Patronage of Boys

The ongoing flow of northern adult singers and their clerical patrons doubtless affected the need for choir schools in Rome. Nevertheless, one of the most remarkable aspects of Julius II's concern to create a school for Italian boys is that none of his fifteenth-century predecessors had thought to take the same action, not Eugenius IV when he provided for a series of cathedral schools in Florence (1436), Treviso (1437-38), Padova (1439), and Verona (1440), not Pius II when he established a similar school at Vicenza, not even Sixtus IV when he founded his own chapel at St. Peter's.^[51]

Julius did not lack precedents. He had himself previously founded a school for the teaching of plainchant to boys at Avignon Cathedral. As the first archbishop of the new archdiocese created by Sixtus IV, Cardinal della Rovere revealed to residents of Avignon the same trait as an ecclesiastical patron that he later demonstrated to the world: a concern for building. He renovated both the papal palace at Avignon and the palace of the archbishop, he sponsored repairs at the cathedral and elsewhere in the city, and he completely reorganized the administrative structure of the cathedral.^[52] When he had first visited Avignon in 1476 he founded the Collège du Roure, providing a building and the revenues necessary to support thirty-six students, one rector, and four priests or chaplains. On his second visit in 1481, Giuliano also created a school for the musical training of the youths of Avignon, a maîtrise

[51] Giulio Cattin, "Formazione e attività delle cappelle polifoniche nelle cattedrali: La musica nelle città," 270ff; and Alberto Gallo and Giovanni Mantese, Ricerche sulle origini della cappella musicale del duomo di Vicenza , 31-33. Following Eugenius's example, bishops founded cathedral schools for limited numbers of boys in Bologna, Pistoia, Venice, Catania, and others (see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 , 6-11; and Luigi Pesce, Ludovico Barbo vescovo di Treviso (1437-1443) , 1:120-31, and 2:13-17).

[52] Léon Honoré Labande, Avignon au XVe siécle: Légation Charles de Bourbon et du Cardinal Julien de la Rovère , 335-39.

for six boys and one instructor of chant. One stipulation he placed on them was a daily Mass sung by the boys.^[53] These previously unnoticed precedents for the educational mission of the Cappella Giulia come from the early years of Julius's career. While the maîtrise followed Sixtus IV's establishment of a music chapel at St. Peter's by one year, it is independently conceived: Sixtus made no provisions for a school, and Giuliano clearly was not at a place or stage in his career to be concerned with providing himself with a burial chapel.

The oldest Roman predecessor of the Cappella Giulia was the medieval schola cantorum, which dated at least from the papacy of St. Gregory (590-604).^[54] An institution with a different organization and a greater international prominence than the Cappella Giulia, the schola had several functions and two residences, one at San Gregorio in Cortina near St. Peter's, and its principal one at San Stefano near St. John Lateran. Both as performers and educators, the members of the schola were an elite group of musicians, perhaps the earliest polyphonic ensemble outside of Byzantium. And in the face of Julius's intent to educate Roman youths to lessen the dependence on northerners, it is ironic that by the twelfth century northern clerics regularly came to the schola cantorum for a musical education.^[55] In this century and the next the schola was one of the most durable agencies of the papacy in Rome. While the papal court camped for several years at a time in cities from Viterbo to Lyon—it lived away from Rome more often than not—the papal choir school remained behind.

Thus when Clement V presided over the first years of papal residence in Avignon, the schola cantorum survived independently, as it was accustomed to doing. How quickly its standards slipped and when it ceased functioning are not known. However, by the time Pope Urban V reassigned the financial assets of the schola in 1370, it had undoubtedly disintegrated along with the rest of the city from too many

[53] Ibid., 334-35; and E. A. Granget, Histoire du diocèse d'Avignon et des anciens dioceses dont il est formé , 13-14.

[54] Many have discussed this early chapel. See among others Starr, "Music and Music Patronage," 63-67; S. J. Van Dijk, "The Urban and Papal Rites in Seventh-and Eighth-Century Rome"; Helmut Hucke, "Zu einigen Problemen der Choralforschung," 399-408; Casimiri, "L'antica 'schola cantorum' romana e la sua fine nel 1370"; Haberl, "Die römische 'schola cantorum.'" On the early centuries of the schola, see Josef Smits van Waesberghe, "Neues über die Schola Cantorum zu Rom."

