The University of Milan - The Marco Fodella Foundation

1497-1997

The Francesco da Milano International Symposium
on the five hundredth anniversaryof his birth

23 - 24 October, 1997
Milan, Italy

organized jointly by
Universita' degli Studi of Milan
Marco Fodella Foundation
Municipality of Milan

Contents

Comments about the symposium:
 Christopher Wilson
Lucas Harris
Mariagrazia Carlone

Program of the symposium

Review of the Symposium concert (in Italian)

Christopher Wilson:

    Any excuse to visit the delights of Milan is always something to look forward to. The International Symposium to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Francesco Canova da Milano organized by the Università di Milano, the Fondazione Marco Fodella and the Comune di Milano proved an irresistible opportunity to meet with fellow enthusiasts of the music of  'Il divino Francesco'.

    The symposium took place over two days, the 23rd and 24th of October in the splendid surroundings of what was the old hospital of Milan that houses the Aula Magna of the University. The first morning began with two papers on iconography of the early sixteenth century that in many ways complemented and elucidated each other. Mariagrazia Carlone opened with a discussion of two paintings that have come to be thought of as possible portraits of Francesco. The anonymous portrait of a bearded musician from the Ambrosiana Library holding a recorder and an open book of music in front of him, with the inscription 'Franc.o del liuto' was discussed first. The similarity to the woodcut at the beginning of the 1536 Marcolini print, showing a lutenist with a beard and a hat were pointed out. However, Francesco Canova da Milano was not the only lutenist with 'Francesco' as his Christian name. Francesco Vindella was another lutenist from the same period that would also be a contender, but Mariagrazia Carlone argued that this was unlikely. She then moved on to discuss the portrait of a lutenist in the museum in Como by Giulio Campi. Once again there are some superficial similarities to the Marcolini lutenist and to the anonymous Ambrosiana portrait. The concluding part of the talk discussed the common practice of using designs and poses from other paintings and artists as well as the widespread use of more or less exact copies of popular paintings, thereby making the iconographers task in these cases more complex. This theme, of copies, was taken up by H. Colin Slim in his discussion of the lady lutenist paintings of Bartolomeo Veneto. The painting is probably best known to lutenists now as the illustration used on the paperback edition of the Dowland lute music. Colin Slim explained that he had fount 26 versions of this painting, a surprising number that was raised to 27 when one of the auditors pointed out that there was yet another one hidden away in a church in Milan. The paintings interestingly have always been associated with Milan and many versions have an easily traceable provenance to the city or are still found there in museums and private collections. At some stage the lady lutenist began to be described as either St. Cecilia or as St. Catherine and acquired a halo. This however, was certainly not originally intended, St. Cecilia is always portrayed with the organ and St. Catherine with the olive branch and the wheel. This means that to obtain the real identity of the sitter the clues must lie in the fact that she's playing the lute and in front of her lies an open book of music. Unusually, the piece is a complete 3-part composition for cantus, tenor and bassus. Colin Slim had transcribed all these versions and they ranged from near nonsense, through corrupt versions to a near perfect version, strangely in a painting that is otherwise not at all to be recommended. None of the surviving versions of this portrait are signed by Bartolomeo, whereas he signed and dated many other portraits, so we must conclude that the original is not among the many extant versions and that the original is lost.

    The afternoon session began with Franco Pavan reviewing the new biographical discoveries that his researches into Francesco have revealed. He has found that Francesco was born on 18th August 1497, that it seems unlikely that Giovanni Antonio Testagrossa taught him, since their paths do not seem to have crossed. It is also unlikely that he was ever an organist at the Duomo in Milan, but he did marry a wealthy Milanese aristocrat. Also, amongst a number of interesting tidbits of information about other lutenists, we were told about Giovanni Maria Alemanni, author of Petrucci's lost third book of lute music and the dubious reputation of Pietro Paulo Borrono - he was a secret agent and spy whose lute playing activities acted as a cover. Giovanni Maria Alemanni seems to have been one of the last exponents of the plectrum style of playing and on one occasion in 1521 performed with a quartet of lutes all using plectra. Perhaps the most exotic new finding concerning Francesco is some information that talks about a North African lutenist working in the Papal Court at the same time as Francesco. In a letter of 1524 a concert is detailed where Francesco is described as using silver thimbles with quills attached that enabled him to play very clearly and quickly. Franco Pavan thinks that this technique may have been inspired by the African lutenist, who presumably used a quill plectrum.

