Gian Paolo Lomazzo (Libro de Sogni, 1564) describing the genius of Sofonisba Anguisola in the context of an imagined conversation between Leonardo da Vinci, representing modern painting, and Phidias, the artist from Antiquity.

Anguisola, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, c. 1550

The image we’ve chosen to represent the upcoming Magnificat program featuring music by four women from the 17th century was painted by the extraordinary Sofonisba Anguissola in 1550. An exceptional work that captures the place of women in late Renaissance, the painting is both a self portrait, a portrait of her master teacher, and a compelling allegory of women as defined by men of the period. It aptly symbolizes the barriers to artistic expression faced by women and the fruits of the individual struggle in the face of those barriers.

Anguissola was born in Cremona around 1532, the oldest of seven children, six of whom were daughters. Her father, Amilcare Anguissola, was a member of the Genoese minor nobility and her mother, Bianca Ponzone, was also of an affluent family of noble background. At fourteen, Anguissola started studying with Bernardino Campi, at the Lombard school and later on under Bernardino Gatti. It is clear that her privileged status as a noble woman were a contributing factor to the fact that she had been given an opportunity to become an artist. Read more at Suite101

Although Sofonisba enjoyed much more encouragement and support than the average woman of her day, her social class did not allow her to transcend the constraints of her sex. Without the possibility of studying anatomy or drawing from life (it was considered unacceptable for a lady to view nudes), she could not undertake the complex multi-figure compositions required for large-scale religious or history paintings. Instead, Anguissola created wry and witty portraits of family members and acquaintances.

“Sofonisba’s painting of her teacher, painting her portrait – a story within a story – demonstrates how she negotiated her male-dominated world. Anguissola’s gaze rivets the viewer of the painting, forcing consideration of what appears to be the inscribing of male authority on the body of the female. Campi’s gaze complicates matters, however, since as he paints he, too, looks out of the painting toward what the picture indicates must be his subject, Anguissola. Thus the viewer in front of the painting plays a double role: that of the subject of the painting within the painting, namely Anguissola herself, and of an engaged viewer – watched by both Campi and Anguissola – made complicit in Anguissola’s destabilizing of contemporary social norms.” (Read more at wga.hu)

From Paul’s post:

“Bologna’s Festa della Porchetta was an annual carnival held on 24 August for more than five centuries. It commemorated both the Feast of St Bartholomew and the victory of Bolognese forces over Frederick II during the Battle of Fossalta in 1249. Frederick’s son, King Enzo, was imprisoned for thirty years in the city centre in a tower that now bears his name, adjacent to where the Porchetta celebrations took place in Palazzo Maggiore.

It was customary for the city’s nobles to enjoy a banquet in a palace fronting onto Palazzo Maggiore, and a spit-roasted suckling pig, together with poultry, breads, cheeses and cakes, was thrown from the balcony for the regular townsfolk to fight over. The festivities evolved over the centuries into large-scale affairs with acrobats, games, singing and dancing, in theatrical productions of wars, historical events and allegorical performance plays. Giant purpose-specific floats, stages, theatre props and machinery were constructed each year to accommodate the unique requirements of the year’s entertainment theme.”

View the many images and read the entire post at BibliOdyssey

Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci was born into a noble Italian family in Macerata, Italy. He studied law in Rome but became more interested in the new science that was sweeping Western Europe. Entering the Society of Jesus in 1571, he continued his studies in philosophy, theology, mathematics, cosmology, and astronomy. Ricci was sent on a mission to Asia and in 1580 was sent by Alessandro Valignani, superior of Jesuit missions in the East Indies, to prepare to enter China.

In the Portuguese colony of Macau Ricci mastered the Chinese language and entered China in 1583 dressed first in the clothing of a Buddhist monk and then later as a Confucian mandarin. He brought with him Western clocks, musical instruments, mathematical and astronomical instruments, and cosmological, geographical, and architectural works with maps and diagrams. These, along with Ricci’s phenomenal memory and mathematical and astronomical skills, attracted an important audience among the Chinese elite.

The Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries

After a decade of dialogue with members of the Chinese intelligentia, Ricci was called to meet with Emperor K’ang-Hsi in Beijing in 1601, the first western missionary to receive such an invitation. He became the court mathematician and remained in Beijing for the last nine years of his life. In 1602 , he published his “Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries,” a world map for China.

While in China Ricci wrote a Treatise on Friendship, a Treatise on Mnemonic Arts, a Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, a book of Chinese apologetics—The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, and Ten Discourses by a Paradoxical Man. In addition, the journals that he kept and edited for publication allow one of the few glimpses of an outsider’s view of Chinese society and government during a period when China was closed to foreign visitors.

The website IgnatianSpirituality notes:

“After Ricci’s death certain of his decisions were questioned by Church authorities. Especially questioned was Matteo Ricci’s acceptance of Chinese ancestor worship as a legitimate, nontheological memorial to their ancestors that Catholic converts could practice. Later missionaries, not as schooled in Chinese culture, questioned this interpretation and brought their case to the Vatican. After decades of debate, in 1705 the Vatican decided that the Chinese practice of ancestor worship rites was incompatible with Catholic doctrine and was forbidden. Hearing this, the Chinese emperor banned Christian missions from China in 1721, closing the door that Ricci worked so patiently to open.”

I have drawn freely from this and several other articles for this brief overview of the fascinating life of Matteo Ricci.  A wealth of information about Ricci is available on the Zhaoqing Ricci  Center website. The University of San Francisco’s Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History promotes Chinese-Western interaction in the spirit of friendship and respect exemplified by Ricci. An extensive article on Ricci and the Catholic Church’s deliberations with regards to Ricci’s mission can be read at the Catholic Encyclopedia site.

“Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the same moment the impression of gentle kiss and of a bite.”

Music played not only a unique, but an essential role in leading Galileo to his new physics. Because it is an art demanding precise measurement and exact divisions, music reflected the spirit of Galileo’s science.

One of Galileo’s most important discoveries, the law of falling bodies, can actually be traced to his early musical experiments with his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a musicologist and lute virtuoso. Together, they discovered the motions of pendulums while measuring with weights, the tensions of lute strings.

Galileo was an outstanding lutenist himself, whose “charm of style and delicacy of touch” surpassed even that of his father. Playing the lute was a source of great pleasure and a special comfort to him in his final years, when blindness was added to the many other trials of his life.

”Everything Galileo ever did has been challenged,” said the late Stillman Drake, Canadian historian of science and preeminent biographer of Galileo. ”But ultimately it stands up.”

It was also in 1610 that Europe got its first taste of tea, a beverage that had been popular for centuries in China and Japan, as Amsterdam received its first shipment of the intoxicating leaves. The Dutch East India Company initially marketed tea as an exotic medicinal drink, but it was so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford it and it only became available to the general public later in the century.

In 1610, Cornelius Drebbel, best known perhaps for his invention of the submarine,  applied the principles he had used in his “perpetual mobile” to thermostatic regulators that controlled ovens, furnaces, and incubators – the first thermostat. As the temperature rose, air expanded, forcing quicksilver to close a damper. When it cooled, the damper opened. The incubator he made hatched both duck and chicken eggs.

Caravagio ca. 1600

The mannerist painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died on July 18 1610 at the age of 39 and the circumstances of his death have been controversial ever since. It has been suggested that he contracted syphilis or even that he was assassinated but anthropologists from the universities of Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna are studying other theories – that he contracted malaria while traveling in Italy or that he suffered from lead poisoning. The anthropologists hope to prove their theory by carrying out DNA tests on bones which they believe are the remains of the Renaissance artist.

Renowned for his hot temper, heavy drinking and violent temperament Caravaggio was forced to go on the run in 1606 after killing a man in a tavern brawl, a crime for which he was condemned to death by Pope Paul V.

