Figure 22.1 Baffo harpsicord. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The material culture of the past is often treated as silent. Although sixteenth-century texts comment on the ‘racket’ of wooden shoes during dances1 or the ‘noise of plates and knives’ in a kitchen during the preparation of a meal,2 when we examine such historical objects today, their cacophony is forgotten.3 Yet the range of sounds objects made – and the cultural and economic forces required to produce those sounds – can reveal valuable information that mute examinations ignore. In this chapter on music and material culture I will consider how we can explore international trade, collaborations between craftsmen, aesthetic choices and fashions, and changing social practices and values in the early modern period by listening to musical objects.
There is nothing new about the desire to recreate the music of the past. An interest in historically authentic performance of early music started in the last decades of the nineteenth century and has resulted in an impressive quantity of performances and recordings.4 This movement has focused in part on musical texts found in manuscripts and early printed books and been preoccupied with compositional styles, composers and patrons. The instruments from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards that survive today, often in modified form, have also been studied in forensic detail by practicing musicians, organologists and instrument builders. Their primary motivation has been the painstaking reconstruction and replication of these instruments to produce as historically accurate a sound as possible rather than understanding the broader role they played in contemporary culture and society. But this focus on authenticity has shifted attention away from other objects with less explicit musical functions that nevertheless reveal much about music’s historic meanings. Material culture studies recognise the other traces that music, as a social and cultural act, has left behind. Music did not take place in a vacuum: it echoed within spaces other than churches and courts and played an important role in everyday life alongside the objects of the early modern home. Starting with a harpsichord made in 1574, I will explore how considering musical instruments as material object and, conversely, recognising material objects as musical reconnects musical activity with people, spaces and other artefacts.
Sound was an important means of identifying locations in the early modern period. Soundscapes then were, however, more distinctive and recognisable than those of today. The lack of high decibel levels and constant ‘white noise’ permitted sounds to be heard clearly over greater distances and to be understood in the context of a close knowledge of local communities.5 From organs and chant echoing throughout churches to the clamour of street cries and town bells in urban centres, soundscapes reflected the activities and materiality of particular environments.
Sound informs us therefore about both material environments and their objects. From Aristotle onwards, the sound-producing properties of an object were seen as dependent on the material from which they were made, with wool or sponge having ‘no sound’ and bronze having a high capacity to ‘generate’ sound.6 But this potential can also illuminate our understanding of an object’s function and meaning and tell us something about people’s responses and behaviour towards it. Frequently ignored, sound – intentional or unwanted – is a useful and important category of material analysis. Amulets for children appearing frequently in Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century inventories have been discussed in terms of the perceived magical properties of their materials – coral and animal teeth – which protected the children that wore them from harm, but they often also incorporated small silver bells.7 Their tinkling sound not only entertained children but also made it easier to keep track of where they were. The noisy wooden shoes mentioned above appear in a dance manual which goes on to instruct the reader how exactly to move the feet and legs in order to walk elegantly and silently, eliminating clatter. By thinking about sound, we can see how people modified their behaviour when interacting with objects to conform to contemporary ideas about decorum.
If we think about the sounds objects made in the past, we are immediately forced to consider the people or other artefacts that surrounded them. The harpsichord in Figure 22.1, now in the V&A, was made by Giovanni Antonio Baffo in Venice in 1574.8 Four instruments signed by Baffo and another seven attributed to him survive, including the virginals he made for Queen Elizabeth I in 1594.9 The harpsichord was a novelty in the early modern period. The Florentine Giovanni Tortelli, writing in around 1450, describes the clavichord and harpsichord as inventions ‘made for the delight of the senses’,10 and even a century later the Bolognese medic Leonardo Fioravanti notes that ‘these are modern instruments, because they have been the most recent to come to light in the world’.11 Appearing for the first time in the late fourteenth century, the harpsichord represented a significant development in technology, using a keyboard mechanism that employed bird-feather quill plectra to pluck its gut, brass or iron strings.12 Considerable engagement with the local economy, international trade and other artisans was required to optimise the effect of this encounter between quill and strings.