    Following this Arthur J. Ness, the editor of the complete works of Francesco Canova da Milano, gave us a resume of recently discovered sources and in particular the four new Francesco pieces that have been found, three solo fantasias or fugas and one duet. He explained that the main problem for editors and players, since there are no autograph versions of Francesco's works, was to find sources that were nearest to the original. Francesco's music was first published in 1536 by Marcolini, Casteliono and Sultzbach, but he pointed out that the undated publication, 'Intabolatura da leuto del divino Francisco da Milano novamente stanpata', may well precede these. Since many of the pieces appear in the other 1536 publications, in the case of the Marcolini the recercars are the same ones and in an identical order, in the Sultzbach Neapolitan tablature volume they also seem to have originated from some pre-existing source. The one concordance that may shed some light on a possible date for the undated tablature is the appearance of a Francesco piece in an earlier Gerle book. Could the undated edition predate all of these publications? Arthur Ness stressed that these early prints were unfortunately prone to repeated errors and suggested the Siena Lute Book and the publication of Francesco's favored pupil, Perino Fiorentino in 1546 as all being particularly reliable.

    The early evening session began with Philippe Canguilhelm's discussion of Francesco's influence on Vincenzo Galilei and his importance in Florence. There are some fantasias in Galilei's first book of tablature of 1563 that are unique - numbers 68 to 73 inclusive in the Ness edition. Philippe Canguilhelm showed that these pieces were indeed by Francesco even though they may have undergone the odd retouching by Galilei. However, Galilei takes trouble to tell his reader's what a wonderful player Francesco was and that they should follow his example when making their own intabulations. Galilei seems to have taken some care in sourcing reliable versions for the pieces he included in his publication, but it was becoming clear from many of the papers that accurate sources even in the 16th century, for Francesco's music, were extremely rare.

    The day’s papers concluded with a somewhat controversial talk given by Victor Coelho in which he exhorted his fellow scholars and players to reassess the works of Francesco as they survive with a new methodology. He drew an analogy with the way the portraits of Leonardo da Vinci have come down to us. Compared to his own drawn self-portrait as an old man, with flowing hair and beard and philosophical expression, the paintings and woodcuts that were produced, particularly after his death, were more stylized representations based on a memory rather than true portraits. He tried to show how this could be analogous to the dissemination of Francesco's pieces, as he felt many versions were lacking in the true hand of the master - they were copies of copies. Using this new methodology he proposed that since it only survives in very late sources from the 1590's, the piece know as 'La Compagna', recercar No. 34 in the Ness edition, may in fact not be by him but merely a parody by a later lutenist in his style. This suggestion was not widely accepted, but the day had ended with a stimulating talk.

    The evening concluded with a recital by Paul Beier in the Basilica dei SS. Apostoli e Nazaro Maggiore adjacent to the university where Francesco was a canon. The concert was free and attracted a huge audience of over 500. Paul Beier played a programme that came entirely from the undated edition of Francesco's music that is perhaps the earliest source for his music. It gave the performance a marvelous unity, it felt as though this must have been Francesco's repertoire from the late 1520's, clearly influenced in part from his knowledge of the French chansons of Sermisy, Compere and Mouton that he had intabulated. Another plus was hearing the new 6-course lute that Klaus Jacobsen had made for the concert, entirely strung in gut and behaving itself by staying perfectly in tune.