“Lead poisoning accentuates traits like aggressive and nervous behaviour, which Caravaggio displayed during his life,” said Silvano Vinceti, the team leader. “Painters in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries used these paints all the time and often suffered serious health problems as a result.” Francisco de Goya and Vincent van Gogh are both thought to have suffered from lead poisoning.

The Galilean Moons

In January 1610 Galileo Galilei first observed the four moons of Jupiter now known, appropriately, as “The Galilean Moons”. The largest of the many moons of Jupiter, Galileo initially named his discovery the Cosmica Sidera (“Cosimo’s stars”) but they are now known by the names given by Simon Marius in his 1614 Mundus Jovialis: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – the lovers of Zeus.

Galileo first noticed Saturn’s peculiar shape later in 1610, well after the publication of his landmark book Sidereus Nuncius.  The story of how he initially revealed the new discovery to his fellow astronomers by means of an anagram is told in a 1974 article by Albert van Helden of Rice University.

Galileo's first sketches of his observation of four of Jupiter's moons

Galileo’s discovery of celestial bodies orbiting something other than the Earth dealt a serious blow to the Ptolemaic, or the geocentric, cosmology in which the universe orbits around the Earth. The possibility of viewing Saturn’s moons was made possible by improvements Galileo made to his telescope in 1609. Images of the moons as seen through Galileo’s telescope can be viewed here. Matk Thompson’s website Galileo 1610 has a wealth of information about Galileo as does Rice University’s Galileo Project website.

Chilly Gondolas

Like most I suspect, when I think of Venice I imagine a sun-baked Piazza of San Marco, but of course winter visits Venice each year and it seems that before the advent of modern heating, the experience was particularly brutal. In his engaging journals recounting his three years in Venice during the 1860s, W.D. Powell describes the attitude of the locals to winter:

“The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere to claim that such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before.”

In common with other places (like California) where the weather is generally agreeable, houses are built with a view to coolness in summer and one can only imagine that the experience of a Christmas or Epiphany feast in the spacious interior of San Marco was often a chilly one. In fact in Howell’s judgment it is those who must spend their time indoors that suffer the most.

“When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian sometimes wears it. Ineed the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.”

Howell also notes the local celebration of the “Anno del Ghiaccio” (Year of Ice) that commemorated a memorably cold winter early at the turn of the 18th century that coincided (fittingly) with a visit of the King of Denmark. (The winter of 2004-2005 was also memorably snowy in Venice and an album of photos can be viewed here.) The lagoon was frozen solid for over two weeks and became “a scene of the liveliest traffic, and was everywhere covered with sledges…Venetians of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart.”

He goes to describe the Piazza and Basilica most beautifully.

“The lofty crest of the bell tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchatment around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic.”

Magic indeed.

Annunciation

Last Sunday, I attended Artek’s performance of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine at the National Gallery in Washington DC. It was lovely to hear a fine performance of this masterpiece (a piece I’m thinking about alot these days) in one of my favorite buildings in the world. We arrived through the East entrance and were directed by the guards up to the second floor, which meant that we got to have a glimpse of a Cranach alterpiece, Gentileschi’s lute player (which is not a portrait of Francesca Caccini by the way), and several Vermeers and Rembrandts before hearing Monteverdi’s magnificent music.

Almost as if it had been planned I turned one corner and there was the magnificent Annunciation by Van Eyck. I first saw this extraordinary painting shortly after it was restored. A whole room had been dedicated to its display. Now it occupies a more modest space but it is just as stunning.

Magnificat’s will perform the Vespers within the context of Second Vespers for the Feast of Annunciation and there was something very satisfying about having Van Eyck’s colors in my head as I heard the fanfare of the opening response of Monteverdi’s 1610 collection. The dislocation of the 15th century painting, the 17th century music and the 21st century setting emphasized the unspeakable timelessness of beauty.

