Medieval Organs

See that pretty instrument?  That's my baby - my gorgeous handmade portative organ, created in the Netherlands by a master organmaker (Winold van der Putten), owned by another musician before me, and constructed based on information contained in a 15th-century treatise.

I play it a lot.  It's tuned to a period-appropriate Pythagorean scale, and it makes a perfectly lovely sound.

Most of the time.

But lately it developed an alarming air leak.  The bellows pressure dropped so rapidly that I'd be flapping my left arm like a hysterical one-winged chicken, just trying to keep enough air flowing to make some noise.  (The bellows is in back; I pump it with my left hand and play the keys with my right.  The instrument sits perpendicular to my body.)

Then, to add to my dismay, it started whistling a rather whiny-sounding E-flat every time I pumped the bellows.  I could gently whack the key and it would stop, but it kept starting up again.  When it started whistling a D as well, we could no longer ignore the problem.  After all, there isn't much medieval music that works with an involuntary drone of D and E-flat, played simultaneously.

Organ, fooling around

To make this long story shorter, my clever husband eventually figured out that the poor organ was protesting the low humidity in our house.  Once we hauled a humidifier into the living room, the instrument, now happy once more, miraculously healed itself and stopped whistling unpleasant intervals while hemorrhaging air.

But it's taken a while to sort it out, which means I've been thinking about portative organs a lot of late.  Hence this little post, which may well turn out to be mostly pictorial, because there are so many illustrations of these instruments available.

First, though, let me provide you with some YouTube links, in case you are unfamiliar with the sound of this instrument.  In all cases, the organist is Jankees Braaksma, founder and leader of the Netherlands-based medieval music group Ensemble Super Librum.  He plays a different instrument in each of these three performances; all are made by Winold van der Putten, who you can see in the third example.  Enjoy!

Jankees Braaksma 1
Jankees Braaksma 2
Jankees Braaksma 3

The organ is a very ancient instrument, invented - some say - in Alexandria in the third century BC by one Ktesbios, a Greek engineer.  Pliny the Elder called that instrument "one of the wonders of the world."

Hydraulic organs were well known to the Romans.  Cicero said their sound was "as agreeable to the ear as the tastiest fish is to the palate" (Pliny and Cicero quotes are from David Munrow's book Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance).

Water organ

These early instruments did not have a keyboard.  The notes were sounded by pushing or pulling wooden "sliders," and it was a tricky and cumbersome process.

Note the "sliders"

The evolution of the instrument is frustratingly difficult to reconstruct, with stops along the way in Byzantium, the Middle East, and the court of Pepin the Short.  So let's focus on small organs from around 1300 - not big church organs, but the kind that can be moved around and played without a committee.  (Some of the earliest larger organs required as many as four men to pump the bellows and two more to work the sliders.)

At this point (turn of the 14th century), we encounter two basic types of small organs:  portative organs and positive organs.  What's the difference?

A true portative is small, and light enough to be played on one's lap, or to hang from a strap around the player's neck.  It is monophonic - it may have a couple of drone pipes, but otherwise the player will only be sounding one note at a time.  It may well be diatonic (no sharps or flats).  It's played by a single musician, who pumps the bellows with one hand and plays the keyboard (which has evolved by now into something we would recognize) with the other.  It's in the treble range.

Portative organ

A positive organ is portable in the sense that it can be moved, but not by one person alone.  The instrument rests on a table or other surface while being played; multiple notes can sound simultaneously; the player sits in front of the instrument and uses both hands on the keys, while someone else pumps the bellows from behind.  It has a larger range than the portative, being substantially bigger, and may be more likely to include sharps and flats, though by the time we get to the 15th century all sizes will have become all or mostly chromatic. 

Positive organ

Often you will see angels or saints playing portative organs in late medieval and Renaissance art.  Saint Cecilia, in particular, is associated with the instrument.

St. Cecilia

St. Cecilia

St. Cecilia

Angel musician

St. Cecilia

Musicians in the 14th and 15th centuries took pride in being organists.  The blind Florentine composer Francesco Landini is shown with the portative that was his trademark instrument, both on his tombstone (in San Lorenzo, in Florence) and in an illustration of the pages devoted to his compositions in the ornate Squarcialupi Codex.

Landini's tombstone

Landini in Squarcialupi

David Munrow quotes a novella by Giovanni da Prato concerning Landini:  "... a thousand birds were singing.  Francesco was ordered to play on his organetto to see if the singing of the birds would lessen or increase with his playing.  As soon as he began to play, many birds at first became silent, then they redoubled their singing and, strange to say, one nightingale came and perched on a branch over his head."

(Personally, I don't know if I'd want a bird perching over my instrument, but so far it hasn't come up as an issue.)

In this picture of 15th century composers Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1400-1474) and Gilles Binchois (ca. 1400-1460), we see Dufay standing next to a positive organ, while Binchois grasps his harp.