[55] Casimiri, "L'antica 'schola cantorum,'" 192.

decades of papal neglect.^[56] Its continued existence became irrelevant to the French popes and cardinals in Avignon who came to depend on musical clerics educated in Flanders and northern France. These clerics relied in turn on the system of patronage with benefices that reached new heights of accessibility early in the Babylonian captivity, under popes Clement V (1305-14) and John XXII (1316-34).^[57] During the Great Schism the Roman popes were unable to rebuild St. John Lateran, let alone the schola. And the return of the papacy to Rome in the fifteenth century did nothing to diminish the advantages of the system developed in Avignon.

If the preference shown to northern adults in the papal choir helped make the expense of a new Roman schola cantorum unnecessary, it is probably also true that a choir school at St. Peter's was not founded much earlier because the availability of northern boys in Rome during the 1400s and early 1500s was adequate to meet the needs of the pope, of Roman cardinals, and their churches. The superiority of northern training is indicated both by the popularity of northern boys in Italian choirs throughout the Renaissance and indirectly by the number of Italian choir schools headed by French or Flemish teachers. Northern boys are documented in Rome already in the 1420s. The choir of Martin V had as many as six of them affiliated with it by 1425 or 1426, all apparently under the care of Nicholas Grenon, Du Fay's friend from Cambrai. One of these boys, the composer Bartholomeus Poignare, joined the papal choir himself in 1427. Grenon was doubtless one of the first northerners to arrive in Italy accompanied by boys, but he was assuredly not the last. Jean de la Fage did so when he came to Rome in 1516, and the French cardinal Jean du Bellay brought two with him to Rome in 1548.^[58]

At St. Peter's, reports of boys are infrequent in the fifteenth century (Table 14). In this case there is no way of knowing whether the lack of archival references accurately reflects an absence of boys or simply

[56] Casimiri prints the bull in its entirety in ibid., 197-99.

[57] Reynolds, "Musical Careers, Ecclesiastical Benefices," 75-76; Andrew Tomasello, "Musical Culture at Papal Avignon," 405-82; E. Delaruelle, E.-R. Labande, and Paul Ourliac, L'église au temps du grande schisme et de la crise conciliaire (1378-1449) , 1:306 and 2:1,138.

[58] See, respectively, Lewis Lockwood, "Jean Mouton and Jean Michel: New Evidence on French Music and Musicians in Italy, 1505-1520," 222, and Dickinson, Du Bellay in Rome , 90.

means that boys would not have been paid and that their adult guardians were normally paid without any mention of this responsibility. Early in the papacy of Nicholas V, the singer Rubino twice collected extra wages to cover the expenses of two boys (docs. 1447a and c). The next reference is not until August 1485, when the choir lost six singers in three months, suffering with all of Rome from a particularly virulent plague. Under these extreme circumstances, Johannes Purro Parvo appeared for two weeks, when he was paid for singing "with the voices of the boys" [cum voce pueribus ]. Whether he brought the boys with him or they were present all along is not stated.^[59]

In addition to the presence of boys in the care of adult singers, there was at least one more stable source of trained youths in Rome. Cardinal d'Estouteville provided for the instruction of boys at Santa Maria Maggiore, where he served as archpriest from 1443 to 1483. According to the contemporaneous report by. Gaspar of Verona, d'Estouteville had also rewarded musicians at Santa Maria Maggiore "with very high salaries" and benefices to teach music and grammar.^[60] One of these has been identified as Johannes Tondrif, a Flemish musician, Carmelite friar, and "expert in the musical arts" [in arte musice peritus ]. Cardinal d'Estouteville hired him in 1472 to direct the choir and instruct the boys.^[61] As protector general of the Augustinian Order from 1446,

[59] Censualia 12, int. 7, fol. 75v. Rome was hardly the only goal for northern boys. At Ferrara a choir of garzoni tedeschi sang for Ercole d'Este in the 1470s. It numbered as many as fourteen in 1473 and included boys from Bruges, Flanders, and Trent (Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara , 157-58 and 318). Flemish boys remained desirable right up to the religious wars at the end of the next century. The mathematician and theorist Jean Taisnier was sent from Rome to Flanders in 1550 by his patron, Cardinal Francesco de Mendosa, to recruit a whole choir for Palermo Cathedral: ten singers and two boys. In Madrid, Philippe II asked the Tournai Cathedral and collegiate churches in Bruges, Douai, Soignies, and Leuven to send him sopranos (1559); and then every few years, presumably as their voices changed, he requested new groups of boys from Flanders, in 1564, 1573, and 1577 (Edmond Vander Straeten, La musique au Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle: Documents inédits et annotés , 3: 230-31 and 312-17).

