Chapter 2—
Florentines in Venice and the Madrigal at Home

Throughout much of the 1530s and beyond Venice sheltered a colony of exiled Florentines, the fuorusciti. As a group, the fuorusciti were highly aristocratic and educated, well versed in music and letters, and eminently equipped to indulge expensive cultural habits.^[1] One of them, Neri Capponi, arrived in Venice in 1538 from Lyons. Before long he had established what became the most sophisticated musical academy in Venice, headed by Willaert and graced by the acclaimed soprano Polissena Pecorina. Like other private patrons, Capponi seems to have gathered his academists under his own roof, where they flourished in the early 1540s and almost surely premiered much of Willaert's Musica nova. Another Florentine, Ruberto Strozzi, lodged intermittently in the city during the thirties and forties in the course of far-ranging business and political errands that accelerated after his family was banished from Florence in 1534.^[2] In the same years Strozzi seems continually to have sought out new madrigals.^[3] The Strozzi kept a palace by Venice's Campo San

[1] The Florentine community had maintained a chapel at the Venetian Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari since 1436. The portion of the Frari's archive at I-Vas designated "Scuola dei fiorentini" lacks items for the years 1504 to 1658.

For an informative essay emphasizing the literary aspect of Florentine exiles in Venice see Valerio Vianello, "Tra Firenze e Venezia: il fenomeno del fuoruscitismo," in Il letterato, l'accademia, il libro: contributi sulla cultura veneta del cinquecento, Biblioteca Veneta, no. 6 (Padua, 1988), pp. 17-46.

[2] Capponi lived from 1504 to 1594 and Strozzi from ca. 1512 to 1566. See further on Capponi's genealogy in n. 11 below.

[3] For knowledge about patronage of the madrigal by Florentine exiles in this era, see the crucial findings of Richard J. Agee: "Ruberto Strozzi and the Early Madrigal," JAMS 36 (1983): 1-17, and idem, "Filippo Strozzi and the Early Madrigal," ibid., 38 (1985): 227-37. Agee was cautious about concluding definitively that the Neri Capponi of musical fame is the same as the one appearing in many Strozzi letters, but cross-references in the letters combined with Passerini's genealogy cited in n. 11 below confirms that they are one person.

Canciano along the lovely Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli (Plate 7).^[4] Even though their presence in Venice was sporadic, various members of the family including Ruberto made stays long enough to establish a base for domestic music making there. In the early to mid-forties, as he tore about Italy and France, Ruberto is known to have bought up madrigals and motets by Cipriano de Rore.^[5]

The coincidence of the Florentine presence in Venice with the flourishing of Venetian madrigals was fateful. Florentines made their way into Venice following a long history of political strife in their own city, whose republican edifice by then had collapsed. During the years spent in Florence, these exiles had sustained a long tradition vigorously promoting Italian vocal music. It was only natural that they should have continued it once abroad.

The patronage of both Capponi and Strozzi was aggressively acquisitive, seeking sole ownership of important new settings. But their interest was not mere collection. Each was groomed in gentlemen's musical skills and moved in patrician circles that practiced part singing.^[6] Each also studied viol in Venice with the pedagogue Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego, as Ganassi revealed in dedicating to them in 1542 and 1543 the respective halves of his treatise on viol playing.^[7] In both roles — as patrons and as amateur musicians — they met with extravagance the expectations of class and pedigree that they shared with a large network of affluent Florentines abroad, whose cultural heritage placed arts and letters at its center.

In both political and artistic realms the vicissitudes and imaginative powers of Ruberto's father had played a dominant role — a role that is critical for our understanding of the next generation's construction of this heritage and its relationship to Venetian music. Ruberto was the son of Filippo di Filippo Strozzi, the most prominent Florentine banker of the first third of the century and, by many reckonings, for most of his life the richest man in Italy.^[8] It was for the Strozzi bank in Lyons that Capponi had served as company manager from 1532 until 1538, when he fled to Venice

[4] The information comes from a letter from Lione Strozzi, prior of Capua, to Cavalier Covoni, minister of the Strozzi tariffs, addressed to "campo di San Canziano, in ca' Strozzi." The letter appears with documents published in G.-B. Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, tragedia (Florence, 1847), p. 312; see also Agostino Sagredo, "Statuti della Fraternità e Compagnia dei Fiorentini in Venezia dell'anno MDLVI dati in luce per cura e preceduti da un discorso," Archivio storico italiano, App. 9 (1853): 447. Sagredo believed that the Strozzi house was "quella ora del Weber dove altre volte era la famosa Biblioteca Svajer" (p.447), that is, Davide Weber, the famous early-nineteenth-century art collector, and Amedeo Svajer, the bibliophile. This house stands at the Ponte di San Canciano by the so-called Traghetto di Murano and is now numbered 4503 in the sestiere of Cannaregio. The ancient Greek reliefs on the exterior, apparently added by Weber, are described by Abbé Moschini, Itinéraire de la ville de Venise et des îles circonvoisines (Venice, 1819), pp. 189-91. See further in Giuseppe Tassini, Alcuni palazzi ed antichi edifichi di Venezia storicamente illustrati con annotazioni (Venice, 1879), pp. 171-72, which traces the house back to the Morosini family, and idem, Curiosità veneziane, ovvero origini delle denominazioni stradali di Venezia, rev. ed. Lino Moretti (Venice, 1988), p. 119.

[5] See Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi."

[6] See nn. 24-27 below.

[7] See his Regola rubertina (Venice, 1542), dedicated to Strozzi, and Lettione seconda pur della prattica di sonare il violone d'arco da tasti (Venice, 1543), to Capponi. For an English text see the trans. of Hildemarie Peter made from the German ed. of Daphne Silvester and Stephen Silvester (Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1972).

[8] Filippo was born in 1488 and died in 1538. For a contemporary view of his wealth see the cinquecento historian Bernardo Segni, Istorie fiorentine dall'anno MDXXVII al MDLV, ed. G. Gargani (Florence, 1857), who claimed that "nella ricchezza fu solo, e senza comparazione di qualsivoglia uomo d'Italia" (p.371).

7.
Strozzi palace in Venice along the Rio dei Santissimi Apostoli by the so-called
Traghetto di Murano, Ponte di San Canciano. Parish of San Canciano, Cannaregio
4503. Photo courtesy of Osvaldo Böhm.

in early spring in the face of French demands to release certain of Filippo's funds.^[9] Capponi's involvement in Strozzian financial affairs formed part of a protracted union between the two families, which involved a web of marriages around the turn of the century and included the marriage of Ruberto's sister to Luigi Capponi.^[10] Neri's father, Gino di Neri, had been wedded to Filippo's sister Caterina. Ruberto and Neri were thus first cousins, and Filippo Strozzi, Neri's uncle.^[11] The two families had formed within Florentine society a considerable power base, which had its center in the person of Filippo. By the mid-thirties, however, owing to Strozzi clashes with the new duke, Alessandro de' Medici, Filippo's family and its immediate associates had been cast into a restless and embittered exile. In the course of this, Filippo's banking interests were managed from abroad, mostly by employees from the ranks of the fuorusciti. Venice was just one of several cities that received substantial Strozzi business, along with Rome, Naples, Lyons, and Seville.^[12]

To clarify the precarious social and political situation in which Filippo, his family, and their Florentine allies found themselves in the 1530s, it is necessary to look briefly back over the long-standing Strozzi relationship with the Medici. In 1508, during Florence's next-to-last republic, the headstrong Filippo became engaged to Clarice de' Medici. At that time her family was banished from the city. The engagement was a brash move on Filippo's part that drew horror and fury from his half-brother Alfonso and members of the extended Strozzi clan, who held at the time at least tentative favor with the Ottimati government.^[13] Yet it soon showed his shrewd foresight. With the Medici restoration of 1512 Filippo found himself ideally placed to exploit the financial interests and favor of Clarice's uncle Giovanni, who assumed the papacy as Leo X the following year. In the decades up to 1534 Filippo bankrolled two Medici popes in his role as papal financier, culminating in 1533 with his dowering of a Medici bride for the future king of France, Henry of Orleans, at the staggering sum of 130,000 scudi.^[14] In exchange for such favors he received an almost

[9] See Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 306-7.

