About
This website is part of the project Pietro Bembo’s soundscape: a musical tour in the early modern Italian peninsula (BEMUS), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 101025775, and was conducted at the University of Padua from April 2021 to March 2023.
The Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (Venice 1470 – Rome 1547) was a key figure of the Italian, and indeed European, Renaissance. His works are widely known and his rich epistolary attests to both his contacts with all the most important figures of his time and the variety of his interests, ranging from literature to the arts. The project aimed at restoring the missing musical dimension in the scholarly portrait of Pietro Bembo investigating the soundscape in which he was immersed, his involvement in the musical milieu, his musical tastes, and his opinions about music and musicians, and providing a comprehensive overview of the music settings of his texts. The website consists of two main parts: the first concerns the music in the four cities where Bembo spent most of his life (Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, and Padua); the second is a database of music settings of Bembo’s secular poems composed during the sixteenth- and the first half of the seventeenth century.
About
This website is part of the project Pietro Bembo’s soundscape: a musical tour in the early modern Italian peninsula (BEMUS), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025775, and was conducted at the University of Padua from April 2021 to March 2023.
The Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (Venice 1470 – Rome 1547) was a key figure of the Italian, and indeed European, Renaissance. His works are widely known and his rich epistolary attests to both his contacts with all the most important figures of his time and the variety of his interests, ranging from literature to the arts. The project aimed at restoring the missing musical dimension in the scholarly portrait of Pietro Bembo investigating the soundscape in which he was immersed, his involvement in the musical milieu, his musical tastes, and his opinions about music and musicians, and providing a comprehensive overview of the music settings of his texts. The website consists of two main parts: the first concerns the music in the four cities where Bembo spent most of his life (Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, and Padua); the second is a database of music settings of Bembo’s poems composed during the sixteenth- and the first half of the seventeenth century.
Cities
The CITIES section contains information on the four cities where Bembo spent most of his life and had the most significant contacts with music and musicians: Ferrara, Urbino, Rome, and Padua. Information on each city includes the years Bembo spent there, a quick overview of the musical life of the city during those specific years, and details about Bembo’s musical experience. For further reading, see the BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Padua
Ferrara
Rome
Urbino
Bibliography
This bibliography does not pretend to be exhaustive but only aims at contextualizing and deepening the information presented on the website.
Bembo’s life
Luca Marcozzi, “Pietro Bembo nella Roma di Leone X: diplomazia, epistolografia e letteratura alla corte del papa Medici”, in Leone X: Finanza, mecenatismo, cultura. Atti del Convegno Internazionale Roma, 2-4 novembre 2015, ed. Flavia Cantatore (Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2016), 553–63.
Carlo Dionisotti, “Bembo, Pietro”, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 8, 1966 (https://www.treccani.it/biografico/index.html)
Vittorio Cian, Un decennio della vita di M. Pietro Bembo (1521-1531): appunti biografici e saggio di studi sul Bembo: con appendice di documenti inediti (Torino: Loescher, 1885)
Reference editions of Bembo’s works mentioned in the website
Asolani
Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, ed. Giorgio Dilemmi (Firenze: Accademia della Crusca, 1991).
Carminum libellus
Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry. Etna, ed. Mary P. Chatfield, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Lettere
Pietro Bembo, Lettere, ed. Ernesto Travi, Collezione di opere inedite o rare, 4 vols. (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987–1993).
Prose
Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua: L’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino 3210, ed. Claudio Vela, Testi e Studi di Filologia e Letteratura (Bologna: CLUEB, 2001).
Rime
Pietro Bembo, Le rime, ed. Andrea Donnini (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2008).
Stanze
Pietro Bembo, Stanze, ed. Alessandro Gnocchi (Firenze: Società editrice fiorentina, 2003).
Bembo and music
Cristina Cassia, “Pietro Bembo e l’ambiente musicale padovano”, in Musica e cultura nella Padova di Pietro Bembo, ed. Cristina Cassia, Studi e saggi, 57 (Lucca: LIM, 2023), 3–24. link
John Griffiths, “Bembo to Barbetta: Lutes, Lutenists and Luthiers in Cinquecento Padua”, in Musica e cultura nella Padova di Pietro Bembo, ed. Cristina Cassia, Studi e saggi, 57 (Lucca: LIM, 2023), 25–38.
Gabriele Taschetti, “Claudio Monteverdi, Pietro Bembo e il computer. Appunti per un’analisi digitale del Secondo libro de madrigali”, in Musica e cultura nella Padova di Pietro Bembo, ed. Cristina Cassia, Studi e saggi, 57 (Lucca: LIM, 2023), 39–65.
Cristina Cassia, “Séverin Cornet e ‘Quant je pense au martire’: circolazione e ricezione di una canzonetta di Pietro Bembo”, Textus et musica, 5 (2022). link
Cristina Cassia, “Bembo, Palestrina, and an English ‘contrafactum’: A Cross-Cultural Translation of ‘Gioia m’abond’al cor’ and its Issues”, Musica Iagellonica, 13 (2022), 43–67. link
Cristina Cassia, “Pietro Bembo and Music Patronage”, in Music Patronage in Italy, ed. Galliano Ciliberti, Studies on Italian Music History, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 243–66.
Katelijne Schiltz, “Bella guerriera mia (München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms. 1503g) und Pietro Bembos Kriegesdienst der Liebe”, Musik in Bayern, 84 (2019), 78–104. link
Iain Fenlon, “Pietro Bembo’s Musical World”, in Pietro Bembo e le arti, eds. Guido Beltramini, Howard Burns, Davide Gasparotto (Venezia: Marsilio, 2013), 267–80.
