Construction

In the years after the curia returned to Rome in 1420, there were at least two organs in Roman basilicas, in addition to the one built at St. Peter's. The canons of St. John Lateran commissioned an organ in 1427 from Andrea di Francesco Pinelli, a chorister from the Roman church San Lorenzo in Damaso. Typical of the competitive environment in papal Rome, the only concern that the canons specified in the contract was that the organ should be larger than that owned by Santa Maria Maggiore; in fact, they wanted an instrument a third larger. Judging from the proposed dimensions of the choir loft—4 meters by 2.60 meters—which would hold the organ and the organist, the instrument was of moderate size.^[2] However meager this description, it is still more than we know about the organ then at St. Peter's.

Although the earliest account books of St. Peter's are from 1372, there is not a payment regarding an organ at the basilica until that to the magister organorum during the papacy of Martin V. From August 1424, it could be either for repairs to the organ or for salary to the organist (doc. 1424a). Regular salary payments commence in October, and these name Gregorius de Pisa as presbyter et organista . His wages were set at 1 gold ducat per month, as opposed to 1 1/2 ducats for the only other organist known at St. Peter's during the first half of the century, Johannes Jacobus. The organ played by Gregorius and Johannes was probably that constructed by the German organ builder Paulus Henrici dicti Wenchen, whose death was entered into the basilica's Liber anniversarii sometime during the century preceding the election of Nicholas V in 1447. Noting the date of his death (31 August) but not the year, the Liber adds that he "built and assembled [composuit ] our organ as a testament to his life, and his parents; and in his death [he]

[2] Renato Lunelli, Der Orgelbau in Italien in seinen Meisterwerken vom 14. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart , 133-34. Lunelli quotes from an unpublished study of Raffaele Casimiri, "Memorie e documenti per servire alla storia della Chiesa Lateranense." In 1434 Andrea da Roma, identified as a canon at San Lorenzo in Damaso, turned up at Orvieto Cathedral to repair 171 organ pipes. See Luigi Fumi, Il duomo di Orvieto e i suoi restauri , 455, col. 2.

bequeathed 200 gold florens to our basilica," some of which was to be devoted "to the repair of the house with the sign of the organs."^[3]

The terms of the bequest make it possible to estimate the date of the organ Paulo di Henrico built at St. Peter's. Before 1395 there is no mention of a house cure signo organum among the dwellings owned by the basilica, but from then through 1454 the account books locate it in the parish of San Gregorio de Cortina. This medieval church, situated squarely in front of the basilica (approximately where the obelisk is now), served as a residence for the singers of St. Peter's.^[4] Among its tenants were Paolo Tebaldeschis in 1405, then a prebendary and singer at the basilica, and, before him in 1397, a German scribe of Pope Boniface IX named Henrico (doc. 1397a). If this Henrico theotonico is the father whom Paolo honored by building an organ, then this organ was probably constructed in the first part of the fifteenth century. This possibility is all the more credible for the 1407 report of damage to the house Henrico had rented. Decrepit and uninhabited, the house with the sign of the organs had broken windows, stairs, and doors doubtless among the repairs Paolo hoped to effect.^[5] Because the pay books from 1407 to 1416 contain no references at all to organs, Paolo's work at St. Peter's must fall between 1416 and the next accounts in 1424. Almost certainly it occurred after Martin V entered Rome at the end of September 1420 and, with the assistance of the cardinals he brought with him, set about rebuilding the palaces, churches, and streets of Rome. He assumed responsibility for renovating St. Peter's, the Vatican Palace, and St. John Lateran. While the locus cantorum in the papal chapel was restored in 1420-21, it is tempting to think that St. Peter's acquired its first organ in at least fifty years.^[6]

[3] Tiberio Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae antiquissima et nova structura , 60-61, n. 2; and Lunelli, L'arte organaria del Rinascimento in Roma ... dalle origini a tutto il periodo frescobaldiano , 37.

[4] Christian Huelsen, Le chiese di Roma nel medio evo , 257. Regarding the house itself, Pio Pecchai implies that there was also a house cum signo organorum in the parish of Santa Maria de Virgariis, a church next to San Gregorio de Cortino on the piazza; see his "I segni sulle case di Roma nel medio evo," 31.

