The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal (review)

The 1520s witnessed the birth of the Italian madrigal, a genre first cultivated in Florence, and Anthony Cummings aims to clarify its early history. First, he documents patrons in Florentine secular institutions and their connections with the earliest composers of madrigals, including Francesco Layolle and Philippe Verdelot. The patrons included members of informal discussions at the garden of the Rucellai, the Orti Oricellari, and members of the Sacred Academy of the Medici, as well as companies of the Cazzuola, Diamante, and Broncone. After demonstrating contacts between these patricians and early madrigalists, Cummings surveys two types of music familiar to these patrons, solo song with string accompaniment and carnival songs, and he suggests that these styles influenced the development of the early madrigal.

Two groups cultivated solo singing in a private, intimate setting: the Rucellai gatherings that commenced in the early sixteenth century, and the Sacred Academy of the Medici (1515–19). The companies of the Cazzuola, Diamante, and Broncone on the other hand, cultivated a different Florentine musical tradition, that of the public performance of carnival songs scored for a quartet of singers in chordal texture.

Cummings argues that the Florentine cultural elite fostered the creation of the madrigal, and he questions aspects of the magisterial account of the genre by Iain Fenlon and James Haar (The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century [1988]). Fenlon and Haar pointed to the French chanson as an important influence on the musical style of the madrigal due to the transmission of chansons in Florentine sources. While Cummings allows for the influence of the chanson, he emphasizes the importance of social networks of Florentine patrons and clients.

The first chapter explores the activities of the Rucellai group, and includes a listing of all twenty-three members, including Machiavelli, Jacopo Nardi, Lorenzo Strozzi, and Antonio Brucioli. This group's attitudes toward music can be glimpsed in Brucioli's writings and in other contemporary references. Although critical of the effects of music, especially in works for multiple voices, they favored improvised solo singing with string accompaniment. Solo singing is again a focal point of chapter 2, on the Sacred Academy of the Medici. The academy addressed several letters to two prominent singers in Florence, Bernardo Accolti (called Unico Aretino) and Atalante Migliorotti, and in 1515 they compared the latter to Orpheus and elected him as "lutenist in perpetuity." Cummings provides samples of notated solo songs that suggest the improvisatory style of these singers, and notes that a string instrument provides a firm foundation, thus allowing the singer to produce "a flexible, expressive delivery of the text in a way that made the melodic line seem almost an extension of speech. The challenge for the early madrigalists was to translate such elements of solo song into the polyphonic 'maniera'" (90).

The third chapter turns to the contrasting genre of the carnival song, cultivated by companies of the Cazzuola, Diamante, and Broncone. Vasari's life of Pontormo provides a well-known account of songs prepared by these companies for the 1513 carnival, and Cummings explores the textual imagery and musical style in several of them. Here the larger point about the relation of carnival songs to the early madrigal could have been more effectively made. Both genres do feature chordal writing with clear declamation of the text, but Cummings stresses one type of madrigal, Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli's poetry inserted between acts of the comedies La Clizia and La Mandragola. These particular madrigals of Verdelot did function like carnival songs —both were intended for public performance—but these works are exceptional. Most madrigals were intended for intimate gatherings of relatively skilled amateur singers, and the music featured a more sophisticated blend of chordal and contrapuntal textures. Further details could have been improved: some of the music examples have defective text (ex. 15...