    The following morning had three talks instead of the planned four because Jean-Michel Vaccaro was unable to attend the symposium. William Prizer began with a discussion of secular music in Milan at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He has found in the library in Florence a manuscript that was compiled in Milan during the second decade of the century that may well have been for Galeazzo Sforza. The repertoire, as one may have expected for that period, was of frottole, mostly songs of longing, love and love lost. This was the music of young courtiers who lived a life not so dissimilar to the youth of today. Social life was everything, they went out riding together, had wonderful dinners together, stayed up to all hours of the night, made music together and made love - the impression was that little has changed in the last five centuries.

    Dinko Fabris had some intriguing new possibilities concerning Francesco's early years. He had uncovered in church records in Barletta, near Bari on the southeast coast of Italy, that a young cleric was working there for five years from 1512. He signed himself Francisco da Milano, the same spelling that is used for Francesco on the title cage of the anonymous publication 'Novamente stanpata', that had already caused so much interest at this symposium. The archbishop of the area came from Pavia but spent much of his time in Rome, only visiting Barletta twice a year. Dinko Fabris suggested that he may have brought Francesco with him from Pavia and that he traveled with his retinue. So he may have had connections with Testagrossa and it may well have been through his association with the archbishop that he obtained his position at the Vatican. Perhaps more conjectural was his suggestion that the dancer described by Castiglione in 'The Courtier' called 'Il Barletto' may well have been Francesco - could he have been a wonderful dancer as well as lutenist?

    The final paper was given by Henri Vanhulst, the Belgian specialist in the publications of Pierre Phalese. Once again it was the younger generations of the period that were to figure prominently in his talk. As we know, Phalese published an enormous quantity of all kinds of music in the middle years of the century in Louvain, near Brussels. This was, and still is, an old university town, and it seems that the young students had an insatiable appetite for his lute books. They contained quantities of all genres of lute music under the same cover, their popularity certainly goes some way to explaining the repetition of pieces in subsequent editions. The Francesco works that appear there seem to have been well sourced and corrected, but they may well be taken from a concordance well known to us - he certainly used Castelione.

    This talk concluded the proceedings and great thanks must go to Franco Pavan who's idea it was to hold the symposium to celebrate the anniversary and to Gianni Fodella of the Fondazione Marco Fodella who tirelessly publicized and coordinated the event.

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Lucas Harris:

    The five-hundredth birthday of Francesco da Milano was celebrated in style at an international symposium entitled "II divino Francesco nell'ltalia rinascimentale," organized by the Marco Fodella Foundation and sponsored by the Municipality of Milan and the University of Milan. Nine scholars from Italy, the United States, Canada, Belgium, and France gave papers on various topics surrounding Francesco's life and works. The symposium was held over October 23-24 at the University of Milan, and was attended by a dedicated audience of music scholars, lute enthusiasts, and other friends of early music. Among other lute celebrities present was Christopher Wilson, whose disc of early sixteenth-century solo music was reissued in a special edition in honor of Francesco's birthday by the magazine Orfeo, a copy of which was given to each of the symposium's presenters.

    The centerpiece of the symposium was a concert of ricercars, fantasias, and vocal intabulations by Francesco, masterfully performed by lutenist Paul Beier. The concert was held at the Basilica dei SS. Apostoli e Nazaro Maggiore, where Francesco himself was a Canon. Paul played with impressive style and grace upon a brand new lute constructed by Klaus Jacobsen especially for this concert. Despite a huge audience, Paul and this lute had no problems filling the enormous basilica with Francesco's music all the way to the back row. Paul's approach to the programming was unique: instead of the typical mixture of popular pieces from widely diverse historical sources easily put together by means of the Ness edition, all the pieces were taken from a single historical source, the Intavolatura di Liuto del Divino Francesco da Milano, probably the first publication dedicated to Francesco's music.

    The papers of the symposium included a nice mixture of subjects, which dealt directly with Francesco's life and works, and others which focused on more contextual aspects of the period:

   Mariagrazia Carlone shared a portion of her research for an ongoing dissertation on musical iconography in the sixteenth-century. She displayed slides of and discussed the existing portraits believed to be of Francesco, making interesting hypotheses about his possible identification in other paintings, some based on symbols such as his forked beard and beret! Some of us were able to see one of the above portraits in person at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (which was reopened by coincidence the very week of the symposium after remaining closed to the public for many years). Harry Colin Slim compared various copies of Bartolommeo Veneto's 'Lady Lutenist,' handing out a transcription of the short piece of music featured in eleven copies of this painting (now scattered across Europe and America) in order to discern which of them was the original.