[5] Doc. 1407a. If the chapter ever spent his money to that end, the improvements were temporary. The notices from 1448 to 1454 bluntly state: "Domus cum signo organorum est in ruina"; e.g., Censualia 5, int. 5, introitus (1448), fol. 42v.

[6] Regarding repairs to the papal chapel, see Franz Ehrle and Hermann Egger, Der vaticanische Palast in seiner Entwicklung bis zum Mitte des XV. Jahrhunderts , 90-91.

Considering all the building Nicholas V sponsored at St. Peter's—in 1453 alone he spent over 30,000 gold ducats on construction at the basilica and the papal palace^[7] —and considering the other signs of musical expansion evident during his reign, a new organ would have ranked among the lesser of his contributions to the luster of ceremonies in the basilica. Yet there is only the slimmest evidence that such construction actually transpired, in the form of a legal document from 1448, briefly summarized as an instrumentorum obligationis pro capitulo Sancti Petri . This links a Venetian organ builder (organorum artifex ) named Urbano Spera to the basilica, without supplying details about the nature of his dealings with St. Peter's.^[8] And while no archival records survive for 1448 or 1449, information from the years preceding and following suggests that the chapter did indeed issue a commission for another organ shortly before the Jubilee of 1450.

Of the fifteenth-century organs in St. Peter's, that built by Paulo di Henrico looms as one of the sturdier, apparently surviving through most of the papacy of Eugenius IV (1431-47) and his decade-long absence from Rome. Admittedly the sparse documentation for this period does not cover the years from 1424 to 1436. But if the organ in use through February 1445 was the one first recorded in 1424, then St. Peter's maintained its organ only slightly longer than did the chapter of St. John Lateran. They evidently replaced an organ constructed in 1427 sometime between 1444 and 1447. For much of this time the magister organorum at St. Peter's was Johannes Jacobus, a prebendary and in 1438 also a chamberlain of the treasury. His long career stretched from 1438 at the latest to 1456, with the telling exception of 1447.

During this first year of Nicholas's papacy, as St. Peter's hired several northern singers, the basilica had not one but an odd collection of organists drawn from the ranks of the St. Peter's clergy. And even though Johannes Jacobus was present, regularly collecting his ecclesiastical sti-

[7] Eugene Müntz, Les arts à la cour des papes pendant te XVe et le XVIe siècles , fasc. 4, p. 72, n. 1.

[8] The document is cited in Antonio Bertolotti, Artisti veneti in Roma nei secoli XV, XVI, e XVII: Studi e ricerche negli archivi romani , 13. See also Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae , 60-61, n. z; and Lunelli, L'arte organaria , 2-3. In 1489-90 a ftate Urbanus Venetus built the large organ "in cornu Evangelli" in the basilica St. Mark's of Venice; see Lunelli, Studi e documenti di storia organaria veneta , 227-29; and Der orgelbau in Italien in seinen Meisterwerken vom 14. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart , 188-89.

pend, he did not serve as an organist. Nicholas had evidently been pope for over three months before anyone played an organ in the basilica. Then for the Octave of Corpus Christi—one of the more important feasts celebrated at St. Peter's—the chapter allocated 'a meager 6 bolognini for the meal of "one who plays the organ" (doc. 1447b). Another several months passed before a group of fourteen clergy, mostly clerics, received an extraordinary "organ payment" (solutio organorum ) at the end of October, "for the organ on several occasions." A second such listing occurred in January or February 1448 (docs. 1447h and 1448a), this time naming ten individuals. In contrast to previous years in which one or two bolognini were frequently given to "he who agitates the bellows," the accounts do not mention that chore at all in 1447.

Yet the sums after each name are too high to be for the menial task of bellows pumping. Nor could they be the accumulated expenses from several weeks or months of pumping an organ, because either of the lists alone—each for three or four months—easily exceeds the total bellows expenses of any single year before or after. A similar payment occurs only in February 1493, shortly before the 1475 organ ceased to function, when the mansionario or custodian Christoforo was paid for playing the organ. The organ duties in 1447-48 were certainly temporary and likely basic, perhaps only to provide intonations for antiphons, hymns, and magnificats during Vespers, or for the Gloria of the Mass. Two of the tasks specified for a new organist at Udine Cathedral in 1454 were to play the cantus firmus and the intonations.^[9] It also seems doubtful that the various clerics at St. Peter's were playing a large organ, given the absence of bellows payments and the inactivity of the regular organist Johannes Jacobus.

