournaments), and, of course, his chapel.52 From the papal court to France, from Burgundy to the Italian states, the organization of court music through the creation of chapels responded to the need to construct and to exhibit one’s princely status by investing an inherited practice with strong identitary values. Such splendid institutional display of music was in many cases inversely proportional to the legitimacy of one’s claims to royal rank, and to the political or economic fortune of a dynasty or family.53 The institutionalization of court chapels over the course of the fifteenth century responded to a general re-thinking of the role of music at court, which, far from being due to the artistic inclinations of individual “enlightened” patrons, participated in the transformation of the court and, specifically, the rationalization of ritual practices between the late middle ages and the modern era. Over the course of only a few decades, the establishment of a chapel able to perform polyphonic music became one of the indispensable requisites for the very exercise of princely power.54 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. See Piperno, “ ‘Suoni della sovranità’ ,” pp. 24-25. On the Sforza court of Milan and the political significance of music for its dukes, see Evelyn S. Welch, “Sight, Sound and Ceremony in the Chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza,” Early Music History 12 (1993): pp. 151-90; Lubkin, “Strutture;” Idem, A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994), pp. 87-121 and 214-41. See Luisa Gentile, “Musica, musicisti e riti del potere principesco tra Savoia e Piemonte (fine XIV – inizio XVI sec.),” in cappelle musicalo, pp. 137-52; Marie Thérèse Bouquet, “La cappella musicale dei duchi di Savoia dal 1504 al 1553,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 5 (1970), pp. 3-36. Regarding the growth of artistic patronage in periods of political weakness, see Piperno, “ ‘Suoni della sovranità’,” pp. 24-25. The centrality of chapels in the exercise of princely power is reflected in the richness of surviving documents connected to such institutions, and in the relatively high number of extant musical sources directly linked (or at least linkable) to the main princely houses of Europe from the mid 196 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power The fortune of the court chapel in the fifteenth century proves that, as Barthèlemy de Chasseneux wrote in his Catalogus gloriae mundi, “honor consistit in signis extereoribus.”55 According to this sixteenth-century Provençal jurist, the visibility of social ranks was a fundamental element of the world order. He underlined how the theatricalization of the symbols of this social hierarchy had become an integral part of the possession of power. The birth of the court chapel and the “institutional” patronage associated with it represent a crucial step towards the aestheticization of fundamental aspects of feudal culture, an aestheticization that was later consecrated by Castiglione. For him, significantly, the pre-eminence of the courtier in the matter of arms did not refer so much to his ability in leading actual armies, but to his handling of arms and horses (as well as dance, games, conversation, and musical instruments) with grace and sprezzatura within the theatrical space of the court.56 The foundation and diffusion of the court chapel are therefore decisive steps away from the medieval world of chivalry and towards the etiquette and good manners characteristic of the ancien régime, already portrayed in the foundational pages of The Book of the Courtier. Music for Princes, I: The Neapolitan “L’homme armé” Masses If during the fifteenth century music became the carrier of some fundamental values of the ruling class, is it possible to see the effects of such a functional change in the music itself? Can music conceived for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courts be interpreted as analogous to the warrior in Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-mode? Is there a privileged repertory for the self-representation of the ruling class? As I have anticipated above, in the remainder of this article I will suggest how the appropriation of music by the aristocracy to symbolic and ideological ends is reflected in the music itself. The sacralization of the figure of the prince can be connected with the formation of a “new” repertory typical of the fifteenth century, the polyphonic setting of the ordinarium missae. Unlike the motet, in the mid fifteenth century the polyphonic mass still lacked a significant history: its fortunes grew rapidly precisely from this period. The fast-increasing production of polyphonic masses is revealing in itself of this genre’s newly- 55. 