Acoustically, the most important element in the harpsichord was the sound board.13 Lying beneath the strings and connected to them via a hardwood bridge, the soundboard vibrates at the same frequency as a plucked string. Its greater surface area enables it to move air more efficiently than the vibrating strings alone, allowing the instrument as a whole to resonate. Harpsichord soundboards in sixteenth-century Italy were mostly made of coniferous softwoods, such as spruce or fir, because they were light and pliable. The cypress wood used to make the soundboard in the Baffo harpsichord is typical of Venetian instruments of this period: as well as resonating well, its elasticity created a sweeter tone.14 Awareness of the properties of cypress wood was widespread. In a mid-sixteenth-century agricultural treatise, Pietro Crescentio noted that it was used ‘willingly in the soundboards of musical instruments, as in the lute, in the cittern and others’.15 Vincenzo Scamozzi also mentions the employment of ‘very noble and delicate’ cypress, ‘very large quantities of which have always been, and are, found in the Isle of Candia [Crete] and the Kingdom of Cyprus’, stating that ‘today it is used to make harpsichords, spinets and other fine knacks’.16 This wood was imported from territory under Venetian rule (Cyprus ceded to the Ottomans in 1573; Crete remained part of the Venetian dominions until the seventeenth century) and was therefore readily available in the city,17 although cypress was not viewed as native to Italy, as Bernardino Carroli writes in his dialogue Il giovane ben creato (1581): ‘but these [pine and cypress] not being plants born of our country, I am resolved not to talk about them further’.18
Using seasoned cypress made the soundboard more stable in the face of changing humidity, which can otherwise cause the wood to warp and twist. Fioravanti’s account of harpsichord-making in Venice from 1567 notes that the wood used ‘should be dry for many years, so that it may be stable’, adding that the soundboard should use ‘planks of the oldest cypress that they may be able to find’. In 1490, the Mantuan ambassador to Venice, Giovanni Brognolo, wrote to Isabella d’Este to tell her that he could not find dry cypress wood in the city for a harpsichord being made for her in Ferrara, so was sending five sheets of green cypress instead.19 It is not clear where makers usually found seasoned wood, but an interview of 1711 with Bartolomeo Cristofori suggests that the prolific sixteenth-century keyboard instrument maker Dominicus Pisaurensis ‘began to make use of old chests that he found in the granaries of Venice and Padua, which were for the most part of cypress wood from Candia [Crete] or Cyprus’.20 Wherever they were, makers of harpsichords employed the most suitable type of wood available – while Venetian instruments are characterised by the use of cypress, in Naples, soundboards and cases are usually made of maple wood.21
Acoustically, the other most important elements of the harpsichord are its bottom (baseboard) and sides, which create a cavity in which air resonates when the soundboard above vibrates.22 Those of the Baffo in Figure 22.1 are made of pine, which Fioravanti describes as ‘light and resonant’, although a number of Venetian instruments also use cypress here too. The materials from which the inner structural and mechanical elements are made – sycamore, pearwood, beech and boxwood – have been chosen for their hardness and durability. Almost all the pearwood jacks, which move to pluck the strings when keyboard notes are pressed, are still original.
The painstakingly elaborate decoration of this harpsichord represents much time, energy and expense, from the preparation of veneers and inlays to the complex and carefully balanced filigrees unfurling within the geometric structure. Here additional materials – rosewood, boxwood, ebony and ivory – are used for purely decorative purposes, their rarity and expense adding to the instrument’s costly prestige. Venice’s central role in international trade in this period meant that a rich array of materials and an abundance of imported goods were available in the city, and the appearance of the harpsichord reflects this. The keyboard notes are covered with ebony and ivory, and ivory studs embellish the edges of the instrument. Ivory came to Italy from Africa during this period.23 The Romans brought ebony from Africa and southern India,24 and by the seventeenth century Portuguese merchants imported this rare wood into Europe from Madagascar, Mauritius and Goa.25 In 1506, the instrument maker Lorenzo da Pavia wrote to Isabella d’Este telling her that he was unable to find a good piece of ebony to make a viola for her, despite looking as far as Damascus.26 Veneers of dark rosewood, inlaid with interlacing geometric lozenge patterns of ebony and boxwood and further decorated with gilded arabesques, adorn the harpsichord’s most prominently visible surfaces. Rosewood was mostly imported from India, although the rosewood veneers of a surviving casket with very similar decoration to that of the Baffo harpsichord may have come from the New World.27