From no organist at all to a communal corps—in this abnormal context the unspecified contract between St. Peter's and a Venetian organ builder looks more plausibly like an agreement to replace an old and irreparable instrument. When accounts resume in the Jubilee Year 1450, Johannes Jacobus is once again salaried as nostro beneficiato et horganiste (doc. 1450b), albeit intermittently. Furthermore, in this same

[9] These are among the most basic functions enumerated in Otto Gombosi, "About Organ Playing in the Divine Service, circa 1500," 51-68. See also, Vale, "La cappella musicale del duomo Udine," 93.

year two carpenters received telltale compensation, one for "expenses to the organ" and the other "for a door on the stall [case] of the organ" (docs. 1450d and 1451a). These are probably not repairs, always the responsibility of the organist, but actual construction, presumably on the case of an organ completed in time for the extensive Jubilee Year celebrations.

Once the basilica had its own choir of northerners, the organ appears to have become less important in the 1450s and even completely irrelevant between 1461 and 1475. The organ from Nicholas's papacy evidently broke down in 1461; moreover, after Johannes Jacobus retired, the basilica employed organists on a short-term basis. Beginning in July 1458 the sporadic accounts identify three organists, at least two of whom were clerics (listed in Table 6): Frater Antonio, "master of organs and sacristan in our sacristy," Frater Francisco, and then for eight months in 1461, Johannes "magistro nostro horganistae." Following the last payment to Johannes in November, the basilica did not have a functional large organ until 1476. While someone could have played a small portable organ, there are no payments of any kind regarding an organ until those pertaining to the construction of a new organ in March 1475.^[10] Because this loss coincided with far-reaching changes in the basilica's choir, both in the number of singers and in the amount of salaries, the absence of an organ after 1461 was probably the result of a conscious decision to change past musical practices. Italian organists who were accustomed to performing according to older, less often polyphonic, traditions must eventually have encountered problems accompanying choirs composed of northerners. For roughly fifteen years music heard at St. Peter's and that heard in the papal chapel therefore followed the same tradition of liturgical music performed without organ. But while this evidently represented a long-standing practice for papal singers, at St. Peter's it may have represented a practical solution to the problem of how older Italian organ traditions yielded to northern polyphony.

St. Peter's acquired not one organ but two in 1475. The identity of the organ builder, Jacobus Johannes da Lucca, is revealed in a contract

[10] Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs at San Pietro in Vaticano," 43; the payment is given there in Appendix 1, no. 4, P. 55.

between him and the Orvieto Cathedral in 1480 to build an organ pair just like the one he had recently completed for St. Peter's in Rome.^[11] According to the Orvieto specifications the large organ had four registers, and the small organ, evidently a rückpositiv , could "sound both separately from the large organ and together according to the will of the player." ^[12] At Orvieto they had first attempted to engage the German organ builder Fra Leonardo tedesco .^[13] When he did not come, the bishop of Orvieto proposed Jacobus Johannes da Lucca, who then submitted his designs to the chapter. The bishop recommending Jacobus Johannes was Giorgio della Rovere, a man with ideal connections to act as an artistic liaison between Rome and Orvieto. Not only was he a relative of Sixtus IV, but, more significant for his awareness of Jacobus's work, he was papal vicar at St. Peter's from 1477 to 1483.^[14] Word-of-mouth reports on past commissions must have played a large role in the job prospects of organ builders, particularly when the words of recommendation came from the presiding bishop. The contractual stipulation in Orvieto to build an instrument like the one recently completed at St. Peter's speaks well for the satisfaction of the basilica chapter and its vicar.

The inaugural performance of the new St. Peter's organ pair must have occurred one year later, not long after Ausquier finished copying the manuscript SPB80. By March 1476 the basilica had in its employ a Spanish organist, Johannes Alfonsus Salamantinus, who signed his first receipts proudly, "organista in basilica Sancti Petri."^[15] Although the organ was musically functional, work on the decoration of the organ

[11] The work at Orvieto is described in Luigi Fumi, Il duomo di Orvieto e i suoi restauri , 456-57. It and the organ at St. Peter's are discussed in detail in Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs," 43-49.