Dufay and Binchois

And here we see Paul Hoffhaimer (1459-1537), Austrian composer and organist, who served at the court of Archduke Sigismund and, later, at the court of the Emperor Maximilian.  Hoffhaimer, who was knighted for his musical prowess, here has figured out a way to make a positive organ truly portable.

Paul Hoffhaimer

And my instrument?  It seems it's neither fish nor fowl.  Like a medieval portative, it is played and pumped by the same person, but it can also be played as a positive, with a second person pumping.  It is far too large and heavy to set on my lap, or to walk with in a procession.  It plays (or will, if I ask it to) more than one note at a time.  It can be lifted by one person - a strong one, because those pipes are lead, and they're heavy - but not carried far.  It is almost fully chromatic (minus a B-flat at the very top of the range).  It is in many ways more positive than portative, but it seems actually to be somewhere in between.

I would guess that there may have been many instruments in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries that were also hybrids, with characteristics of both types.  I'll finish this post with a few more illustrations to show the many variations in size and design that we find in the iconography.

And whatever mine is, I'm just glad it stopped being OCD about E-flats!

King David - illustration of "De institutione musica" by Boethius

St. Cecilia (detail)

Cantoria, Duomo, Florence - Luca Della Robbia

The Lady and the Unicorn (and the organ)

Note the fireplace-style bellows

Illustrations in this post are in the public domain (because of copyright expiration, more than 100 years having passed since the death of the creator, or because the creator has released the image into the public domain) with one exception:  the angel musician is copyright Carlets, via Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (Wikimedia Commons).  All captions (except our own photos) have links to their Wikimedia Commons pages for more information. 

Minstrel Schools in the Middle Ages

When you get a lot of musicians together in one place, interesting things happen.

Terry Jones, medievalist and Python, cites an example:

"... in 1212, when Randulf, Earl of Chester, was besieged by the Welsh in his castle of Rhuddlan in Flintshire.  He sent an appeal for help to Roger de Lacy, justiciar and constable of Chester, affectionately known in the local dungeons as 'Roger of Hell.'

"Roger, casting around for the most effective, vicious and altogether intimidating relief force he could find, realized that Chester was full of jongleurs who had come for the annual fair.  He gathered them up and marched them off under his son-in-law Dutton.  The Welsh, seeing this fearsome body of determined musicians, singers and prestidigitators bearing down on them ready to launch into an immediate performance of their terrifying arts, fled."  (Medieval Lives by Terry Jones)

As Jones points out later, these were wandering minstrels, and they had wandered to Chester because there was a fair.  No doubt they hoped to perform and earn some money; perhaps they hoped to impress a potential employer, so they could achieve some stability and lead a less hand-to-mouth existence.

But it is very likely that they also intended to use the opportunity to meet with other musicians, share repertoire, buy, sell, or trade instruments, learn new playing styles and techniques, trade gossip, talk about who might be hiring, and also just have a good time with their peers.

In the 14th century (and quite possibly earlier), it was not only the freelance musicians who sought opportunities to congregate for this valuable information exchange.  Annual minstrel schools, held in many different locations, hosted scores of musicians whose travel and expenses were paid by their employers - the nobles and municipalities of Europe, whose musical establishments were major sources of prestige for them.  (And some of them got quite competitive about it, too:  "My shawm band can outplay your shawm band!")

These minstrel schools were the occasions whose sole purpose was for musicians to meet and hobnob, to share and learn from one another.  Medieval musicians had other opportunities to assemble, but they involved other activities:  courtly weddings, visits between nobles (with their entourages), fairs, major celebrations.

Performers were a mobile lot, traveling surprising distances with surprising frequency; the result was a very cosmopolitan European musica culture.  Not that the different nations were without their separate, distinctive styles - learning these other styles was, in fact, a large part of the reason musicians wanted to get together.  But the musicians themselves were a polyglot and sophisticated bunch of travelers - the sort who today would be frequent fliers - at a time when many people never left the village they were born in.  

So.  Those schools.  Let's look at the what, the where, and the when of them, having already given a bit of thought to the why.

The what:  The schools were gatherings of musicians, organized and hosted by musicians, often with financial and other support from the host town, which benefited from the commerce generated by so many visitors (not to mention getting to hear a lot of music).  The 14th century schools existed primarily, though not exclusively, to serve the needs of instrumental musicians (at this point, that's what menestral usually meant, with a singer called, for example, a menetrier de bouche and a string instrument player a menetrier de cordes to make the distinction).  By this time, the role of the all-purpose jongleur was shrinking.

The where:  Sometimes more than one school was held in a single year, in two different places, but often the venue appears to have rotated among hosting towns.  The Low Countries probably hosted most of them; perhaps they were in a sufficiently central location to make it convenient.  Records are spotty and not at all centralized, but schools have been reported in all the following towns:

Brussels, Mons, Cambrai, Beauvais, Lyon, Geneva, Bourg-en-Bresse, Malines, Bruges, Paris, Tournai, Lille, Douai, Valenciennes, Namur, and Mechlin.

