INTRODUCTION

Two days before his death, Pope Julius II issued the bull (19 Feb. 1513) that established his funeral chapel, the Cappella Giulia, in St. Peter's. In this bull he formally endowed the chapel with a sizeable choir of "twelve singers, as many students, and two masters, one of music and the other of grammar."^[1] Although Julius had already offered support for the choir of St. Peter's on three separate occasions, this was both the first bull to associate the singers with his chapel and the first to mention a choir school. To justify the foundation of a choral chapel he cited the recent example of the cappella his uncle Pope Sixtus IV had founded in old St. Peter's; but the school was a comparative innovation. Not since the papacy resided in Avignon during the fourteenth century had St. Peter's maintained a schola cantorum . Yet rather than invoking this precedent, Julius instead decried the lack of musical training for local youths. This lack, he wrote, forced the papal choir (since 1483 the choir of the Sistine Chapel) to recruit mostly French and Spanish singers.

In this study of the music establishment at St. Peter's, the foundation of the Cappella Giulia initially serves as a convenient terminus for an archival investigation that begins in the 1380s, during the Great Schism. It is not entirely correct to see the new chapel as a significant musical turning point—the size, personnel, and customs of the choir experienced no sudden changes—but Julius did give the choir greater

[1] An extensive excerpt of the bull is in doc. 1513a. Archival documents relating to music at St. Peter's are presented in Appendix 1, organized by year.

administrative independence and a more solid financial footing than it had previously known. The comparative stability after 1513 contrasts with earlier periods of dramatic fluctuations in the fortunes of music at St. Peter's. Among the most important fifteenth-century changes are the expansion of the choir from three or four Italian clerics to an international group of twelve musicians, the construction of several organs (including three within twenty years), and support for an active succession of music scribes, leaving what is now the earliest documentable tradition of written polyphony in Rome. These developments were neither gradual nor continuous but progressed in fits and starts. Most appear dependent on the inclinations and financial strength of the reigning pontiff. Indeed, Julius's provision for a choral chapel at St. Peter's epitomizes an involvement in the musical affairs of the basilica more visible among popes before the Cappella Giulia existed than afterwards.

Because of this involvement, the personnel of the choir and the role of music at St. Peter's need to be discussed in the context of the basilica's privileged position at the papal court. Built by Constantine to shelter the grave of St. Peter, the ancient basilica was both a source and a beneficiary of papal power. While the papacy derived much of its spiritual and temporal authority from its association with the most venerated Christian shrine in Europe, the canons of St. Peter's had long banked on the financial generosity of popes. Each party gained from the well-being of the other. The basilica profited most visibly from the regular repairs and new construction that began in 1420 when Martin V returned a united papacy and curia to Rome. From then until Julius II decided to clear the way for a new basilica by tearing down the old, individual popes contributed according to the limitations of their treasury and the extent to which they wished to be identified with the heritage of Peter the Prince of Apostles.

No fifteenth-century pope had a greater understanding of what St. Peter's represented to the papacy than Nicholas V (1447-55). Often hailed as the first Renaissance pope, Nicholas set the course for his successors by exploiting his ties with St. Peter's symbolically as well as materially. The basilica continued to serve as the scene of the most important papal celebrations, such as canonizations and the coronations of emperors and popes, but Nicholas found the size and the condition

of the building inadequate both for the crowds that gathered at major feasts and for the grandeur expected of pontifical ceremonies. Thus, as the centerpiece of an ambitious scheme to transform the city of Rome and the image of the papacy, he instigated plans to expand St. Peter's with the addition of a new choir and transept. The building plans Nicholas formulated for St. Peter's, as described by Gianozzo Manetti, sought inspiration in no less an edifice than the Temple of Solomon. By asking for three porches at the front of the new basilica, Nicholas intended to make the papal temple even more magnificent than Solomon's, which had only one, however monumental it was reputed to have been.^[2] Between 1449 and 1453 he spent some 100,000 ducats on the papal palace and on St. Peter's alone; and in the single year 1453, Nicholas allotted approximately 46,000 ducats for his various building projects.^[3]

At the same time, Nicholas elevated his ties to St. Peter's over those to the papal cathedral St. John Lateran, which, as the church of the bishop of Rome, traditionally claimed the title of Urbis et orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput . This he did by taking the keys of St. Peter as his own coat of arms and by making the Vatican Palace the permanent residence of the papacy, rather than the living quarters in the Lateran palace adjacent to San Giovanni or others favored by his predecessors. Beyond giving St. Peter's a hierarchical primacy among Roman churches it had never before enjoyed, Nicholas expressed a new view of a papacy that was apostolic rather than imperial, and centralized rather than episcopal or conciliar.^[4]

Death brought Nicholas's construction to a halt, as it did again when Paul II (1464-71) briefly resumed the project in the last two years of his term; but the conception of a papacy dependent on its Petrine ties survived. Other popes, saddled with the expenses of mounting a crusade against the Turks, restricted themselves to less costly improve-

[2] Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture , 351-62; and Roberto Salvini, "The Sistine Chapel: Ideology and Architecture," 153.