    Franco Pavan gave an update on the status of Francesco's biographical knowledge, correcting many important points from his dissertation research. Arthur Ness discussed his preparation of the second edition of Francesco's complete works, including a detailed discussion of the many additional sources which have surfaced since the appearance of the first edition.

    Philippe Canguilhem spoke about Francesco as seen by Vincenzo Galilei and the 'Florentine' reception of his figure. Victor Coelho spoke about Francesco's reputation after his death, and with clever spreadsheets of the sources of his music showed patterns in the republication and posthumous circulation of his works. Among other things, he discussed a Francesco 'revival' in the 1560s as well as a 'refashioning' of his image by means of which kinds of works were attributed to him and most widely circulated.

    William F. Prizer discussed the contents of a manuscript of secular vocal music from Milan in the early sixteenth-century, providing valuable evidence of what kind of music was being performed in Milan during Francesco's youth. Dinko Fabris spoke about Francesco's influence in the region of Naples, even hypothesizing that Francesco may have traveled there.

    Finally, Henri Vanhulst gave a witty presentation about Francesco's music published by Pierre Phalese in Louvain. Jean-Michel Vaccaro was unfortunately unable to be present to give his presentation on Francesco's music in French sources and his influence on transalpine lutenists.

    All the participants agreed that the symposium was a very special occasion for lute music scholars and enthusiasts to come together, as well as a glorious way to celebrate Francesco's memory. We were especially thankful to Gianni and Wanda Fodella for the unimaginable amount of organizational work they did to make the symposium possible.

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Mariagrazia Carlone:

Why a symposium dedicated to Francesco da Milano?

    The best answer to this question was perhaps provided by the huge audience of about five hundred people at the concert of Francesco's music performed by lutenist Paul Beier. This concert, the last in a series dedicated to the lute also organized by the Marco Fodella Foundation, was held at the Basilica dei SS. Apostoli e San Nazaro Maggiore, where Francesco was a canon, on the evening of the 23rd of October. It was at the center of the Symposium and was a logical and indispensable component of it: musicology has meaning when it allows us to discover and, above all, experience the music of the past. All the pieces in the concert program were taken from the Intavolatura di Liuto del Divino Francesco da Milano, probably the first publication dedicated to Francesco's music (it precedes those of Marcolini, Casteliono and Sultzbachius) and included works that, although rarely executed in modern times, must have been particularly loved by Francesco's contemporaries. Mr. Beier, at ease with this difficult repertoire, played with great style and inspiration. The sound of his lute (especially build for this concert by Klaus Jacobsen), entirely strung in gut, resounded clearly throughout the large Basilica. The public, unusually numerous for a solo lute recital and surprisingly various, was enthusiastic about a repertory which revealed itself to be both up-to-date and fascinating.

    The Symposium was one of the most important among those organized this year in Italy, both for the relevance of its argument and for the participation of many important scholars. Arthur J. Ness' book The complete works of Francesco Canova da Milano 1497-1543 (Harvard University Press, 1970) has been the bible for every performer and scholar wishing to know and play Francesco's music for nearly the last 30 years. The book was widely appreciated for its clarity and comprehensiveness, and also for the accurate preface containing all of the information then available regarding the historical sources. Since the appearance of the first edition, however, many new sources and a few unique pieces have been discovered, such as those in the manuscript hidden in the Duomo of Castelfranco and the in Berlin manuscripts, thought to have been destroyed during WW-II and newly rediscovered in Krakow. Ness outlined these discoveries in his paper and spoke of some of the editorial procedures to be followed in a new critical edition of the complete works by Francesco da Milano which he is preparing. Hopefully, it will be published soon.