The city or one of its religious houses might house the visitors, or local musicians might extend their hospitality to their traveling colleagues.  In Bruges in 1318, we know that the visiting musicians bunked in an area near the Carmelite convent that even today is known as "Speelmansstrate." 

The when:  Schools were held during Lent (when the musicians' employers couldn't make much use of their services anyway), in the week before Laetere Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent.  That way the attendees had at least 16 days of travel time to get back home, if they could, in time for Easter, when their talents might be wanted again at home.  Also, Laetere Sunday was a bit of a break from Lenten rigors, and was even sometimes celebrated as a feast day - hence, the musicians might get a chance to perform while in their host city.

A few cities maintained more-or-less permanent schools (Paris, Bruges).  Musicians extending their musical boot camp (or waiting for more auspicious travel conditions) might while away some time at these establishments.

We have records of minstrels attending the schools throughout the 14th century and a little beyond, and around that time the schools apparently ceased to exist, or at least ceased to be a major draw for performers from courts and municipalities.  This may have been for any number of reasons, but one certainly was a rise in musical literacy among performers.  The schools served a vital function while people still depended on rote learning and memorization to acquire repertoire, but once it was possible to circulate written music and have the players able to read it, long slogs across Europe were no longer so necessary.  A bit like conferencing by Skype rather than sending your employees off on business trips.

John of Aragon

There's also the who (no, The Who were not among the attendees... you know perfectly well I didn't mean that!  Stop grinning, Dorothy.  Though it is an interesting mental image.).  Minstrels came from all over.  Some could have made the trip home in time for Easter, but the musicians from the court of Aragon, for example, usually made it back home between the middle and the end of May.  Some years, the minstrels of John of Aragon spent half the year on the road, getting to the schools and back.  (In a year when Easter came early, some routes might have still been impassable, so the musicians would either have to leave before winter weather set in, or miss out.)

A few examples:

• The court of Burgundy regularly sent its musicians to the schools.  They traveled in a group, and received horses, valets, and 20-50 francs apiece from the Duke for expenses.  
•  In 1366, the school held in Brussels hosted minstrels from Denmark, Navarra, Aragon, Lancaster, Bavaria, and Brunswick.
•  In 1377-8 the Counts of Savoy sent their minstrels to Bourg-en-Bresse, where the chatelain graciously provided them with fodder for their horses.
• In 1377, John of Aragon's minstrels brought home a new shawm player, Jacomi Capeta.
•  In the only mention I found of a school held in England (town unspecified), Brabantine minstrels Hansen and Henderlijn attended in 1365.
• John of Aragon's minstrels were charged, in 1381, with locating a bombarde to purchase that would match their other instruments.  They failed to do so.
• Three of Edward III's English musicians - Merlin the fiddler and bagpipers Barberus and Morlanus - got a leave of absence to attend in 1334 or 1335, sent "across the seas, to learn new songs"

 It wasn't always easy.  Minstrels are known to have died on the way, and once in a while somebody would complete the journey only to learn that he'd been replaced during his absence, and must now seek work elsewhere.

As to what these musical gatherings accomplished for the state of music in Europe, there's one intriguing example, which, while not tied specifically to a school, may very well have sprung from one.

It is unusually specific about timing, too, calling to mind a quote from David Barber's book, Bach, Beethoven and the Boys:  Music History as it Ought to be Taught:

"The Renaissance era ended and the Baroque began on March 25, 1600 at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  No other history of music has the courage to make this statement with such conviction."

Our chronicler is not quite that specific.  But Tielman Ehnen von Wolfhagen, in his Limburg Chronicle written around 1360, does tell us this:

"Up to now songs had been sung long, with five or six measures, and the masters are making new songs with three measures.  Things changed also with regard to trumpet and shawm playing, and music progressed, and had never been as good as it has now started to become.  For he who was known, five or six years ago, as a good shawm player throughout the whole country, is not worth a fly [sometimes translated as 'a hill of beans'] now." (Quoted in an article by William Wegman)

So, something happened in or around 1354-5, right in the middle of the heyday of the minstrel schools, which conceptually changed musical performance, and which resulted in important changes in the quality of shawm and trumpet playing.  Do we have any idea what it was?  Of course not - we should only be so lucky.

But it sure sounds like the kind of thing that might have emerged from a minstrel school.  And if it didn't, surely it was the schools that managed to disseminate whatever it was within a half-dozen years - a lightning fast record for spreading this sort of trend in the middle ages.

Images in this post are all in the public domain by virtue of being really seriously old. 

Lowde Mynstralcyes

Lowde mynstralcyes, indeed.  That's what Chaucer calls a huge gathering of minstrels and jongleurs he wrote about in his work House of Fame.  He describes it as a dream sequence, but some musicologists believe that he must have been a witness to one of the annual Lenten minstrel schools that took place in Europe throughout the 14th century and a bit beyond (and which some say began as early as the 12th century). 