56. fifteenth century onwards. Even allowing for significant material losses for the previous centuries, the abundance of documents on and of music at European courts from the fifteenth century cannot be solely due to closer chronological proximity. Such abundance is also the consequence of the increased production and consumption of polyphonic music at courts, which in turn is the symptom of a new attitude towards this art form on the part of the ruling elite. Bartholomaeus Cassaneus, Catalogus gloriae mundi, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1579), as cited by Mörke, “The Symbolism of Rulership,” p. 31. See Amedeo Quondam, “Introduzione,” in Baldassar Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano (Milan: Garzanti, 2003), p. xv-xvi. 197 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power found pre-eminence, which was soon recognized by theorists: in the 1470s Johannes Tinctoris gave the mass pride of place in his hierarchy of musical forms.57 Over the course of the fifteenth century, the polyphonic mass became the central undertaking of composers/chaplains, and consequently a crucial element in the repertory of chapels. Such a dominant status finds its reason in the context of the development of court music in the late middle ages discussed above. If the liturgical celebration of the mass constituted the central moment in the performance of princely pietas, the addition of polyphony to this ritual changed the meaning of the ritual itself. The polyphonic setting of the ordinarium conferred greater importance onto the musical work, emphasizing not so much its liturgical function, but rather its magnificent elaboration: the splendor of the product pointed metonymically to the magnificence of its patron. Magnificence characterized all aspect of princely devotion: the splendor of polyphony was matched by the splendor of objects (vests, draperies, furniture, manuscripts), transforming the celebration of the divine office into that of the sovereign. The polyphonic mass as the musical expression of a magnificent religiosity was one of the most evident signs of the sacralization of the court between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, classically described by Bloch and more recently explored further by Adamson and others. What is more, in the second half of the fifteenth century the standardization of the sequence of the five sections of the ordinarium (within the limits imposed by local liturgical practices) made the mass eminently exportable, allowing it to circulate widely. In short, over the course of the fifteenth century the mass became the most prominent musical genre associated with the court chapel, and therefore one of the most important musical means to construct, consolidate, and spectacularize the social rank and the sacred and eucharistic identity of the prince. If the entire repertory of chapel music can be strongly connected to the courtly world from which it emanated, there exists a specific group of masses that best reveals an awareness of the representational and ideological role of music in this period: I am referring to the masses composed on the melody of the chanson “L’homme armé” from the mid fifteenth century well into the seventeenth.58 The chanson “L’homme armé,” 57. 58. “Missa est cantus magnus,” wrote Tinctoris under the heading “Missa” in his Diffinitorium musice; se Iohannes Tinctoris, Diffinitorium musice: un dizionario di musica per Beatrice d’Aragona. Studio, edizione critica e traduzione italiana, ed. Cecilia Panti (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004), pp. 8-9. Laurenz Lütteken has compared Tinctoris’ classification with the classical theory of styles, considering the mass a musical expression of the literary genus sublime; see Lütteken, “Ritual und Krise,” p. 216. The literature on the chanson “L’homme armé” and its sacred and secular versions is far too vast to be addressed here: I will cite only studies directly relevant to my argument. For a full list of publications see Annegrit Laubenthal’s and David Fallows’ articles “L’homme armé,” respectively in MGG II, 5, pp. 1110-16 and Grove Music Online; see also Alejandro Enrique Planchart, “The Origins and Early History of L’homme armé,” Journal of Musicology 20 (2003), pp. 305-57. 198 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power dating from the first half of the fifteenth century, describes an armed man who instills fear in his enemies. The complete text of the song is as follows: L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé / l’homme armé doibt on doubter. / On a fait partout crier, / que chascun se viegne armer / d’un haubregon de fer. / L’homme, l’homme, l’homme armé.59 This text has been interpreted in various ways, either as an anti-military song against an homme armé, or as a call to arms in favor of this homme armé.60 In the past few decades the second of these opinions has prevailed, in part because scholars have identified one possible context for the chanson and its elaborations in the Order of the Golden Fleece and the call for a crusade against the Turks discussed at its meetings following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.61 Supported especially by the Burgundians, this call was echoed at the main European courts. The L’homme armé masses were most likely the “official” musical expression of this movement for the defense of the Christian faith. Who was then this homme armé? If the context of the chanson was that of the call for a crusade against the Turks, the person hidden by “l’haubregon de fer” should be a miles Christi, a fighter for the values of the Christian faith.62 Therefore, even if armed men were of course part of the human landscape of fifteenth-century Europe, I do not believe that the haubregon of the homme armé was meant to protect just any soldier. The 59. 60. 61. 