[3] Eugene Mántz, Les arts à la cour des papes pendant le XVe et le XVIe siècles , fasc. 4, pp. 111-15 and 123; and Arnold Esch, "Maezenatentum im Rom des 15. Jahrhunderts und seine politischen und wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen," 10 (I consulted the type-script of the proceedings at the Villa I Tatti, Florence).

[4] Carroll W. Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55 , 1-2, and 16.

ments: new chapels, repairs to the roof, refurbished windows—all of them short-term undertakings. Plus II (1458-64) was typical in this regard, contributing a papal benediction loggia, two chapels, statues of Sts. Peter and Paul, and other works. He also appears representative of the popes that followed Nicholas, if more vocal, in his awareness of how much the Vatican basilica contributed to his authority, writing that papal letters "seem to carry no weight unless they are dated from St. Peter's at Rome."^[5]

Sixtus IV (1471-84) also understood and promoted the Petrine foundation of papal authority. The iconographic scheme he devised for the first frescoes in the Sistine Chapel give a prominent role to Perugino's Charge to Peter . In his carefully thought-out theological program for the chapel, Sixtus called attention to the ideological parallel between Christ giving the keys to his apostle and his own claim, as Peter's successor, to a direct connection to Christ.^[6] When Julius finally moved to realize Nicholas's plan for a shrine that would dominate Rome, the prestige of the papacy, not the needs of the St. Peter's chapter, motivated his commission. And not the financial resources of the chapter, nor even of his own treasury, but of all Christendom were enlisted to subsidize this "important part of the great providential design for the pontificate."^[7] The pope's ability to collect and award monies from throughout Europe influenced artistic endeavors of all kinds. It is particularly important for his patronage of musicians.

Papal support of music at the basilica, like that of architecture, betrays a proprietary self-interest. In the provisions for the Cappella Giulia, Julius even spells out a subservient role for the St. Peter's choir, notably in his desire for the chapel to school young Italians and thereby lessen the dependence of the Sistine Chapel on foreign singers. This subservience was new only in its emphasis on youth. All through the

[5] Pius II, Commentarii: Rerum memorabilium que temporibus suis contigerunt , bk. 4, vol. 1, 293.

[6] Salvini, "Sistine Chapel," 148. L.D. Ettlinger and Roberto Salvini both made similar arguments for the participation of Sixtus in the artistic scheme of the papal chapel in separate (and simultaneous) monographs (Ettlinger, The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy ; and Salvini, La Cappella Sistina in Vaticano , 1:26-30 and 36-71).

[7] John O'Malley, "Fulfillment of the Christian Golden Age under Pope Julius II: Text of a Discourse of Giles of Viterbo, 1507," 272.

last half of the fifteenth century the papal chapel—larger, better paid, and more illustrious—had skimmed off the most talented singers employed by the basilica. Moreover, because the pope, the resident cardinals, and all of their retainers annually heard Mass in St. Peter's on Christmas, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and several other occasions, papal patronage of organs was far from disinterested. Given the lack of an organ in the pope's own chapel, the availability of one in St. Peter's raises questions about the extent of the a cappella performance practice among the papal singers.

But Julius pointedly alludes to a wider, more worrisome kind of subservience in his bull, that of Italian singers to foreign. His protonationalistic wish to replace singers "ex Galliarum et Hispaniarum partibus" with local talent speaks in two directions: it acknowledges an established preference for employing non-Italians and then looks to a future when the papal choir could recruit its members from properly educated Italian musicians. Either the status quo had grown more difficult to sustain, and the bull recognized a political and ecönomic necessity, or the international standards of the fifteenth century were no longer deemed desirable for the sixteenth, and Julius voiced a cultural bias.

In either case, the story of northern musicians at St. Peter's in the fifteenth century is worth telling not just because it will help to interpret Julius's motivations for establishing the Cappella Giulia; rather, among the approximately ninety-four northern musicians known to have been employed at the basilica between 1447 and 1513, there are potentially several significant composers. The possible employment of Le Rouge, Faugues, and others has escaped detection for a variety of reasons: the St. Peter's archives so often identify singers by first names only, especially in the crucial decades after 1447; the contributions of Nicholas V to the music of the basilica have not yet been identified; changes in political relations between the papacy and France in the 1460s—changes that occurred at a particularly propitious time for St. Peter's to hire singers—have yet to be associated with an increased number of French singers at St. Peter's; and the surviving collection of polyphony, the manuscript known as San Pietro B 80 (SPB80), was until recently thought to have originated in the north.

More broadly, an account of music at St. Peter's offers a chance to

examine why the basilica was able to attract singers from France and Flanders, despite the fact that from a northerner's standpoint a position at St. Peter's was clearly not a career goal. This investigation therefore testifies to the strength of the patronage system that existed at least from the Avignon papacy to the Council of Trent. The presence of French and Flemish musicians at St. Peter's may be a sign of papal influence, but it is an influence of a kind very different from that which brought Bramante or Raphael. These artists were immediately accountable to Julius II and were present because of his particular involvement. Instead, the papal responsibility for northerners at St. Peter's is indirect rather than direct, systemic rather than personal. Foreign singers came to Rome in the hopes of finding ecclesiastical patronage in the corporate sense. Whether they came in the entourage of a cardinal or on the advice of a northern colleague, they were attracted by the papal curia with all its agents and offices. This is quite different from coming because of a papal commission or individual summons.