I want to tell you something about these gatherings.  It's an arresting thought:  minstrels, particularly instrumentalists, coming together from many countries to share repertoire, learn new techniques, trade or purchase instruments, recruit new players, and form personal connections, all at the expense of the lords or municipalities who employed them, and who wanted their musicians to be au courant for the honor, prestige, and pleasure of their masters at home.

I want to and I will, but I'm late in posting this, and time is at a premium for me just now.   So let me just - for now - share with you a bit of personal history that probably explains why the idea of such international musical gatherings so intrigues me.  In a week or so, as time permits, I'll write that blog post; meanwhile, consider this the preamble.

I have some idea of what this extraordinary week-long experience might have felt like to the musicians.  For years, my husband and I attended a week-long medieval music workshop every summer.  We brought along our shawms, crumhorns, and recorders.  We traveled halfway across the continent to get there, and it was a major investment of time and money.

Once there, we found friends from far-flung places, people we never saw at any other time, and greeted them happily.  We plunged into a frenzy of intense musical activity, forming classes and performing groups according to our most immediate needs and interests.  We pushed ourselves, not wanting to miss a moment.

Trying to do it all

All of us ate together, slept in spartan dormitory rooms, and lived and breathed music from the moment we awakened to when we finally collapsed, late at night.  We learned, experimented, performed, clowned around, partied, and shared experiences.

It must have been very much the same for the minstrels.

Was it intense for them too?  I should think so.  Was it exhausting?  It must have been, especially on top of all the rigors of travel in the 14th century.

Tired musicians

Was it exhilarating?  I'll bet it was.

One thing we found at our workshop was the phenomenon of the Wednesday Meltdown.  That was the point, midweek, when we had all crammed our heads so full of new information and experiences that we suddenly couldn't remember which end was up.

That fingering?  I dunno - am I trying to play a D soprano shawm with the same fingerings I used yesterday for a G alto recorder?  What's the chance that it might actually work?

Are we transposing?  Which line is that C-clef on, and what does that mean if I'm on the bass line?  If we're reading period notation, how do I know how many units of perfection there are if I don't know whether that's a dot of augmentation or a dot of division?

Are all of us in the same hexachord here?  And if we aren't, who's going to do what with the ficta to make the cadence work?  If we're improvising, can I play a 6th above the tenor here or not, if it's 3-part discant?

This is the point where you believe in all sincerity that you've forgotten everything you ever knew, including your name.  In the end, you just pick up an instrument and honk on it until something works.

Oddly enough, I've seen people drop out of classes they think are too demanding, but only on Monday or Tuesday.  I've never seen somebody give up on a Wednesday.  I think by that time we're all so deeply involved in what we're doing that it simply doesn't occur to us.

Ah, but Thursday...  Thursday is different.  We wake in the morning, and somehow something has shifted.  We know what we're doing again.  In fact, it's really not so hard, after all.  And I've got some new ideas I want to try...

Then at the end of the day, after listening to strains of Machaut, Dunstable, and Landini issuing from the classrooms, we gather on the porch at night, relaxing and sharing a bottle of wine (okay, several bottles of wine), and singing what must sound to an outsider like Beatles tunes, of all things.  Until the listener realizes that the words are something like, "Machaut, ma beau, these are words that well together go, ma Machaut..."

Was it like that for the minstrels?  I'd like to think it was.  (Possibly minus the Beatles songs.)  Check back for the post that's the Real Thing, where we delve into this phenomenon in detail.

They really knew how to make a guy feel welcome

Giostra del Saracino, Via Larga, Firenze

Recently, while researching another topic entirely, I found a description of a fifteenth-century Florentine party that absolutely boggled my mind, and I couldn't resist sharing it here.

I was doing some reading about late medieval wind bands, and I picked up a book by musicologist and music historian Timothy McGee, called The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence.  In the course of describing some of the elaborate ceremonies with which the Florentines marked special occasions - religious holidays, celebrations of military victories, knightings, investiture of officers, visits by foreign dignitaries, and so forth -  he gave us a detailed description of two overlapping visits in 1459 that illustrates the lengths to which fifteenth-century Florentines would go to do honor to their guests (and by so doing, bring honor to their city).

The first visitor:  the young Count Galeazzo Maria Sforza, fifteen-year-old son of Duke Francesco I of Milan, sent to Florence to meet Cosimo de' Medici and help cement the alliance between the two cities.  Young Galeazzo was also to have the opportunity to meet the second visitor, Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), who was to stop at Florence on his way to Mantua for a church council. 

Here are Florence's two honored guests, that spring of 1459 (though the portrait of Galeazzo Maria was painted about twelve years later than the visit:

Portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza by Piero Pollaiolo, ca. 1471

Pope Pius II

And what do we know about these two distinguished gentlemen?