62. The complete text of the chanson (musical and verbal) is found in the manuscript now preserved in Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, VI E 40. I follow, with minor changes, the text established in Judith Cohen, The Six Anonymous L’homme armé Masses in Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms VI E 40 ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1968), p. 10. For the interpretation of the song as anti-homme armé or as the warning cry of a sentry at the arrival of enemy troops, see Geoffrey Chew, “The Early Cyclic Mass as an Expression of Royal and Papal Supremacy,” Music and Letters 53 (1972), pp. 254-69, esp. 267; Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 130. The possible links between the movement for a crusade against the Turks, the Order of the Golden Fleece, and “L’homme armé” was first suggested by Ruth Hannas, “Concerning Deletions in Polyphonic Mass Credo,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 5 (1952), pp. 152-86, esp. 167-168; it was then amplified by William F. Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial in the Low Counties: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece,” Early Music History 5 (1985), pp. 113-53; Adalbert Roth, “L’homme armé, le doubté turq, l’ordre de la toison d’or: Zur ‘Begleitmusik’ der letzten großen Kreuzzugsbewegung nach dem Fall von Konstantinopel,” in Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter. Paderborner Symposion des Mediävistenverbandes, ed. Detlef Altenburg, Jörg Jarnut, and Hans-Hugo Steinhof (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1991), pp. 469-79; Lütteken, “Ritual und Krise;” and Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 59205. It should be noted that the archives of the Order do not include any polyphonic music, and there are no documents supporting the hypothesis that the piece was composed for the meetings of the Order; see Barbara H. Hagg, “The Archives of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 120 (1995), pp. 1-43; Idem, “Music and Liturgy,” in L’ordre de la Toison d’or, de Philippe le Bon à Philippe le Beau (1430-1510): Idéal ou reflet d’un societé? (Bruxelles and Turnhout: Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique–Brepols, 1996), pp. 184-88. The chanson “L’homme armé” was used in combination with other cantus firmi tied to the cult of warrior saints such as Andreas or Michael; see Roth, “L’homme armé;” Wright, The Maze and the Warrior. 199 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power popularity of the chanson as a basis for polyphonic masses and the connections (either documented or suggested by scholars) of this specific repertory with the sovereigns of the time make it possible to identify this armed man with the figure of the prince himself, whose power, according to tradition, derived from his abilities as a military leader. The chanson “L’homme armé,” however, appeared and spread at a particular historical moment that saw the crisis of the medieval conception of war and the progressive dissolution of the ideals behind this conception. The employment of armies made up of professional mercenaries and especially the introduction of fire arms called into question the traditional role of the noblesse d’epée in battle. The arquebus, decried by Ludovico Ariosto as a “damned, abominable device made in hell,” had definitively compromised the military function and moral prestige of the medieval knight.63 Similarly, Niccolò Machiavelli often lamented the declining role of the sovereign as a military leader as one of the prime causes of the weakness of the Italian states in his period. In The Prince (1513-1514), for example, while discussing “how a ruler should act concerning military matters,” he observed: A ruler […] should have no other objective and no other concern, nor occupy himself with anything else except war and its methods and practices, for this pertains only to those who rule. And it is of such efficacy that it not only maintains hereditary rulers in power but very often enables men of private status to become rulers. […] Because Francesco Sforza was armed, from being a private citizen he became Duke of Milan; since his descendants did not trouble themselves with military matters, from being dukes they became private citizens.64 When Machiavelli wrote these words, however, for the prince the art of war had meant the art of playing at war for almost a century already: a “rhetorical” demonstration of military virtues under the general heading of “grace,” the sole quality, according to Castiglione, that would “merit that universal favor so highly valued.”65 The rhetorical dimension of such a demonstration is evident in the fact that, as mentioned above, the most complete Livre de turnois was written by a king without a kingdom, René of Anjou, nominally (and only nominally) king of Naples, who attempted to make his regal status evident through his investment in the symbolic gestures of a warrior-prince. His work on the tournament synthesized “the transformation of chivalric culture between the 63. 64. 65. See Cardini, Il guerriero e il cavaliere, p. 121. The passage of Ariosto (“maledetto, abominoso ordigno fabricato nel tartareo fondo”) is from Orlando furioso, canto 9, stanza 91; see Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), p. 222. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 51-2. Machiavelli also deplored the reduction of military acts on the part of Italian princes in the final chapter of L’Arte della guerra; see Idem, L’arte della Guerra, ed. Denis Fachard (Rome: Salerno, 2002), pp. 229-49. “Meritar quell’universal favore che tanto s’apprezza;” Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, p. 51. 