[10] See Melissa Meriam Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favour and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3-4. (Note, however, Agee's cautions concerning some apparent genealogical confusion in her discussion of these marriages, "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 7 n. 27.)

[11] This fact, previously unmentioned, helps explain Filippo's willingness to rely on Neri to care for his family finances, particularly by making him executor of his will. The family tree, first noted by James Haar, "Notes on the Dialogo della musica of Antonfrancesco Doni," Music & Letters 47 (1966): 207 n. 38, is included in the multifascicle work Le famiglie celebri italiane, gen. ed. Pompeo Litta (Milan, 1819-1902), which is variously ordered and bound in the different copies that survive. The copy in I-Vas includes 14 vols., with "Capponi di Firenze," ed. Luigi Passerini (1871), in vol. 3, tavola XX. Neri's grandfather is described there as a very rich banker who opened a banking house at Lyons. His mother is given as Caterina Strozzi, who married Gino di Neri Capponi. Our Neri, born 6 March 1504, appears as the oldest of ten children.

[12] Filippo speaks of his bank in Venice in various letters and wills; see Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 315ff., and Sagredo, "Statuti della Fraternità e Compagnia dei Fiorentini," p. 447.

[13] On the marriage contract and its aftermath see Bullard, "Marriage Intrigues," Chap. 3 in Filippo Strozzi and the Medici, and idem, "Marriage Politics and the Family in Renaissance Florence: The Strozzi-Medici Alliance in 1508," American Historical Review 74 (1979): 51-71. For a general account of the hazard perceived by the Ottimati government in Strozzi ambitions see Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago and London, 1973), esp. p. 7.

[14] See Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici, pp. 158-62, on the history of this affair.

endless series of venal offices. On a single occasion in 1524, at the institution of the College of the Knights of St. Peter, Giulio de' Medici, then Pope Clement VII, awarded him eleven titles of the office of knight in return for credits totaling 9,130 ducats; he divided them among four of his sons, giving three to Ruberto.^[15]

Until Clement VII's death in September 1534 Filippo's political position experienced only one real setback when he abandoned Rome for Florence shortly before the sack in 1527 to take the helm of popular republican leadership. Having failed in that role, he was temporarily forced to pursue interests abroad. But by 1530 he had reforged Medici bonds in Florence and Rome and resumed principal residence in the latter city.

It was only after several years of renewed papal collaboration that Filippo's seemingly unbreakable financial edifice began to crack with the death of the pope — Filippo's primary debtor and Medici supporter. Filippo still boasted a sprawling empire and had much to protect in the continued prestige of the Strozzi family. But any goodwill toward them that remained among Medici at home was dwindling fast. Filippo's wealth and leverage among princes posed an immediate threat to the collateral line of the Medici headed by the dissolute Duke Alessandro, now in firm — and monarchical — command of the patria with imperial support. Alessandro grew increasingly suspicious of Filippo and his sons. At last, in December 1534, shortly after Clement's death and after various skirmishes that took the family again out of Florence, Alessandro declared them rebels.^[16]

Filippo's story merges at this juncture with that of members of the younger generation who are my main concern here. In August 1536, after a two-year stay in his palazzo at Rome, Filippo finally retired to Venice.^[17] His time there was soon cut short, however, by what Benedetto Varchi later described as Lorenzo de' Medici's breathless arrival at San Canciano on 8 January 1537 with news that he had murdered Alessandro.^[18] Filippo quickly married off his sons Piero and Ruberto to Lorenzo's sisters. Goaded on by Piero, he also began to organize troops for an assault against the Medici, only to be captured in his first major attempt in the Tuscan hills of Montemurlo on 31 July. The Florentine historian Jacopo Nardi recounted that Filippo's sons retreated the next day toward Venice, tired and defeated and with no alternative but to take stock of their situation and await a better opportunity to strike.^[19] By December 1538 Filippo had died in prison, reputedly

[15] Ibid., p. 152.

[16] Lorenzo Strozzi, Le vite degli uomini illustri della casa Strozzi, ed. Pietro Stromboli (Florence, 1892), pp. 173-74.

[17] I base this chronology on the first of Neri Capponi's many letters to Filippo written from Lyons. Originally they were addressed to Rome, but beginning on 19 August 1536 they were sent to Venice (I-Fas, CS, Ser. III [95], fol. 23). This initiated a continuous series of letters to Venice until 25 March 1537, when Capponi began writing Filippo at Ferrara (CS, Ser. V [95], fol. 129'). (See Table 1 below.)

[18] Storia fiorentina, 2 vols. (Florence, 1963), 2:555 (Book 15, Chap. 4). Varchi's account largely agrees with those of Strozzi, Vite, pp. 174-75, and Segni, Istorie fiorentine, p. 345. Both of the last two include the story that Filippo, once he made up his mind to believe Lorenzo, proclaimed him the Florentine Brutus — just one detail whose repetition suggests a strong narrative filiation among the various versions.

[19] Istorie della città di Firenze, ed. Agenore Gelli, 2 vols. (Florence, 1858), 2:306.

by his own hand, but most probably at the hands of the Medici.^[20] In the years afterward, Ruberto and other anti-Mediceans abroad continued to pursue schemes to retrieve Florence from the Medici until their defeat in the War of Siena in 1552-55 dashed their last real hopes.

I have synthesized events highlighted in Florentine letters and histories in order to emphasize the intrigues and narrowly factional politics that brought elite Florentine patrons into Venice. Far from epitomizing the republicanism idealized in Venice and attached to Filippo in various romanticized representations that appeared after the events of 1537-38, he and his kin differed little in kind from the Medici themselves. In a very real sense, an entrepreneurial merchant-banker on the rare order of Filippo Strozzi — not unlike Jacob Fugger, imperial banker to Charles V — was at once invention and inventor of the princely sponsors who required him to stage their grand schemes. His identity depended on an exchange of mutually productive powers. Born into such a dynasty in the world of early modern power politics, a young man like Ruberto cannot have thought himself much less a prince's son than if his father had been a duke or an emperor, a difference he might have attributed to the winds of fate or to a slight disparity in style or ambitions.