[60] The passage occurs in Gaspar's biography of Paul II. See Gaspar Veronensis, De gestis tempore pontificis Maximae Pauli Secundi liber secundus , 1,031: "Quid dicam de praeceptoribus Grammaticae & Musicae, quos & salariis optimis & dignitatibus insigniri eo loco procuravit." Regarding his dates as cardinal archpriest, see Morom, Dizionario , 12:130.

[61] Roth prints the text of a supplication on his behalf, in "Primus in Petri aedem Sixtus perpetuae harmoniae cantores introduxit : Alcune osservazioni sul patronato musicale di Sisto IV," 238, n. 62.

d'Estouteville also had responsibility for San Agostino during the last years of his life. In addition to completely rebuilding the church from 1479, he probably also provided for the musical needs of the church. A reference to Baptista de Papia, magister puerorum , in 1482 indicates that his "other" Roman church also had a choir of boys.^[62]

Italian boys evidently first began to sing at St. Peter's around the turn of the century, anticipating not only the practices of the Cappella Giulia by more than a decade but also the papacy of Julius II. During the final years of Alexander VI, the Italian organist Aloviso de Spiritu regularly played with individual singers, apparently Italian boys in his familia. Vincentio adolescenti (1497-98), Gabriele de Gabrielis (1499-1501), and Minico puero (1502-3) sang with the organ. To judge from the rapidity of their turnover, they performed with Aloviso until their voices changed. Minico, the last of these boys, overlapped with Alexo puero de Primis and Paulo de Primis, who sang in 1502-3. Both doubtless related to the papal singer Philippo de Primis de Fano, they were paid as actual members of the choir, and thus presumably performed with the choir and not with Aloviso or Minico puero. According to the phraseology of the account books, Vincentio and Minico sang "in organo," Gabrielo "cum organis," a designation that probably signifies a simple, nonpolyphonic style of music such as the lauda . It is likely related to performances in Florentine churches of the time at which a boy sang with organ "in sul' organo." In Florence this phrase was used interchangeably with "cantare le laude," a type of performance that always involved boys singing with organ from the first citation of it at the Annunziata in 1488 through the next century. There a contrast of singing "in sul' organo" with singing "figural music" underscores the monophonic (or soloistic?) nature of the performance. But "in organo" at St. Peter's and "in sul' organo" in Florence also seem to indicate something of the physical arrangement of the performance, that the boys sang with the organist in the loft above the altar.^[63]

[62] ASR, Congregazioni religiose, busta 107, San Agostino, exitus 1474-96, fol. 16V (April 1482).

[63] Frank D'Accone, "The Musical Chapels at the Florentine Cathedral and Baptistry during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century," 12. Thanks to David Nutter for his suggestion that the phrase "in sul' organo" might have implications for the physical setting of the performance. See also Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges , 53, for a reference to "in organis decantabuntur" already in 1425, which he interprets as "sung in discant with organ."

In the few records from the papacy of Julius II—from 1506 and 1507—the St. Peter's choir anticipated the founding of the Cappella Giulia in two important respects: Italian boys in the choir and, to teach them, a pair of choirmasters. Pay records identify Nicholas de Furnis as magister in 1506, just as he started to collect supplementary wages for the care of two boys. The records never identify the boys by name, but the first two may have been Hieronymus Florentinus and Julio Romano, because both their names and the 4 ducats they were paid disappear from the account books just as Nicholas de Furnis started to receive 4 ducats each month for two unnamed boys.^[64] Along with Nicholas de Furnis the basilica also designated Bernardino di Modena (Mutinensis) as magister. Although their duties are nowhere stated, the pairing of a northerner and an Italian suggests a division of labor that would recur in the Cappella Giulia forty years later, when François Roussel taught music and Verzelino taught grammar. Thus the essentials of the Cappella Giulia were in place even before April 1506, the month that Julius laid the first stone of the new St. Peter's.