200 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power twelfth and the sixteenth century [and] the loss of concrete military and social values attached to chivalric status.”66 The changes in the technique of warfare meant that in the fifteenth century the fight between “fearsome” knights covered by armors no longer had a determining military importance. The cuirass mentioned in “L’homme armé” progressively lost its practical purpose and became an object for tournaments, to be preserved through the codification of its forms and uses in a precise ritual. This codification was necessary in order to emphasize the role of this object in the self-identification of the ruling class, since this role was no longer obvious. The chanson “L’homme armé” was a step in this process of ritualization: it was, so to speak, the parade of the homme armé, celebrating through a magnificent ritual a world of valiant knights in armor whose identity was undergoing a crucial transformation. All sacred compositions based on “L’homme armé” sit at the intersection of a number of discourses related to the definition and defense of the identity of the prince, his status, his function, and the legitimization of his power. In a specific group of L’homme armé messes, however, the symbolic and ideological subtext implied by the choice of this tenor was expressed in a particularly effective way: I am thinking of the six L’homme armé masses in the manuscript VI E 40 of the National Library of Naples.67 This parchment codex was presented to Beatrice of Aragon, daughter of Ferrante I, King of Naples, on the occasion of her 1476 wedding to the King of Hungary, Matthaeus Corvinus. Its origins are to be located in a Burgundian milieux, both on account of its paleographic and codicological features, and because the dedicatory text at its close reveals that the six masses were welcome by “Charolus princeps,” usually identified as Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.68 66. 67. 68. Cardini, Il guerriero e il cavaliere, p. 115. Perhaps the most famous demonstration that the medieval and chivalric conception of warfare was out of date was the complete and mortifying defeat of the French chivalry by the English infantry at Agincourt in 1415, on which see at least Christopher Hibbert, Agincourt (London: Batsford, 1964). Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VI E 40 [hereafter NapBN 40]. For a detailed consideration of the manuscript and its repertory, see Cohen, The Six Anonymous L’homme armé Masses. “Charolus hoc princeps quondam gaudere solebat” (v. 15); the complete text is in ibid., p. 62. The coat of arms in the manuscript is accompanied by a motto that has until now remained unidentified; see ibid., p. 11. For the recent hypothesis that, after Beatrice of Aragon, NapBN 40 belonged to Charles de Clerc (1477-1535), a nobleman serving at the Habsburg-Burgundian court, or to a member of his family, see Barbara H. Hagg, “Charles de Clerc, seigneur de Bouvekerke, and Two Manuscripts: Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 215-16, and Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VI E 40,” in The Burgundian-Habsburg Court Complex of Music Manuscripts (1500-1535) and the Workshop of Petrus Alamire, Colloquium Proceedings, Leuven, 1999, ed. Bruno Bouckaert and Eugeen Schreurs (Leuven: Alamire, 2003), pp. 185-202. 201 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power The codex contains six masses: the first five for four voices, the last for five. Masses I-V are each based on a fragment of the “L’homme armé” melody, while the sixth contains the entire chanson.69 The use of the melody follows the outline in Example 1.70 The cantus firmus, which appears each time in enigmatic form, is accompanied by canons interwoven with Vergilian citations. Only the canon of the last mass reveals the Aeneid as the source: its first verse reads “Arma virumque cano, vincorque per arma virumque,” echoing the first verse of the Vergilian epic, “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris.” Each Kyrie, as well as the Gloria in the final mass, are troped, each trope expanding the fragment of the chanson used. An example of this process is the canon and tropes of Mass II (terms referring to an armed man are italicized): Text of the cantus firmus: l’homme armé, l’homme armé, l’homme armé Text of the canon: Ambulat hic armatus homo, verso quoque vultu arma rapit [...] Text of the trope: [...] Kyrie fidei miro arma donans viro quis cum hoste dimicet diro eleyson. Kyrie cuius virtute vir armatus tute hostem vincit gaudet salute eleyson. [...]71 The texts and paratexts of the Naples codex are highly significant for its overall meaning, for the three main reasons that I will now discuss. 69. 70. 71. In all the masses the first Kyrie and concluding Agnus dei are fragmentary, since the initial sheets of each mass were removed, probably because they were decorated with elegant miniatures; see Cohen, The Six Anonymous L’homme armé Masses, p. 12. This example is adapted, with some modification of the verbal text, from ibid., p. 25. I cite the transcription of the canon and tropes of the six masses by Steven Moore Whiting, published in Barbara H. Hagg, “Communication,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40 (1987), pp. 139-43, esp. 140. 202 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Example 1: The melody “l’homme armé” in the masses in NapBN 40. Firstly, all six L’homme armé masses employ a rigorous cantus firmus technique, in which the pre-existing melody, even if fragmentary, is easily perceived against the free voices. Hearing the tenor is made possible either by its melodic profile, which, with its fanfare-like quality and many intervals of a fourth and a fifth, differentiates it from the other voices even when the note values are the same, or by longer values with respect to its context. Examples 2a and 2b illustrate this point through two fragments: in the 203 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power first (Ex. 2a) the tenor has the same note values as the other voices, while in the second (Ex. 2b) its values are longer.72 In the first case the cantus firmus, even if mensurally similar to the free voices, is easily identifiable thanks to its ostinato-like repetition on different degrees of the lydian scale (C, F, B flat).73 Example 2a: NapBN 40, Mass III, Kyrie 2. 