For the Strozzi, empire and culture formed an indivisible alliance. As Pier Paolo Vergerio had put it, not only was "the ability to speak and write with elegance" — and, we might add, to sing — "no slight advantage."^[21] Learning and cultural refinement both expressed and bolstered the imperial claims of those born into entitled possession of them. Filippo's passions for high finance and Florentine politics extended almost by necessity to arts and literature, in which he developed considerable abilities. His brother Lorenzo wrote that on all those days that Filippo was free to plan as he liked, his time was divided equally between "the study of letters, private business, and private pleasures and delights."^[22] He hired as an intellectual companion and for help with correcting the natural history of Pliny the philologist and composer Bernardo da Pisano.^[23] He also composed lyrics of some distinction that were set to music by the likes of Arcadelt, Layolle, and Willaert, and wrote poems for other aristocrats in his circle.^[24] Both brothers, according to Lorenzo, were

[20] Controversy arose immediately as to how Filippo had really died; see Segni's Istorie fiorentine, pp. 370-71. See also Gelli's commentary in Nardi, Istorie 2:324 n. 1, and 1:325 n. 1.

[21] Quoted in Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1979), p. 194; see also his view of humanistic education and the arts in connection with the ruling classes, passim, esp. Chaps. 11 and 13.

[22] "Tutti i giorni della sua vita, che gli fu lecito dispensar per elezione, costumò in tre parti dividere: una alli studi delle lettere, l'altra alle sue private faccende, l'ultima alli suoi privati piaceri e diletti" (Strozzi, Vite, p. 200).

[23] See Varchi, Storia fiorentina 2:274. Filippo was the dedicatee of Pisano's edition of Apuleis, on which see Frank A. D'Accone, "Bernardo Pisano: An Introduction to His Life and Works," Musica disciplina 17 (1963): 125-26. D'Accone hesitated to link too securely the identity of this Pisano with that of the musician, but his doubts are certainly cleared up by Varchi's reference to Pisano as an "eccellente musico in que' tempi, che grande e giudizioso letterato" (as noted by Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 229 n. 11).

[24] On Layolle's setting of Gite, sospir dolenti see Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, pp. 150, 279, 282. The madrigal was included in the first layer of B-Bc, MS 27.731, which they date to ca. 1535-40. Only a few settings of Filippo's poetry are known today, but given the exclusive patterns of patronage that obtained with Florentine patrons it seems likely that others (ones for which he commissioned settings, for example) simply are not extant. The findings of Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," suggest that literary patrons wrote many more verses for commissioned settings than now survive; see also Thomas W. Bridges, "The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982), p. 29. (Apropos, it might be of interest that while in Lyons Capponi wrote Filippo, then in Venice, to send thanks for a capitolo Filippo had composed for him — for singing to music?; 1 December 1536, CS, Ser. III [95], fols. 71'-72'.)

accustomed to singing part music, not only madrigals but carnival songs and Lamentations, which they performed on feast days publicly and "without shame."^[25] Their houses were rich repositories of books and musical instruments, and both Lorenzo and Filippo have been associated with manuscripts central to French and Italian polyphonic repertories of the time.^[26] Recent archival unearthings, finally, show Filippo as patron to Bartolomeo degli Organi, a singer named "La Fiore," an instrumentalist called "urbano sonatore," the Roman madrigalist Constanzo Festa, and possibly the Ferrarese composer Maistre Jhan.^[27]

The pains Filippo took to reinforce his cultural hegemony naturally included his immediate family. He attended to the humanistic education of his sons by hiring noted tutors and (later) sending his sons to the Studio in Padua. Girolamo Parabosco's description of Ruberto as having "rare judgment in all sciences" may therefore reveal more than the usual hyperbole,^[28] for Ruberto's education not only included the Paduan stint but tutoring in Greek letters and law with Varchi.^[29]

Ruberto and his brothers sang part music like their father and uncle, as shown by a letter of 19 November 1534 (first noted by Agee) that Ruberto's Lyons-based relative Lionardo Strozzi wrote him in Rome.^[30] Lionardo alludes to Ruberto's request

[25] "Dilettavasi oltre modo della musica, cantando con modo e ragione; nè si vergognò insieme con Lorenzo suo fratello e altri suoi simili, cantare ne' giorni santi pubblicamente nelle Compagnie di notte, le Lamentationi. Similmente fece per carnevale in maschera per le case le canzoni. Dilettossi anche di comporre nella nostra lingua in prosa e in versi, come per più sue traduzioni e madrigali, che oggi in musica si cantano, puossi conoscere" (Strozzi, Vite, p. 202).

[26] On Filippo's books and instruments see Frank A. D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms and Settings in an Early 16th-Century Florentine Manuscript," in Words and Music — The Scholar's View: A Medley of Problems and Solutions Compiled in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt by Sundry Hands, ed. Laurence Berman (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 29-58, and Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 227 n. 2. On Filippo as recipient of the chansonnier in I-Fc, MS Basevi 2442, see Howard Mayer Brown, "Chansons for the Pleasure of a Florentine Patrician: Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442," in Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering in Honor of Gustave Reese, ed. Jan LaRue et al. (New York, 1966; repr. New York, 1978), pp. 56-66, and idem, "The Music of the Strozzi Chansonnier (Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica, MS Basevi 2442)," Acta musicologica 40 (1968): 115-29, as well as Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 230 n. 12. On Lorenzo Strozzi's extensive connections with the proto-madrigalian manuscript I-Fc, MS Basevi 2440, esp. as poet, see D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms," pp. 33-35, and idem, "Bernardo Pisano."

[27] Filippo created a mascherata together with Bartolomeo in 1507 and bought music from him in 1510, as discovered by Frank A. D'Accone, "Alessandro Coppini and Bartolomeo degli Organi: Two Florentine Composers of the Renaissance," Analecta musicologica 4 (1967): 52-53. On Filippo's connections with "La Fiore," dating from 1517, see Richard Sherr, "Verdelot in Florence, Coppini in Rome, and the Singer 'La Fiore,'" JAMS 37 (1984): 406-8, 410-11. For Filippo's patronage of Festa and "Urbano sonatore" see Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," pp. 229-30 and passim, and for that of a "maestro Janni musico" in 1521 see D'Accone, "Transitional Text Forms," p. 33 n. 16.

[28] See Parabosco's dedication of his Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1546), quoted in full in n. 65 below.

[29] As recounted in the anonymous biography of Varchi, "Vita di Benedetto Varchi," in Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 3 vols. (Florence, 1857), 1:25.

[30] Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 9-11. For a different translation see Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, pp. 66-67.

for new music, revealing at the same time that the Lyonnaise circle — of which Ruberto periodically formed a part — sang music at home, "either at your house [i.e., the Strozzi's], or at Niccolò Mannelli's." The current group includes Lionardo himself, Ruberto's brother Vincenzo, the Florentine composer Layolle, as well as Neri Capponi (whom Lionardo familiarly calls "vostro nery Capponi").^[31]

Among the most striking aspects of Florentine epistolary exchange are the elitist postures adopted time and again in patrimonial ploys and in the Florentines' observations of outsiders. Florentines pursue what is rare and new, unknown, and decidedly private. In the first and best known of their letters, from Ruberto, in Venice, to Varchi of 27 March 1534, Ruberto described his attempt to have an epigram of Varchi's set by Willaert and asked Varchi in return to compose a madrigal in honor of "Madonna Pulissena" (undoubtedly Pecorina). Ruberto's assumption that he would wield influence with the chapelmaster is remarkable in itself. But even more so is the clandestine, cocky way he went about the whole venture. Ruberto presents himself as something of a roué, asking his teacher for a text "with that same boldness that I would use to ask one of my lovers to screw her."^[32] He folds his swaggering bravado in love matters into a self-assured cultural elitism. Linking sexual and cultural conquest in a single identity that placed stealth at the strategic node of a sacred bond, Ruberto expressed his hopes through the conjuncture of culture and combat: "I don't want to tell you not to speak to a soul on earth about this [madrigal], because I would do you an injury, as if I lacked faith in you; yet I have more faith in you than the Hungarians have in their swords."^[33]