The central decades of the sixteenth century saw an intensified use of Islamic ornament in Venice, suggesting that our harpsichord was a fashionable item.28 The intricately painted arabesque scrollwork is derived from filigree motifs found on the Islamic-inspired book-bindings popular in Venice in this period, and an elegantly painted papier-maché binding made by Safavid craftsmen in Istanbul after 1530 is very close in style.29 Similar gilded and varnished motifs are found on pieces of furniture, small boxes and mirrors. This suggests Baffo may have collaborated closely with other Venetian craftsmen who were responsible for carrying out this complex work.30
The Islamic style of ornament found on the instrument itself contrasts with the flamboyant all’antica painting, contemporary in date, that decorates the inside lid of the harpsichord’s protective outer case. The central cartouche of Apollo and the Muses is surrounded by lively putti, sphinxes, masks, vases, lunettes, scrolls and garlands, airily and energetically painted on a white ground. The stylistic disparity between the ornament of the outer case and the instrument it contains reminds us that such decoration was probably carried out by someone other than the harpsichord maker and suggests that in the sixteenth century variety was more highly prized than the aesthetic homogeneity we expect in the adornment of objects today. The scrolls and roses painted on the exterior of the case are later additions; its outer surfaces may or may not have originally been painted. But the concentrated decoration of the case’s inner lid is typical of sixteenth-century harpsichords. These lids were structured with hinged sections that unfolded in stages, at each point revealing more painted decoration and permitting the sound of the instrument to resonate more loudly. Some harpsichords exploited this combination of visual and sonic effects explicitly in a way that recalls the way imagery functioned on other domestic objects. The inner lid of one instrument bears the figure of a reclining Venus, whose tapering form fits the shape perfectly.31 When the lid was lifted, the suggestive image was revealed. This echoes the restricted visibility of erotic imagery elsewhere in the household, such as the reclining figures of naked men and women decorating the undersides of fifteenth-century cassoni lids and sixteenth-century canvas paintings found behind curtains in contemporary bedrooms.32 With the Baffo harpsichord, lifting the lid of the outer case not only affected the sound it produced and altered the aesthetic balance of the instrument’s appearance, it reminds us of the powerful, sometimes inflammatory, role musical performance could play in the early modern period.
It is clear from contemporary discussions of musical instruments that the way an instrument looked was not merely a superficial afterthought but was seen as an intrinsic part of its identity and an important facet of its function. In his Ricordi of 1554, Fra Sabba da Castiglione approved of furnishing the house with musical instruments because they ‘greatly delight the ears and refresh the spirits … and they also greatly please the eye when they are diligently made by the hands of excellent and ingenious masters’,33 while a motto on a harpsichord from about 1560 reads ‘I make the eyes and the heart happy at the same time’, making no mention of the ears.34 Fioravanti’s discussion of the making of keyboard instruments is emphatic about the importance of a harpsichord’s visual appearance, placing it on a par with, if not above, that of its sound. He writes that instrument makers must be ‘most diligent … since these are instruments that beyond their melody and consonance require also beauty and neatness, and because there are two senses that take delight in them, that is, sight and hearing. Sight, when an instrument is made well with many ornaments, and that to the eye is very lovely. Hearing, when it plays well and that the ear takes great pleasure in listening to it played. And therefore these instruments must be firstly beautiful in manufacture and then good in voice, to have their perfection, and therefore the master must use much care in the [drawing] of the body of these instruments of most beautiful form, so that they may please the eye’.35
Understanding the musical and visual roles the harpsichord originally fulfilled helps us to appreciate the cultural and economic changes that took place between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy. This period witnessed a shift from music as something predominantly performed by the few, for small audiences, to a widespread activity involving the participation of many, taking place at almost all social levels. Musical instruments entered houses not just for particular festive occasions but on an everyday basis, and the harpsichord was the largest trophy in this procession.