In its choice of northerners (Rubino, Nicholas de Furnis, François Roussel) to teach Italian boys polyphony, St. Peter's was very traditional. The number of Italian ecclesiastical and court music chapels headed by foreign musicians up until the Counter-Reformation was substantial, rivaling in our own century the legions of foreign conductors leading American orchestras. Willaert and Tinctoris are hardly the only northern teachers "who can be adduced as links between north and south" in support of the primacy of northern contrapuntal skills.^[65] From the mid-1400s until the 1550s and beyond, French and Flemish instructors were much in demand. As a boy in the 1530s, Palestrina studied with Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel; Pietro Gaetano, a

[64] There is a possibility that this boy singer is the artist Giulio "Pippi" Romano born in Rome in 1499. Yet among accounts of Giulio later in life, there are none that describe him as musical, as exist for Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo, and others; and the first known reference to Giulio Pippi by the name "Romano" is not until 1526, by which time he had been in Mantua for four years (Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano , 1:80; regarding his birth year, see 1:3-4, n. 1).

[65] Claude Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought , 10.

singer and theorist at St. Mark's in Venice later in the century, acknowledged Lhéritier as his praeceptor . Northern instructors were more often than not undistinguished composers, if indeed they composed at all. Men like Desiderius Babel at San Luigi dei Francesi (1515-19) and Adrien Valent at Santa Maria Maggiore (?1553-61) are much more representative than the towering figures of Willaert and Tinctoris. In Rome the influence and presence of these northern teachers persisted until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it nearly—but not entirely—disappeared within the space of twenty-five years.

Elsewhere, generations of boys in the musical heartland of Italy, the Veneto, learned about music from northern masters. In Venice the identifiably northern chapel masters include Willaert's immediate predecessors at St. Mark's, Albertus Francigena (1485-91) and the Fleming Petrus De Fossis, entrenched from 1491 to 1527. At Treviso Raynaldus Odenoch and then Petrus Bordonus de Flandra were preceded and followed by the Flemish singer and printer Gerardus de Lisa (1463-76 and 1488-96); during his second tenure the choir was composed entirely of Italians, and his duties included teaching the zaghi [ragazzi] del domo canto figurà . Similar figures taught at Padua (including Johannes Marescalli in 1492 after he had sung at St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel), Vicenza, Loreto, and Rieti (the magister Rainaldus at the cathedral in 1472 is perhaps the Rainaldus de Meis at St. Peter's immediately after).^[66] While this list could continue, it is enough to document the sustained popularity northern teachers enjoyed long after Italian teachers were available.

It is therefore striking that well into the sixteenth century, after the foundation of the Cappella Giulia and other Italian choir schools, and

[66] Even when Italian musical styles became dominant and northern singers more and more unusual, Lenard Meldert served as chapel master for the cardinal of Urbino at least from 1578, Claudio francese taught in the Umbrian town of Spello (1591), and Renaude de Melle followed Cardinal Gabriele Paleotto to Magliano in Sabina (1591). For a list of chapel masters in sixteenth-century Rome, there is Christopher Reynolds, "Rome: A City of Rich Contrast," 69-71; for Rieti, A. Sacchetti-Sassetti, "La cappella musicale del duomo di Rieti," 157; for Treviso, Giovanni d'Alessi, "Maestri e cantori fiamminghi nella Cappella Musicale del duomo di Treviso (Italia), 1411-1561," 155; for Loreto, Floriano Grimaldi, ed., La cappella musicale di Loreto nel Cinquecento , 13 and 19; for Spello, L. Fausti, "La cappella musicale della Collegiata di S. Maria di Spello"; on Rainaldus de Meis, see p. 117 n. 11; and on the two cardinals, Vander Straeten, La musique , 6:489-91.