Dean T. Mace, “Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal”, The Musical Quarterly, 55/1, (1969), 65–86.
Music in Ferrara
Elizabeth Randell Upton, “Lucrezia Borgia’s Voice”, in Uncovering Music of Early European Women (1250–1750), ed. Claire Fontijn (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 125–142.
Laura Moretti, “Spaces for Musical Performance in the Este Court in Ferrara (c. 1440–1540)”, in The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy: Sound, Space and Object, eds. Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti (British Academy, 2012), 213–36.
David Fallows, Josquin, Epitome Musical (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 235–271.
Lewis Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara 1400-1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Paul Merkley and Lora Merkley, “Aspects of Sacred Music and the Network of Patrons at Court during the Time of Ercole d’Este”, in Cappelle Musicali Fra Corte, Stato e Chiesta Nell’Italia del Rinascimento: Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Camaiore, 21-23 Ottobre 2005), eds. Franco Piperno, Gabriella Biagi Ravenni, e Andrea Chegai, Historiae Musicae Cultores, 108 (Firenze: Olsckhi, 2007), 191–229.
William F. Prizer, “Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia as Patrons of Music: The Frottola at Mantua and Ferrara”, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38/1 (1985), 1–33.
Alessandro Luzio e Rodolfo Renier, “Commedie classiche in Ferrara nel 1499”, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 11 (1888), 177–89.
Music in Rome
Blake Wilson, Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 337–405.
Anthony M. Cummings, The Lion’s Ear: Pope Leo X, the Renaissance Papacy, and Music (The University of Michigan Press, 2012).
Anthony M. Cummings, “Informal Academies and Music in Pope Leo X’s Rome”, Italica, 86/ 4 (2009), 583–601.
Anthony M. Cummings, “Three gigli: Medici Musical Patronage in the Early Cinquecento”, Recercare, 15 (2003), 39–72.
Klaus Pietschmann, Kirchenmusik zwischen Tradition und Reform: Die päpstliche Kapelle und ihr Repertoire unter Papst Paul III. (1534–1549), Capellae apostolicae sixtinaeque collectanea acta monumenta 11 (Città del Vaticano, 2000).
Richard Sherr, Music and Musicians in Renaissance Rome and Other Courts (Ashgate, 1999).
Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Music and Festivities at the Court of Leo X: A Venetian View”, Early Music History 11 (1992), 1–37.
Music in Urbino
Blake Wilson, Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 283–303.
Luciana Miotto, “Leonora Gonzaga della Rovere (1493–1550)”, Studi pesaresi, 4 (2016), 46–69.
Anna Maria Salvadè, “Per un carme del Castiglione latino”, in Imitar gli antichi: appunti sul Castiglione, ed. Anna Maria Salvadè (Milano: Unicopli, 2006), 11–32.
Maria Cecilia Clementi, La cappella musicale del Duomo di Gubbio nel ’500: con il catalogo dei manoscritti coevi, Quaderni di Esercizi: musica e spettacolo (Perugia: Centro di studi musicali in Umbria, 1994).
Music in Padua
Cristina Cassia (ed.), Musica e cultura nella Padova di Pietro Bembo, Studi e saggi, 57 (Lucca: LIM, 2023). link
Elda Martellozzo Forin, “Musica tra le pareti domestiche a Padova nei secoli XV e XVI: dagli ensemble di docenti universitari ai singoli strumenti di studenti e commercianti”, in Music in schools. From the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, ed. Paola Dessì (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 113–42.
Guido Beltramini, “Spaces for Music in Sixteenth-Century Paduan Courts”, in The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy, eds. Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 177–94.
Francesco Liguori, L’arte del liuto: le botteghe dei Tieffenbrucker prestigiosi costruttori di liuti a Padova tra il Cinquecento e il Seicento, Quaderni dell’artigianato padovano (Saonara: Il Prato, 2010).
Laura Moretti, “‘Quivi si essercitaranno le musiche’: La sala della musica presso la ‘corte’ padovana di Alvise Cornaro”, Music in Art, 35/1–2 (2010), 135–44.
Laura Moretti, “The Function and Use of Musical Sources at the Paduan ‘Court’ of Alvise Cornaro in the First Half of the Cinquecento”, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, 1 (2010), 47–61.
Franco Colussi, “Una ‘societas ad sonandum’ costituita a Padova nel 1531”, Rassegna veneta di studi musicali, 5–6 (1990 1989), 361–69.
Elda Martellozzo Forin, “Il maestro di liuto Antonio Rota e studenti dell’Università di Padova suoi allievi”, Atti e memorie della Accademia Patavina di scienze, lettere ed arti, 79 (1966-1967), 425–43.
Repertoires
DIAMM: The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (https://www.diamm.ac.uk/)
RePIM: Repertorio della Poesia Italiana in Musica, 1500-1700, ed. Angelo Pompilio (http://repim.muspe.unibo.it/)
RISM: Répertoire international des Sources Musicales (https://rism.info/)
VOGEL: Emil Vogel, Alfred Einstein, François Lesure, Claudio Sartori, Bibliografia dell musica italiana vocale pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700 (Pomezia: Staderini – Minkoff), 1977.
BACKGROUND
Jacques Arcadelt, Quand’io penso al martire (Il primo libro di madrigali… a quatro, Venezia, 1539)
credits: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4 Mus.pr. 95 (https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00071893?page=60,61)
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0