Lionardo's letter of 19 November 1534 evinces the same Florentine attitude toward sharing music. Ruberto's request was specifically meant to procure new and unknown music from the Lyonnaise contingent. Lionardo hopes that a canzone that arrived from Florence some eight days earlier will serve; if it's already known in Rome, he'll get some other new pieces for them — not hard for him to do since, as he boasts, a friend in Florence always sends along Arcadelt's latest things. The entire letter turns on this issue of having the latest pieces on hand — and only for restrictive, private use.^[34]

[31] For general background on music making in sixteenth-century Lyons see Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford, 1992); pp. 254-56 treat Strozzi patronage.

[32] A published repr. of the letter may be found in Raccolta di prose fiorentine: tomo quinto contenente lettere (Venice, 1735), parte terza, 1:69. For a version based on a copy in I-Fas see Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 1-2. I quote from Agee's transcription, which reconciles the printed version with that of a manuscript copy: "Non havendo a chi ricorrere, m'è forza venire a Voi, et certo lo fo con quella baldezza [the printed version has caldezza ], che se avessi a richiedere una mia innamorata [here, di chiavarla is crossed out in the manuscript — the printed version avoids the expression by replacing it with dots]" ("Ruberto Strozzi," p. 2 n. 4).

[33] "Non voglio dirvi non ne parliate con homo del mondo, perche io vi ingiurerei, parendovi avessi poca fede in Voi, il che certo non saria, perche ho piu fede in Voi, che li Ungheri nelle spade" (ibid.). Strozzi's outrageousness doesn't stop there; witness the salutation that he juxtaposes immediately afterward: "Fate, lo abbia quanto prima meglio; e senza altro dirvi, raccomandomi a voi per infinita saecula saeculorum Amen. "

[34] Some years later, on 26 April 1539, a Strozzi employee in Venice may have been emulating the Florentine fervor for novelty by pleading with one Palla Strozzi in Lyons to have a text of his set by Layolle, "a 4, but if you would have him do it a 5, so much the better" — this just at the time when five-voice pieces were gaining favor over four-voice ones. See Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," pp. 236-37 nn. 37-38.

This was the same tight vise that gripped the new Venetian-styled madrigals of Willaert and Rore. In 1542 Ruberto's employee Pallazzo da Fano angled to have Strozzi send him a new madrigal of Rore's written for Capponi, should he be able to get hold of it.^[35] Failing that (his letter reveals), he hopes for "some other lovely thing, but not one that many people have — that is, one that might be for a man like messer Nerio. . . . And truly not a man will have your madrigal that you sent me, for I know the one to whom I sent it to be of messer Nerio's kind" (emphasis mine).^[36] Whoever got the madrigal from da Fano was probably not a Venetian; for the secrecy and exclusivity that marks these transactions are little known in the dealings Venetian patricians had with composers.^[37] On the contrary, Venetians largely welcomed printed venues, except at times for their own literary production.

Capponi's tightfistedness was the very quality that so astonished the low-born Antonfrancesco Doni. When his exiled compatriot Francesco Corboli took him to Capponi's salon, Doni was already beginning to fashion a career out of the new livelihood to be earned from the Venetian printing industry and was squirreling away musical works for his forthcoming Dialogo della musica. He claimed to be agog on his first encounter with Venetian music making there — not only at the dazzling musical scene but at the total inaccessibility of the music.

There is a gentlewoman, POLISENA Pecorina (consort of a cittadino from my native town), so talented and refined that I cannot find words high enough to praise her. One evening I heard a concert of violoni and voices in which she played and sang together with other excellent spirits. The perfect master of that music was Adrian Willaert, whose studious style, never before practiced by musicians, is so tightly knit, so sweet, so right, so miraculously suited to the words that I confess to never having known what harmony was in all my days, save that evening. The devotee of this music and lover of such divine composition is a gentleman, a most excellent spirit, Florentine as well, called Messer Neri Caponi, to whom I was introduced by Messer Francesco Corboli [another Florentine] and thanks to whom I listened, saw, and heard such divine things. This Messer Neri spends hundreds of ducats every year on such talent, and keeps it to himself; not even if it were his own father would he let go one song.^[38]

[35] The final digit of the letter's date is illegible; for Agee's views of its date see "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 12 n. 39, where he first assigned the date 1541, and idem, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 236 n. 35, where he amended his reading to 1542 based on a subsequent finding. My investigations of Strozzi's whereabouts (as summarized in Table 1 below) indicate that the date must be 1542.

[36] Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," p. 13, letter IIa.

[37] Accordingly, composers in Venice, with rare exceptions, were inclined to hand works to the press accompanied by toadying endearments to wealthy dedicatees from whom they hoped for subvention, rather than selling them off piecemeal. On this issue see Jane A. Bernstein, "Financial Arrangements and the Role of Printer and Composer in Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Printing," Acta musicologica 62 (1990): 39-56.

[38] "Ecci una gentil donna POLISENA Pecorina (consorte d'un cittadino della mia patria) tanto virtuosa & gentile, che non trovo lode sì alte, che la commendino. Io ho udito una sera un concerto di violoni & di voci, dove ella sonava, e cantava in compagnia di altri spiriti eccellenti. il maestro perfetto della qual musica era Adriano Villaert di quella sua diligente invenzione non più usata dai musici, sì unita, sì dolce, sì giusta, sì mirabilmente acconcie le parole, ch'io confessai non avere saputo che cosa sia stata armonia ne' miei giorni, salvo in quella sera. L'infervorato di questa musica, e l'innamorato di tanta divina composizione è un gentil'uomo, uno spirito eccellentissimo pur fiorentino, detto M. Neri Caponi: al quale per mezzo di M. Francesco Corboli uomo Reale fui fatto amico e mercé sua sentii, vidi, et udii tanta divinità. Questo M. Neri dispensa l'anno le centinaia de ducati in tal virtù e la conserva appresso di sé né se fosse suo padre darebbe fuori un canto." The letter, dated 7 April, was appended to the tenor part book of Doni's Dialogo della musica of 1544, ed. G. Francesco Malipiero and Virginio Fagotto, Collana di musiche veneziane inedite e rare, no. 7 (Vienna, 1964), p. 5.