The rise in ownership of harpsichords during the sixteenth century mirrors their growing availability in Italy, largely due to increases in local manufacture.36 Although Italian makers were constructing harpsichords and other keyboard instruments by the mid-fifteenth century, these were usually highly expensive and for courtly clients. The customers of the instrument maker Lorenzo da Pavia (d.1517) included Isabella d’Este, Lucrezia Borgia and Pope Leo X, and members of the Sforza, Montefeltro and della Rovere families.37 Such objects were luxuries, available only to a very limited spectrum of the population, often made to specification and exchanged as diplomatic gifts.38 This pattern changed during the sixteenth century, as Venice became one of the most important and prolific centres for the building of harpsichords in Europe.39 Domestic inventories record a general rise in the number of musical instruments – mostly lutes and keyboards – from the 1520s onwards, which continues into the second half of the sixteenth century. Although smaller and more portable virginals were most commonly listed in houses, harpsichords were owned across an increasingly broad section of the population.40 At the time that the Baffo harpsichord was being made, other harpsichords are recorded in Venice in the possession of a pharmacist (1560),41 the wife of a barber (1577)42 and a spice merchant (1578).43 A harpsichord with legs was valued at six ducats in Venice in 1555, while a new harpsichord bought in Florence in 1569 cost 120 lire (approximately 15 Venetian ducats).44 Not all domestic inventories list objects according to the room in which they were found, but in Venice, keyboard instruments are usually in the most accessible spaces in the house, the sizeable portego used for entertaining and the ‘large’ or ‘golden’ camere (bedchambers) leading off it, while in Florence they mostly appear in camere and anticamere, used less frequently for social occasions, alongside a concentration of artworks and objects. In some inventories, instruments were not in the house at all but are recorded as having been pawned or lent, reminding us of their mobility and suggesting that their economic value was retained and could be exploited when necessary.45
The painted decoration of the Baffo harpsichord’s inner lid includes the crescent moons of the Strozzi family coat of arms, suggesting that a member of the noble Florentine family may have originally owned the Venetian-made instrument. Strozzi documents record the exchange of one harpsichord for another in 1602 and inventories of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence list a ‘buon’accordo’ and a ‘gravecembalo’ in the sale of the palace in 1609 and 1611, but it is impossible to link any of these references directly with our instrument.46 The Strozzi enjoyed connections with Venice: exiled members of the family lived there earlier in the century and were renowned musical enthusiasts,47 while a letter to a Leone Strozzi writes of ‘the appreciative welcome made to you in Venice’ in 1574, the year the Baffo harpsichord was made.48 Baffo also made the virginals for Queen Elizabeth I which were sent from Venice to England and is also known to have worked for the Este court in Ferrara.49 That his harpsichords were exported to Florence comes as no surprise.
Harpsichords could be luxury objects, indicators of status and active participants in the visual culture of the home. But how do we know that they were used? Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century domestic account books list payments for tuning, re-stringing, re-quilling and repairing instruments, as well as for repainting their cases.50 Other documents describe harpsichords being moved from one part of the house to another, from within the house to the outside, from one house to another, or even played on gondolas floating around the canals and lagoon of Venice.51 A letter from the writer Anton Francesco Doni asks a singer friend to come with a group of fellow musicians, bringing ‘a case of viols, a large harpsichord, lutes, flutes, crumhorns and part books for singing’ for a comedy they were to perform at his house.52
In the sixteenth century, music specifically written for keyboards was printed in books of tabulature, with no distinction between pieces written for organ, harpsichord or clavichord. Combining arrangements of and pieces inspired by vocal works with dances and variations, these publications, many of which are as easily played on the harpsichord as on the organ, tell us of the existence of an amateur market for printed keyboard music and indicate the types of pieces performed on the Baffo harpsichord. But although we might trace what was played and where, how can we establish what the connotations of playing an instrument such as the Baffo harpsichord might have been? What did it mean to sit in front of a harpsichord and play? Debates about music’s influence reveal complex and contradictory attitudes. Silvio Antoniano’s comment that music ‘altered the spirits in different ways, making them more disposed and inclined towards virtue or vice’ captures the ambiguities of many discussions which oppose its dangerous sensual influences with its improving spiritual effects.53 Some authors stress music’s benefits for libidinous youths: ‘I find nothing calms me and cheers up the perturbed harmony of the soul better’, writes Ortensio Landi, ‘it softens the ardour of anger, and reforms degenerate customs’.54 Federico Luigini described music as not ‘an igniter of lechery … but a curb’;55 while a dialogue ‘in favour of music’ claimed that it ‘reforms depraved habits’.56 Examples cited from classical literature describe how lusty youths were reformed or wives’ chastity preserved thanks to music’s agency.57 But alongside the belief in music’s chastening properties sat equally strong associations with lasciviousness, vanity and superfluous luxury. Savonarola consigned musical instruments and music books to the famous bonfire of the vanities,58 and a sixteenth-century Dialogue against Music cited classical examples of musicians who were ‘for the most part delicate, lascivious and effeminate’.59 Debates about ‘policing’ the senses reveal profound anxieties about the capacity of certain sounds to inspire lust and relinquish bodily control.