The Pope is described (elsewhere, not by McGee) as intellectually gifted and ambitious, a man of letters (with poetry, a comedy, and a slightly naughty novella entitled The tale of two lovers to his credit, as well as the surprisingly frank memoirs of his papacy), a womanizer, a skillful and pragmatic political strategist, and a talented town planner who turned the village of his birth (Corsignano) into the exquisitely-designed Renaissance city of Pienza.

And Galeazzo?  He does not fare so well, at least in his later years.  Wikipedia tells us that he was famous for being lustful, cruel and tyrannical, and he was eventually to be assassinated by a group of men with a surprisingly eclectic collection of grievances.  The year after this visit he took as his mistress the lovely Lucrezia Landriani, who was the wife of his close friend, and she bore him several children, including the redoubtable Catherina Sforza.  Besides a certain proclivity for viciousness, however, he did have a more positive side:  a lover of music, he was patron to some of the finest musicians of his day, including Alexander Agricola, Johannes Martini, Loyset Compere, and Gaspar van Weerbeke.

Lucrezia Landriani

This portrait can be found attributed variously to Domenico Veneziano and to Antonio del Pollaiuolo.  I tried to check online to see which was right, but kept turning up gems like "Lucrezia Landriani (572 years old) is a famous Duke..."  So I gave up.  Next time I get to the university art library, I'll check it out and edit this, if I remember.

Anyway, on the Florentine side, we have Cosimo de' Medici, 70 years old, holding the reins of government (albeit unofficially).  His grandson Lorenzo, later to be dubbed Il Magnifico, was at this time ten years of age and probably more precocious and cute than magnificent, but he was working on it. 

But on to The Party.  It all began when Galeazzo arrived at the gates of Florence on April 17, 1459.  He had brought a few people with him:  500 of them, in fact, including the Archbishop of Milan, the captain-general of the Milanese army, a bevy of barons, knights, counts, and other nobles, and all of the various people required to take care of, cosset, and entertain all of these important folks.

Galeazzo's party was met by a mounted delegation of over 300 distinguished Florentine citizens, as well as the Priors, the Podesta, the Capitano del Popolo, the herald, and all the civic musicians (which at this point amounted to three different groups:  the trombadori, which consisted of six large trumpets, a shawm, and nakers [small kettledrums], for fanfares and announcements; the trombetti, players of smaller trumpets which had more notes available to them and therefore more musical possibilities; and the pifferi, or shawm band, which consisted of three shawms and a slide trumpet at that time).

Wind band (this configuration is a little late for 1459)

If this suggests to you that a lot of music was to take place during this visit, that's absolutely correct.  Francesco Sforza, Galeazzo's father, had a band of 18 trumpeters, at least some of whom would have come with his son, and Cosimo de' Medici had his own household musicians and singers from the church choirs, to add to the mix.

In Florence that day the shops were closed, and people filled the streets to greet the visitor.  Among the greeting committee was a group of a hundred boys, dressed in silver with pearls.  Galeazzo's carriage was preceded by fifty mules wearing his heraldic colors, but it's not clear to me whether these mules were Florentine or Milanese.  After a lot of fanfaring and church bells ringing, the whole bunch processed to the Piazza della Signoria for the official welcoming ceremony.

The order of the procession through the streets is known to us:  first Florentine famiglia (staff - civil servants, actually), then Galeazzo's famiglia; next the trombetti; the Florentine boys and the Milanese foot soldiers; the pifferi with the civic herald; Galeazzo with the Florentine Priors; the knights from both parties; and then all the other Florentine citizens.  After much more fanfaring and some speechifying, the young Galeazzo was taken to the Medici palace, where he would stay during his visit and where, presumably, he would meet the even younger Lorenzo.

And here I will digress for a moment.  Benozzo Gozzoli, who painted the magnificent fresco of The Journey of the Magi in the Medici Palace, is said to have incorporated images of both of those young men in the panel depicting the journey of the youngest king.  Some art historians dispute these attributions, but let's have a look at the images anyway.  Here's the Young King, said to be a portrait of Lorenzo:

And here, on the white horse, is the young man said to be Galeazzo:

 Some art historians believe that the second picture actually depicts Lorenzo and his younger brother Giuliano.

The Pope was not to arrive until April 26, but there is little doubt that the Florentines kept Galeazzo well entertained in the meantime, with music, feasting, various performances, and courtly dances, such as the one pictured below (note the shawms accompanying the dancers).

When the Pope did arrive, he also brought a large contingent:  many nobles from different cities, ten cardinals, sixty bishops, and quite a few priests.  Officials of the Guelf Party met him  at a monastery outside the gates of the city and escorted him, under their banner, to the gates, where the civic leaders received him.  He was then seated on a throne covered with gold brocade and carried through the streets on a litter.  (He requested that the litter be carried by the Priors; Florence said no.  I would love to have been there for that discussion!  Instead, various princes and nobles in the Pope's party served as litterbearers, and Florence's civic dignity remained untarnished.)

