Urbino

urbino

Pietro Bembo moved to the duchy of Urbino in the summer of 1506. He first resided in the abbey of Santa Croce in Fonte di Avellana and then was hosted at the court by Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and his wife Elisabetta Gonzaga. After Guidobaldo’s death (April 1508), the duchy passed into the hands of Francesco Maria I Della Rovere. Bembo left Urbino for Rome at the beginning of 1512.

Bembo and music

During the years spent in Urbino, Bembo composed, among other works, the Stanze (1507) and by the beginning of 1512, he finished the first two books of his Prose della volgar lingua. A passage of the Stanze, which Bembo and his friend Ottaviano Fregoso, both dressed as ambassadors of Love, recited in front of the Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga and her friend Emilia Pio, probably alludes to Elisabetta’s singing. An apparent reference to the music of the time is instead found in the first book of the Prose; Bembo, in fact, mentions the giustiniane, originally composed and sung by the fifteenth-century improviser and singer Leonardo Giustiniani, complaining that, both in the past and in the present, they were more appreciated for the music than for the quality of their lyrics. The term “giustiniana” appears in the title of Ottaviano Petrucci’s Frottole libro sesto, printed in 1506, which contains four pieces of this kind. We may wonder whether Bembo had the opportunity to hear performances of that kind of pieces when he lived in Urbino.
In 1510 Bembo brought to Eleonora Gonzaga a viola that the lute maker Lorenzo da Pavia had made for her, as mentioned in a letter that Lorenzo wrote to Eleonora’s mother, Isabella d’Este.
As for Bembo’s acquaintances in Urbino, he was familiar with Castiglione, who portrayed him as a character in both his Tirsi and Il cortegiano; he likely met most of the musicians mentioned in Castiglione’s works and was familiar with the situations described there. Surely Bembo knew Jacopo da San Secondo, whom he had heard playing in Ferrara, and Terpandro, whom he mentioned in a few letters written in Urbino between 1506 and 1507. Moreover, the first meeting with Marco Antonio Cavazzoni seems to go back to those years. The two men would meet again in Rome, and later Cavazzoni would enter Bembo’s service in Padua.

Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, Recercare primo (Recerchari motetti canzoni libro primo, Venezia 1523)

Augusta Campagne

Franciscus Bossinensis, Non è tempo d’aspettare (Tenori e contrabbassi intabulati col sopran in canto figurato per cantare sonar col lauto… libro primo, Venezia 1509)

Roberta Invernizzi, Accademia strumentale italiana, Alberto Rasi