Nevertheless, prescriptive literature recommended that musical education for boys should start at the age of 7.60 Late sixteenth-century account books record that both the sons and daughters of noble Florentine families received lessons in ‘playing keyboards’, ‘playing’, ‘singing’, ‘music’ and ‘writing and music’. Settimia Corsi’s family bought her ruled music books ‘for writing Settimia’s sonate’ and ‘for writing the arias that Settimia sings’.61 From 1599, the lessons received in reading, writing and playing music (together with dancing and grammar) by the sons and daughters of Emilia Guicciardini and Lorenzo di Giambattista Strozzi are grouped together in account books under the heading ‘expenses of teachers to teach the virtues to my children’.62
Further positive indications of the social and cultural value of music during this period can be found in portraits. The emphasis on including objects that reflected people’s character and interests, ‘bearer[s] of the owner’s selfhood’,63 suggest that being painted with an instrument such as a harpsichord, or an open music book, was a deliberate choice that advertised the sitter’s musical ability or literacy.64 Notably, three of the best-known female artists of the period, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana and Marietta Robusti, chose to represent themselves at the keyboard in self-portraits that unquestionably promote their musical accomplishments.65 Leandro Bassano’s painting of several generations of a family playing and singing together around a table powerfully symbolises their domestic harmony in a way that echoes the use of metaphors of musical concord in household treatises. ‘Make music with members of the household’, exhorts Silvio Antoniano in his Tre libri dell’educatione christiana dei figliuoli (1584), ‘not as a thing of great preparation, but as game, and brief entertainment’.66 By the sixteenth century music-making with family and friends had become a new type of social interaction and pastime enjoyed by many – and was, in the words of another contemporary author, ‘the condiment of our happiness’.67
While we have seen how the harpsichord was implicated in many of the social, economic and cultural dynamics at work in early modern Italy, its primary purpose was to make music. As an object, its Aristotelian potential ‘to sound’ resided in its keyboard mechanism, the materials from which it was made and the people with whom it came into contact. But the sound potential of an object does not always relate to its materiality. A paper book of music has a high ‘sound potential’ because it brings music to life through the act of people deciphering its notation in order to sing or play. Other objects in the early modern period – from painted altarpieces, embroidered textiles and inlaid wood tables, to knives and ceramic dishes – also bore legible and functional musical inscriptions that granted those objects the potential to sound when in the presence of people who understood them. In this way, sometimes surprising connections between early modern material culture and music are forged, in ways that tell us about the social currency and value of musical knowledge.
For example, the musical identity of the fragmented dish in Figure 22.2 is not immediately obvious.68 Made in Faenza in the first decade of the sixteenth century, it was found during excavations of the basilica of Saint Agatha in Ravenna. Its central image is of a woman holding a footed cup containing a pair of eyes and with a large book tucked under her arm, but her identity is ambiguous. She carries the attributes of St Lucy, but is given the inscription ‘S.A.’ and has no halo. She is surrounded by a striped scroll, a wide band of grotesque decoration and a now fragmentary Latin inscription around the rim. On the scroll are a mixture of words and almost meaningless syllables that read nonsensically, interspersed apparently randomly with musical notes: ‘Tu sei che i ngui cum tua tra che passato il co o possente amo gia nol posso abandona’. But if we recognise the stripes to be lines of a musical stave and the notes as deliberately placed amongst the syllables, we can start to understand the full meaning of what is a coded inscription. A viewer able to read musical notation can decipher this inscription by adding the syllables of the musical hexachord that the individual notes represent – ut, re, mi, fa, sol or la – to those already written out. This completes the poem’s text and reveals its amorous message (musical syllables in bold):
Tu sola sei che mi fai languire
Cum la tua faretra che mi [ha?] passato il core
Sol fa mio possente amore
Già nol posso abandonare
[You alone make me languish
With your quiver that has pierced my heart
Only the strength of my love
Prevents me from abandoning it]
However, the dish conceals a further layer of meaning. Having decoded the poem’s full text by recognising the musical syllables, the viewer can then sing it, as the text syllables are located on specific lines of the stave, creating a melody. The music and its message are therefore inextricably linked, but apparent only to those with the necessary musical knowledge to uncover them. What was apparently an innocuous, even pious, object carried a very different message to those able to interpret it correctly. If presented as a gift, a devotional maiolica dish could be transformed into an ardent love song.
This dish is an unusual example of an everyday object having the potential to become a piece of notated music. But a dish without such an inscription would have a very different relationship to sound, clinking when stacked on top of another dish or when struck with metal cutlery; making a sharp thud when placed on a wooden table. Although these thuds and clunks seem a long way from melodious harpsichord pieces and love songs, they all form part of an informative spectrum of sounds that material culture contributed to the early modern environment. While the musical sound of the harpsichord might have been fairly commonly encountered in sixteenth-century Venice, thanks to high levels of local production and a developed culture of amateur music-making, in London it would have been something of a rarity. The connotations of a sound, and therefore of the object that made it, depended on where and when it was heard.