    Harry Colin Slim, the author of the first major, in-depth modern study of Francesco da Milano, has conducted a great deal of important research on many subjects, including musical iconography. At the Symposium, he spoke about the numerous copies of Bartolomeo Veneto's Lady Lutenist, which might have been painted during Francesco's youth. Slim has found 26 copies of this beautiful painting (the existence of yet another one in a church in Milan was signaled by a member of the audience), which sometimes transformed the unknown sitter into a saint (possibly St. Cecile or St. Catherine), sometimes adding angels to her sides. In the painting, a book is shown in front of the lady lutenist, upon which is inscribed a short piece of music, a complete 3-part composition for cantus, tenor and bassus. Slim showed that the music portrayed here is a simple dance arrangement, whose musical characteristics bring us back to the beginning of the 16th century, if not earlier. The large number of copies of this painting in Milan offers more evidence of the importance of the lute and of music in the city then ruled by the Sforza dynasty.

    The question asked at the beginning of this article ("Why a symposium …?") was asked, rhetorically, by Franco Pavan, the person who originated the idea for this event. Pavan has spent many years exploring archives both in Italy and abroad for information about Francesco da Milano, and he has discovered many interesting things. In his paper, he made a survey of the recent state of knowledge regarding the life of Francesco and of his family, as well as of lute related activity in Milan and Rome during the first 40 years of the Cinquecento. Among other things, Pavan convincingly demonstrated that the "Lombardy" school of lutenists of the beginning of the sixteenth-century, which has often been hypothesized by scholars who supposed that Francesco Canova was its most important exponent, never existed. Instead, Rome was the real center of lute activity in that period, thanks to important patrons of the arts in the eternal city who created private chapels with a particular emphasis on instrumental music.

    Francesco spent most of his life in Rome, but there are some periods (especially during his youth) about which we have no information. Dinko Fabris advanced a most intriguing proposal, purely as a hypothesis, when he revealed that from 1512 to 1518 there are traces of a "D.Francisco de Milano" among the clerics at a church in Barletta, a small town near Bari in the south of Italy, which was under the authority of a bishop from Pavia, Giovanni Maria Ciocchi Dalmonte, the future pope Giulio III. This "D.Francisco de Milano" could well have been our lutenist: in fact, Francesco Canova began his career as a cleric and remained in contact with the Church throughout his life, even after quitting his religious orders and giving his ecclesiastical benefits over to his brother Bernardino (presumably in order to marry, a few years later, a rich and noble Milanese woman, and leave an heir to the Canova fortune).

    The paper of William Prizer dwelt on the musical milieu in which Francesco might have taken his first steps. Prizer discussed a manuscript now housed in Florence (Biblioteca del Conservatorio, ms. Basevi 2441) but probably written in Milan during the second decade of the century. It contains secular vocal music and documents the interest in love songs of the young noblemen and courtiers of the city: one of these was Massimiliano Sforza, who was known for his hedonistic nocturnal diversions.

    Francesco's music had an extraordinary diffusion not only in Italy, but also abroad. When one lists all the publications containing his music and divides them by countries, it is immediately evident that two countries were particularly prolific: Italy, of course, and the Low Countries. But while the publications in Italy are divided between four cities, the northern European prints that appeared between 1546 and 1573 are concentrated in one town in what is now Belgium: Louvain. There, the prolific editor, Pierre Phalèse, provided an enormous quantity of music of all kinds especially sought after by the acculturated public of the University, and this was the theme presented by the Belgian specialist Henri Vanhulst.

    Francesco's heritage was also the center of another interesting paper. Philippe Canguilhem analyzed the passages dedicated to the "Milanese" by Vincenzo Galilei in his famous treatise, Il Fronimo. Galilei wanted to teach lutenists how to intabulate vocal pieces for the lute and held up Francesco as the ideal model to follow, because he had been "eccellentissimo" in this art, and demonstrated a profound knowledge of the rules of music. Galilei, "dagli essempi di si grand'huomo mosso [following the examples of such a great man]", also used Francesco's method of intabulating. Canguilhem showed that in Florence, thanks to Galilei, Francesco was remembered after his death not simply as a legendary performer, but as a musician, and that his music really did influence lute composers of the following generations.