Just as, on an individual level, the Italian careers of competent but undistinguished northerners reveal more about the strength of the system than the careers of luminaries like Josquin, on an institutional level, the presence of northerners at Roman churches like St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, or San Luigi dei francesi is more telling than that of northerners in the papal choir. That is to say, not only Italian rulers could compete with employers in the north, but also many Italian churches, notwithstanding the lower status and salary of such a position compared with employment in the papal choir or some ducal chapel. Many singers at St. Peter's had the qualifications to join the more elite choirs, as their previous or subsequent careers attest. But unlike a job in the Sistine Chapel, employment at St. Peter's was demonstrably not the culmination of a career. While in the next centuries Palestrina and Frescobaldi were content to spend great portions of their careers at St. Peter's, for their fifteenth-century predecessors, the basilica was a stepping stone.

For this period it is possible to relate several decades of changes in the personnel of the choir to different stages in the surviving collection of Mass and Office polyphony contained in SPB80. Together the archival records and the music manuscript provide a much clearer

picture of the basilica's traditions than either one or the other would alone, for where historical data exist together with music from the same time and place, one corpus complements the other: The contents of SPB80 help to document the musical life of the basilica as surely as that musical life, insofar as it can be reconstructed from the archives of the basilica, illumines SPB80. This kind of interrelation is perhaps more compelling for sacred manuscripts and institutions than for secular, because liturgical practices were codified, while recreational usage was more ephemeral, varying more easily according to the inclinations of the patron and shifts in poetical styles.

The historical account that constitutes part 1 of this study charts the evolution of the music institution, documenting "who, what, and when" for singers, music scribes, composers, organists, and other instrumentalists. The account keepers of St. Peter's varied greatly in the thoroughness with which they notated payments for music.^[8] In many cases we learn of musicians' activities not through references to singers or the organist but only incidentally, through payments to a pauper for carrying the singers' book, or to whoever pumped the bellows of the organ. Particularly in the 1450s and 1460s, when northern singers became a fixed presence at St. Peter's, the Italian bookkeepers identified the singers by first name only, if by name at all. Payments to "our singers" or to "eight singers for the month of March" are all too frequent. Nevertheless, in the Archivio Capitolare di San Pietro, the Exitus (expenditure) sections of the Censualia registers supplemented by the series of Quietanza volumes (signed receipts) contain ample material to investigate issues of patronage, manuscript production, and performance practice.

In part 2, which focuses on several of the anonymous Mass cycles in SPB80, I begin by proposing a distinction between full-fledged attributions of anonymous works and compositional "associations," that is, works that bear a significant resemblance to the style of a composer but which, for various reasons, are certainly or likely the products of another composer. Both the attributions and associations that I propose

[8] Regarding the makeup of the St. Peter's archives and the different kinds of information that they preserve about music and musicians, see Christopher Reynolds, "The Music Chapel at San Pietro in Vaticano in the Later Fifteenth Century," chapter 1; and the studies of Robert Montel.

in succeeding chapters have biographical implications. These I examine both in part 2 and in the final chapter of part 3, where musical and archival evidence are brought together in an attempt to flesh out the skeletal portrait of music at St. Peter's in the 1450s and 1460s that can be drawn from the archives alone.

The music of these Mass cycles is examined in part 3 for what it reveals about the cultural values and educational backgrounds of their composers. To what extent do these works reflect the culturally cosmopolitan environment in which they were composed or, at the very least, performed? Does it matter at all that some of this polyphony may have been composed in Italy rather than in the north? That is to ask, were these composers receptive to the Italian cultural milieu in which they worked or insulated from it? These questions deal less with sub-stance—for instance, a northern composer's use of a local chant or lauda melody—than with style, understanding "style" in a rhetorical sense to signify the way in which an idea is expressed. For fifteenth-century Rome, a time and place in which style played such a crucial role in all forms of communication, this focus is apt.

The organization of this book reflects my conviction that issues of style and patronage in any period are closely allied; that to probe the musical conventions of Masses in the 1450s and 1460s helps us to understand the circumstances that made the employment of a choir of northerners at St. Peter's not only possible but normative and desirable; and that to observe the changes in the conditions of this patron-age—progressing to decades in which northerners first had to be balanced by Italians, and then to Julius's call to replace northerners altogether—is to chronicle the stages in which new stylistic norms emerged. For all of Julius's debts to Sixtus IV and Nicholas V, he could not have embraced the cosmopolitan heritage of his most influential models. Nevertheless, the strength of the patronage system that he inherited ultimately prolonged the life of international musical styles in Rome far into the sixteenth century, almost as long as it took to complete the rebuilding of St. Peter's.