Many have assumed, with good reason, that the music Doni heard at Capponi's house included works printed only fifteen years later in the Musica nova.^[39] The links between the two repertories are strong. Francesco dalla Viola's dedication of the printed volume maintained that the pieces in the Musica nova had been "hidden and buried" so that no one could use them and that consequently "the world came to be deprived" of its contents.^[40] The very person who later possessed the collection — presumably after Capponi and before its owner at the time of publication, Prince Alfonso d'Este — was the woman Doni so praised, Polissena Pecorina; it was from her that Alfonso later bought the collection.^[41] Doni's claim that Willaert's "diligente inventione" heard at Capponi's had never before been practiced by musicians may even help explain the print's belated designation as "musica nova."^[42] Even more than all of this, Doni's letter describes with uncanny closeness the Musica nova's studied, introspective character, its meticulous setting of text, its lofty musical rhetoric ("questa divina compositione," Doni calls the music), and its ability above all to inspire awe — qualities that became touchstones of later descriptions of Willaert's Musica nova compositions.^[43]

This repertorial link gives a very good idea about one aspect of the musical fare at ca' Capponi — or, more precisely, about its compositional substance. Doni offers his Piacentine dedicatee little in the way of concrete information about the

[39] For early views to this effect see, for example, Armen Carapetyan, "The Musica Nova of Adriano Willaert: With a Special Reference to the Humanistic Society of 16th-Century Venice" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1945), pp. 91 and passim, and Edward E. Lowinsky, "A Treatise on Text Underlay by a German Disciple of Francisco de Salinas," in Festscrift Heinrich Besseler zum sechzigsten Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1961), pp. 231-51; repr. in his Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1989), 2:868-83.

[40] In dalla Viola's words, it had been "nascosta & sepolta di modo, che alcuno non se ne potea valere, & il mondo venea à restar privo di cosi bella compositione." The dedication is reprinted in facsimile in Willaert, Opera omnia, ed. Walter Gerstenberg and Hermann Zenck, vol. 5 (1957), p. x.

[41] On Alfonso's purchasing of the collection from Pecorina in December 1554 see Anthony Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova: New Evidence, New Speculations," JAMS 26 (1973): 132-45. The documents surrounding this exchange are now reprinted together with numerous new ones in Richard J. Agee and Jessie Ann Owens, "La stampa della Musica nova di Willaert," Rivista italiana di musicologia 24 (1989): 219-305. See also David S. Butchart, " 'La Pecorina' at Mantua, Musica Nova at Florence," Early Music 13 (1985): 358-66.

Doni fashioned for his Dialogo a sonnet of his own in homage to Pecorina, A la bella concordia unica e rara (p. 318); perhaps he hoped for access to Willaert's much-guarded compositions through her.

[42] Einstein's error in translating Doni's "non più usata da i musici" as "no longer followed by musicians" (The Italian Madrigal 1:199), still often repeated, would have Capponi spending a fortune on music that was already out of date, rather than on "musica nova." The Italian idiom frequently appears in music prints as an advertising ploy (as in Perissone Cambio's Madrigali a cinque voci of 1545, whose title page includes the phrase "non più veduti ne istampati").

[43] See, for example, Zarlino's descriptions cited in Chap. 6 below and those of theorists like Vicentino and Stoquerus assembled in Don Harrán, Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought: From Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, Musicological Studies and Documents, no. 40 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 177-79, 230-32, and passim. In a passage in Chapter 19 of his Germani de musica verbali (ca. 1570) Gaspar Stocker claimed that Willaert's music stood at the summit of the new approach to text setting, which all good composers were then following; on this treatise see Lowinsky, "A Treatise on Text Underlay."

performances themselves, except that the concerts included both voices and viols.^[44] And Ganassi's dedication in the Lettione of the previous year adds nothing else of substance to Doni's description. Together, however, Doni and Ganassi corroborate at least two aspects of the academy's structural makeup: first, that Willaert's role was that of a kind of Promethean maestro, "principio" of what Ganassi called Capponi's "divino e sacro collegio"; and second, that the academy presented itself through the double claims of novelty and exclusivity.

Doni's account also confirms various contemporaneous representations of Pecornia that identify her as a central interpreter of Willaert's music.^[45] She may have assumed this role already by the early 1530s. As we saw, Ruberto Strozzi in 1534 requested his teacher Varchi to compose a madrigal text in her honor (most likely Quando col dolce suono, later set by Arcadelt, as Agee believes).^[46] In the same letter Strozzi remarked that Pecorina sang very well not only to the lute but also from part books.^[47] This information virtually clinches the idea that much of the Musica nova was composed with her soprano in mind. Indeed Pecorina was so directly identified with the collection that it came to be nicknamed after her.^[48] All of this, finally, reinforces the Musica nova's striking position between the dual poles of sacred church and secular home.

Willaert himself set another madrigal lauding Pecorina, the still-anonymous text Qual dolcezza giamai.

Qual dolcezza giamai                                 As much as the sweetness
Di canto di Sirena                                   Of the Siren's song ever
Involò i sensi e l'alm'a chi l'udiro,             Rapt the senses and the soul of the listener,
Che di quella non sia minor assai             No less than that does the beautiful Pecorina
Che con la voce angelica e divina            Stir the heart with her                                            5
Desta nei cor la bella Pecorina.               Angelic and divine voice.
A la dolce armonia si fa serena                   At the sweet harmony the air becomes
L'aria, s'acqueta il mar, taccion'i venti,     Serene, the sea calms, the wind turns quiet,
E si rallegra il ciel di gir'in giro.^[49]              And the heavens rejoice from sphere to sphere.

[44] Doni does not say whether Capponi's academists played and sang simultaneously. In treble-dominated pieces we would expect that viols often accompanied voices, but Doni leaves us maddeningly uninformed as to whether instruments played some parts alone, without doubling voices — a signal point in madrigals so textually conceived as those in the Musica nova.

[45] A famous reference is that of Girolamo Fenaruolo, whose capitolo urging Willaert not to forsake Venice for Flanders (as he did for a time in 1556) referred to "the good times of Pecorina" (buoni tempi de la Pecorina); printed in Francesco Sansovino, Sette libri di satire . . . Con un discorso in materia de satira (Venice, 1573), fol. 193'; repr. in Vander Straeten, ed., La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:219.

[46] See Agee, "Ruberto Strozzi," pp. 11-12.

[47] "Canta sul leuto benissimo, ed in su' libri." Compare this with Ortensio Landi's listing of her among the notable modern musicians in his Sette libri de cathaloghi a' varie cose appartenenti (Venice, 1552), p. 512.

[48] As Lowinsky pointed out, Stocker cited by way of example a work "referred to by the Italians as Le pecorine" ("A Treatise on Text Underlay"). Among other things, the article includes Lowinsky's discovery of a sixteenth-century handwritten notation, "La Pecorina di Ms. Adrian," in a set of part books of the Musica nova in Treviso; see ibid., 1:881. See also Newcomb, "Editions of Willaert's Musica Nova," pp. 140-41.

[49] Verses 7-9 gloss Petrarch's Hor che 'l ciel, no. 164, in turn an adaptation of a nightscape in Virgil's Aeneid; on both see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), pp. 116-17.

I santi angeli intenti                                   The holy angels, intent,                                 10
Chinand'in questa part'il vago viso,            Bow their lovely faces earthward,
S'oblian'ogni piacer del paradiso.              Forgetting every pleasure of Paradise.
Et ella in tant'honore                                 And she, so honored,
Dice con lieto suon "qui regn'Amore."       Says with a happy sound, "Here reigns Love."

