Synopses & Reviews
During the years between the restoration of the Medici to Florence and the election of Cosimo I, the Medici family sponsored a series of splendid public festivals, reconstructed here by Anthony M. Cummings. Cummings has utilized unexpectedly rich sources of information about the musical life of the time in contemporary narrative accounts of these occasions--histories, diaries, and family memoirs. In this interdisciplinary work, he explains how the festivals combined music with art and literature to convey political meanings to Florentine observers. As analyzed by Cummings, the festivals document the political transformation of the city in the crucial era that witnessed the end of the Florentine republic and the beginnings of the Medici principate. This book will interest all students of the life and institutions of sixteenth-century Florence and of the Medici family. In addition, the author furnishes new evidence about the contexts for musical performances in early modern Europe. By describing such contexts, he ascertains much about how music was performed and how it sounded in this period of music history and shows that the modes of musical expression were more varied than is suggested by the relatively few surviving examples of actual pieces of music.
Originally published in 1992.
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Table of Contents
| Illustrations | |
| Preface and Acknowledgments | |
| Partial Genealogy of the Medici Family | |
| To the Reader | |
| Introduction: Some Aspects of Methodology | 3 |
Pt. I | The First Years of the Medici Restoration: The Union of Florence and Rome | |
Ch. 1 | The Restoration | 11 |
Ch. 2 | The 1513 Carnival | 15 |
Ch. 3 | The Election of Leo X | 42 |
Ch. 4 | Giuliano de Medici's Capitoline Investiture | 53 |
Ch. 5 | Leo X's 1515 Florentine Entrata | 67 |
Pt. II | Toward the Principato: Lorenzo De Medici, 1513-1519 | |
Ch. 6 | Archbishop Giulio's Possesso | 85 |
Ch. 7 | The 1514 Feast of San Giovanni | 87 |
Ch. 8 | Lorenzo de Medici, Captain General of the Florentine Militia and Duke of Urbino | 93 |
Ch. 9 | The Wedding of Lorenzo and Madeleine | 99 |
Pt. III | Alessandro De Medici and the Establishment of the Principato | |
Ch. 10 | The First Years of Clement's Pontificate | 117 |
Ch. 11 | The Coronation of Charles V | 128 |
Ch. 12 | Alessandro, Duke of the Florentine Republic | 140 |
Ch. 13 | The Wedding of Alessandro and Margaret | 151 |
| Conclusion: Toward a Typology of Florentine Festival Music of the Early Cinquecento | 163 |
| Notes | 173 |
| Index | 251 |