[12] Fumi, Il duomo , 457, col. x; Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs," 45.

[13] Lunelli identified him as the Augustinian frate Leonardo de Alamania active in Spoleto (1470) and then Rieti. Leonardo returned to Spoleto in late 1479 (Der Orgelbau , 103).

[14] He became bishop of Orvieto in 1476 (Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario d'eriduzione storico-ecclesiastico da S. Pietro sino ai nostri giorni , 49:221).

[15] Quietanza 8 (1476-77), unfol. This is also cited in Roth, "Primus in Petri aedem Sixtus perpetuae harmoniae cantores introduxit : Alcune osservazioni sul patronato musicale di Sisto IV," 234-35. There he repeats Lunelli's erroneous contention that Sixtus IV built an organ in his St. Peter's chapel in 1479; for a discussion of Lunelli's arguments, see Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs," 43-45.

described below continued still for another several months. So successful was the novel organ pair that Antonio de Thomeis, a Roman notary, specifically mentioned it in verses he wrote in 1477 or early 1478 to honor Sixtus IV. Lauding the sculptures and marble of the first altar, Antonio describes "the opposing organs, so excellent that they appear serene atop the sea."^[16] The reference to the sea must have something to do with artistic decoration and its probable position in a balcony above the early Trecento tomb of Orso Orsini (d. 1304) and the ancient altar, already present in the eighth century and known simply as buon Pastore .^[17]

As before these organs did not last long. Sometime during a two-year break in the records (March 1493 through February 1495), they expired.^[18] By 1496 the chapter had hired an organ builder of renown, Domenico di Lorenzo da Lucca (1452-1525). Midway through a career that began before 1479 and spanned half a century, he had already constructed at least a dozen organs, five of them in Padua and three each in Pisa and Lucca. From Rome he went on to work in Milan, Siena, Florence, and Genoa among other places.^[19] Domenico may have answered a summons to St. Peter's by the beginning of 1496, only months after contracting to build a fourth organ in Lucca.^[20] By February 1496 two canons at St. Peter's signed a contract with the principal

[16] The poem is published in Fabio Carboni, "Un capitolo ternario di Antonio de Thomeis in onore de Sisto IV," 273-85. The relevant verses are: "Del principe San Pier la sepultura/nella tribuna dello primo altare/quante figure di nobile scultura/marmoree, degno, como evidente appare, /colli organi in opposito si excellenti/che pargono serena sopra el mare" (p. 279).

[17] Arthur George Hill found this placement over an altar "peculiar" (The Organ-Cases and Organs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance , 2: 53). Cerrati summarizes the history of the altar, in Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae , 60, n. 1.

[18] For details on this and the organ of Alexander VI, see Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs," 49-52.

[19] See ibid., 50. On Domenico di Lorenzo, see Franco Baggiani, "Gli organari lucchesi," 5-19; and Lunelli, L'arte organaria , 40-43. See also his Studi e documenti di storia organaria veneta , 33 - 35, 181.

[20] He assumed the rent of a house occupied until December 1495 by Bartolomeo di Cristoforo, a papal instrumentalist ("tubicina di S. Sta.") from Mantua; see A. Bertolotti, Artisti lombardi a Roma nei secoli XV, XVI, e XVII: Studi e ricerche negli archivi romani , 1:380. Yet on 10 Dec. 1495 Domenico had agreed to terms with San Pier Maggiore in Lucca. Regarding the contract and the specifications for the organ, see Baggiani, "Gli organari lucchesi," 13 and 16.

artist and goldsmith charged with decorating the organ, so Domenico must have secured his own agreement by then, to the point of describing the size and capabilities of the instrument.