Like Doni's A la bella concordia and Varchi's Quando co 'l dolce suono,^[50] this poem captured Pecorina's renowned vocal élan for an audience probably composed in the main of admirers well-acquainted with her. It glossed Petrarch's praise of Laura from the fourth stanza of the canzone Chiare freshe et dolci acque, where flowers falling about her seem to say "qui regna amore" (no. 126, v. 52). Neither this nor any of the celebratory texts or surviving accounts of her support the assumption routinely made by earlier writers that Pecorina was a courtesan.^[51] The poem makes no attempt of the sort common in encomia of cortigiane oneste to link her vocal charms (or, in other cases, literary aplomb) with physical allurements. In its emphasis on how moving her singing is, lauding her power to transform the natural bodies of earth, sea, and sky, it fashions her image instead as that of a divine enchantress, attracting the beneficent notice of heaven by calling the harmonies of heavenly love to earth. She was thus almost undoubtedly a gentildonna, as Doni called her, styled after the musically skilled donne di palazzo Castiglione described in Book 3 of Il cortegiano.

[50] The former was included in Doni's Dialogo della musica (mod. ed., p. 318). There is also a setting by Vincenzo Ruffo to a Polissena, Era lieta Junon — whether to Pecorina it is less certain.

[51] For a typical representation of Pecorina as a courtesan see Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:175, who assumed that virtually all women active as performers were courtesans. (See also Donna G. Cardamone, ed., Adrian Willaert and His Circle: Canzone Villanesche alla Napolitana and Villotte [Madison, 1978], p. ix.) Anthony Newcomb argues a contrary view regarding Pecorina in "Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy," in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), pp. 105-6. The notion that music making by women was universally regarded in the sixteenth century as leading to licentiousness is put to rest by H. Colin Slim, "An Iconographical Echo of the Unwritten Tradition," Studi musicali 17 (1988): 48-49. His central topic, a portrait in the Spada Gallery of Rome by an unidentified north Italian painter, depicts a gentildonna with lira and the cantus part of a strambotto setting. Similar iconography can be seen in other representations of the time, for example in Habiti d'huomeni e donne venetiane (Venice, 1570), an engraving from which is reproduced in Gaspara Stampa, Rime, ed. Maria Bellonci and Rodolfo Ceriello, 2d ed. (Milan, 1976), p. [71].

The difficulty of reading evidence to determine whether or not sixteenth-century women were courtesans must be understood to originate in contemporaneous tensions over the appropriation of styles. It was the intended strategy of elevated cortigiane oneste to take on the courtly graces of cultivated women — hence the notion of gracious service that underlies the cortigiano/cortigiana pairing — and the phenomenon generated a nervous ambiguity that lasted throughout the century. The idea that women who made music were prostitutes was promoted in satiric literature such as Pietro Aretino's Ragionamenti (Venice, [1538] 1539); see also Fenaruolo's capitolo to Willaert cited in n. 45 above: "Ne si trovano donna cosi strana / Ne tanta casta, che s'egli cantava / Tosto non divenisse una puttana," vv. 122-24 (repr. in Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:221). Much confusion about how to regard cinquecento women making music seems to stem nowadays from the famous admonition Bembo made in a letter of 1541 to his sixteen-year-old daughter Helena not to play a musical instrument, since doing so is a thing for vain and frivolous women ("il sonare è cosa strana e leggera"); see Opere in volgare, ed. Mario Marti (Florence, 1961), pp. 877-78. But Bembo's letter, probably anticipating an eventual public readership, must be interpreted in the context of his concerns about Helena's illegitimacy and his (ultimately successful) efforts to establish her within patrician society: two years after the letter was written he married her off to the Venetian nobleman Pietro Gradenigo (see Chap. 4 n. 20, below).

The configuration of Capponi's academy as I have described it raises questions about the changing place of madrigals in private aristocratic homes. With Willaert installed as director, Pecorina as prima donna, and other top musicians as the corps of singers and instrumentalists (those "altri spiriti eccellenti" who played and sang), all producing what Doni called "concerti," did Capponi, the accomplished part singer and student of Ganassi, still participate in music making as he had in Lyons? Could he have set up his academy to include him as singer or violist?

Probably not, or at least not with as much regularity. The metrical instabilities and contrapuntal independence of Willaert's madrigals would have made them more difficult for amateur singers than the madrigals and chansons of Arcadelt and Layolle sung at Lyons. Most likely secular settings of slightly older vintage complemented the new fare by Willaert and his circle, as happens in Doni's Dialogo della musica. There may well have been simple ricercars and instrumental arrangements of vocal music playable by nonprofessionals like Capponi, similar to those Ganassi used to illustrate his manuals. But based on the descriptions of Capponi's academy by Doni and Ganassi and the imitations of Willaert's madrigals made by members of his cappella who were both singers and composers, it seems inconceivable that professionals did not play the largest role in performing the music heard at Capponi's house (at least on important evenings attended by outsiders like Doni).^[52] In this analysis, the same situation that placed Capponi and his kind at the center of musical patronage pushed them to the margins of music making.

In short, Venice must have worked a sea change on the musical scene in noblemen's homes since Capponi's Lyonnaise days, transshaping their role in the private soirée. Unlike the symmetries described in accounts of earlier meetings, where nobles appear to stand on fairly equal ground, Capponi's new accademie observed a definite structural hierarchy (however shadowy and inaccessible they may have been). Meetings now pointed hierarchically to two patriarchal figures, the master of ceremonies and the musical director.

I have belabored this shift and the state of Florentine expatriate patronage generally not because Florentines offered the exclusive or even the primary venues for Venetian madrigals at midcentury (though I believe theirs were crucial ones), but because the conditions of Florentine patronage helped inaugurate a direction of great stylistic and social importance for madrigals generally. Secular music making in the early sixteenth century, as described by Castiglione, was a central occupation of courtly noblemen, one of their masks and avocations. From the time of Filippo's and Lorenzo's involvement in carnival, their singing of Lamentations, polyphonic canzoni, and probably chansons, to their promotion of the new genre of Florentine and Roman madrigals by Festa, Layolle, and Arcadelt, noble patrons shared domestic

[52] Perissone Cambio would be a central example, an outstanding singer of high parts and an ambitious young composer who first came on the scene about 1544. His Madrigali a cinque voci, published in 1545, was the first book to imitate Willaert's settings printed much later in the Musica nova; see Chap. 9 below, pp. 341-56.

music as one of their elegant pastimes. It was the patrons themselves who performed, if with the occasional addition of more expert practitioners like Layolle and (we may imagine) Pisano. Whatever went on in Capponi's salon, the newer madrigals were probably no longer the principal province of Capponi and his peers, except in the noblemen's roles as owners, overseers, and auditors. The courtly amateur was gradually becoming the ceremonial host, a position that would become commonplace later in the sixteenth century.

Neri Capponi evidently resided in Venice from at least 1538 until 1544.^[53] After that he disappears from view, nowhere to be found in the exiled Strozzi correspondence of the 1540s after June 1543 — a correspondence in which he had previously been a central figure.^[54] The explanation for this may lie in Capponi's political orientation. Like most other Florentine exiles, Capponi lacked the intense interest in republican revolution that fueled the Strozzi sons. Despite his close financial ties to Filippo Strozzi, who had not only made him manager of the Lyons bank in 1532 but an executor of his will in 1535,^[55] nothing in contemporary histories connects him with efforts at Medicean overthrow. Once Filippo had passed away and Cosimo's rule had been securely consolidated, Capponi probably shared the doubts then growing within the exile community about the efficacy of the Strozzi's continued anti-Medicean schemes. Like so many other fuorusciti, chances are he slipped back into the shadows of his native city, disappearing from prominence as soon as it was safe enough to do so quietly.^[56]

Ruberto Strozzi, on the other hand, continued training his thoughts on revolutionary schemes to play French supporters of the republic against the imperial backers of Cosimo's monarchy. Ruberto's political burden was heavy. By 1537 he was apparently the only one of Filippo's male heirs who had reached his majority still in his father's good graces.^[57] Less experienced in arms than his eldest brother, the ruffian Piero,^[58] but better suited to diplomacy, Ruberto took on much of the work of forging diplomatic bonds with the French and arranging purchases of arms.