72. 73. NapBN 40, mass III, Kyrie 2; NapBN 40, mass II, Qui tollis. These examples are taken, with some modifications, from Six Anonymous L’homme armé Masses in Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VI E 40, ed. Judith Cohen, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 85 (Neuhausen--Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, 1981). This phenomenon is accentuated in the case of the first mass, where the brevity of the fragment of cantus firmus makes it easier to use it in progressions. 204 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Example 2b: NapBN 40, Qui Tollis. Secondly, the verbal text of the canons makes explicit references to the Aeneid, which, as Laurenz Lütteken has reminded us, was considered a founding text of chivalry throughout the middle ages. Aeneas became the paradigm of the warrior-prince, especially in the period of the crusades, when the image of Jerusalem or Constantinople falling into the hands of the “infidels” was regularly superimposed with that of Troy in flames.74 Therefore, the “Arma virumque cano” of the Neapolitan codex provides an interpretive key for the texts accompanying the masses: recalling metonymically the Aeneid, and therefore the ideals of the medieval courtly world, it effectively functions as a gloss to the text of the melody of “L’homme armé.” Finally, the references to the Aeneid and the texts of the chanson and of the tropes constitute a hermeneutic context for the compositional technique of the masses. If one decides to communicate the fundamental values of feudal society through the rigorous technique of cantus firmus, this very technique is invested with a strongly representative value. In NapBN 40 the musical pre-eminence of the tenor can be interpreted as the expression of its symbolic pre-eminence. 74. See Lütteken, “Ritual und Krise,” pp. 213-5. 205 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Thus far I have concentrated on several details of the content of the Neapolitan codex. As for all other musical sources, especially those commissioned for official occasions, however, this manuscript entrusts its message not only to its textual and paratextual content. The communicative process of NapBN 40 is rather located in the interrelation between its texts, both musical and verbal, and its material characteristics. In NapBN 40 the musical and symbolic emphasis on the tenor is constructed not only through notes and words, but also through unique visual and material features. The central role of the tenor in the contrapuntal fabric is evident both in the mise en page and in the very structure of musical notation. The graphic layout of the manuscript provides for a clear ordering of spaces destined to each individual part, an ordering uniformly maintained throughout the manuscript: superius and tenor always on the verso, contratenor altus and contratenor bassus always on the recto of every opening, as seen, for example, in Figure 2, which reproduces ff. 15v-16 (Mass II, Crucifixus). It is evident that such a disposition confers particular prominence to the tenor: this is the only voice that occupies a separate writing space on the page, the only one preceded and followed by empty staves, and the only one that is always identified by a large initial, a calligraphic Cadel more grandly and richly elaborated than the capital letters for the other voices. The musical notation intensifies in its own way the symbolic value of the cantus firmus. The presence or absence of “L’homme armé,” just like that of the prince in his residence, is signalled in a spectacular fashion and with extreme care: red notes when “L’homme armé” is silent, black ones when he sings (a differentiation that even involves the puncta augmentationis). It is possible to conclude, then, that the central position of the tenor “L’homme armé” in NapBN 40 celebrated the centrality of the prince in the ritual, and hence consecrated a mass with a rigorously treated cantus firmus as the musical tool best suited to emphasize and exhibit the identifying myths of the chivalric élite between the middle ages and the modern era. I would suggest that, above and beyond their call for a war against the Turks, the L’homme armé masses owed their success and longevity primarily to their function as the main musical symbol of the haute noblesse. Just like other symbolic fetishes of the medieval aristocratic ideal, the L’homme armé masses survived far beyond the crisis of chivalry and of the medieval socio-political order: they lasted well into the seventeenth century, by that time emblems of lost splendor and prestige. 206 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Fig. 2: NapBN 40, ff. 15v-16. 