The Pope's entry was treated as a religious procession, complete with relics, torches, and sacred music.  All of the important people from Galeazzo's entry were there, and Galeazzo himself followed behind the Pope's litter on horseback, and behind him came the cardinals and the other churchmen.  After the welcoming ceremony at the Piazza della Signoria and a stop for the Pope to pray in the Duomo, the procession took the Pope to Santa Maria Novella, where he was to reside in the papal apartments. 

The next day, April 26, another procession took place, from Santa Maria Novella to the Duomo, where he spoke to the people and received many valuable gifts.   And on an unspecified day soon afterwards, yet another procession occurred, this one including sacre rappresentazioni (dramatic presentations of sacred stories) and floats, an ephemeral art form in which Florence excelled, all carried on a total of 46 carts. 

By April 29, they were ready to liven things up a little.  After all, Calendimaggio, the May Day festival, was almost upon them.  So that day they held a joust in the Piazza Santa Croce, with platforms for the audience.  Tapestries hung from the windows of the surrounding buildings, and each contestant was greeted by a trumpet fanfare and preceded by pages carrying standards bearing their heraldic insignia.  All the horses (and the people) were lavishly decorated.  Antonio Boscoli and Braccio Guicciardini  took first and second place, respectively, and received decorated helmets.  All finally left the field to the music of the pifferi.

The next day, April 30, involved a massive ball, with an estimated 20,000 persons in attendance.  Held in the Mercato Nuovo, this splendid occasion included lavish costumes and decorations, an elaborate dais set up for Galeazzo and the Pope, rich carpets and cloths everywhere, another raised place for the pifferi to play the music for the dancing, All sorts of banners and twenty trumpeters who saluted the arrival of each and every lady with a fanfare.  (Galeazzo got a fanfare, too.)

On May 1, Galeazzo was invited to dine with the Priors, at a particularly lavish meal  with "every kind of splendid food and elegant wine." ( The next day the Pope was the guest of honor at the Prior's mensa, and again there would have been musical performances for their dining pleasure.)

That afternoon, the visitor was treated to a caccia, a sort of bear-baiting on steroids, in which a cordoned-off Piazza della Signora contained cows, bulls, horses, wolves, wild boar, wild dogs, a giraffe, and either twelve, sixteen, or twenty-six lions, depending upon whose account you believe.  As you can imagine, this was not a particularly pacific mix.  And in the midst of this mess was a man in a large round ball about two and a half meters high, able to propel the ball where he wanted it to go and to chase the lions and wound them through openings in the ball, while remaining safe inside.  This was described by an observer as "a beautiful, grand, and ingenious thing, never before done in Italy.  And this idea came from a Florentine who had seen it done in the countries of the Sultan and in Syria."  No comment.  (Also, unfortunately, no pictures.)

That evening, in case Galeazzo wasn't entertained enough by then, the Florentines held an armeggeria for his amusement.  (That's an equestrian exhibition, featuring stylized war games and contests.)  It was held on Via Larga, and was much like the picture at the beginning of this post.  The ten-year-old Lorenzo was the signore for the event, wearing a golden jacket and cape like the Youngest King in the Gozzoli fresco.  The armeggeria also involved a certain amount of processing, this time by torchlight, and a trionfo consisting of fifty costumed youths leading The Triumph of Love, a four-sided tower three meters tall, decorated in gold and silver, on a wagon.  It featured large gold balls with falcons, fire spewing from openings on both sides, and a youth dressed as Cupid perched atop it all.

Once everyone (except for a lot of the animals) had survived May Day, things began to wind down a little.  On May 2, Galeazzo received from Florentine officials gifts that included two silver basins decorated with the emblem of the city of Florence, two tankards, and twelve engraved cups, all of which weighed 125 pounds and was valued at 2,000 florins.  (Also two boxes of candy - he was, after all, fifteen.)

Finally, on May 3, Galeazzo headed for home.  Not that he managed to just slip quietly away, of course - his departure included ceremonies and extended processions through the city streets.  Two days later, the Pope also left to continue his journey to Mantua, and then, too, there was much pomp and circumstance.

Not too shabby, for the young count, especially.  Florence had done itself proud, and finally everyone could kick back and relax and let life get back to normal.  The stores could reopen, and people could get back to doing what they did best, even better than partying, which was making money.

***

Postlude:  Galeazzo did make another visit twelve years later, but it was during Lent and there was no Pope in evidence, so things were much quieter and calmer.  This time he brought his wife, and an entourage of over a thousand people, with 1,500 horses and mules.  Both the Duke (as he was by then) and the Duchess, Bona of Savoy, had their own extravagant households.  An eyewitness described their entry this:  "There was a livery for his greater Camerieri, all dressed in crimson, and each one well mounted on horseback, with a greyhound on a leash.  There were also sixty pages, all dressed in green velvet, on huge coursers, all with fittings of gold and silver, and saddles covered with brocade of various colors and crimson..."  There's more, but you get the gist. 


Images in this post are all in the public domain.

Dads & Sons 1: The Painter and the Musician

With this post I propose to begin a three-part series exploring the lives of three sets of famous fathers and sons in Italian history.