Because of his quixotic, itinerant existence after the family was banished from Florence in 1534, tracking Ruberto's movements is not easy. I offer a provisional attempt for the decade from 1536 to 1546 in Table 1, based primarily on the evidence of locations to which selected letters were addressed. Ruberto's correspondents

[53] Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 306-7.

[54] Capponi wrote what seems to be his last extant letter to Ruberto from Venice and mailed it to Ferrara; it dates from 23 June 1543 (I-Fas, CS, ser. V, 1210.10.204).

[55] The will, dated 31 December 1537, is reprinted in Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 323-31; see esp. pp. 327 and 330.

[56] Compare the cases of Benedetto Varchi and Vincenzo Martelli mentioned in Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, pp. 41-42.

[57] See Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, pp. 327-28, where Piero and Vincenzo are cut out (see also p. 307).

[58] Ibid., p. cii.

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

were at times as unsure of his whereabouts as we,^[59] but in general we can surmise from their letters that Ruberto spent the bulk of his time in Venice from about August or, at latest, October 1538 through at least part of the summer of 1542, where he and his kin were apparently living and being treated "like kings."^[60] Titian's famous portrait from 1542 of the little girl feeding a biscuit to her dog, identified as Clarice Strozzi, shows none other than Ruberto's daughter (Plate 8).^[61] It is just one token of the family's high style of living there, since portraits of children were rare in the sixteenth century, most of them having been made of royalty.

In these years the Strozzi probably kept a lively household in Venice. Ruberto's teacher Ganassi, in dedicating to him the Regola rubertina (glossing his student's name), hinted that the Strozzi salon was one of the most active in the city: "since there is a harmony . . . in giving everyone his due, when thinking to whom I should address this little work, I remembered you, to whom one ought to give more than others since you are more adorned with harmony of the soul, harmony of the body, and vocal and instrumental harmony within your magnificent house, and delight in it more than do others."^[62] One of Ruberto's republican compatriots, the historian Donato Giannotti, wrote a letter on 9 December 1544 to Ruberto's brother-in-law Lorenzo Ridolfi that may complement Ganassi's remark.^[63] Giannotti explains that Ruberto, in Venice for the previous month, is about to depart for Rome, and then takes up Ridolfi's inquiries about a certain "cantafavola" that Giannotti (then in Vicenza) had composed some time previously Irked to hear that Ridolfi had got hold of this work, Giannotti

[59] Most of the letters I cite are preserved in originals or manuscript copies in the Carte Strozziane at I-Fas. In addition I draw from Niccolini, Filippo Strozzi, and Donato Giannotti, Lettere italiane (1526-1571) , ed. Furio Diaz, vol. 2, (Milan, 1974), for letters that concern Ruberto. Some of my information derives from internal remarks in letters, as noted.

[60] Segni, Istorie fiorentine, pp. 380-81.

[61] Aretino praised the portrait in a letter of 6 July 1542 along with the child's father, that "grave e ottimo gentilhuomo"; Lettere di M. Pietro Aretino, 6 vols. (Paris, 1609), 2:288'; mod. ed. Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino, commentary by Fidenzio Pertile, ed. Ettore Camesasca, 3 vols. in 4 (Milan, 1957-60), 3/1:217-18, with the portrait given as Plate 30. Patricia H. Labalme thought Aretino might have seen the portrait at Strozzi's house in Venice; see "Personality and Politics in Venice: Pietro Aretino," in Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (New York, 1982), p. 126. On the portrait itself see Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition, 2 vols. (New York, 1971), vol. 2, The Portraits, p. 142, and Plates 106-8 and 110. Titian's painted inscription ANNOR II MDXLII is visible in the upper left-hand corner of the painting. See also Georg Gronau, "Zwei Tizianische Bildnisse der Berliner Galerie: I, Das Bildnis des Ranuccio Farnese; II, Das Bildnis der Tochter des Roberto Strozzi," Jahrbuch der königlich preuszischen Kunstsammlungen 27 (1906): 3-12. Wethey, following Gronau, placed Ruberto and his wife in Venice from 1536 until 1542, but this is misleading (cf. Table I).

[62] "[P]erche è armonia . . . il dare ad ogniuno quello, che si conviene, pensando io a chi questa mia operetta si dovesse indrizzare, mè sovvenuta. V.S. allaquale si deve piu che ad altri: quanto essa è piu d'altri ornata de l'armonia de l'anima, de l'armonia del corpo, & de l'armonia vocal & istrumental, con tutta la sua magnifica casa, & piu d'altri se ne diletta" (Regola rubertina [Venice, 1542]; facs. ed. BMB, ser. 2, no. 18a [Bologna, 1976]).

[63] Lettere italiane 2:115-17. Giannotti's correspondence is a rich source of news about the exiled community. See Randolph Starn's edition of some of Giannotti's letters, Donato Giannotti and His "Epistolae": Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, Rome, M. 107, Travaux d'humanisme et renaissance, no. 97 (Geneva, 1968), with a good biography and summary of the exiles' machinations in the late thirties and early forties on pp. 45ff. and passim and discussion of Giannotti's patronage by Lorenzino de' Medici on p. 143 n. 7.

8.
Titian, Portrait of Clarice Strozzi  (daughter of Ruberto Strozzi), 1542. Photo courtesy 
of the Gemä ldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

protests in typically Florentine fashion that he wanted it to remain "hidden" (occulta ) and not be recited by friends in Rome where Ridolfi was staying. He wonders if the work was procured from the Strozzi house in Venice. Since Giannotti calls it both a "cantafavola" and "commedia," the work was probably a light one — a pastoral, fable, or fairy tale — and quite possibly to be done with singing.^[64]

[64] Paolo Fabbri informs me that here the term probably means simply "trifling work," as in Aretino's Lo ipocrito (5.24) of 1542, where cantafavola appears to be virtually synonymous with "commedia": "LISEO: Signori, poi che colui che ha fatto la comedia, è stato sempre de la fantasia ch'io voglio esser tuttavia, so che gli faccio una grazia rilevata a dirvi che, se la cantafavola vi è piaciuta, l'han caro, e se non vi è piaciuta, carissimo" (private communication). The Nuovo dizionario della lingua italiana defines cantafavola as a "frivolous fiction."

By the time Parabosco dedicated his Madrigali a cinque voci to Ruberto in 1546, Ruberto's ties to Venice had become far more tenuous. Parabosco's is the only surviving musical dedication to Strozzi aside from Ganassi's, yet it shows only a passing acquaintance with him — tellingly, considering Parabosco's usual inclination to flaunt as much familiarity as he could get away with. Here Parabosco instead fashioned a paradoxical opposition of his humble gift with Strozzi's grand station to frame a conceit congratulating his own presumption in risking the dedication.