207 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Music for Princes, II: The Celebration of the Sovereign from the Neapolitan Codex to the Alamire Manuscripts There is no doubt that the codex NapBN 40 is an exceptional case among the musical sources of its time. As far as I know, there is nothing similar to either its content (a unitary cycle of masses on the same tenor) or its mode of transmission (its exceptional mise en page and distinct notational style). This manuscript, however, is much more than an isolated, clever late-medieval curiosity: NapBN 40 constitutes a true archetype of the importance that, from the mid fifteenth century, came to be bestowed onto a specific musical genre (the polyphonic mass), a specific compositional technique (the rigorous cantus firmus), and a specific type of book (the deluxe choirbook).75 In order to understand its paradigmatic value for the ideological use of music discussed above, it is necessary to place the Neapolitan codex in a wider perspective and compare it with both the repertory and some of the most representative manuscripts of the following decades. In terms of compositional technique, the first example that could be mentioned is Josquin’s Mass Hercules Dux Ferrarie. It is certainly not coincidental that Josquin recurred to a rigorous treatment of the cantus firmus similar to that found in the Neapolitan masses in order to glorify musically Ercole I Duke of Ferrara, nor that the tenor is reserved for the musical “embodiment” of the sovereign, thanks to the technique of the soggetto cavato. It is also no coincidence that the Hercules Mass became the basis for a rich tradition of masses for the official celebration of monarchs, including, to cite only a few examples, Vivat felix Hercules secundus dux Ferrariae by Cipriano de Rore, Ferdinandus Dux Calabrie by Jacquet de Mantua, and Carolus Imperator Romanus Quintus by Lupus. All these compositions basically employ the same techniques used first by Josquin and the anonymous composers of NapBN 40: whether they recur or not to the soggetto cavato, all exhibit a rigorous cantus firmus treatment, with a clear separation between the tenor and the free voices. An exclusive concentration on compositional techniques, however, would mean falling back into the very historiographical impasse mentioned early in this article, in which a strong link between music and patronage could only be posited in the presence of explicit textual and/or documentary references, while in their absence any investigation into the reciprocal interrelations between music and princely power would be foregone. As I have tried to demonstrate through my analysis of NapBN 40, it is instead possible to ask different sorts of questions to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music, avoiding 75. On the archetypal role of NapBN 40 for music manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Vincenzo Borghetti, “Il manoscritto di musica tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” in Il libro di musica: per una storia materiale delle fonti musicali in Europa, ed. Carlo Fiore (Palermo: L’Epos, 2004), pp. 89114, esp. 107-12. 208 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power considering the notes the sole signifying system, and studying the musical text together with the paratexts (not only verbal, but also iconographical) that accompany it and the material evidence of the books by which it was transmitted. In order to evaluate whether such an exceptional document as NapBN40 can be indicative of a new paradigm of patronage, one must compare it with other manuscripts containing polyphonic masses and observe the relative impact of its communicative strategies. One possible term of comparison can be found in the manuscripts produced by the scriptorium directed by Petrus Alamire at the Habsburg Court in the Low Countries from 1510 to 1530. Such a choice is not dictated purely by considerations of cultural milieu (the same court of the Low Countries, albeit a few decades later), but also by the observation that, in a few of his manuscripts, Alamire developed in a particularly direct and explicit fashion the suggestions advanced by the Neapolitan codex. From the point of view of the pagination of polyphony, Alamire’s manuscripts do not present any significant novelties in comparison with preceding or contemporary music books. His codices are distinguished primarily by the exactness of their calligraphy and especially by their many illuminations, which made them particularly prized objects.76 The richness of the decorative apparatus, however, does not function merely as an expensive decoration, accessory to a musical work endowed with autonomous relevance. The number and workmanship of the miniatures are instead the very instruments through which, in his luxury musical manuscripts, Alamire represented the definitive appropriation of polyphonic music to self-celebratory ends by the prominent ruling families in the early sixteenth century. The most characteristic aspect of Alamire’s decoration in comparison with other music manuscripts of the time is the recurring use of coats of arms and portraits of the commissioning patrons and/or the intended recipients of these manuscripts as gifts.77 Such images, indissolubly tied to the identity of the ruling class, were never employed merely as a precious but neutral background to the music that they accompany; they were rather placed within the musical text, and hence provide a key for an explicitly ideological reading of the polyphony within which they are visually embedded.78 76. 77. 