Both the dish and the Baffo harpsichord share the same silent fate today. The harpsichord underwent significant alterations at various points in its history, affecting both its dimensions – it is now about 25 cm shorter than it was originally – and its sound. Although it was restored to playing order in 1964, when recordings of it were made, it is no longer playable. It stands behind a rail in Gallery 62 of the V&A, a mute relic of noisy and vital days.
1Fabritio Caroso, Nobiltà di dame (1630), 75: Sogliono alcune Signore, & Gentildonne, quando vogliono caminare, strascinar tanto le pianelle, che il rumor che fanno stordisce le genti; trans. and ed. Julia Sutton (Oxford and New York, 1986), 141: ‘Some ladies and gentlewomen slide their chopines along as they walk, so that the racket they make is enough to drive one crazy! More often they bang them so loudly with each step, that they remind us of Franciscan friars’.
2Piero Belmonte, Institutione della sposa (1587), x: tanti romori di piatti, et di coltelli.
3Christopher Witmore, ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time’, Journal of Material Culture, XI (2006): 267–292.
4See John Butt, Playing with History. The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge, 2002).
5Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago, 1999), 49–51.
6Alan Towey, ‘Aristotle and Alexander on Hearing and Instantaneous Change: A Dilemma in Aristotle’s Account of Hearing’, in Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk eds., The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London, 1991), 7–18 and Charles Burnett, ‘Sound and its Perception in the Middle Ages’, also in The Second Sense, 43–69.
7Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, ‘Lambs, Coral, Teeth and the Intimate Intersection of Religion and Magic in Renaissance Tuscany’, in Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery eds., Images, Relics and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Tempe, 2005), 139–156.
8Howard Schott, Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum – Part I: Keyboard instruments (London, 1998), 32–35.
9Denzil Wraight, ‘Baffo, Giovanni Antonio’, Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/43037; and Donald H. Boalch, ed. Charles Mould, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, 1440–1840, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1995), 7.
10Alex Keller, ‘A Renaissance Humanist Looks at ‘New’ Inventions: The Article ‘Horologium’ in Giovanni Tortelli’s ‘De Orthographia’ ’, Technology and Culture, XI (1970), 345–365, 359.
11Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universal (Venice, 1567), f.116r.
12F. Hubbard, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Raymond Russel, The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1973); Boalch, ed. Mould, Makers of the Harpsichord; Ed Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord (Bloomington, 2003).
13For a clear and simple introduction, see Edward L. Kottick, Kenneth D. Marshall and Thomas J. Hendrickson, ‘The Acoustics of the Harpsichord’, Scientific American, 264.2 (February 1991), 110–115.
14 http://www.denzilwraight.com/venetian.htm. For the acoustic properties of different kinds of wood used for musical instruments, see Daniel W. Haines, ‘The Essential Mechanical Properties of Wood Prepared for Musical Instruments’, Catgut Acoustical Society Journal, IV.2 ser. II (2000), 20–32 and Iris Brémaud, ‘Acoustical Properties of Wood in String Instruments Soundboards and Tuned Idiophones: Biological and Cultural Diversity’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, CXXXI (2012), 807–818.
15Pietro Crescentio, D’agricoltura. Dove si contiene il modo di coltivare la terra (Venice, 1552), Libro Quinto, Cap. XXXVIII, ‘De l’Arcipresso’: lequale gli huomini pongono volentieri ne fondi delli strumenti da sonare come nel liuto nela cithatara e ne l’altri.
16Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (Venice, 1615), 257: grandissima quantità ne sono stati ritrouati sempre, e se ne ritroua nell’Isola di Candia, e Regno di Cipro … hoggidì si seruono per far Clauicembali, Arpicordi, & altre gentilezze.
17Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, 70.
18Bernardino Carroli, ed. Elide Casali, Il giovane ben creato (Ravenna, 2004), 230: ma per non esser piante nate nel nostro paese, mi rissolvo non parlar più di quelle.
19William F. Prizer, ‘Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da Pavia, ‘Master Instrument-Maker’ ’, Early Music History, II (1982), 87–118 and 120–127, 94, n.36.
20Scipione Maffei, interview with Bartolomeo Cristofori, published in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, 1711, quoted and translated in Stewart Pollens, The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995), 61, original Italian 242.
21Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, 97.
22William Savage et al, ‘Air and Structural Modes of a Harpsichord’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, XCI.4 (1992), 2180–2189.
23Ezio Bassani, William Fagg and Susan Vogel eds., Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (New York, 1988).
24Roger B. Ulrih, Roman Woodworking (New Haven and London, 2007), 251–252.
25Adam Bowett, Woods in British Furniture Making 1400–1900 (Chicago, 2012), 69.
26Prizer, ‘Isabella d’Este’, 117.