To the illustrious and generous Signor Ruberto Strozzi

My Lord, knowing music to be as pleasing to you as it is made pleasing to the whole world by your infinite virtues and kindnesses, I did not want to fail to make you a present of these little notes of mine, such as they may be. This, which others would perhaps have desisted from making, has (like everything else) spurred me on and entreated me. . . . Many, my Lord, being ashamed of the humbleness of their gift, or fearing your judgment, would not have done this, but I make you a gift of these little efforts of mine most boldly. I will not be ashamed to present them to you because they are poor, nor will I be afraid because they are not revised. For I am certain that in the greatness of your merits and your judgment, they will be what every large present is. For into the great sea the big rivers disperse just like the little rivulets, and it thus receives one just like the other, benignly and courteously. I do not rest without kissing your hand, infinitely joining my affection to you. Your most devoted servant Girolamo Parabosco.^[65]

But the dedication evidently failed to further the ambitions of either party. There is no evidence of Ruberto's involvement with music after this time. Parabosco's book was never reprinted, and after it he all but quit musical composition, never replacing the high-brow Venetian madrigal with anything that could have brought him a wider musical audience.

In sum, the state of affairs concerning Strozzi in the early forties is arresting in two respects: first, his pet object of patronage was the gifted but at first little-known

[65] "Allo illustre et generoso Signor Roberto Strozzi Signor mio, sapend'io la Musica esser si grata a V.S. come quella é grata a tutto il Mondo per le infinite sue virtu, & cortesie: non ho voluto manchare di non farle presente di queste mie poche note: quale elleno si siano. & quello, che a cio fare havrebbe forse altrui ritenuto: me quanto ogni altra cosa a spinto, & inviato: che é la grandezza de i meriti di V.S. & il pellegrino giuditio, che ella hâ in tutte le scienze. Molti signor mio vergognandosi per la poverta del presente, o temendo il giuditio di V.S. non havrebbono fatto quello, che facc'io che per questo quanto per darle segno della servitu ch'io le porto, le faccio baldanzosissimamente dono di queste mie poche fatiche. ne mi vergognaro di presentarglile per che elle siano povere, ne temero per che non siano senza emenda: chio mi rendo sicuro, che nella grandezza de i meriti & del giuditio di V.S. esse saranno quello, che saria ogni altro gran presente. che nel grandissimo Mare cosi si disperdono i grandi fiumi, come i picciol rivi, & cosi egli benigno, & cortese riceve l'uno come l'altro. altro non mi resta se non basciar la Mano di V.S. raccordandole la affettion mia verso di lei essere infinita. Devotissimo servo Girolamo Parabosco" (Madrigali a cinque voci di Girolamo Parabosco discipulo di M. Adriano novamente da lui composti et posti in luce [Venice, 1546]).

Rore, for whom he remains the main Italian patron known to us before Rore's employment by the dukes of Ferrara (the other being Capponi);^[66] and second, Strozzi resided during that period in the same city with which Rore's early madrigal style is identified — even though Rore's own biography remains cryptic. When Pallazzo da Fano's letter was written, surely in November 1542, Rore had apparently been composing in Brescia, where he seems to have been based, and in Venice, where da Fano says the composer traveled and delivered madrigals to Neri Capponi. Wherever Rore's madrigals for Strozzi were composed, therefore, Venice formed a point of convergence for both composer and patron in the early forties, entangled in the larger web of circumstances and interrelations there.

Despite this Venetian nexus we cannot infer with any confidence the actual compositions Rore wrote for Strozzi (by contrast with those Willaert wrote for Capponi). Presumably they consisted mostly of madrigals and perhaps secondarily motets, similar in style to the ones Rore published in 1542 and 1544: the Strozzi correspondence mentions Rore's secular works only with the generic "madrigali." A letter from Capponi in Venice to Strozzi in Ferrara of 18 October 1542 sends Ruberto a sonnet "fecj fare a Cipriano" (done by Cipriano), which accords with the sort of sonnet-filled repertory of Rore's First Book from that same year.^[67] And Pallazzo da Fano's letter of the early forties shows interest in a motet that Rore had "gotten into good shape" since returning from Venice, as well as a "madricale . . . che fece a M, nerio" (a madrigal he made for messer Nerio). It hardly seems possible that these were the same works included in Rore's first and second books of madrigals, for why would he have published them?

Ruberto's move from Venice to Ferrara — a court in sympathy with the anti-Medicean French king from whom he hoped for support — took place no later than October 1542. When da Fano's letter was written, in other words, Ruberto had just left Venice. It seems revealing that Rore should have landed in Ferrara just a few years after Strozzi's dealings with the Ferrarese were intensifying, and it is certainly possible that Strozzi could have been influential in securing Rore's foothold there. The impression Rore's musical portfolio made in Ferrara may well mark the beginning of intense Ferrarese interest in Venetian repertory, an interest that was to culminate in Alfonso's acquisition in 1554 and publication in 1559 of the coveted Musica nova (see Chap. 3 below). To that extent Ruberto's influence at court concerning Willaert and Rore also marks a stage in the dissemination of Venetian style throughout northern Italy.

There is no reason to think that the Strozzi ever provided a stable presence in Venice's musical life after 1542.^[68] Parabosco's hapless dedication inadvertently

[66] See Capponi's letter of 18 October 1542, cited in Agee, "Filippo Strozzi," p. 236 n. 35.

[67] Ibid.

[68] A letter of Giannotti's, probably from April 1546, reveals that Ruberto's wife may have moved back to Venice for a time that year. Giannotti tells Ridolfi that Piero's and Ruberto's wives are going to Venice soon, that Piero has resolved to move his wife back to Venice, and that Ruberto may do the same (Lettere italiane 2:133).

underscores the waning impact of Florentines on Venetian music. One could hardly have expected that exiles like Filippo, Ruberto, and Capponi, landed in the city's peaceful lap, would have found in it the ultimate resting place — the "Noah's Ark," "Holy City and terrestrial paradise" — that the self-made Aretino did when he drifted into the city in 1527 (never again to leave).^[69] The physiognomy of Florentine patronage abroad was essentially one of restless exile. These men were bitterly frustrated, at pains to protect their wealth and patrimony and to assert to the world their continued dominance in culture and politics — the more so since they were by history and inculcation masters of their destinies, princes of the establishment from which they now found themselves disenfranchised with dwindling hope for reversal. The processes of acquiring new music, performing it, admitting one's select audience and coparticipants, trading new works and even information about them all became acts of stealth that defined power and position. The acquisitions themselves were marks of privilege, earned through the same cloak-and-dagger tactics used for trades in arms.^[70] To these Florentines, Venice may have been a friendly sanctuary from exile and impossible tensions at home, but also a slightly common place — overly inclusive by comparison with the elect circles in which they were accustomed to move.

[69] The characterizations come from additions Aretino made to the revised version of his comedy La cortigiana (1st ed. 1525; rev. ed. Venice, 1534) after arriving in Venice; for the panegyric on Venice see La cortigiana, act 3, sc. 7, in Pietro Aretino, Tutte le commedie, ed. G.B. De Sanctis (Milan, 1968), pp. 168-76.

[70] Indeed, the letters to and from Ruberto of 18 October and 3 November 1542 that reveal clandestine procurements of music are dominated by secret plans to procure arms.