78. On the manuscripts of Alamire, see the recent catalogue The Treasury of Petrus Alamire: Music and Art in Flemish Court Manuscripts 1500-1535, ed. Herbert Kellman (Ghent: Ludion, 1999); see also Borghetti, “Il manoscritto di musica,” pp. 113-14. The use of heraldic symbols and portraits distinguishes Alamire’s manuscripts from other luxury codices produced in the Low Countries in this period, among them some notable books of hours; see Brigitte Dekeyzer, “The Decoration of the Alamire Music Manuscripts: Function and Meaning,” in The Burgundian-Habsburg Court Complex of Music Manuscripts, pp. 125-45. For an analysis of the potential connections between a polyphonic composition and its decoration in an Alamire manuscript, see Borghetti, “Il manoscritto, la messa, il giovane imperatore: la messa ‘Fors seulement’ di Pipelare e la politica imperiale della Casa d’Austria,” Imago Musicae 20 (2003), pp. 65-107; Idem, “Petrus Alamire und die Missa ‘Fors seulement’ von Matthaeus Pipelare,” in The Burgundian-Habsburg Court Complex of Music Manuscripts, pp. 309-24; see also Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Messages in Miniatures: Pictorial Programme and Theological Implications in the Alamire Choirbooks,” in ibid., pp. 161-84. 209 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power With “L’homme armé” in NapBN 40 the tenor carries a direct reference to a Christian prince, and its centrality on the page was the result of its musical centrality, as well as of the symbolic centrality of the prince within the contrapuntal edifice of the piece and in the ritual of its performance, and therefore by extension also in the world. In Alamire’s manuscripts, however, such compositional techniques are no longer a necessary prerequisite: without regard for either technique or material employed (be it a courtly chanson or a fragment of liturgical chant), any polyphonic composition could symbolize princely power through the use of a decoration that pointed towards princely identity. My emphasis on the masses is due to the simple observation that the most richly decorated manuscripts by Alamire were destined primarily for intonations of the ordinarium, rather than for shorter compositions (let us not forget Tinctoris’s designation of the mass as “cantus magnus”). But I would maintain that for Alamire it is polyphony tout court that offers a formidable means to celebrate a sovereign. An example of this ideological use of sacred polyphony on the part of Alamire is Pierre de la Rue’s Mass Resurrexi (Paschale) for five voices in the manuscript JenaU 4.79 Technically this is a cantus firmus mass, but, unlike in the L’homme armé masses examined above, the tenor is rhythmically homogeneous with the voices that surround it.80 As can be seen in Figure 3, however, the placement at its start of the coat of arms most intimately connected to the identity and power of the Habsburg family, that of Austria, invests this voice with a symbolic prominence on the written page that finds no audible correspondent in the performance of the mass. Alamire clearly considered the tenor ideologically as the fundamentum compositionis, interpreting it as the voice most worthy of representing the prince in the contrapuntal edifice, and hence of carrying his most representative coat of arms. It is not without significance that the other voices are distinguished by the other main coats of arms of the Habsburg family—old Burgundy (bassus), Spain and Austria-Burgundy (tenor secundus)—while the coats of arms of the Habsburg territories of lower rank are situated on the margins, not in the music, as if to underline the fact that the great polyphonic mass was intended above all for the upper nobility rather than lesser rulers. In this way, a mass without a “center” clearly perceptible as such because drastically separate from the rest in mensural terms (as happened in the L’homme armé masses in NapBN 40 or in Josquin’s Hercules Mass) is no less suited to representing symbolically the centrality of a sovereign (who in this case is the Archduke Charles of Habsburg, later the emperor Charles V), thanks to the specific use of decoration in the manuscript. 79. 80. Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS 4 [hereafter JenaU 4], ff. 15v-28. The tenor primus is the voice that sings the cantus firmus. 210 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power Fig. 3: JenaU 4, ff. 15v-16. 211 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power What is more, according to Alamire’s typical procedure, in the Mass Resurrexi of JenaU 4 the patron/recipient is concretely present, portrayed at the beginning of the contratenor, praying under a canopy and protected by Charlemagne (here depicted as a saint in armor wielding a sword). This portrait, found on the recto of f.16, occupies a space symmetrical to another historiated illumination showing Christ’s Resurrection, which decorates the superius on the verso of f. 15. In JenaU 4 as in other similar codices, then, Alamire introduced not only the symbols, but the very image of the prince himself: through this kind of pictorial decoration a mass by de La Rue, beyond its specific liturgical use determined by the cantus firmus, becomes the means for celebrating the superiority of the figure of the sovereign in this world. Firstly, the first two pages of de La Rue’s mass in JenaU 4 confirm the supremacy of a ruler’s rank, whose power is second only to the divine one: while the portrait of Charles follows Christ’s Resurrection, it appears at its same height. Secondly, the presence both direct (the portrait) and symbolic (the coat of arms) of the prince within the musical fabric of the mass renders the construction of the prince’s identity as persona sacra even more explicit than in the case of the Neapolitan L’homme armé masses. Alamire’s codices interpreted the aspirations of the great feudal aristocracy of the period through polyphonic