Patronage

After approximately seventy-five years without an organ, the chapter purchased five between circa 1420 and 1495. Doubtless technological advances in organ' construction made ever newer instruments desirable; and the employment of northern rather than Italian organists may also have affected attitudes toward the organs. But quite probably the pope and not the St. Peter's musicians or chapter officials had determined when the basilica received a new organ. In the fourteenth century, as noted in chapter 1, and again late in the sixteenth century the hand of the pope in providing organs is clearly evident. When St. Peter's received a new organ in 1580—the first since 1495—it was thanks to the benevolence of Pope Gregory XIII; similarly, Clement VIII took the initiative for St. John Lateran at the end of the century.^[42] From this time come also the first written acknowledgments that St. Peter's owed the 1495 organ to papal generosity. Tiberio Alpharano wrongly attributed the 1495 organ to Calixtus III (1455-58) in his De Basilicae Vaticanae antiquissima et nova structura (Rome, ca. 1571). Writing in the reform-conscious climate of post-Tridentine Rome, Alpharano evidently identified the coat of arms of the libertine Alexander VI with that of his puritan uncle Pope Calixtus—they both belonged to the same branch

[42] Lunelli supplies the documentation respectively in L'arte organaria , 53, and Die Orgel von San Giovanni in Laterano , 3.

of the family—and so erroneously predated the organ built during Alexander's term by several decades.^[43] Grimaldi correctly attributed the organ to Alexander VI. Further testimony associates the construction of two other Roman organs to Alexander. Grimaldi supplies one, identifying him as the benefactor of an organ built by Domenico da Lucca for San Salvatore in Lauro, and an anonymous chronicler at Santa Maria del Popolo, writing in 1501, records the sponsorship of Alexander for the instrument they had gained only two years before.^[44] Indeed, few other Renaissance popes or cardinals could match this degree of support for music.

Alpharano and Grimaldi presumably based their attributions for the organ on the Borgia coat of arms that had been painted by Aspertini or one of the lesser artists. Patrons—papal or otherwise—traditionally affixed their name, their family's insignia, or both, to anything they had financed, no matter how small. Patrons proclaimed both their own generosity and their particular interests to future generations by signs such as Martinus de Roa's coat of arms on St. Peter's manuscripts, the inscription "Nicholas PP. 1449" in the basilica over each of the doors at the entrance of the atrium, or the ubiquitous Orsini crest on everything from books to altars. But as Grimaldi noted, the organ bore two coats of arms; the Borgia bull was paired with the basilica's insignia, the crossed keys of St. Peter. As with similar combinations this undoubtedly denoted a shared patronage, as on the roof of the atrium where the arms of Martin V were displayed in marble alongside those of the Duke of Brittany;^[45] or in the six windows of the facade designed by Michelozzo Michelozzi, three of which carried the insignia of the

[43] Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae , 60-61: "iuxta altare sancti Pastoris Calixto tertio Pont. Max. magna modulatissima et elegantissima organa e metallis lignisque deauratis exornata sex columnis porphireticis sustenata ad concentus cantus chori et Basilicae decorem suffecta fuerunt." Cerrati explained Alpharano's confusion over the Borgia coat of arms (ibid., 60, n. 2). See also Müntz, Les arts ô la cour , fasc. 4, p. 197. The attribution to Calixtus has been repeated as recently as Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, La Basilica di S. Pietro , 102.

[44] The reference of Grimaldi is in Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae , 60, n. 2; regarding Santa Maria del Popolo, see Enzo Bentivoglio and Simonetta Valtieri, Santa Maria del Popolo a Roma, con una appendice di documenti inediti sulla chiesa e su Roma , 46, n. 60, and 47, for a citation from 1646 about "l'organo già fatto fare dal sommo Pontefice Alessandro VI, Borgia."

[45] Alpharano, De Basilicae Vaticanae , 6o, n. 2.

original donor Cosimo de' Medici and three the Farnese arms of Paul III, who paid to have the windows refurbished.^[46]

There is no record of an agreement between the basilica chapter and Alexander VI, yet some sense of how the financial responsibilities would have been apportioned may exist in the documents that have survived. Regarding the two major expenditures, for construction and for decoration, I have already noted the absence of any payments to Domenico da Lucca, either for his wages or his expenses, and suggested that St. Peter's was therefore primarily charged with decorating the organ. This does not preclude payments to the organ builder as well, but if the chapter paid for everything, there would have been no reason to affix the Borgia coat of arms. The source of funding for the organ built for Santa Maria del Popolo in 1499 is no less ambiguous. Curiously, the contract between the church and organ builder never names Alexander VI, despite his receiving the credit two years later. Moreover, the contract explicitly spells out a separation of responsibilities: The organ builder was to pay all his own expenses, while the church would finance the decoration and the carpenters who prepared the spot assigned to the organ.^[47]

Legal action taken against St. Peter's offers another indication of papal involvement with the 1495 organ. Years after most of the work had been completed, agents of the pope applied extreme pressure on the canons of St. Peter's to get them to fulfill their obligations regarding the organ. From August 1501 through February 1502, the chapter weathered a series of ecclesiastical injunctions pertaining to their failure to meet their contracted payments. The first sign of trouble, a payment for a "seal on the lifting of the excommunication of the papal vicar [Pietro Strozzi?] over the 19 ducats for the organ" (doc. 1501d), was soon followed by others. In September the chapter met to discuss the censure they had received over "the money owed for the organ" and "other matters." The vague archival summaries of the meetings that followed tell us that the debts persisted and little else. Moderate sums demanded monthly attention in the fall of 1501; and in December, a brief four days before the arrival of their new cardinal archpriest,

[46] Ibid., 15, n. 1.