    Victor Coelho brought this idea to its extreme consequences. At first, he created a parallel between the transmission of a composer's style and of an iconographical tradition, using as an example the transformations of Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait. Then, rather provocatively, Coelho proposed that one of the best known of Francesco's pieces today, La compagna, which only appears in posthumous sources, might be the result of an imitation of his style by an unknown later composer. A very vivacious and stimulating debate was inevitable at this point.

    The "Divino" Francesco was, without any doubt, one of the most illustrious men of the Renaissance. It is therefore highly probable that he was celebrated in paint. My own inquiry considered possible images of Francesco and the circumstances in which they might have been commissioned. Only one portrait of Francesco survives that can very probably be considered to actually represent him. It is the one that was collected by the famous sixteenth century Cardinal, Federico Borromeo, for his gallery of famous men in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, and is likely have been a copy made from a lost original. In my talk, I compared it to the Lute Player at the Como Museum, which was discovered a few years ago: my research into the provenance of this beautiful painting, attributed to Giulio Campi, led me the noble Milanese Parravicini family. Also, there are others images which could be, or could derive from, portraits of Francesco. Among these I found two small anonymous paintings now in Bourges to be particularly interesting. A man who looks very much like the personage in the Ambrosiana and the Como portraits is shown playing the lute and singing in the company of three women. The name of Francesco da Milano became a symbol of the lute: perhaps his image, too, became a sort of icon of the ideal lutenist and performing musician.

    This symposium, far from being a sterile succession of monologues, was characterized by a lively participation and a profitable exchange of ideas. Surely our knowledge of Francesco da Milano and his time has been enlarged. We are now looking forward to the publication of the Acts.

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Nicoletta Sguben, Amadeus magazine, December 1997:

    Milano, una sera d'autunno dentro una chiesa. Fuori impazza la città con la sua corsa frenetica, i suoi rumori e il suo grasso divertimento. Dentro la basilica il tempo s'è fermato, il rumore non osa varcare la soglia del luogo sacro e il divertimento coincide con l'atteggiamento interiore dei presenti: un pubblico che vuole ascoltare. Si dirà che il pubblico di tutti i concerti vuole ascoltare. E' diverso: la platea di cui stiamo parlando, quella che numerosissima è intervenuta al concerto di chiusura del terzo ciclo della Fondazione Marco Fodella, voleva ascoltare con una disponibilità tutta speciale ad assumere dentro a sé la musica del concerto. Musica di grande effetto e di sicuro richiamo, si penserà. No, musica di rarissimo ascolto, sussurrata da un liuto che sembrava suonare per se stesso più che per gli spettatori. Eppure l'ascolto era tesissimo, il silenzio assoluto, e la voglia di entrare in quella musica solitaria palese come una dichiarazione. Piccoli miracoli come questo accadono se ci sono almeno due ingredienti: un grande compositore e un bravo interprete. Il primo era Francesco da Milano, fulcro dell'intera rassegna ideata dalla Fondazione Fodella nonché oggetto di studio del simposio internazionale che ha avuto luogo all'Università Statale, in occasione del quinto centenario della nascita del compositore rinascimentale. Il secondo era Paul Beier, sensibilissimo liutista americano, ormai da anni in Italia, che ha interpretato i Ricercar del Libro Primo - raccolta all'epoca famosissima, tanto da aver conosciuto più ristampe - come se stesse suonando in uno studiolo cinquecentesco: appartato a interrogare le sublimi, rapsodiche pagine di Francesco. Un atteggiamento solipsistico che non si deve confondere con altezzoso. Piuttosto, è la dimensione riservata del "Divino" liutista che Beier ha esaltato, come rapito dalla spiritualità contemplativa dei Ricercari e dalla loro pensosa concentrazione. Un concerto così ci ricorda che non solo ciò che luccica sotto i bagliori del facile effetto della popolarità può interessare il pubblico. Un interesse che qui era autentica malìa.

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