despite decades of hiring northern choirmasters, there is ample evidence that popes, cardinals, and many secular leaders from Sicily to Milan still preferred to seek out northern boys. Given the common presence of northern teachers in Italy, the methods of an education in the north cannot have been so different from those available to many Italian boys. So why did French and Flemish youths still come to Rome with other singers, with the families of cardinals, and also as gifts, as when Louis XII sent three to Leo X when he became pope in 1513? And why after the Sack of Rome in 1527 did Pope Clement VII recruit a new trio of French rather than Italian boys?^[67]

There remains a crucial difference between the training a child would receive in any Flemish cathedral school and that available in the Cappella Giulia. The advantage of a northern education is not that there were more schools or better instructors in the north: French, Flemish, and German boys had significantly more opportunities to practice and perform simply by virtue of the greater number of services requiting polyphony north of the Alps. Tinctoris touches on this point at the end of the Liber de arte contrapuncti :

For, as Cicero says in his Ad Herennium , in every discipline the teaching of art is weak without the highest constant effort of practice, since it is constant effort alone and unique which, after a certain general knowledge of pitches, notes, quantities and concords, and having relied upon the arithmetical rather than the musical training of Boetius, has made numerous singers and those men particularly whom I have mentioned above as most outstanding and most celebrated composers. Nor must it be thought that the former or the latter have completely devoted themselves to a constant effort in this kind of composition or in singing super librum from advanced age, like Socrates studying the lyre, but rather from childhood.^[68]

While the "certain general knowledge" of musical grammar may have differed little between north and south, the same cannot be said about the opportunities for "constant effort of practice" in reading and improvising polyphony. The daily rounds of services in northern

[67] Two of these boys were supplied by the archbishop of Sens (Anne-Marie Bragard, "Détails nouveaux sur les musiclens de la cour du Pape C1ément VII," 12-18).

[68] Johannes Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint , 140.

churches gave Flemish and French boys a life-long advantage by providing them with regular chances to apply in practice the rules they had learned in study. For the sake of comparison, the charter of the boys' choir established in 1485 at Florence Cathedral required them to sing every Saturday morning and on "every solemn occasion, day of indulgence, and holy day," a stipulation that D'Accone has shown generally added only nine more services per year; and within a matter of months, these nine services were sung by adults.^[69]

Even as late as 1517-18, the astonishment of one Italian visitor to France and Flanders indicates how drastically the regimen of services in the north differed from what he was accustomed to in Italy. In Flanders every parish church had two Masses sung each day as well as a Salve "sung each evening," all assisted by "a great number of servers of from ten to twelve years old"; while in France they "often have fine churches, where divine worship is well performed; and there is not a cathedral or main church anywhere which does not have polyphony [musica figurata ] and more than one sung mass daily, led by six to eight choirboys who are learning to sing and who serve, tonsured like little monks, in the choir, receiving free food and clothing in return."^[70] This reaction is all the more pertinent since it comes from the familiar of a curial cardinal. It is therefore the opinion of an ecclesiastic intimately acquainted with the everyday practices of Roman churches during the papacy of Leo X, by all accounts one of the golden eras of sacred music in Rome, an era that encompassed the first years of the Cappella Giulia.

Italian singers in the fifteenth century were twice disadvantaged as children: there were fewer schools for them than in the north and

[69] D'Accone, "The Musical Chapels at the Florentine Cathedral," 6. There was no shortage of endowed Masses in Italian churches; but compared to the north, few specified polyphony. On the practices of endowed Masses in Florence and the problems that the clergy had in coping with votive and anniversary Masses, see Robert Gaston, "Liturgy and Patronage in San Lorenzo, Florence, 1350-1650," 111-34.

[70] Hale, The Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis , 105 and 166. I have slightly altered the second translation. The original Italian text is in Ludwig Pastor, Die Reise des Kardinals Luigi d'Aragona ... beschreiben von Antonio de Beatis , 165; see also Don Antonio de Beatis, Voyage du Cardinal d'Aragon en Allemagne, Hollande, Belgique, France et Italie (1517-1518) , esp. 32-33 and 259.

fewer opportunities for them to develop in performance. By the time they matured and began competing with northerners for jobs in the major courts and churches, these handicaps were compounded by the poorer treasuries of Italian churches and by their inability to profit from one of the most lucrative forms of ecclesiastical patronage: northern benefices granted by the pope.