[47] T. Valenti, "Il contratto per un organo in S. Maria del Popolo a Roma (1499)," 289-96.

Ippolito d'Este, the chapter convened to deal with "the remainder [of the debt] and the painting of the organ," as if to put its house in order (docs. 1501e and g).

The trouble came to a head in February, when a papal functionary threatened to place the basilica under an interdict and to excommunicate all of its canons. While excommunication seems a drastic measure, it was not an uncommon weapon for collecting debts. Indeed, precisely because ecclesiastics were susceptible to this form of intimidation, they were apparently reliable debtors.^[48] Papal patience with this debt had worn thin after six months of inaction. For the first time the account indicates who the chapter owed, not an artist or an organ builder, but a member of the papal household who had lent 39 ducats "for the rest of the organ" (doc. 1502a), evidently for unfinished painting.

Receipts and other records for painting the organ always name one or two of the canons, but they were the agents of the chapter, "especially delegated" to oversee the details of the various expenditures;^[49] the St. Peter's official with the greatest responsibility for bringing papal programs to fruition, or for initiating some of his own, was the cardinal archpriest. His role in all this is unknown, but some contribution is indicated by a striking coincidence. Beginning with Antonio Correr (1420-34), present when the basilica probably gained its first fifteenth-century organ, all the important work on organs took place during the tenure of a cardinal archpriest from Venice. That early instrument was apparently rebuilt or replaced shortly before 1450 under the Venetian Pietro Barbo (1445-64), the future Pope Paul II. Then Battista Zeno (1470-1501) served sufficiently long to witness the construction of an organ pair plus the last and most durable organ of the century. And after another forty years, when it too was rebuilt in the 1530s, the archpriest was Cardinal Francesco Cornaro of Venice (1530-43).

Whether the regional consistency of this series is simply a chance occurrence or the product of a local tradition is unclear; however, from the list of archpriests we can draw an inference about the partic-

[48] Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494 , 213.

[49] In 1496 Nicholas de Campania and Franciscus de Anguillaria were called "Basilicae Principis Apostolorum de Urbe canonici et commissarii ad fabricam organorum a canonicis et capitulo ejusdem basilicae specialiter deputati" (Müntz, Les arts à la cour , 195).

ular influence each cardinal had in the commissions. Not only were all of the organ builders from the north, rather than from Naples or even Rome, three of them had demonstrable ties to the Veneto: the Venetian Urbano Spera in 1448, Domenico di Lorenzo da Lucca (probably the Dominicus Venetus cited by Cortcsi) in 1496, and Alessandro Trasuntino di Venezia in the 1530s.^[50] In contrast, the chapter hired its first local builders in 1580, Mario and Vincenzo da Sulmona, at a time when the cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a Roman, was archpriest. Whatever this suggests about the sway a cardinal archpriest could muster in favor of awarding a commission to a compatriot, there is nothing to indicate a financial stake, such as in the numerous works at St. Peter's widely attributed to the patronage of the archpriest. Elsewhere in Rome the cardinal archpriest evidently took full responsibility for both commission and payment. There is a report from St. John Lateran of an organ sponsored by the cardinal archpriest Antonio Martins de Chavez before 1447,^[51] and by the 1460s at Santa Maria Maggiore its cardinal archpriest, Guillaume d'Estouteville, had supplied the church with both organ and organist, according to Gaspar of Verona.^[52] Lastly, while he was cardinal archpriest at St. Peter's, Ippolito d'Este apparently gave an organ to the Ferrarese church Santa Maria in Vado in 1515.^[53]

As I have argued elsewhere, the lengthy lifespan of the organ of 1495-96 is due as much to its lavish artistic decoration as to the presumed merits of its construction, since the money that purchased the time and materials of three artists and two goldsmiths represented an investment far beyond that seen for the earlier organs.^[54] But another factor would single-handedly have reversed the free-spending policies of the Quattrocento, when each successive generation commissioned a new organ: namely, the construction of the new basilica. Alexander VI was the last Renaissance pope whose approach to patronage was es-

[50] Lunelli describes his work in L'arte organaria , 49-50.

[51] Moroni cites the patronage of this Portuguese cardinal (Dizionario , 12:33). However, Lunelli states only that an organ was renovated under Nicholas V (thus after 1447), apparently unaware of the reference in Moroni (Die Orgel von San Giovanni in Laterano , 3).

[52] Gaspar Veronensis, De gestis tempore Pontificis Maximae Pauli Secundi liber secundus , 1,031.

[53] Lunelli, L'arte organaria , 22.

[54] Reynolds, "Early Renaissance Organs," 53-54.

sentially medieval.^[55] It lacked the focused resolve of the visionary Nicholas V, a resolve that Julius II forced on all of his sixteenth-century successors by the initiative he took toward St. Peter's. In this century papal money for organs is notable for its absence until 1580. Thus when the chapter showed its old impulse to have an up-to-date organ after the Sack of Rome (1527), the musical response of the 1530s was to renovate, the artistic to retouch. But these were mere concessions to modernity made in the face of the incomparably greater expense of rebuilding the basilica itself.

[55] Pius III reigned too briefly to implement a policy of patronage.