27The casket is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Stefano Carboni ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New Haven and London, 2006), cat. 147, 338.
28Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 28–29.
29Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, cat. 128, 334.
30Alison Ohta, ‘Binding Relationships: Mamluk, Ottoman and Renaissance Book-Bindings’, in Anna Contadini and Claire Norton eds., The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (Farnham, 2013), 221–230. Tony Chinnery, ‘A Celestini Harpsichord Rediscovered’, Recercare, XI (1999), 51–74, 51–52.
31Harpsichord made by Alessandro Trasuntino (1531), now in the collections of the Royal College of Music, London, painted in the style of Paris Bordone (1580). See Elizabeth Wells et al, Royal College of Music Museum of Instruments Catalogue. Part 2: Keyboard Instruments (London, 2000), 28–31; and Flora Dennis, ‘Unlocking the Gates of Chastity: Music and the Erotic in the Domestic Sphere in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Sara Matthews-Grieco ed., The Erotic Cultures of Early Modern Italy (Ashgate, 2010), 227–245.
32This type of erotic imagery is discussed by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio in The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (London and New Haven, 1999), 132 and idem, ‘Imaginative Conceptions in Renaissance Italy’, in Sara Matthews-Grieco and Geraldine Johnson eds., Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge, 1997), 42–60, 49–53.
33Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, overo, ammaestramenti (Venice, 1554), quoted in Paola Barocchi ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols (Milan and Naples, 1971–78), III, 2219: perché questi tali instrumenti dilettano molto alle orecchie et ricreano molto gli animi … ancora piacciono assai all’occhio, quando sono diligentemente et per mano di eccellenti et ingegniosi maestri lavorati.
34‘Rendo lieti in un tempo gli occhi e’l core’, Harpsichord by Vido Trasuntino, 1560?; Boalch, ed. Mould, Makers of the Harpsichord, 181–182.
35Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale (Venice, 1564), f. 116v-117r: E dunque necessario al maestro di tal arte, per fare li detti instrumenti esser diligentissimo nell’operare percioche sono instrumenti, che oltra la melodia & consonantia sua se gli richiede ancor la beltezza & politezza e perche dui sentimenti sono che di tali instrumenti pigliano dilettatione, cioè: il vedere & l’udire. Il vedere, quando un’instrumento è fatto bellissimo con molti ornamenti; et che all’occhio è molto vago. L’udire quando suona bene, & che l’orecchie ne pigliano grandissimo gusto nell’udirlo sonare. E però debbono questi istrumenti esser prima belli di fattura, & dipoi buoni di voce, per havere la sua perfettione, e pero dee il maestro usare molta diligenza, nel tirare il corpo di ditti istrumenti di bellissimo sesto, acciò piaccia all’occhio.
36For a general introduction to makers of keyboard instruments, see the bibliography cited in n.12. An introduction to instrument-making of all types in Venice is provided by Stefano Toffolo, Antichi strumenti veneziani (Venice, 1987) and Stefano Pio, Viol and Lute Makers of Venice, 1490–1630 / Liuteria Veneziana, 1490–1640 (Venice, 2011).
37Prizer, ‘Isabella d’Este’, 88.
38See the several examples given in Prizer, ‘Isabella d’Este’, and Stefano Davari, ed. Anna Maria Lorenzoni and Clifford M. Brown, ‘Notizie di fabbricatori d’organi e d’altri instrumenti’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Virgiliana di Mantova, n. s. XLIII (1975), 29–47.
39See bibliography cited in n.12.
40Toffolo, Strumenti musicali, 47–67 and Palumbo Fossati, ‘L’interno della casa dell’artigiano’, cited in Flora Dennis, ‘Music’, in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006), 230–233.
41Archivio di Stato, Venezia (ASV), Cancelleria inferiori, Inventari, busta 40 (1560–1566), n.73.
42ASV, Giudici del Proprio, Mobili, registro 46, c.57.
43ASV, Archivio Notarile, Atti, Notaio P. Contarini, reg. 2586, c.79.
44ASV, Canc. inf., Misc. not. div., Inv., b.38, n.70, f.3v (1552) and Archivio di Stato, Firenze (ASF), Capponi, 147, f.4r, 9 September 1569. The Venetian ducat was worth 6.2 lire in the early sixteenth century and 10 lire by the end of the century (Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999), xi.
45ASV, Cancelleria inferiori, Inventari, busta 43 (1583–1590).
46Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF), Carte strozziane, V serie, n/197, 240 and 1429.