Guido's Hand from Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650)

A particularly interesting short session on the fascinating figure Athanasius Kircher scheduled for the opening afternoon of the conference. I encountered Kircher while preparing the first program on the very first Magnificat series concert in 1992, which included Carissimi’s magnificent oratorio Jephte. In his monumental Musurgia universalis (1650) Kircher mentions Jephte and also reproduced the music for the final chorus, Plorate filii Israel, citing it as an example of excellent rhetorical style and providing musicologists with a convenient terminus ante quem for the dating of Carissimi’s masterpiece. Since then, details of Kircher’s fantastic and curious engravings have occasionally  made their way into Magnificat’s programs, websites, and brochures, including his representation of Guido’s hand.

Recent scholarly interest in Kircher has resulted in a wealth of resources on the web. Stanford University hosts a website project devoted to Kircher, with a wealth of information and selection of images from works by and related to Athanasius Kircher present in the collections of Stanford University Libraries. Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ has published an excellent book Athansius Kircher: The Last Renaissance Man, the website for which includes many of Kircher’s engravings. The useful website Kircherianum Virtuale provides links to a many sites devoted to the Kircher.

As for the AMS session on Kircher, David Crook of the University of Wisconsin-Madison writes in his overview of the session:

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), a Jesuit polymath and one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century. Because of his penchant for exaggeration and his tendency to include everything he could find on a given topic—“no matter how strange or dubious”—Kircher’s reputation had already begun to wane by the late seventeenth century. Recent research by historians of science and linguistics, however, demonstrates that Kircher’s work was of critical importance to the scholarly community of his time. In addition to publishing at least forty volumes on magnetism, optics, geology, medicine, linguistics, Egyptology, and early medicine, Kircher corresponded with hundreds of scholars in more than twenty languages. Situated at the leading Jesuit college in Rome, he had unparalleled access to a global network of missionaries and researchers. A 2001 conference devoted to Kircher drew scholars from over a dozen disciplines, including luminaries such as Stephen Jay Gould and Anthony Grafton, in an attempt to comprehend his massive output. Many institutions and libraries have followed with conferences, seminars, and special events on Kircher.

While Kircher has recently begun to excite the interest of a few German and Italian music scholars, music scholarship has not been at the center of the current Kircher revival. This is all the more surprising given that music is one of the few disciplines that continued to be influenced by Kircher’s writings well after his death. Kircher devoted two of his most successful publications entirely to music, including the giant 1,200-page treatise Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), an encyclopedia of music and music theory. He also timed the publication of Musurgia (one of his longest works) to coincide with the Jubilee Year of 1650, thus ensuring wide exposure. Hundreds of copies were distributed around the globe, making it the most widely-distributed and influential music treatise of the seventeenth century, a treatise that continued to be used as a primary source by musicians and scholars for over 150 years.

Two papers will be read. The first will be “Father Kircher ’s Singing Sloth (And Other Wonders of the New World)” by Eric Bianchi a Pd.D candidate at Yale University and recipient of a 2008-2009 Rome Prize. From the abstract:

Athanasius Kircher crammed his mammoth music treatise Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650) full with, apparently, everything he had ever heard about music. Courtesy of a fellow Jesuit priest stationed in South America, he brought readers face to face with a marvel from the New World: a sloth that sang—perfectly—the Guidonian hexachord. This account has subsequently been discussed as an example of Kircher’s credulity, as well as his unparalleled ability to amaze early modern readers with the strange, the exotic, and the novel. The sloth was strange and exotic, but it was not novel—not even in 1650. Beginning in the 1520s, the animal was discussed, depicted, and dissected in dozens of printed sources. Not only musicians, but also mathematicians, clerics, explorers, and natural historians weighed in on this remarkable creature. Their accounts formed the basis of Kircher’s, despite his claims to the contrary. Few of Father Kircher’s words were actually his own.