In each case, it is the son whose name is best known today.  In each case, this was not necessarily so during the years when the sons' lives overlapped with the fathers'.

In each case, father and son are remembered for excellence in two different spheres of activity.  In each case, I propose to try to find a connection, a way in which the famous (in his day) father influenced or taught his famous (even today) son.

And I propose to spend more time on the father than on the son, as it is very easy to find information on the latter, but the former presents more of a research challenge.

It would be much more difficult to do this with mothers and daughters, given the paucity of records about the lives of Italian women in the middle ages and Renaissance, but I just might give it a try anyway, once this is done.  We'll see.

The Painter and the Musician

Our first father-son pair is comprised of 14th century painter Jacopo (or Iacopo) del Casentino and his son, the composer and organist Francesco Landini.  In this pairing the son will get particularly short shrift, because he interests me, a lot, and I plan to focus on him in a later blog post, so I don't want to use up all my material now.

Tombstone of Francesco Landini, San Lorenzo, Florence

The Son

Luminibus captus, Franciscus mente capaci cantibus organicis quem cunctis Musica solum pretulit, hic cineres, animam super astra reliquit.

"Deprived of the light, Francesco, whom alone Music extolls above all others for his great intellect and his organ music, rests his ashes here, his soul above the stars."  (translated by musicologist Leonard Ellinwood)

So reads the inscription on the tombstone of Francesco Landini, was was born in either Fiesole or Florence, in 1325 or 1335.

Francesco's image shows a dignified and sightless man, holding a portative organ.  The best-known Italian composer of his day and a virtuoso on the organ and on several other instruments, Francesco Landini was a poet as well as a musician.  He received a laurel crown for his poetry from the King of Cyprus in Venice in 1364 (and Petrarch was one of the judges).

Landini was well-versed in philosophy and was a follower of William of Occam.  He was also thoroughly educated in the seven liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar), and he took an active part in the various political and philosophical debates of his time.

He was a maker of instruments as well.  A consultant to organ builders and a tuner of organs, he is also said to have invented an instrument called the "syrena syrenarum," which may have been an ancestor to the bandora.

The birds themselves were said to respond to Francesco's organ music, and as for his human listeners, his contemporaries tell us that Francesco "delighted the weary with pleasing sweetness," and that "the sweetness of his melodies was such that hearts burst from their bosoms."

And he accomplished all this despite having been blinded by smallpox as a child.

Today we still have over 150 of Francesco Landini's compositions.  In fact, his output comprises a quarter to a third of the Italian trecento repertoire known to have survived.  It is still performed regularly by early music ensembles, and many recordings have been made.

We'll return to Francesco in a future blog post.  In the meantime, though, since when dates are unknown or confusing a medieval musician is often said to have "flourished" during a certain time period, I thought I should give you a picture of Francesco flourishing a bit more than he was in the picture above:

Francesco Landini (from the Squarcialupi Codex)

 The Father

Jacopo del Casentino (maybe)

For many years, most of what we knew about Jacopo del Casentino came from Giorgio Vasari's vast work, Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, published in 1550 and heavily revised in 1568.  Vasari is, in fact, the source of much of what we know about many of the artists up until his time.

But while Vasari's work is a treasure trove of information, not all of it holds up.  He gave it his best shot, but considering the volume of information he was working with, it's not surprising that he would occasionally be taken in by confusion regarding names or dates, or report legend or hearsay as fact.

Victorian art historian Herbert P. Horne wrote a commentary on Vasari's life of Jacopo, in which he says that confusion about Jacopo's date of death, combined with the existence of a slightly later painter with a very similar name, has resulted in a muddled identity for Francesco Landini's father.  Thus, the portrait above (from Vasari) may well not be Jacopo after all.

Triptych by Jacopo del Casentino, Uffizi

 So what do we know for sure?  Not very much, actually.  Jacopo (or Iacopo) del Casentino (or da Prato Vecchio) was a painter of some distinction, working in Tuscany in the 14th century.  (The surname "Landini" was applied to Francesco Landini only after his lifetime; it comes from the given name of one of his forebears.  "del Casentino" means that Jacopo came from the Casentino region, one of the valleys of the Arno River, the river which runs through Florence and once constituted the city's southernmost border.)

Jacopo is said to have been born around 1297, but wildly differing death dates have been suggested for him:  1349 (suggesting that he might have succumbed to the plague), or 1358, or, if Vasari is correct that Jacopo died at the age of 80, he might have died as late as 1377 (or else been born considerably earlier than 1297).  He is described as being "of the school of Giotto" (Dante's famous contemporary Giotto di Bondone is a topic for another future post).

Triptych by Giotto

Let's wrestle with the death date issue a bit, because it's important.  We know that Jacopo was one of the co-founders of the Company of San Luca, a confraternity of painters in Florence, and we know that it was founded in 1339.  If he was born in 1297, he'd have been 42 at that time, and his son Francesco would have been either 4 or 14, depending on which birth year is correct for him.  If the former, he might still have had his sight; if the latter, he probably didn't.