47Richard Agee, ‘Filippo Strozzi and the Early Madrigal’, Journal of the American Society of Musicology, XXXVIII (1985), 227–237 and idem., ‘Ruberto Strozzi and the Early Madrigal’, Journal of the American Society of Musicology, XXXVI (1983), 1–17.
48ASF, Carte strozziane, V serie, n/197 1216.
49Schott, Catalogue of Musical Instruments, 29–31 and Nanke Schellmann, ‘The Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal, Scribbles, Scratches and Sgraffoto’, V&A Conservation Journal, XLII (2002), 9–11.
50See, for example, ASF, Guicciardini Corsi Salviati, Libri di amministrazione, 443 and 446 for a number of payments of this kind.
51See Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Muth in Renaissance Venice (New Haven and London, 2007), 205–206.
52Letter from Doni to the singer Luigi Paoli (1552), cited in Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, 1995), 19: la Cassa con le Viole, le Stromento grande di penna, i Liuti, Flauti, Storte, & libri per cantare.
53Silvio Antoniano, Tre libri dell’educatione christiana dei figliuoli (Verona, 1584), f.157v: si alterassero gli animi & ne divenissero più disposti, & inclinati alla virtù, ò al vitio.
54Ortensio Landi ed., Ragionamenti familiari di diversi autori (Venice, 1550), f.4r: non ritrovo cosa che meglio mi acqueti & rassereni la conturbata harmonia dell’animo … ch’ella ammollischi l’ardor dell’ira, & riformi le depravate usanze.
55Federico Luigini, Il libro della bella donna (Venice, 1554), 107: non perche havesse ad essere loro un solfanello di lascivia … ma un freno.
56Landi, Ragionamenti familiari, cit., f.4r: & riformi le depravate usanze.
57See, for example, Landi, Ragionamenti familiari, cit., f.5r and Tomaso Garzoni, ed. P. Cherchi and B. Collina, La piazza universale di tutte le professione del mondo (1585) (Turin, 1996), 715.
58See Girolamo Savonarola, trans. and ed. Anne Borelli et al, Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola. Religion and Politics, 1490–1498 (New Haven and London, 2006), 248–251, 254 and 257.
59Landi, Ragionamenti familiari, cit., f.2v.
60Niccolò Vito di Gozze, Governo della famiglia (Venice, 1589), 65.
61ASF, Guicciardini Corsi Salviati, Libri di amministrazione, 443: un libro per scrivere le sonate della settimie e penne e fogli (1609); un libro per scrivere l’arie che canta la Settimia (1610).
62ASF, Carte strozziane, V serie, 240: spese di maestri per insegniare le virtue a mia figliuoli.
63Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (London and New Haven, 2006), 47.
64On musical portraits, see Iain Fenlon, ‘The Status of Music and Musicians in the Early Italian Renaissance’, in J.-M. Vaccaro ed., Le concert des voix et des instruments á la Renaissance (Paris, 1995), 57–70; Arnaldo Morelli, ‘Portraits of Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy: A Specific Typology’, Music in Art, XXVI (2001), 47–57; H. Colin Slim, Painting Music in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot, 2002) (which reprints many of his articles on this subject); Mariagrazia Carlone, ‘Portraits of Lutenists’, Music in Art, XXIX (2004), 65–76 and Arnaldo Morelli, ‘Il ritratto di musicista nel Cinquecento: Tipologie e significati’, in Aldo Galli et al. eds., Il ritratto nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence, 2007), 169–191.
65See Mary D. Garrard, ‘Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist’, Renaissance Quarterly, XLVII (1994), 556–622; Katherine McIver, ‘Lavinia Fontana’s ‘Self-Portrait Making Music’ ’, Woman’s Art Journal, XIX (1998), 3–8; Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London, 1998), 210–211 and 215–218; Caroline Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna (New Haven and London, 2003), 40–42.
66Antoniano, Tre libri, f.157v:si faccia la musica tra gli istessi famigliari di casa, non come cosa di grande apparato, ma per un giuoco, & trattenimento breve.
67Landi, Ragionamenti familiari, f. 5r: il condimento delle nostre contentezze.
68Gaetano Ballardini, ‘Una coppa d’amore al Museo Nazionale di Ravenna’, in ibid., Coppe d’amore nel secolo XV (Faenza, 1928), 123–150; Giuseppe Liverani, ‘Un’incisione di Jacopo de’ Barbari su di una coppa d’amore faentina’, Faenza, XIX (1931), 109–113; Francesco Liverani and Giovanni L. Reggi, Le maioliche del Museo Nazionale di Ravenna (Modena, 1976), 25–28.