Starting from Kircher’s discussions of the singing sloth and the Guidonian hexachord, I reconstruct a largely forgotten world of seventeenth-century erudition, and suggest what place music scholarship had in it. With particular attention to visual images from early modern books, I suggest how and why Kircher fashioned his account and image as he did—and why they appeared in a music treatise at all. In that age of polymaths, music scholarship was not solely the domain of musicians, nor was it necessarily written for them. Even at his most extreme, the famously digressive Kircher (best known in his day as a mathematician, linguist, and Egyptologist) may be more representative than is generally supposed. Kircher was drawn to the sloth by more than his love for the exotic. As the self-anointed Christian Pliny, he saw himself continuing the comprehensive natural history that the pagan Roman had begun. As the most famous professor at the Catholic world’s leading educational institution (the Collegio Romano), he was expected to rehabilitate the image of Catholic scholarship and science in the wake of Galileo’s condemnation. He was fascinated by Guido of Arezzo, who emerges in Musurgia as a Catholic superhero: a devout cleric who devised the hexachord, invented polyphony, notation, and even keyboard instruments. Guido and his hexachord were the perfect emblems for Kircher’s larger intellectual project: a sacred science that demonstrated the unity of all things and the universality of the Catholic Church. But what had fascinated seventeenth-century readers seemed unscholarly and unscientific to music scholars of the eighteenth century, who responded to Musurgia with skepticism and derision.

The seesion will conclude with “Father Kircher ’s Miraculous Mechanical Music-Making Method” by John Z. McKay a Ph.D candidate at Harvard University and winner of the Ferdinand Gordon and Elizabeth Hunter Morrill Graduate Fellowship. Here’s the abstract:

Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) is—as the title suggests—a treatise on “universal music-making.” Previous studies have emphasized the universal and musical aspects of Kircher’s writing, both within his specific discussions of the Harmony of the Spheres and as a reflection of the larger project of a 1200-page encyclopedia of seventeenth-century music. Few, however, have ventured into his detailed instructions on the making of music. This trend is in part the fault of a more accessible 1662 German translation, which left out over two-thirds of Kircher’s original Latin text. The translation retained brief discussions of philosophical and magical elements of music that bookend the treatise, but vast sections of practical theory and instructions for music-making that make up the bulk of the text were completely omitted. Among the missing portions is a 200-page description, located near the end of the treatise, of an automatic method for composition that Kircher identifies in his preface as the culmination of much of the work that precedes it. By considering the purpose, sources, and output of this compositional algorithm, my paper reevaluates Musurgia’s practical goals in the light of new evidence that challenges the accepted view of Kircher’s place within the world of seventeenth-century music and music theory.

Drawing on theoretical discussions of the ars combinatoria from Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636), Kircher proposes a more workable method for generating musical settings. Dozens of complex tables provide the raw musical material for four-part settings in seventeenth-century counterpoint. Unlike later eighteenth-century dice games that usually limit themselves to short compositions with a preset number of measures, Kircher has a much grander vision of being able to set any text—of any length, in any language, in prose or any poetic meter—to music. Kircher even designed a “music-making ark,” a box containing wooden slats that can be arranged to produce counterpoint using his algorithm, which complemented and simplified his method for truly universal music-making. In addition to serving as one of Kircher’s many miraculous mechanical inventions to awe and amaze his patrons, the method behind this device could have been of great value to his three hundred Jesuit brethren around the globe who were given copies of the Musurgia, including missionaries who needed to create new hymns in native languages. After discussing the sources and rationale behind Kircher’s compositional method, I turn to its musical output and relationship to the Musurgia as a whole. Using my computerized version of the algorithm, millions of potential musical settings can easily be generated. A review of the structural trends derived from these aggregate “compositions” will demonstrate how Kircher’s practical compositional priorities draw on and diverge from the theoretical ones he describes earlier in his treatise, articulating once again Kircher’s true emphasis on the actual making of music.