I took an interest in Jacopo when I realized that this man was an artist with a son who would never be able to see his father's work.  I started (years ago) keeping an eye open for works by Jacopo, so that I could look at them for Francesco.  (I know, it's silly, but when I get mentally and emotionally involved with medieval Italians, I do that sort of thing.)  Here's the one we saw most recently, in the Vatican collection:

Vasari says that Jacopo was a student of Taddeo Gaddi, in Giotto's workshop.  Gaddi's proposed birth years - as usual, we're not sure - are 1290 or 1300, making him either slightly older or slightly younger than Jacopo, an unusual but not impossible teacher-student relationship.  Some scholars believe they were simply contemporaries and colleagues, which could suggest that Jacopo was trained directly by Giotto.

Triptych by Taddeo Gaddi

Vasari claims that Jacopo was the teacher of Spinello Aretino.  But Spinello lived from  ca. 1350-ca.1410 (we think...), which would make it pretty hard for Jacopo to have been his teacher if he had died in 1349.  Or, for that matter, 1358, unless Spinello was quite precocious.  (This would make him - Spinello, I mean - Gaddi's grandstudent and Giotto's great-grandstudent.)

Triptych by Spinello Aretino

And yet... Horne has the last word, to my mind, because he produces evidence.  He cites the death records of the Company of San Luca, which lists the painter's death in 1349.

Which means he cannot have been Spinello's teacher, though it does not rule out his being Gaddi's student.  It also means that my theory of father-son connections just imploded, because I was relying on Vasari's statement that Jacopo supervised the rebuilding of the ancient Roman waterworks of a public fountain in Arezzo - in 1358.  My idea:  Jacopo engineered the flow of water, and Francesco, when he worked on building organs, engineered the flow of air.

Nope.  Oh, well.  The engineer must have been that later artist with a similar name.  Our Jacopo, then, probably died of plague (though I'm sure people did manage to find other things to die of, even in 1348-9).  He left Francesco and at least one brother, though Horne draws up a family tree that includes two brothers:  Cristofano, and Matteo who was a painter.

But music history research reveals that Francesco Landini had a brother named Nuccio, also an organist, though when he performed with Francesco he was relegated to pumping the bellows.  Is Nuccio another name for Cristofano or Matteo, or yet another brother?  I have no idea.

And needless to say, we also have no idea who Francesco's mother was, or whether he had sisters.  We do know that somewhat post-plague, he and one unnamed brother were under the guardianship of someone other than their father, which reinforces the 1349 death date for Jacopo.  Francesco, with the later of his two possible birthdays, would have been a minor at that time, though because of his blindness, even had he reached the age of majority (i.e. the earlier birthdate is the right one), he might still have found himself in the care of a guardian.

We also know that Cristoforo Landino, the Florentine humanist and intimate friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, was Jacopo's great-grandson.  Landino wrote about his great-uncle Francesco in his commentary on Dante's Divine Commedy written in 1481.  Jacopo begat Crostofano who begat Bartomommeo who begat Cristoforo Landino (or Landini), now securely bearing a surname that may have derived from one Landino in his ancestry, who may have fought in the Battle of Campaldino in 1289.

(Dante also fought in that battle.  However, since there are rumors that Jacopo's family hailed from Arezzo, we don't know whether they fought on the same side. Perhaps the Arezzo connection was with that other, later painter, who lived well into the 1370s.)

Jacopo painted altarpieces to adorn Florence's churches, and tabernacles to inspire devotion in her streets.

Tabernacle by Jacopo del Casentino

Many of his works have not survived the ravages of time, but some are in museums for us to enjoy, or even still in their original church locations.

One of them has recently had an adventure.

Last year, officials of Louisville's Speed Art Museum agreed to return a stolen painting to Italy, nearly 40 years after it was taken.  On October 2, 1971, burglars entered the Villa La Giraffa in Goito, Italy early in the morning, cutting through metal bars and a glass window, and absconded with fourteen pieces of art, worth over $30 million at the time.  One of these was a triptych by Jacopo (and I don't have a picture of it, but this whole post has been fairly triptych-intensive, so you probably have a pretty good idea what it looked like). 

Agents of the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tracked the painting down, and the museum, which purchased the painting in 1973, agreed to return it to its rightful owners once the agents brought the theft to its attention.  A press release describes the painting as "one-of-a-kind," which makes me wonder what exactly they were expecting - paint by number, maybe?  Be that as it may, Jacopo's work was freed to go home.

And on that note, we leave this mass of confusing dates and names and guesses behind us, and move on.  Next installment will be Dads & Sons 2:  The Musician and the Goldsmith.  See you then.

Images in this post are in the public domain by reason of antiquity, except for two:  our photo of the painting in the Vatican, and the photo of the tabernacle by Jacopo, which is by Sailko and is licensed on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.