music. It cannot be purely coincidental that among the patrons, recipients, and donors of such manuscripts are to be found the major European powers, from the Habsburgs to the kings of England, from the Pope to the kings of Spain and Portugal, and from the dukes of Bavaria to those of Saxony, to mention only the owners of manuscripts known or documented at present. It is equally noteworthy that these manuscripts were commissioned to Alamire also either by members of the lesser aristocracy who occupied positions at court (such as Charles de Clerc or Ulrich Pfinzing), or by members of emergent families (such as Raimund Fugger the Elder or Pompeius Occo), who, thanks to the fortunes that they had accumulated, sought to acquire recognizably princely objects as a way of projecting themselves onto the highest social circles of the period.81 81. Charles de Clerc held an administrative position at the court of Burgundy under Philip the Good, Maximilian I, and later Charles V, and Alamire prepared for him the codex Brussel, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique [hereafter BrusBR], MS 215-16. Ulrich Pfinzing of Nuremberg was a financial official at the court of Maximilian I, for whom Alamire copied the manuscript Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek [hereafter VienNB], MS Mus. 15497. Alamire prepared manuscripts for various members of the Fugger family, among them VienNB 4809. Other works not prepared for the Fugger were later acquired by them, including VienNB 4810 and VienNB 1178. For the same family Alamire compiled the sets of partbooks VienNB Mus. 15941 and VienNB Mus. 18825. Pompeius Occo, a merchant and representative of the Fuggers in Amsterdam, also commissioned from Alamire the codex BrusBR IV.922. See The Treasury of Petrus Alamire. 212 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power The Ideology of Polyphony The Alamire manuscripts represent one of the highest points of the ideological use of polyphonic music. Their significance can only be understood in the context of the transformations that chivalric culture underwent between the middle ages and the modern era, transformations that introduced and rooted the chapel as an institution indispensable to the exercise of power for the major European rulers of the time. The mansucript NapBN 40 stands instead at the beginning of this process. A close look at the entire codex, and not only its musical content, has revealed how the cantus firmus masses on “L’homme armé” had already staged in ca. 1460-1470 what might be called a “new” form of princely ritual: they did so by concretely placing the prince and his identitary myths at the center of a (musical) ceremony. The physical presence of the prince in the polyphonic edifice through the inclusion of the chanson “L’homme armé” guaranteed and underlined the presence of the armed man, that is, the prince himself, at the core of the ritual celebration of the mass. This manuscript provides therefore early evidence of the gradual assimilation of the sovereign to a sacred person, a process which in the Alamire manuscripts reached levels of visibility and theatricality unimaginable in other times and cultural contexts. It is significant that the remarkable growth of polyphonic masses, above all those based on “L’homme armé,” took place over the course of the fifteenth century, at the same time as the transformations of the courtly world between the late fourteenth century and the publication of The Book of the Courtier in the early sixteenth. As the new court history has taught us, the fifteenth century constituted a laboratory for characteristically modern forms of sovereignty: on the basis of certain elements specific to medieval models of sovereignty, practices, ceremonies, gestures, and protocols were distilled and codified, and then consigned to history up through the eighteenth century and even beyond.82 As an element traditionally present in the spaces of power, music was an integral part of this progressive definition of princely ideology and rhetoric, as is confirmed by both the creation of musical institutions integral to court life and by the emergence of repertories closely linked to such institutions. Both the chapels and polyphony understood as res facta revealed themselves as decisive instruments for the sharpening of the new identity of the sovereign during the shift from medieval forms and ideas to the paradigms proper to the ancien régime. Let us return to Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-mode one final time. The initial scene of this series of images portrays an aristocracy whose claims to power are being challenged, and therefore grows ever more visibly attached to its own symbols. The mass 82. See Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court.” 213 Vincenzo Borghetti – Music and the representation of princely power by Pierre de La Rue in JenaU 4, the Neapolitan L’homme armé masses, and the genealogical tree growing from a warrior to which the Earl of Squander pointedly gestures are manifestations of a world caught at two different moments of its history: the formative phase of new models of aristocratic behavior and their incipient decline. The chapels, the L’homme armé masses in general, the polyphonic masses of the Alamire codices, and, more broadly, sacred polyphony are none other than “ceremonial armors” that the European aristocracy wrapped around itself in order to remind both itself and its social “inferiors” that it remained prepared and worthy to defend the honor and values of its own lands. 214