‘Una persona dependente alla Serenissima Gran Duchessa’ : Female Embroiderers and Lacemakers between the courts of Florence and France

Adelina Modesti reconstructs the experiences of Caterina Angiola Pieroncini and ‘La Trottolina’, two embroiderers and lacemakers in the 1660s. Both were ladies-in-waiting to Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere, an important patron of women artists and artisans at the Medici Court. The Grand Duchess provided training and education to both women, sending them to Paris to perfect their needlework skills in the new French styles. Having gained proficiency in France, both women were repatriated to Florence, where they continued in service to the Grand Duchess, alongside other ladies who had been trained in lacemaking at local convents. All these women were dependent on the protection of their patron, who did not fail to provide morally and materially for her young charges.

Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe

This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.

Madrigals, Part 5

Marco da Gagliano's Quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci was published in October 1608, a little less than two years after his previous book. It contains fourteen madrigals for five voices and one for seven, all composed by Gagliano. The poets represented include Giambattista Marino, Giovanbattista Strozzi, both the older and the younger, Cosimo Galletti, and Ottavio Rinuccini. The madrigals of book 5 are quite varied in their style and their treatment of text. Many are light and remarkably concise, like the canzonetta-influenced madrigals of the Quarto libro, and most often set text syllabically to shorter rhythmic values in motives that alternate between homophony (or near homophony) and polyphony, imitative or nonimitative. Some, however, set poetry very differently. A three-part setting of a Marino sonnet, for instance, is filled with virtuoso melisma, probably intended for the professional singers of the Medici court. Book 5 also includes a concertato madrigal for seven singers and basso continuo that bears the prescriptive direction “per cantare e sonare” (for voices and instruments) in the basso partbook. Although there is no notational indication of instruments, the basso part lacks text for several measures, and it is likely that it was performed with improvised chords on an instrument. The book also contains two threnodies for Count Cammillo della Gheradesca that are in a somber and more traditional polyphony and contrast with the rest of the book's contents.

Madrigals, Part 6

Il sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci, Marco da Gagliano's final book in the genre, was published in 1617, nine years after its predecessor. In the book's dedication Gagliano indicated that its music was composed the year before, and not earlier in the gap between the two books. Book 6 was popular enough that it was reprinted in 1620, and although he lived another twenty-six years, Gagliano published no more madrigals. There are sixteen compositions in the book, fourteen of them by Gagliano, one by Lodovico Arrighetti, and one by an unnamed composer who was most certainly Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. The poets now recognized as authors of the texts are Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Francesco Petrarca, Ottavio Rinuccini, Gabriello Chiabrera, Gasparo Murtola, and Antonio Ongaro. In the diversity of their style, the madrigals of the Sesto libro provide a conspectus of the compositional craft evinced in Gagliano's earlier books: now the rush and brevity of canzonetta-influenced madrigals like those in the fourth and fifth books stand next to madrigals with the more traditional manner of text setting so often found in his first three books. There is also a drinking song that alternates duets with a refrain and a seven-voiced concertato piece, both taken from Medici court entertainments. One of the most telling madrigals in the book, “Filli, mentre ti bacio,” is an abbreviation and a recasting of the madrigal as it appears in his Primo libro, thereby disclosing the remarkable change in Gagliano's aesthetic thinking about the genre during the fifteen years that lie between his first and last books. Shortly after the appearance of the Sesto libro, a vicious attack on its madrigals and on Gagliano himself was made by Mutio Effrem. Although its condemnation of the book on theoretical grounds is misguided and without merit, Effrem's Censure seems to have damaged Gagliano's standing in Florence and to some degree may have influenced his decision to abandon the genre.

A Bolognese collector rediscovered

This study concerns the discovery of a new figure in the field of seventeenth-century art collecting: Count Ludovico Caprara, a general under Ferdinand II de’ Medici. Newly discovered archival documents reveal that the Caprara family had one of the richest collections of paintings in Bologna, displayed in a palace close to the Piazza Maggiore; most of these works, however, remain untraced. Ludovico collected more than a hundred canvases, mostly portraits of contemporary painters. The discovery of a purchase note and an inventory of the picture gallery have allowed the role of Ludovico in contemporary collecting and his contacts with personalities in the art market of Seicento Bologna to be established. An attempt is made here to identify several paintings by Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Francesco Gessi and others, and to clarify certain aspects of Ludovico’s taste, especially his preference for the Bolognese school, despite spending his life at the Medici court.