Given the rapid mortality of the organs that the basilica had purchased earlier in the century, it is not surprising that this time the chapter went to the trouble to deputize a distinguished committee of Isacco Argyropulo, Lorenzo de Corduva, and Stefano da Salerno "master of organs" to oversee Domenico's progress. Argyropulo, an organ builder and virtuoso, had resided in Rome since 1479 as a cubicularius secretus of Sixtus IV, and he occasionally came to read the Epistle in Greek at services in St. Peter's.^[21] Stefano da Salerno is doubtless the organ builder Fra Stefano del Paone da Salerno, active in Naples (1474), Florence (1483-84), and also at the court of Mathias Corvinus and Beatrice d'Aragona in Budapest. Fra Stefano was present in Rome by 1483 and then more permanently from 149O.^[22] Paolo Cortesi praised both Argyropulo and Lorenzo de Corduva in his De cardinalatu , written circa 1503-10, the latter for his dexterity (interpuncta facilitas ) on the clavichord.^[23]

In this same passage Cortesi mentions another organist, otherwise unknown, a Dominicus Venetus, whom others had lauded despite his "intemperate use of quick runs (effusa percusione ), by which the sense of the ear is filled with variety."^[24] Even though the Domenico hired by St. Peter's in 1495-96 was born in Lucca, there is reason to identify him with Cortesi's organist from the Veneto. Paduan churches had commissioned more of his organs than any other city, and in the contract for the two he had constructed for the Basilica del Santo of Padua, Domenico is described as a resident of Treviso. Moreover, between his arrival in Rome and his work a decade later in Milan (1506),

[21] See Celani's remarks in Burchard, Liber notarum , 1 :386, n. 1. On at least two occasions (in 1480 and 1483) he borrowed books from the papal library founded by Sixtus IV (Eugene Müntz and Paul Fabre, La bibliothèque du Vatican au XVe siècle , 281 and 290.

[22] Lunelli, L'arte organaria , 3-4, and 40; and Atlas, Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples , 47.

[23] Pirrotta translated this passage of De cardinalatu in "Musical and Cultural Tendencies in Fifteenth-Century Italy," 103, with commentary on p. 107.

[24] Pirrotta, "Musical and Cultural Tendencies," 103.

the only reference to his presence away from Rome is in Venice in 1502; that is, just before Cortesi began his final essay.^[25] Other wandering musicians were identified as "from" more than one place, or as from someplace other than where they had been born. For Domenico to be born in Lucca yet called "Venetus" by Cortesi has parallels with Stefano del Paone da Salerno, also known as Stefano da Napoli; with Bernardo Pisano, born in Florence; and with the Frenchman Maitre Jhan, called Johannes da Ferrara in one Sistine Chapel manuscript. After finishing the organ at St. Peter's, Domenico went on to build another at the Roman church San Salvatore in Lauro. And in 1501 he was evidently available to tune the organ for St. Peter's. That is the implication of a brief, one-line summary of a chapter meeting in January 1501 about the "out-of-tune" organ and a "needy" Domenico da Lucca (doc. 1501b).

Although there is no contemporary description of the organ Domenico built for the basilica, its general features can be deduced by comparing other organs he had constructed to the itemized account of the renovations made on the St. Peter's organ in 1720. Although most of the fourteen registers would date from the renovation of 1624-26, Domenico had previously built organs in Padua (1479) and Lucca (1480) with a single keyboard, flute register, five bellows, and pipes made of tin and lead. The Lucca organ included a flute register, then a novelty, as did later organs in Lucca (1495) and Siena (1508). And if the St. Peter's organ resembled the one Domenico had just contracted to do in Lucca, it would have had five registers, pedals, and a range in excess of four octaves.^[26] It was therefore a larger instrument than that acquired in 1475-76 with four registers, but it could not equal contemporary German or French organs, either in terms of the number of stops or their variety; for example, the Innsbruck organ of Paul Hofhaimer which was restored in 1497 had six registers plus tambourines, bells, and bird whistles. In 1517 this exotic range of sounds

[25] Baggiani cites a Venetian notarial document signed by Domenico in "Gli organari lucchesi." 13.

[26] Lunelli, L'arte organaria , 41-42, and 87. He printed the Padua contract in Studi e documenti , 33-35. Baggiani presents a tabular comparison of six organs built by Domenico between 1480 and 1509 ("Gli organari lucchesi," 15-16).

still amazed Antonio de Beatis as he journeyed from Rome to Flanders.^[27] Nevertheless, the last of St. Peter's fifteenth-century organs was among the premier Italian instruments of its time.